Month: August 2022

Enlarge / Obstruction light with bokeh city background

The US Department of Homeland Security is warning of vulnerabilities in the nation’s emergency broadcast network that makes it possible for hackers to issue bogus warnings over radio and TV stations.

“We recently became aware of certain vulnerabilities in EAS encoder/decoder devices that, if not updated to most recent software versions, could allow an actor to issue EAS alerts over the host infrastructure (TV, radio, cable network),” the DHS's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) warned. “This exploit was successfully demonstrated by Ken Pyle, a security researcher at CYBIR.com, and may be presented as a proof of concept at the upcoming DEFCON 2022 conference in Las Vegas, August 11-14.”

Pyle told reporters at CNN and Bleeping Computer that the vulnerabilities reside in the Monroe Electronics R189 One-Net DASDEC EAS, an Emergency Alert System encoder and decoder. TV and radio stations use the equipment to transmit emergency alerts. The researcher told Bleeping Computer that “multiple vulnerabilities and issues (confirmed by other researchers) haven't been patched for several years and snowballed into a huge flaw.”

Enlarge / The crowds this year will be smaller, and masked, but offline is back in Vegas (credit: Evo)

After a two-year pandemic-induced break the Evolution Championship Series (better known as just Evo), the annual celebration of all things fighting games, is back in Las Vegas this weekend. Thousands of fighting game players and fans will fill the halls and arena at the Mandalay Bay casino to make their attempts at a top 8 finish, get in casual games with people from around the globe, watch panels, browse Artist Alley, and just generally soak up a chance to be offline with the fighting game community again.

In a more normal year, I'd be there myself, maybe not trying for that top 8 finish, more like just trying not to go 0-2 in Street Fighter V or Third Strike. But despite a robust mask and vaccine policy I'm just not feeling like traveling or being in Vegas with the current state of the world. So I'm going to spend my weekend cozy at home streaming a ridiculous amount of content and trying not to feel like I'm missing out too much. If you'd like to join me here's a quick guide to what the weekend has to offer.

An Evo overview

You may have heard of Evo before, perhaps from the infamous Evo Moment 37 video or from Sony's acquisition of the tournament series in 2021. If you're not already a fighting game tournament watcher, here are the basics of how Evo works. There are eight main games featured, which I'll list below, as well as a huge amount of less official side tournaments. Each game has the same basic structure, you start in a pool of players, everyone on equal footing. Tournaments are double-elimination, meaning you have to lose twice to be out. If you can win several matches in your pool without being eliminated, you move up to the next one, eventually leading to a top 24 bracket, then a top 8, which leads to the grand finals.

Enlarge (credit: picture alliance / Contributor | picture alliance)

Are spam accounts really the reason behind Tesla CEO Elon Musk's decision to back out of his cursed Twitter deal?

This week, Twitter sent a bunch of subpoenas to find out, pulling Musk's close circle of friends and business associates into the chaotic trial. One subpoena includes more than two dozen document and communications requests for Tesla. The documents that Twitter seeks from Musk's friends, advisors, banks, legal team, and investors include emails, text messages, and Twitter DMs.

It's possible that just one email out of all the subpoenaed material could give Twitter enough information to convince the Delaware Chancery Court to force Musk to cough up $44 billion and actually buy the social network. By crawling documents from Musk's inner circle, Twitter hopes to reveal what was happening behind Musk's tweets through the negotiation. In their lawsuit, Twitter claims that Musk violated their merger agreement, and the subpoenas could help prove that he possibly never planned to follow through on the purchase.