Miscellaneous Tech News
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Warcraft III: Reforged will release on January 28, not in 2019
Remaster brings new online features, gameplay tweaks, and overhauled visuals.
This week, game developer and publisher Blizzard Entertainment emailed customers who had pre-ordered its upcoming 4K remaster of strategy classic Warcraft III announcing that the game will become playable at 3am PST on January 28, 2020. The game was previously slated for launch before the end of 2019, but players had begun to suspect some kind of delay when Blizzard didn't provide a firm release date for the game at its otherwise packed BlizzCon conference in early November. The company explained the short delay in a blog post. As recent controversies over crunch in game development have made clear, making triple-A video games is complex and fraught with unexpected roadblocks and ever-shifting scope. Delays like this are common. Some excited players may be frustrated that they have to wait a little longer, but others will be happy to see a focus on quality or saner worker conditions for developers, whichever (if either) the case may be here. Warcraft III was arguably one of the most influential games of the past 20 years because it birthed both World of Warcraft (which defined more than a decade of massively multiplayer online games) and, via community-made modifications, the MOBA genre (League of Legends, Dota 2, Blizzard's own Heroes of the Storm), which in tandem with battle royale games, drove the esports and livestreaming revolution of the gaming industry. -
Giant surveillance balloons are lurking at the edge of space
Balloons in the stratosphere snap images of Earth with unprecedented resolutions. Cheese!
It’s a brisk December morning at Spaceport Tucson, America’s premiere (only?) dedicated launch pad for stratospheric balloons, and a small army of technicians in reflective vests is milling around on the concrete and thawing out after a long, cold night. Nearby, a white metal tripod the size of a smart car is tethered to two dozen solar panels and hundreds of feet of clear plastic that stretches across the pad. -
Russia 'successfully tests' its unplugged internet
Russia has successfully tested Runet, a country-wide alternative to the global internet, its government has announced.
Details of what the test involved were vague but, according to the Ministry of Communications, ordinary users did not notice any changes. The results will now be presented to President Putin. Experts remain concerned about the trend for some countries to dismantle the internet. "Sadly, the Russian direction of travel is just another step in the increasing breaking-up of the internet," said Prof Alan Woodward, a computer scientist at University of Surrey. "Increasingly, authoritarian countries who want to control what citizens see are looking at what Iran and China have already done. "It means people will not have access to dialogue about what is going on in their own country, they will be kept within their own bubble." -
@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
"It means people will not have access to dialogue about what is going on in their own country, they will be kept within their own bubble."
So... replicating what America does voluntarily. JAJAJAJA
I kid, I kid.. Kind of.
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Sangoma CEO:
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Samsung Accidentally Confirms 5G-Ready Galaxy Tab S6
5G tablets are on the way, and Samsung's Galaxy Tab S6 could be repackaged as one of the first. The South Korean company accidentally listed the 5G-ready model on its website. Now, it's only a matter of time before the Galaxy Tab S6 5G goes official.
Samsung appears to be developing the world's first 5G tablet. The Galaxy Tab S6, according to SamMobile, will undergo some tweaks in order to offer compatibility with next-generation wireless networks. Rather than an insider obtaining the information, Samsung accidentally published a listing for the 'Galaxy Tab S6 5G' on its website. The listing is light on details, but it at least confirms what the South Korean company has in the pipeline. Known by model number SM-T866, the Galaxy Tab S6 5G surfaced on Samsung's website with a generic "coming soon" label. Its shown alongside Samsung's regular Galaxy Tab S6, the Galaxy Tab S5e, Galaxy Tab A, and Galaxy Tab A with S Pen. All of them are currently available; however, the Galaxy Tab S6 5G still needs to be announced. -
YouTube admits error over Bitcoin video purge
YouTube has reinstated hundreds of crypto-currency related channels after admitting it had removed them "in error".
A wave of YouTubers received notifications that their videos were in breach of the platform's terms of service earlier this week. The move appeared to target smaller channels and publishers that focused on Bitcoin and crypto-currency content. The Google-owned video sharing platform has since apologised for the mistake. Video-makers initially took to Twitter to share their frustration, after many well-established channels claimed that YouTube had been ignoring their complaints. Alex Saunders, founder of Nugget's News, told his followers that the incident felt "really scary," and claimed YouTube was failing to communicate with its users. He wrote on Twitter: "Hi @TeamYouTube, with over 100 videos removed and two strikes in 24 hours I have still not even received an email from you. This is really scary. We've hired new staff. I have a wife and baby to support. I can't fix the problem if I don't know what I've done or who to communicate with?" Several other crypto-bloggers echoed his complaints, with some suggesting that they intended to boycott the platform completely. -
A thief took Facebook hard drives with payroll data from a worker's car
A thief broke into a payroll worker's car and stole hard drives that reportedly contained unencrypted payroll information for around 29,000 current and former US employees.
