‘League of Legends’ studio buys a fighting game powerhouse

Riot Games, the studio in charge of League of Legends, acquired Radiant Entertainment and all of its fighting game technology this week. Radiant is staffed by popular figures in the fighting game community, including former Street Fighter commentator and Capcom community manager Seth Killian. The studio was created by Tom Cannon and Tony Cannon, who are also founders of the world’s largest fighting game tournament, the Evolution Championship Series. Radiant has two titles under its belt: the free, online fighting game Rising Thunder and the town-building simulator Stonehearth.

Rising Thunder will be taken offline on March 18th so the team can focus on a new game, the Cannon brothers said. Stonehearth will continue development as planned, except the work will now be completed under the banner of Riot Games.

“As for Rising Thunder, the team will start work on a new game that we’re incredibly excited about,” the blog post reads. “We wish we could say more now, but rest assured you’ll hear more when the time is right.”

Riot Games, owned by Chinese company Tencent, has been solely focused on League of Legends until now. It regularly releases supplemental products such as soundtracks and interactive stories related to League, but this marks the first confirmation that it’s building a brand new game. Given Radiant’s history, we’re expecting something with a fighter flair.

This isn’t an unheard-of concept for some hardcore League players — the fan-made game League of Fighters pits Riot’s characters against each other in one-on-one matches. Another fan imagined League characters in a 2D fighting game back in 2014.

We’re THRILLED to welcome @pond3r, @protomcannon, @sethkillian and the amazing Radiant Entertainment team to Riot: https://t.co/jM3iNlD8Kf

— Riot Games (@riotgames) March 8, 2016

Source: Radiant Entertainment

Fresco News teams with Fox stations for crowd-sourced coverage

Back in January, Fresco News launched an Apple TV app to deliver a curated feed of crowd-sourced breaking news coverage. Now, the citizen journalism app is working with local Fox affiliates to make user-submitted photos and videos part of regular new coverage. Television stations in 11 cities will be able to send out location-based alerts through the Fresco iOS app in hopes of getting first-person coverage.

Captured footage and stills will then be vetted and curated by the folks at Fresco before being passed along to the local newsrooms. And yes, if your video or photos are used, you’ll be compensated for them. The going rate is $50 for video and $20 for a photo that’s used on-air during a broadcast. Fresco actually began testing the system with a Fox station in Philadelphia last month. With the newly announced expansion, news teams in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix, Tampa, Charlotte and Orlando will also take advantage of the on-the-ground coverage.

Google Docs gets speedy Android navigation and an outline tool

It’ll soon be a lot easier for you to browse through Google Docs files on Android phones and tablets. With the latest version of Docs on Android, you’ll now see a small overlay when scrolling through documents. Tapping on it brings up the basic structure of your file, which you can then use to hop to different sections. It’s a fairly minor addition, but it’s one that should make it much easier to edit documents on Android (it certainly would have been nice when reviewing the Pixel C).

On a similar note, Google is also adding an outline tool to Docs on the web and Android. It displays a pane of your document’s structure on the left side of the screen, and again you can use it to quickly move around without scrolling much. It could be particularly useful for people who take notes on Docs. By default it’ll organize your document based on heading structure, but if you haven’t added headings it’ll also guess based on how the file is divided.

Microsoft app logs you into Windows 10 using your phone

Windows 10 already does a lot to spare you from typing in your password, but Microsoft wants to take that text-free login one step further. The company has quietly posted a beta Phone Sign-in app for Windows 10 Mobile that, as the name suggests, signs you in to your nearby Windows 10 PC (you have to pair over Bluetooth) with a tap. There’s no guarantee that you can run it — you’ll need the right credentials on top of living in an all-Microsoft ecosystem. If all the stars align, though, the Lumia in your pocket might be all you need to authenticate and start working.

Via: WalkingCat (Twitter), SlashGear

Source: Microsoft Store

RSA security conference: 25 years of discontent and pranks

The first time I went anywhere near the RSA information security conference in San Francisco, it was by way of a prank.

