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Daily Archives: June 16, 2021

‘GTA Online’ will shut down on PS3 and Xbox 360 on December 16th

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It’s almost the end of the line for those who’ve been causing havoc in Los Santos with their friends on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Rockstar Games says it will shut down the Grand Theft Auto Online servers for those consoles on December 16th, bringing an end to the multiplayer mode as well as website stat tracking via the Rockstar Games Social Club. The move doesn’t affect the single-player side of Grand Theft Auto V.

You’ll still be able to buy PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of Shark Cards for GTA Online until September 15th. However, you won’t be able to get a refund or transfer your digital currency or virtual items to another platform.

PS3 and Xbox 360 GTA Online players can no longer transfer their character data or progress to another platform either. When the PS4 and Xbox One versions of Grand Theft Auto V arrived, players were initially able to port their GTA Online progress to the newer consoles. Rockstar ended support for those transfers in 2017.

The publisher says it will “continue to move forward with updates and support” for the PS4, Xbox One and PC versions of GTA Online. In November, it’ll release versions of GTA V and GTA Online optimized for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. PS5 owners will get free access to GTA Online for three months. It’s not yet clear whether PS4 and Xbox One owners will be able to transfer GTA Online data to the upcoming versions.

Rockstar will also shut down online features for other PS3 and Xbox 360 games on September 16th. Multiplayer, leaderboards and website stat tracking will no longer be available in those versions of Max Payne 3 after that date. PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of L.A. Noire will also lose website stat tracking. The single-player aspects of both games are otherwise unaffected.

Source: ‘GTA Online’ will shut down on PS3 and Xbox 360 on December 16th | Engadget

This is a real problem, also for the history of gaming. Regulators should force an open source variant of the server to be released to the public so that these games are not at the mercy of the publisher to kill as and when they please.

FB, Uni of Michigans latest AI doesn’t just detect deep fakes, it knows where they came from

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On Wednesday, Facebook and Michigan State University debuted a novel method of not just detecting deep fakes but discovering which generative model produced it by reverse engineering the image itself.

Beyond telling you if an image is a deep fake or not, many current detection systems can tell whether the image was generated in a model that the system saw during its training — known as a “close-set” classification. Problem is, if the image was created by a generative model that the detector system wasn’t trained on then the system won’t have the previous experience to be able to spot the fake.

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“By generalizing image attribution to open-set recognition, we can infer more information about the generative model used to create a deepfake that goes beyond recognizing that it has not been seen before.”

What’s more, this system can compare and trace similarities across a series of deep fakes, enabling researchers to trace groups of falsified images back to a single generative source, which should help social media moderators better track coordinated misinformation campaigns.

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A generative model’s hyperparameters are the variables it uses to guide its self-learning process. So if you can figure out what the various hyperparameters are, you can figure out what model used them to create that image.

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Source: Facebook’s latest AI doesn’t just detect deep fakes, it knows where they came from | Engadget

Android, Apple Mobile Ecosystems Face UK Antitrust Probe Amid Competition Fears

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Google and Apple Inc. face a sweeping probe into the “duopoly” power of their mobile ecosystems, in the U.K. antitrust watchdog’s latest attack on Silicon Valley.

The increasingly tech-focused Competition and Markets Authority opened a 12-month market study into broad aspects of the iOS and Android systems, saying it feared the companies’ dominance is stifling competition. The investigation adds to the regulator’s separate investigations into both tech giants.

“Our ongoing work into big tech has already uncovered some worrying trends and we know consumers and businesses could be harmed if they go unchecked,” CMA Chief Executive Officer Andrea Coscelli said in a statement.

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The CMA said it will consider whether Apple and Google use their position as the owners of the main app stores to exploit consumers and developers as well as their supply of mobile browsers.

Big Tech is the focus of a vast array of European probes looking at how the firms increasingly govern the terms of what people do online, often gaining insights into user behavior that smaller rivals can’t match.

The market study will inform the CMA’s move to boost oversight over the largest tech companies while it develops a new code of conduct for companies that have “strategic market status.” But the regulator also warned that the study could lead to more stringent interventions, noting that even operational splits of company units were a possible outcome.

The CMA is separately scrutinizing Apple’s app payment rules and Google’s planned changes to ad tracking.

Source: Android, Apple Mobile Ecosystems Face UK Antitrust Probe Amid Competition Fears – Bloomberg

Southwest Airlines cancels 500 flights after computer glitch grounds fleet – for 2nd time in 24 hours

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Southwest Airlines (LUV.N) said on Tuesday it canceled about 500 flights and delayed hundreds of others after it was forced to temporarily halt operations over a computer issue — the second time in 24 hours it had been forced to stop flights.

