Month: July 2021

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  A sample video shows how computer vision (running on an external computer) detects the enemy and calculates how far the mouse needs to move to target that enemy.

When it comes to the cat-and-mouse game of stopping cheaters in online games, anti-cheat efforts often rely in part on technology that ensures the wider system running the game itself isn't compromised. On the PC, that can mean so-called "kernel-level drivers" which monitor system memory for modifications that could affect the game's intended operation. On consoles, that can mean relying on system-level security that prevents unsigned code from being run at all (until and unless the system is effectively hacked, that is).

But there's a growing category of cheating methods that can now effectively get around these forms of detection in many first-person shooters. By using external tools like capture cards and "emulated input" devices, along with machine learning-powered computer vision software running on a separate computer, these cheating engines totally circumvent the secure environments set up by PC and console game makers. This is forcing the developers behind these games to look to alternate methods to detect and stop these cheaters in their tracks.

How it works

The basic toolchain used for these external emulated-input cheating methods is relatively simple. The first step is using an external video capture card to record a game's live output and instantly send it to a separate computer. Those display frames are then run through a computer vision-based object detection algorithm like You Only Look Once (YOLO) that has been trained to find human-shaped enemies in the image (or at least in a small central portion of the image near the targeting reticle).

Enlarge / The now-defunct news aggregator was an excellent source of boldface, italics, underline, and wildly mismatched typefaces. (credit: Jim Salter)

In August of 2019, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp announced that it was developing Knwez, its own "conservative friendly" alternative to Google News. Knewz went live without much fanfare in January of 2020, and officially died today, less than eighteen months later.

What was Knewz?

Knewz described itself as "an innovative service designed to let you consume news from a wide variety of sources, free of the bias bubbles and vacuous verticals that frustrate so many discerning readers and thoughtful publishers." The service was operated by News Corp, the Murdoch-owned company behind Fox News, the New York Post, the Sun, and the Wall Street Journal.

In practice, Knewz was a news aggregator, somewhat similar to Google News. It used AI algorithms to scrape content from hundreds of news sources, with human editors to "highlight a selection of headlines that provide a broad perspective." The site's design was particularly garish, with construction-project-yellow headers, an inconsistently sized tile layout, and frequent use of boldface, underlining, and italics in the same headline.

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  The ABB New York City ePrix is a chance for Formula E to race in front of one of the most dramatic backdrops in racing: the Manhattan skyline. [credit: Glenn Dunbar / LAT Images ]

Formula E, the electric car racing series, is back in Brooklyn this coming weekend. It's the series' first time back in North America since 2019, having skipped last year for obvious reasons. COVID-19 caused most of season six to take place on the concrete of Templehof in Berlin, but season seven saw some return to normality when it began back in February, now with the FIA (which is in charge of global motorsport) blessing it as an official world championship. Ahead of the New York ePrix double-header, Ars checked in with some of the teams and drivers to see how one of our favorite racing series has continued to evolve.

Although Saturday's race will be the 10th round of season seven, the pandemic has continued to make its presence felt this year. Covid cancelled planned races in Santiago, Chile, and Marrakech, Morocco, and kept spectators from attending rounds in Rome and Valencia, Spain. Their absence was noted, even if it has freed up the drivers' time between on-track sessions.

"We're there to entertain people, and not having people there to enjoy what we do has been quite disappointing," said Jaguar Racing's Sam Bird. "It's nice to see fans getting excited, asking for autographs, people having smiles on their faces when they see their favorite drivers or their favorite cars, so yeah it's been tough to not have fans there, and I can't wait to have them back."

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  The Anom login screen, which was hidden in the calculator app. Note the cool "hacker"-style logo. [credit: Vice ]

Last month, authorities disclosed that the FBI and Australian Federal Police secretly operated an "encrypted device company" called "Anom." The company sold 12,000 smartphones to criminal syndicates around the world. These were pitched as secure devices but were actually honeypot devices that routed all messages to an FBI-owned server. The disclosure was light on details, but now that it's public, Anom phones are being unloaded on the secondary market. That means us normal people are finally getting a look at them, starting with this Vice article detailing one of the devices.

