Daily Archives: November 15, 2021

Modders Have Fixed The GTA Trilogy’s Incredibly Ugly Rain

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The recently “remastered” GTA trilogy has some of the ugliest rain I’ve ever seen, and a handful of days later, modders have fixed it. No longer will you walk the streets of Vice City at night, only to be covered in the drippings of Spiderman’s leaky web-shooter. Finally, you can be free of that oddly viscous rain.

Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — Definitive Edition is very sick. The games are ill. They need doctors. Luckily for them, Rockstar has a pretty dedicated modding community, all of whom are trained in virtual trauma care. These brave few, whose greatest works were wiped out by the release of an overpriced, undersupported mess, have taken on the gargantuan task of fixing this shitshow. They have taken to this new work with the practiced, exhausted rage of a community used to being tossed scraps by a company that has become too big to fail.

The rain, which has been made more transparent in about half a dozen mods searching for the perfect drop of water, is just the beginning of their grim quest. Other modders are attempting to restore the series’ signature radio stations, which were utterly eviscerated by expired music licensing. The games’ jerseys, currently haunted by the ghostly textures of dead numbers, have a faithful army of Vatican-ordained modders attempting dozens of simultaneous digital exorcisms. But all of this only scratches the surface.

The rot runs deep. Everything from character geometry to building textures is uncomfortably wrong. It is as if Rockstar has found a new kind of uncanny valley, but instead of being based on how people should look, this new kind of uncanny valley disquiets our memories of virtual cities.

Source: Modders Have Fixed The GTA Trilogy’s Incredibly Ugly Rain

Woman Allegedly Made $57,000 From Unofficial Demon Slayer Cakes

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A 34-year-old resident of Tokyo’s Shibuya has been arrested on suspicion of violating Japanese copyright law after selling unlicensed Demon Slayer cakes.

According to Kyodo News, the women sold the cakes through Instagram, with customers submitting their desired images to be turned into frosting, cream, and sugar. The suspect is said to have charged between 13,000 yen ($114) and 15,000 yen ($132) per cake. Since July 2019, it is believed she made over 6,500,000 yen in sales. That’s over $57,000!

It’s a lot of cakes, too.

The Metropolitan Police Department released photos of the criminal cakes in question, which can be seen in the above TBS News clip.

Source: Woman Allegedly Made $57,000 From Unofficial Demon Slayer Cakes

yay well done copyright. not.

Securing your digital life, part one: The basics

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[…]

Even those who consider themselves well educated about cyber crime and security threats—and who do everything they’ve been taught to do—can (and do!) still end up as victims. The truth is that, with enough time, resources, and skill, everything can be hacked.

The key to protecting your digital life is to make it as expensive and impractical as possible for someone bent on mischief to steal the things most important to your safety, financial security, and privacy. If attackers find it too difficult or expensive to get your stuff, there’s a good chance they’ll simply move on to an easier target. For that reason, it’s important to assess the ways that vital information can be stolen or leaked—and understand the limits to protecting that information.

[…]

Source: Securing your digital life, part one: The basics | Ars Technica

A very good 2 part article about how to stay relatively safe on internet

Amazon textbook rental service scammed for $1.5m

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A 36-year-old man from Portage, Michigan, was arrested on Thursday for allegedly renting thousands of textbooks from Amazon and selling them rather than returning them.

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Also indicted were three alleged co-conspirators: Gregory Mark Gleesing, 43, and Lovedeep Singh Dhanoa, 25, both from Portage, Michigan, and Paul Steven Larson, 32, from Kalamazoo, Michigan

From January 2016 through March 2021, according to the indictment, Talsma rented textbooks from the Amazon Rental program in order to sell them for a profit. The indictment describes what occurred as “a sophisticated fraud scheme.”

Talsma allegedly disguised his identity by creating multiple customer accounts with different names, mailing addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers. He supposedly did so to bypass the 15 book limit Amazon placed on textbook rentals.

His alleged fraud scheme involved using Amazon gift cards to rent the textbooks and prepaid MyVanilla Visa cards with minimal credit balances to cover the buyout price charged for books not returned.