How the hell can it be that a company like Facebook is working with this kind of information locally on their device, and not via SaaS or something. And why the hell are the drives not encrypted? No wonder nobody trusts their data in the U.S.
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@Obsolesce said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
A thief took Facebook hard drives with payroll data from a worker's car
A thief broke into a payroll worker's car and stole hard drives that reportedly contained unencrypted payroll information for around 29,000 current and former US employees.
How the hell can it be that a company like Facebook is working with this kind of information locally on their device, and not via SaaS or something. And why the hell are the drives not encrypted? No wonder nobody trusts their data in the U.S.
Absolutely no one trusts Facebook.
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@scottalanmiller said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
@Obsolesce said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
A thief took Facebook hard drives with payroll data from a worker's car
A thief broke into a payroll worker's car and stole hard drives that reportedly contained unencrypted payroll information for around 29,000 current and former US employees.
How the hell can it be that a company like Facebook is working with this kind of information locally on their device, and not via SaaS or something. And why the hell are the drives not encrypted? No wonder nobody trusts their data in the U.S.
Absolutely no one trusts Facebook.
Yeah, there's no real data governance or protection enforcement. It's up to the company.
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Chinese start-up Mobike loses more than 200,000 bikes
Chinese start-up Mobike has announced that it lost more than 200,000 bikes in 2019.
The company said in a blog that 205,600 "dockless" bikes were lost to theft and vandalism. In 2018, it pulled out of Manchester after a series of incidents. Shared dockless bikes, which are hired via an app, have become commonplace in cities worldwide over the last few years. Companies like Uber, Lime and Ofo have all put shared bikes on city streets, as have some local councils. In China, thousands of shared bikes have ended up in huge scrapheaps, leading to questions about whether there is demand for them. -
Wyze data breach (emailed text)
Wyze Users,
There is nothing we value higher than trust from our users. In fact, our entire business model is dependent on building long-term trust with customers that keep coming back.
We are reaching out to you because we’ve made a mistake in violation of that trust. On December 26th, we discovered information in some of our non-production databases was mistakenly made public between December 4th - December 26th. During this time, the databases were accessed by an unauthorized party.
The information did not contain passwords, personal financial data, or video content.
The information did contain Wyze nicknames, user emails, profile photos, WiFi router names, a limited number of Alexa integration tokens, and other information detailed in the link below.
If you were a user with us before we secured this information on December 26th, we regretfully write this email as a notification that some of your information was included in these databases. If you are receiving this email and joined us after December 26th, we write this email because you use our products and deserve to know how your data is being handled.
Upon finding out about the public user data, we took immediate action to secure it by closing any databases in question, forcing all users to log in again to create new access tokens, and requiring users to reconnect Alexa, Google Assistant, and IFTTT integrations. You can read in more detail about the data leak and the actions we took at this link:
https://forums.wyzecam.com/t/updated-12-30-19-data-leak-12-26-2019
As an additional security measure, we recommend that you reset your Wyze account password. Again, no passwords were compromised, but we recommend this as a standard safety measure. You may also add an additional level of security to your account by implementing two-factor authentication inside of the Wyze app. Finally, please be watchful for any phishing attempts. Especially watch any communications coming from Wyze and ensure they come from official @wyze.com and @wyzecam.com email addresses.
We are deeply sorry for this oversight. We promise to learn from this mistake and will make improvements going forward. This will include enhancing our security processes, improving communication of security guidelines to all Wyze employees, and making more of our user-requested security features our top priority in the coming months. We are also partnering with a third-party cyber security firm to audit and improve our security protocols.
As we continue our investigation into what happened, we will post future updates to the forum link above. More details will follow and we appreciate your patience during this process. Please reach out with any questions or concerns to our customer support team by going to support.wyze.com.
