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Metasploit Launches Exploit Bounty Program 26

Posted by Soulskill from the lighting-a-fire dept.
Trailrunner7 writes "The team behind the Metasploit Project is launching its own version of a bug bounty program: cash payouts for working exploits. The group is hoping to get exploit code for as many of its top 30 vulnerabilities as possible before the program expires later this summer. The amount of money paid for a working exploit module for Metasploit depends on the value of the vulnerability. A module for one of the vulnerabilities in the top five list — which includes a flaw in Google Chrome and another in the Windows DNS client — is worth $500. Modules for vulnerabilities in the separate top 25 list are worth $100 each under the rules."
Piracy

Study Claims $41.5 Billion In Portable Game Piracy Losses Over Five Years 316

Posted by Soulskill from the fair-and-balanced dept.
Gamasutra reports that Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association conducted a study to estimate the total amount of money lost to piracy on portable game consoles. The figure they arrived at? $41.5 billion from 2004 to 2009. Quoting: "CESA checked the download counts for the top 20 Japanese games at what it considers the top 114 piracy sites, recording those figures from 2004 to 2009. After calculating the total for handheld piracy in Japan with that method, the groups multiplied that number by four to reach the worldwide amount, presuming that Japan makes up 25 percent of the world's software market. CESA and Baba Lab did not take into account other popular distribution methods for pirated games like peer-to-peer sharing, so the groups admit that the actual figures for DS and PSP software piracy could be much higher than the ¥3.816 trillion amount the study found."

Comment Re:Book Burning? (Score 1) 515

by el_monkeyo (#32336846) Attached to: Adobe Founders On Flash and Internet Standards
Not sure why my original comment came out as AC, but.....

So you admit they are becoming viable.

Whilst I've never been a Flash evangelist, as a web designer, I have been interested in getting the best results to the widest audience. I now use things like jQuery for most of the things that I would once have used Flash for, but it has taken a long time for there to be a viable alternative. Not so very long ago we were limited to animated GIFs or Flash.

Or they'd just have waited a long time.

I still really like the vector drawing tools in Flash, and will do some things in it over Illustrator, often for designs that will never go on the web and end up being printed. I gather this is down to its SmartSketch heritage, although I didn't use it that long ago! I don't think sites like the ones I mentioned would have existed without those tools, even if SVG, HTML5, JavaScript, ActiveX or whatever had been around to deliver low-bandwidth vector animation to a wide audience. There would not doubt have been some sort of alternative, but Flash created it's own style.

Unless someone writes an automatic conversion tool. In any case, I'm not sure how relevant it is. If I only have to use Flash for stuff from the 90s, that's fine with me. It's still a marked improvement.

If Apple took Gnash and did what they did with Webkit to make Safari (I realise this will probably never happen!), and made something that didn't crash, and supported Flash up to, say, version 8, I wouldn't have any problem with their battle against Adobe for future control.

But there is still a huge amount of internet history in Flash files from a time when Flash was the only way to deliver certain things.

This information is not stored on some inaccessible obsolete disks that can't be read any more, its out there on the internet, and only becoming inaccessible because of companies being dicks.

Are we supposed to just forget about all that information and pretend it never happened?
The Internet

FTC Could Gain Enforcement Power Over Internet 134

Posted by timothy from the who-above-all-else-desire-power dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that under a little-known provision in financial overhaul legislation before Congress the Federal Trade Commission could become a more powerful watchdog for Internet users with the power to to issue rules on a fast track and impose civil penalties on companies that hurt consumers. 'If we had a deterrent, a bigger stick to fine malefactors, that would be helpful,' says FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, who has argued in favor of bolstering his agency's enforcement ability. This power would stand in stark contrast to a besieged FCC, whose ability to oversee broadband providers has been cast into doubt after a federal court ruled last month that the agency lacked the ability to punish Comcast for violating open-Internet guidelines. The provision to strengthen the FTC is in the regulatory overhaul legislation passed by the House, and although it is absent from the legislation before the Senate, some observers expect the measure to be included when the House and Senate versions are combined."
Games

Game Endings Going Out of Style? 190

Posted by Soulskill from the to-be-continued dept.
An article in the Guardian asks whether the focus of modern games has shifted away from having a clear-cut ending and toward indefinite entertainment instead. With the rise of achievements, frequent content updates and open-ended worlds, it seems like publishers and developers are doing everything they can to help this trend. Quoting: "Particularly before the advent of 'saving,' the completion of even a simple game could take huge amounts of patience, effort and time. The ending, like those last pages of a book, was a key reason why we started playing in the first place. Sure, multiplayer and arcade style games still had their place, but fond 8, 16 and 32-bit memories consist more of completion and satisfaction than particular levels or tricky moments. Over the past few years, however, the idea of a game as simply something to 'finish' has shifted somewhat. For starters, the availability of downloadable content means no story need ever end, as long as the makers think there's a paying audience. Also, the ubiquity of broadband means multiplayer gaming is now the standard, not the exception it once was. There is no real 'finish' to most MMORPGs."
Math