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made sure that the MyVanilla Visa cards did not have sufficient credit balances, or any balance at all, when the textbook rentals were past due so that Amazon could not collect the book buyout price from those cards.”

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As the scheme progressed, the indictment says, Talsma “recruited individuals, including defendants Gregory Mark Gleesing, Lovedeep Singh Dhanoa, and Paul Steven Larson, and other individuals known to the grand jury, to allow him to use their names and mailing addresses to further continue receiving rental textbooks in amounts well above the fifteen-book limit.”

Talsma would call Amazon’s customer service department and claim that instead of the textbooks ordered, he had received other items that could not be returned by mail, like flammable objects. Or he would claim he never received any textbooks, in the hope Amazon would credit him for unreceived goods and forget about the rental. And later, he is said to have taught Gleesing, Dhanoa, and Larson to do the same.

Titles taken included “Compensation,” by Jerry Newman, Barry Gerhart, and George Milkovich, which lists a Buyout Price of $172.05, and “Economics,” by Campbell McConnell, Stanley Brue, and Sean Flynn, which lists a Buyout Price of $108.00.

The scheme appears to have been fairly successful: The indictment says the four alleged scammers stole 14,000 textbooks worth over $1.5m.

[…]

Source: Amazon textbook rental service scammed for $1.5m • The Register

French government to speed up deployment of open source – EURACTIV.com

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The French government’s roadmap for developing open source to make it a vector of digital sovereignty and a guarantee of “democratic confidence” was presented by Public Transformation and Civil Service Minister Amélie de Montchalin on Wednesday (10 November). EURACTIV France reports.

Montchalin spoke at the closing of the first edition of the “Open Source Experience”, which took place from 9-10 November and brought together all players in the free software community in Paris.

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“Open source contrasts with proprietary software in that the source code of applications is freely available to the public; it is developed in a collaborative and decentralised way, by a community, and relies on peer review. But more importantly, it is not owned, in the proprietary sense, by anyone,” Quentin Roland of LegalUP Consulting told EURACTIV.

With the vast majority of relations between citizens and state services now being digital, Montchalin believes a “culture of transparency” is necessary for “democratic trust”. It is also a matter of digital sovereignty, she added.

According to a European Commission study published in September, investment in open source software in 2018 generated a sum of €65-95 billion in revenue. According to the same report, France was crowned European champion of open source policies.

To help French administrations make greater use of such solutions, Montchalin announced the creation of a team within the Interministerial Digital Directorate (DINUM) responsible for the promotion and inter-ministerial coordination of this mission.

She also revealed the launch of the code.gouv.fr platform, which will inventory all source code published by public organisations.

The source code for ‘France Connect’, the digital identification system for government services used by more than 30 million French people, will be public ‘in the next few days’, Montchalin also announced, adding that she would do the same for the code determining income tax deducted at the source.

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n his report, Bothorel recommended using more open source software because “infrastructures necessary for data are increasingly exposed to forms of software dependency” and that this therefore raises “a strategic autonomy issue”.

This vision is shared by Montchalin, who wants the state to retain “control over the solutions” it uses. She also stressed the importance of interoperability – the ability to work with other existing or future products or systems – and reversibility – the ability to resume using data or software in the event of migration to another solution.

“By using open source software, you give yourself much more autonomy than by using proprietary software and a fortiori proprietary cloud services that are hosted outside Europe,” Stéfane Fermigier, co-president of the Union of Free Software and Open Digital Businesses (CNLL), told EURACTIV.

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However, it is not a “miracle solution”, he added, noting that this is because open source software does not always offer the same technical level as proprietary solutions, mainly because open source code makes it easier to discover security flaws, which can be exploited.

“However, this is an extremely interesting alternative for Europe, a third way between digital giants and local players; an opportunity to ensure independence through neutrality and decentralisation rather than conflict,” he also said.

According to Fermigier, however, “free software is also an opportunity to rethink a number of habits and reflexes,” particularly in the field of public procurement.