The Federal Aviation Administration said it had issued a temporary nationwide groundstop at the request of Southwest Airlines to resolve a computer reservation issue. The groundstop lasted about 45 minutes, and ended at 2:30 p.m. EDT (1830 GMT), it said.

Southwest said its operations were returning to normal. The issue was the result of “intermittent performance issues with our network connectivity.”

Southwest delayed nearly 1,300 flights on Tuesday, or 37% of its flights, according to flight tracker FlightAware.

Southwest Airlines earlier reported a separate issue that required a groundstop Monday evening after its “third-party weather data provider experienced intermittent performance issues … preventing transmission of weather information that is required to safely operate our aircraft.”

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Source: Southwest Airlines cancels 500 flights after computer glitch grounds fleet | Reuters

Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC

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Most of Amazon’s properties including Amazon.com, WholeFoods.com and Zappos.com are preventing Google’s tracking system FLoC — or Federated Learning of Cohorts — from gathering valuable data reflecting the products people research in Amazon’s vast e-commerce universe, according to website code analyzed by Digiday and three technology experts who helped Digiday review the code.

Amazon declined to comment on this story.

As Google’s system gathers data about people’s web travels to inform how it categorizes them, Amazon’s under-the-radar move could not only be a significant blow to Google’s mission to guide the future of digital ad tracking after cookies die — it could give Amazon a leg up in its own efforts to sell advertising across what’s left of the open web.

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Digiday watched last week as Amazon added code to its digital properties to block FLoC from tracking visitors using Google’s Chrome browser. For example, while earlier in the week WholeFoods.com and Woot.com did not include code to block FLoC, by Thursday Digiday saw that those sites did feature code telling Google’s system not to include activities of their visitors to inform cohorts or assign IDs. But Amazon’s blocking appears scattered.

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Source: Amazon is blocking Google’s FLoC — and that could seriously weaken the system

Open-source projects glibc and gnulib look to sever copyright ties with Free Software Foundation

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The GNU C Library (glibc) and GNU Portability Library (gnulib) are laying the groundwork to divorce themselves from the troubled Free Software Foundation by removing the requirement for copyright assignment.

This move follows in the footsteps of the same shift by the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) on 2 June.

Like many projects under the GNU umbrella, glibc and gnulib – the GNU Project’s C standard library and a collection of subroutines designed to ease cross-platform porting respectively – allow anyone to contribute code. Those doing so are asked to assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation – for now, at least.

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“The changes to accept patches with or without FSF copyright assignment would be effective on August 2nd, and would apply to all open branches.”

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Andrew Katz, managing partner and head of tech and IP at Moorcrofts Corporate Law, said of the move: “My view is that the GPL is sufficient in itself. For GPL, licence in = licence out seems to be the fairest approach from both the developers’ and the project’s perspective, and it means that, ultimately, the developers remain in control of their code.

“Recent questions about governance of the FSF (specifically, concerning RMS’s departure and reinstatement) may cause people to be concerned about the quality of that governance as regards licensing decisions. Assigning copyright to an organisation requires a significant amount of trust, and developers may understandably be concerned that trusting a third party (whether a business or a not-for-profit) presents a greater risk than retaining their own rights in the code.”

Source: Open-source projects glibc and gnulib look to sever copyright ties with Free Software Foundation • The Register

Ukraine police collar six Clop ransomware gang suspects in joint raids with South Korean cops

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Ukrainian police have arrested six people, alleged to be members of the notorious Clop* ransomware gang, seizing cash, cars – and a number of Apple Mac laptops and desktops.

“It was established that six defendants carried out attacks of malicious software such as ‘ransomware’ on the servers of American and [South] Korean companies,” alleged Ukraine’s national police force in a statement published at lunchtime today.

Handout from Ukrainian Police boasting of seized cash from Clop ransomware gang

Ukrainian Police’s stash of seized cash from Clop ransomware gang Pic via: Ukraine police

While the gang is notorious in the West for indiscriminately targeting well-off companies and extorting ransoms in exchange for decryption keys, its most shocking moment was when a poorly secured Accellion file transfer appliance gave the criminals access to defence contractor Bombardier. There the criminals were able to copy blueprints for an airborne early warning radar fitted to the company’s flagship AWACS-style military jet.

The six suspects were arrested in joint raids carried out with South Korean law enforcement authorities earlier today, cops in Ukraine said.

