The real question is how publishers will deal with used games, and the possibility of “transfer” fees. Suddenly online passes, or their equivalent, are being supported at the console level. One thing is for sure, this is not a good system for any retailer that relies on the sale of used games, and it’s going to be very hard to rent games as well.
via The PA Report – Microsoft outlines their system for used games, licenses, and family sharing.
Congress obliged with the Protect America Act in 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which immunized private companies that cooperated voluntarily with U.S. intelligence collection. PRISM recruited its first partner, Microsoft, and began six years of rapidly growing data collection beneath the surface of a roiling national debate on surveillance and privacy. Late last year, when critics in Congress sought changes in the FISA Amendments Act, the only lawmakers who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.
That will teach people not to put so much trust into the cloud.
According to Microsoft pirated Windows XP product keys were used to spread the Citadel malware. Redmond isn’t claiming a full take down because of the sheer size of the botnet but, it is optimistic that the seized equipment will help it to strengthen defenses in the future.
via Microsoft, FBI takedown Citadel botnet – ParityNews.com: …Because Technology Matters.
Prior to take down of Citadel, Microsoft has been a key player in take down of other botnets like Bamital, Kehlios and Nitol botnet
Technically put, I merely needed to write a script to iterate through the various school IDs, check the different servers, and start with a student ID of 1 yet have a way to detect when there were no more students for a given school. I had to retrieve the resultant html files and parse them to extract all the useful information – Name, Date of Birth, ID, School, Marks.
via Hacking into the Indian Education System – On the Stepping Stone – Quora.
Several hours later, I had all the ISC and ICSE results on my very own computer, in a bunch of comma-separated value files. It was truly incredible. 26 megabytes of pure, magnificent data. An Excel file I couldn’t scroll to the bottom of. Just for kicks, I Ctrl+F’d a few names I knew and what do you know? There they were. Line after line of names, subjects and numbers. It was truly mesmerizing.
The next Cisco Systems Inc. is apparently named the “CTR” and is aiming for densities of at least 1Tbit/s per slot, according to a Cisco document obtained by Light Reading.
via Light Reading – Cisco Preps Its Next Core Router: The ‘CTR’.
After 48 hours (and two all-nighters in a row) I logged onto the (now really REALLY) infected computer, complete with shiny new malware updates. I surfed to Bank of America’s web page, and found what I was looking for– a Man-In-The-Browser attack in action!
via Under the Hood: Banking Malware » LMG Security Blog.
We cover malware network forensics, web proxies and flow analysis during Days 3-4 of the Network Forensics class. We’ll be teaching next at Black Hat USA, July 27-30. Seats are limited, so sign up soon!
President Barack Obama spoke about the problem of patent litigation at a recent Google+ hangout, saying that patent trolls “don’t actually produce anything themselves” and instead develop a business model “to essentially leverage and hijack somebody else’s idea and see if they can extort some money out of them.”
via White House effort targets ‘patent trolls’ – Michelle Quinn – POLITICO.com.
So what this all boils down to is that the fundamental premise of the latest BSA study – that licensed proprietary software is better in many ways than pirated copies – actually applies to open source software even more strongly, with the added virtues that the software is free to try, to use and to modify. That means the potential economic impact of free software is also even greater than that offered by both licensed and unlicensed proprietary software. It’s yet another reason for governments around the world to promote the use of open source in their countries by everyone at every level.
via BSA Study Demonstrates Open Source’s Economic Advantage – Open Enterprise.
The process calls for dissolving barium chloride and sodium silicate in a container of water. A chemical reaction then forms barium carbonate crystals (thanks to carbon dioxide in the air). From there, the shape of these crystals can be manipulated with small pH changes to the solution.
via Scientist Creates and Snaps Photographs of Microscopic Crystal Flowers.
The use, abuse, and misuse of data by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War is a troubling lesson about the limitations of information as the world hurls toward the big-data era. The underlying data can be of poor quality. It can be biased. It can be misanalyzed or used misleadingly. And even more damning, data can fail to capture what it purports to quantify.
via Robert McNamara and the Dangers of Big Data at Ford and in the Vietnam War | MIT Technology Review.