Why Programmers Need To Learn Statistics 572

Posted by Soulskill from the because-they-suck-at-poker dept.
David Gerard writes "Zed Shaw writes an impassioned plea to programmers: Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All. Quoting: 'I go insane when I hear programmers talking about statistics like they know s*** when it's clearly obvious they do not. I've been studying it for years and years and still don't think I know anything. ... I have taken a bunch of math classes, studied statistics in grad school, learned the R language, and read tons of books on the subject. Despite all of this I'm not at all confident in my understanding of such a vast topic. What I can do is apply the techniques to common problems I encounter at work. My favorite problem to attack with the statistics wolverine is performance measurement and tuning. All of this leads to a curse since none of my colleagues have any clue about what they don't understand. I'll propose a measurement technique and they'll scoff at it. I try to show them how to properly graph a run chart and they're indignant. I question their metrics and they try to back it up with lame attempts at statistical reasoning. I really can't blame them since they were probably told in college that logic and reason are superior to evidence and observation.'"
Censorship

In the UK, a Few Tweets Restore Freedom of Speech 216

Posted by kdawson from the inconvenient-truths dept.
Several readers wrote to us about the situation in the UK that saw the Guardian newspaper forbidden by a judge from reporting a question in UK parliament. The press's freedom to do so has been fought for since at least 1688 and fully acknowledged since the 19th century. At issue was a matter of public record — but the country's libel laws meant that the newspaper could not inform the public of what parliament was up to. The question concerned the oil trading company Trafigura, the toxic waste scandal they are involved in, and their generous use of libel lawyers to silence those who would report on the whole thing. After tweeters and bloggers shouted about Trafigura all over the Internet, the company's lawyers agreed to drop the gag request.

Is Windows 7 Faster Or Just Smarter? 619

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the perception-is-reality dept.
Barence writes "The Windows 7 unveiling garnered largely positive coverage, with many hands-on testers praising it for being faster than Vista. But is it actually? To find out, this blogger ran a suite of benchmarks to see just how much quicker Windows 7 really is — and the results weren't quite what he expected. 'The actual performance gap between Vista and Windows 7 is ... nada. Absolutely nothing. Our Office benchmarks and video encoding tests complete in precisely the same time regardless of which OS is installed. [...] It's tempting to see this as a bit of a con. They've sped up the front end so it feels like you're getting more done, but in terms of real productivity it's no better than Vista."
XBox (Games)

Inside the New Xbox Experience 50

Posted by Soulskill from the more-and-better dept.
Eurogamer has an in-depth look at the new Xbox Experience, which is coming on November 19th. They discuss the new interface and features, and their reaction is generally positive, citing graphical improvements, smooth file management, and better chat functionality. "The Guide is also your access point to the new Party system, where you can gather eight of your friends together in a voice-chat channel and move the group between games. You don't even have to be doing the same thing: you can just chat along regardless. And because it's a service layer, it automatically works with all your existing games. Gears of War treats it like it's always been there. Instead of inviting a player, you invite the group; instead of ending a session and having to reassemble for another, you stay together. You can open it up to friends or set it to be invite-only, and while it's one of NXE's quieter additions, it's also its most authoritative statement: this is Microsoft saying, 'We figured we might need to do something like this, so we made sure we could.'"
Space

Looking For Earth-Like Exoplanets 73

Posted by Soulskill from the dust-motes-orbiting-a-yottawatt-light-bulb dept.
Discover Magazine is running a story detailing the search for planets like Earth orbiting other stars. While we've been able to locate a few "super earths" so far, none of them really compare in size or the potential for habitability with our own world. Fortunately, advances in data analysis and new space-based telescopes — such as Kepler, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the already-launched CoRoT (PDF) — have some astronomers predicting we'll find such an exoplanet by 2010, and a habitable one by 2012. Earth-based telescopes are also in the hunt, though the article notes, "even if a habitable Earth-like world is found first from the ground, it will most likely take a space observatory to search for the chemical signals that tell us what we really want to know: Is anything living out there? If the planet is one that can be observed transiting, it just might be possible to provide a hint of an answer in the next few years."
Handhelds

Submission + - Pandora Console Ready for Preorders 3

Submitted by Croakyvoice
Croakyvoice writes: Finally months after the official announcement 3000 lucky people can now preorder Pandora, the Worlds fastest handheld console that boasts a processor capable of up to 900MHZ, PowerVR 3D Graphics, a large 800x480 LCD Touchscreen, Wifi, Bluetooth, USB, Dual SD Card Slots, TV Out, Dual analogue and digital controls, a clamshell DS Lite style shape and a 43 button mini keyboard.The Console already boasts an amazing amount of ready to be released software such as Ubuntu and many full speed emulators for systems such as Snes, Amiga, Megadrive and many more that are not publically announced yet. The Console is as powerful as original Xbox and on a par with the Nintedo Wii, Those Interested should visit OpenPandora.Org the home of the Pandora Console. For the full history of news about the Pandora from start until now check out the Pandora Homebrew Site
AMD

Submission + - An insight into AMD's new linux driver development (phoronix.com)

Submitted by
Cowards Anonymous
Cowards Anonymous writes: "It's no secret that ATI Technologies has had a rough time in the past delivering display drivers that met the expectations of their customers. When ATI started out producing a FireGL and Radeon Linux driver they for some time were greatly behind NVIDIA's feature-rich driver.

The early ATI Linux driver had lacked essential functionality such as PCI Express and x86_64 architecture support and was also affected by stability and performance problems — not to mention a great deal of bugs.

Things are looking better though, as the article explains."

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