Back in December, Clop had targeted a South Korean retailer, E-Land, reportedly stealing two million credit card details over a 12-month period. Cops in South Korea apparently identified the Clop suspects soon after.

[…]

Source: Cuffed: Ukraine police collar six Clop ransomware gang suspects in joint raids with South Korean cops • The Register

Alibaba suffers billion-item data leak including usernames and mobile numbers

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Alibaba’s Chinese shopping operation Taobao has suffered a data breach of over a billion data points including usernames and mobile phone numbers. The info was lifted from the site by a crawler developed by an affiliate marketer.

Chinese outlet 163.com reported the case last week and today it was picked up by the Wall Street Journal.

Both reports state that a developer created a crawler that was able to reach beneath information available to the human eye on Taobao, and that the crawler operated for several months before Alibaba noticed the effort.

163.com suggests the source of the crawler was a company that makes money from affiliate referrals to Taobao, and that the site was scraped from November 2019 until Alibaba noticed the activity in July 2020. Alibaba notified authorities, an investigation commenced, and the matter landed in the People’s Court of Suiyang District — which in May convicted a developer and his employer of lifting the data.

Both were sentenced to three years inside.

Thankfully, the perps appear not to have shared the data, instead hoarding it for their own purposes.

[…]

Source: Alibaba suffers billion-item data leak of usernames and mobile numbers • The Register

Finding next-gen space tech: DASA launches the Space to Innovate Campaign

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To promote space resilience and operational effectiveness, the Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) is pleased to announce that we have teamed up with the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) Space Programme to launch the Space to Innovate Campaign.

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The first challenge drop, called the “Alpha challenge drop” in the Space to Innovate Campaign is now open for proposals! This challenge drop focuses on two challenges:

  • Challenge 1: Visualisation tools to enable space operators to exploit information gathered from multiple data sources
  • Challenge 2: Novel methods for characterising objects in space and their intent

Think you have the solution?

Check out the full competition document and submit your idea.

When does the Alpha challenge drop begin and how much funding is available?

The Alpha challenge drop is now open and closes for proposals on 4 August 2021. The value of individual contracts offered throughout the entire Space to Innovate Campaign will be from £125k to £400k, with durations of the contracts expected to be from 6 months to 18 months. The amount of funding available for the entire Space to Innovate Campaign is expected to be £2m, with the campaign ending on 31 March 2023.

The second Bravo challenge drop will address challenges focusing on ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) and SSA (Space Situational Awareness).

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Alpha drop challenges

Challenge 1: Visualisation tools to enable space operators to exploit information gathered from multiple data sources

For challenge 1, DASA is looking for novel solutions that could help to address issues such as:

  • enhancing the situational awareness around an object
  • understanding and monitoring manoeuvres and changes of objects in orbit
  • streamlining ingestion issues with multiple data sources and different naming conventions
  • using machine learning to enhance our understanding and interrogation of the data presented & make sense of results
  • visualising uncertainty in data

Challenge 2: Novel methods for characterising objects in space and their intent

For challenge 2, DASA is looking for novel solutions that could help to address issues such as:

  • detecting changes of state and predicting future changes
  • exploiting non-traditional sensor configurations including bi- or multi-static configurations and the repurposing of existing facilities
  • technologies that allow resolution of individual features on an observed satellite, inferring information regarding payloads
  • observing the interaction and cooperation between satellites in formation in low Earth orbit (LEO) or geostationary Earth orbit (GEO)
  • satellite overflight warning of Earth observation missions primarily in LEO
  • asset protection for high value satellites operating in GEO

Source: Finding next-gen space tech: DASA launches the Space to Innovate Campaign – GOV.UK

Tracking China’s Sudden Airpower Expansion Along Its Western Border

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China’s heavy investment in airpower-related facilities in the region is already being leveraged by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), as evidenced by an unprecedented level of activity along the Sino-Indian border as of late. This is in addition to massive growth in ground-based air defenses, as well as the construction of new fortifications, heliports, and rail lines into the area. As such, there is more going on here than just some defensive upgrades and the strategic implications are potentially severe.

With that in mind, The War Zone brought in some of the best satellite image analysts we know, virtually a who’s-who of the strongest voices in Twitter’s open-source intelligence community who also specialize in develpments in Asia. We want to actually show you via satellite imagery exactly what we mean when we say China is massively expanding its air combat capability footprint in the far western areas of the country, as well as what it all means.

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Source: Tracking China’s Sudden Airpower Expansion Along Its Western Border