“It’s an opportunity to think about what we need, to use the best tools for our needs and not for marketing or expectations,” he added.

Source: French government to speed up deployment of open source – EURACTIV.com

Forget Radio! Transmitting With Neutrons

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Throughout history, people have devised ways to send information across long distances. For centuries we relied on smoke signals, semaphores, and similar physical devices. Electricity changed everything. First the telegraph and then radio transformed communications. Now researchers at the University of Lancaster have demonstrated another way to send wireless data without using electromagnetic radiation. They’ve harnessed fast neutrons from californium-252 and modulated them with information with 100% success.

The setup was interesting. The radioactive material was encased in a cubic meter steel tank filled with water. A pneumatic system can move the material to one edge of the tank which allows fast neutrons to escape. A scintillating detector can pick up the increased neutron activity. It seems like it is akin to using what hams call CW and college professors call OOK (on off keying). You can do that with just about anything you can detect. A flashlight, knocking on wood, or — we suppose — neutrons.

We wondered what the practical application of this might be. The paper suggests that the technique could send data through metal containment structures like those of a nuclear reactor or, perhaps, a spacecraft where you don’t want anything unnecessarily breaching the containment. After all, neutrons cut through things that would stop a conventional radio wave cold.

It seems like you only have to prove you can detect something to make this work — it really doesn’t matter what it is you are detecting. It seems like it would be much harder to do more advanced types of modulation using neutrons. Maybe this is why we don’t hear aliens. They are all Morse code operators with neutron-based telegraphs.

Source: Forget Radio! Transmitting With Neutrons | Hackaday

FBI email servers were hacked to target a security researcher

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The FBI appears to have been used as a pawn in a fight between hackers and security researchers. According to Bleeping Computer, the FBI has confirmed intruders compromised its email servers early today (November 13th) to send fake messages claiming recipients had fallen prone to data breaches. The emails tried to pin the non-existent attacks on Vinny Troia, the leader of dark web security firms NightLion and Shadowbyte.

The non-profit intelligence organization Spamhaus quickly shed light on the bogus messages. The attackers used legitimate FBI systems to conduct the attack, using email addresses scraped from a database for the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), among other sources. Over 100,000 addresses received the fake emails in at least two waves.

The FBI described the hack as an “ongoing situation” and didn’t initially have more details to share. It asked email recipients to report messages like these to the bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center or the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Troia told Bleeping Computer he believed the perpetrators might be linked to “Pompomourin,” a persona that has attacked the researcher in the past.

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Source: FBI email servers were hacked to target a security researcher | Engadget

Apple has tight control over states’ digital ID cards

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Apple’s digital ID card support in iOS 15 may be convenient, but it also comes with tight requirements for the governments that use them. CNBC has learned states using Apple’s system are required to not only run the platforms for issuing and checking credentials, but hire managers to handle Apple’s requests and meet the iPhone maker’s performance reporting expectations. States also have to “prominently” market the feature and encourage other government agencies (both state and federal) to adopt the technology.

Contracts are nearly identical for Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky and Oklahoma, some of the earliest adopters of the program. That suggests other states, including Connecticut, Iowa, Maryland and Utah, may have to honor similar terms.

Apple declined to comment. A representative for Arizona’s Transportation Department told CNBC there were no payments to Apple or other “economic considerations,” though the states would have to cover the costs.

The details raise a number of concerns. While it isn’t surprising that states would have pay for at least some of the expenses, the contracts give a private company a significant amount of control over the use and promotion of government systems while asking governments to foot the bills.

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Source: Apple has tight control over states’ digital ID cards | Engadget

Vizio’s profit on ads, subscriptions, and data is double the money it makes selling TVs

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It’s been less than a year since Vizio became a publicly traded company, and one consequence of that is we know more about its business than ever before. The TV maker released its latest earnings report on Tuesday and revealed that over the last three months, its Platform Plus segment that includes advertising and viewer data had a gross profit of $57.3 million. That’s more than twice the amount of profit it made selling devices like TVs, which was $25.6 million, despite those device sales pulling in considerably more revenue.