Sincerely,
Yun Zhang
CEO @ Wyze3f205602-c887-45fe-8897-901756b8972a.png f0b8ece4-03d6-4a63-b7ee-bcdfd63c9255.png 2f7f729a-2726-4312-9857-302f7ed3dad2.png 38522248-2ad2-4812-9dfb-afd5e0419fba.png 2a61240c-2961-4f2b-a5e8-a9c06fe516b9.png
2019 Wyze Labs, Inc.
You're receiving this email because you have a Wyze account.
Wyze Labs, Inc.
3933 Lake Washington Blvd NE
Suite 350
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Tech 2019: Our biggest technology stories
As 2019 splutters to a close, it's time for our annual lookback at our most-read tech stories, and to ask: "What happened next?".
Facebook and its family of apps dominates this year's list with four entries - it probably won't be a surprise that none of them were particularly brand-enhancing. The Chinese viral video app TikTok makes the cut for the first time. And many of the other "big tech" names are there too in one form or another. But there are a few notable exceptions. Neither Elon Musk nor Tesla made it, despite the window-smashing launch of the Cybertruck and plans to hack our brains. Google's co-founders were originally on the list after deciding to give up day-to-day control of their empire, but were squeezed out just before publication. Video gaming also missed out, even though Prince Harry attracted lots of attention for suggesting Fortnite should be banned. And both Huawei and Samsung are absent, even though the former's loss of Google's apps and the latter's folding phone fiasco were two of the year's standout developments. -
@DustinB3403 The Wyzecam breach is a non-issue as I always assume email addresses are already known.
But it does provide more information for social engeering attacks with the camera nicknames being part of it.
That said, the supposed security researcher and news organization that posted it did not follow any kind of responsible reporting delay either. They outed the breach mere minutes after sending in a notice to Wyze. I've not seen but one news article mention that.
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Pokemon Go: Documents show Canadian military's struggle with game
The arrival of Pokemon Go left a baffled Canadian military struggling to understand a surge in trespassing, newly released documents show.
When the game was launched in 2016, civilians started walking and driving on to operational bases at all hours. "Plse advise the Commissionaires that apparently Fort Frontenac is both a PokeGym and a PokeStop," one email from a major read. "I will be completely honest in that I have no idea what that is." The documents were released to national broadcaster CBC in response to an information request. The news organisation had spotted a criminal advisory in July 2016 - eight days after the game's release, warning police that many defence locations were "game landmarks". -
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H2Go Power seeks to power drones with a 'happy gas'
When you think about hydrogen and flight, the image that comes to mind for most is the Hindenburg airship in flames.
But in a lab deep in the basement of Imperial College in London, a young team has built what it believes is the future of air travel. H2Go Power is seeking a patent to store the explosive gas cheaply and safely. Until now, storing hydrogen required ultra-strong and large tanks which could withstand pressures of up to 10,000 pound-force per square inch (psi). That is hundreds of times greater than what you would find in a car tyre. But, while studying for her PhD in Cambridge, Dr Enass Abo-Hamed came up with a revolutionary structure which could store hydrogen as a stable solid without compression. -
@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
H2Go Power seeks to power drones with a 'happy gas'
When you think about hydrogen and flight, the image that comes to mind for most is the Hindenburg airship in flames.
But in a lab deep in the basement of Imperial College in London, a young team has built what it believes is the future of air travel. H2Go Power is seeking a patent to store the explosive gas cheaply and safely. Until now, storing hydrogen required ultra-strong and large tanks which could withstand pressures of up to 10,000 pound-force per square inch (psi). That is hundreds of times greater than what you would find in a car tyre. But, while studying for her PhD in Cambridge, Dr Enass Abo-Hamed came up with a revolutionary structure which could store hydrogen as a stable solid without compression.This is pretty interesting.
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@mlnews said in Miscellaneous Tech News:
H2Go Power seeks to power drones with a 'happy gas'
When you think about hydrogen and flight, the image that comes to mind for most is the Hindenburg airship in flames.
But in a lab deep in the basement of Imperial College in London, a young team has built what it believes is the future of air travel. H2Go Power is seeking a patent to store the explosive gas cheaply and safely. Until now, storing hydrogen required ultra-strong and large tanks which could withstand pressures of up to 10,000 pound-force per square inch (psi). That is hundreds of times greater than what you would find in a car tyre. But, while studying for her PhD in Cambridge, Dr Enass Abo-Hamed came up with a revolutionary structure which could store hydrogen as a stable solid without compression.I like that they are just using a drone for the initial test. They are talking about the possibility of powering air planes with it.