The FBI has basically weaponized what the Android modding community has been doing for years. Some Android phones have unlockable bootloaders, which let you wipe out the original operating system and replace it with your own build of an OS, called a custom ROM. The Anom device Vice got was a Google Pixel 4a, one of the most developer-friendly devices out there. The FBI's custom ROM shows an "ArcaneOS" boot screen, and it replaced the normal Google Android distribution with the FBI's skin of Android 10.

The FBI's sales pitch to alleged criminals was that these were security-focused devices (so please use them to document your illegal activities!), and that involved a lot of fun security theater. A "pin scrambling" feature would swap around the order of the lock screen numbers so that no one could guess your code from screen smudges.

Enlarge / Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez pose for a picture during their visit at the Taj Mahal in January 2020. (credit: PAWAN SHARMA/AFP via Getty Images)

Virgin Galactic is continuing to make final preparations for the historic flight of its VSS Unity vehicle on Sunday morning, carrying the company's founder, Richard Branson, and three other employees. To that end, on Friday, the company announced that it will have a livestream, hosted by Stephen Colbert and featuring a new song by Khalid, to publicize the flight into space.

But wait, is it really space? Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says Virgin Galactic's flights above 80 km are not space.

In a pair of salty tweets on Friday, Bezos' space company, Blue Origin, took potshots at Virgin Galactic and its rocket-powered space plane. "From the beginning, New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name," the company tweeted. "For 96% of the world’s population, space begins 100 km up at the internationally recognized Kármán line."

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Update, July 11: Two days after our original report went live, Heritage Auctions' latest slate of game-related auctions concluded with a staggering highlight: a boxed, sealed copy of Super Mario 64 selling for a new world-record auction bid of $1.56 million. This copy of the N64 classic doesn't include any indication about being a special or rare print of the game; rather, it comes with an uncommon Wata Games rating of 9.8 out of 10, making it as pristine a box of the 25-year-old game as you might ever find in the wild.

Original report:

The world record for most expensive video game sold at auction has now been surpassed by a staggering amount, thanks to a sealed, "9.0"-rated copy of 1987's The Legend of Zelda.

Enlarge (credit: EVA MARIE UZCATEGUI / Getty Images)

Shortly after the collapse of Champlain Towers in Surfside, Florida, the hunt for answers began. In a rare move, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced that it would be taking the lead in what promises to be a long process investigating the event that took, at current count, 64 lives. The involvement of the NIST—which also led the investigation in the wake of 9/11—could signal coming changes in the United States’ building codes. 

The collapse wasn’t a product of an earthquake or other natural disaster. While many ideas have been floated to explain the event, it could be a long time before we get any solid answers. Understanding it isn't made easier by the fact that the vast majority of the remains of the structure is just rubble at this point. Yet investigators have ways of determining the factors that led to this massive, tragic disaster—even though the clues have been reduced to tiny pieces. 

The NIST declined to speak on the matter at this point, so Ars reached out to researchers in the field to get a sense of how these kinds of investigations are done. 

Enlarge / Then-Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Ajit Pai testifies at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on June 24, 2020 in Washington, DC. Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, who is now the FCC's acting chairwoman, looks on. (credit: Getty Images | Alex Wong)

President Biden today urged the Federal Communications Commission to restore net neutrality rules and take steps to boost price transparency and competition in broadband—but the FCC can't do most or all of that yet because Biden still hasn't nominated a fifth commissioner to break the 2-2 deadlock between Democrats and Republicans.

Consumer advocacy groups have been urging Biden to nominate a third Democrat to the deadlocked FCC for months, but he still hasn't done so. What's causing the holdup isn't clear. The delay could wipe out the FCC's ability to do anything opposed by Republicans for all of 2021, because it can take the Senate months to approve FCC nominations, and the FCC process for complicated rulemakings is also lengthy.

Biden today released a fact sheet describing an executive order focused on boosting competition in numerous industries. The order targets four broadband problems that Biden's order "encourages" the FCC to solve: deals between ISPs and landlords that limit tenants' choices; misleading advertised prices; high termination fees; and net neutrality. (We published a separate article today on how other parts of the executive order affect the tech industry.)