When Vizio filed to go public, it described the difference between the two divisions. While Devices is easy to understand — 4K TVs, soundbars, etc. — Platform Plus is a little more complicated. It counts money made from selling ad placements on its TV homescreens, deals for the buttons on remotes, ads that run on streaming channels, its cut from subscriptions, and viewer data that it tracks and sells as part of the InScape program.

The company says shipments of its TVs fell to 1.4 million in 2021 compared to 2.1 million in 2020, a drop of 36 percent. CEO William Wang told investors on the call that he sees “pretty healthy inventory” going into the holiday season, so anyone planning to pick up a value-priced TV or soundbar should have some decent options available.

That spike in Platform Plus revenue, which shot up 136 percent compared to last year, did a lot to help Vizio make up the difference as profits from TVs dipped compared to last year. Supply chain and logistics problems affecting many companies hit Vizio hard, too, but execs also said the company is working with its third-party partners to help find warehouse and trucking employees.

Where the numbers keep growing is in its number of active SmartCast accounts, which are now over 14 million, and how much money it makes from each user on average. That number has nearly doubled from last year, going from $10.44 to $19.89. On the call with investors and analysts, Vizio execs said 77 percent of that money comes directly from advertising, like the kind that runs on its WatchFree Plus package of streaming channels, a group that recently expanded with content targeting. The next biggest contributor is the money it makes selling Inscape data about what people are watching.

Vizio isn’t the only smart TV maker that’s really in the advertising business — as we noted a couple of years ago, while you probably know Roku for its TV OS and streaming boxes, CEO Anthony Wood is very up front about its true model. Roku’s most recent report revealed that on average it’s pulling in $40 per month on each user, or more than double what Vizio manages. One way Vizio plans to catch up is by building its own in-app payment system, which chief revenue officer Mike O’Donnell says will roll out to consumers next year.

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Source: Vizio’s profit on ads, subscriptions, and data is double the money it makes selling TVs – The Verge

With this kind of profitability it’s not really surprising that everyone is out to turn you into a product.

Take Two and Rockstar Use DMCA Claims To Remove More GTA Mods

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As players continue to criticize the recently released GTA Trilogy remastered collection, Rockstar Games parent company Take-Two Interactive has decided this is the perfect time to use DMCA takedown notices to remove some more GTA mods and fan projects.

On November 11, according to the folks over at the GTA modding site LibertyCity, Take-Two contacted them and used DMCA strikes to remove three different GTA-related mods. The three removed mods are listed below:

  • GTA Advance PC Port Beta 2
  • The Lost and Damned Unlocked for GTA 4
  • GTA IV EFLC The Lost And Damned (65%)

GTA Advance PC Port is a fan-developed project attempting to port the game into the GTA 3 engine. Developed by Digital Eclipse, GTA Advance was only released on the GameBoy Advance in 2004.

The Lost and Damned Unlocked for GTA IV is a mod released in 2009 which lets players swap out the star of GTA IV, Niko Bellic, with the protagonist of the Lost and Damned DLC, biker Johnny Klebitz. It also included some new biker outfits and icons.

Finally, GTA IV EEFLC (65%) isn’t even a mod! It’s just a save file for the game that lets players start from 65% completion. Yes, Take-Two used a DMCA strike against a save file for a game released over a decade ago.

These are just the latest in a growing number of GTA mods Take-Two has gone after and removed using legal DMCA notices. Over the last year, the company has been on a takedown spree, like a GTA character on a rampage. It has also sued fan devs over source code projects and led to some old mods, like GTA Underground, shutting down over fears of more legal and financial trouble.

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Regardless of if these takedowns are evidence of a future GTA IV remaster or not, it still is a frustrating situation for modders and community devs who have spent decades improving, porting, and maintaining the classic GTA games, allowing fans to play them years after Rockstar had moved on. Kotaku spoke to some modders who seemed fed up with Rockstar and many more have moved on to other games from other companies, worried about the potential legal pitfalls for continuing to mod Grand Theft Auto titles.

Source: Take Two and Rockstar Use DMCA Claims To Remove More GTA Mods