Two things I love to cover are computer crime and and enterprise security, so when I met friends for drinks at a downtown hotel bar during the conference one year they were genuinely surprised I’d never attended RSA. One of my drinking pals that night was Twitter’s head of security, and he jokingly asked if I wanted to go to RSA — right now.

Seeing the confused look on my face, he explained that RSA’s big, lavish, exclusive “Codebreaker’s Bash” was happening at the very hotel whose Grey Goose supply we were currently draining. He grabbed the badge of another Twitter security employee sitting next to me, and handed me his own. To get in I just had to follow his lead, and impersonate him.

Turns out I wasn’t a very convincing head of security at Twitter. We cruised past a few sets of intimidating security teams (who were more concerned about my inability to match the Victorian-themed dress code) and then my guide toured me around a fairly opulent ballroom of endless shrimp platters and flowing champagne.

Pranking me like only a hacker would, he made a point of introducing me to attendees he claimed were from the FBI. Seeing as that the conference is a mix of government, enterprise, commercial security product vendors, and contractors, I’m inclined to believe the nice gentlemen teasing me over champagne cocktails about whether or not my name was really “Bob” were actually with the agency.

As an event, RSA began as a non-corporate gathering that grew big enough by 1994 to have its second event at the Redwood Shores Sofitel — a good distance both in physicality and spirit from its present-day sprawl of 40,000 attendees filling up San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Reflecting on RSA’s Softel days, one anonymous source recalled beloved industry elder Bruce Schnier as “some kid named Schneier who sold me a book called “Applied Cryptography” from a blue nylon duffel bag he had full of them.”

But even though RSA Conference has changed a lot since its inception 25 years ago, attendee pranks are among its consistencies. My source explained that as the conference became more business focused into the late 1990s, there were power struggles and “a lot of bad blood.” At that time, RSA didn’t let just anyone attend the conference. I was told, “European competitors couldn’t get a booth. If you did things that they didn’t like you couldn’t get a booth.”

So, a number of the earliest RSA “pranks” were essentially getting one over on the powers-that-be by way of what we’d now consider guerrilla marketing — mild by today’s standards, criminal to RSA at the time. If you couldn’t get a booth at the conference, my sources explained, “you’d get a suite at the W Hotel and hire people to hand out leaflets inviting them to your thing. The RSA people were humorless and reacted in humorless ways. I don’t know that they ever actually tried to get guerrilla marketing, off-site events arrested, but the tales flew that they did.”

RSA’s big party (then called the “RSA Cryptographer’s Ball”) was also a target for these seemingly harmless pranks. The dot-com boom days of the early 2000’s was when the party had top tier musical acts, custom martini bars, cigar bars, single malt scotch, and according to our source, one year there was literally caviar. Getting in was a brass ring — which meant social engineering your way in and spoofing badges was a hot prank.

This was especially because RSAC people didn’t like badge sharing, attendees asking for plus-ones, and hated any other after-hours parties. I was told, “If a company was known to throw an after-hours party, they might get denied booth space next year (yes, really) so a number of these were themselves pranks and almost like speakeasies. There were people who ran secret mailing lists to let people know where the parties were. (People involved with Survival Research Labs* helped a lot with this.) RSA parties were kinda like SRL events, where the location was a secret until the last minute.”

One year, our source explained, the RSA Cryptographers Ball was at an undisclosed location “and we were all herded into buses. A number of people had in a matter of just a few hours hacked their own tickets and followed the buses to the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, found parking, and then walked in through the kitchens in their tuxes and ball gowns playing dumb. They beat us through the gauntlet that we other people had to go through.”

Enter Team Sadface

Around 2010, RSA Conference became the dated-feeling, mega-corporate trade show of security vendors and U.S. government agencies it is today: A boring event that feels like it’s staffed by other people’s parents, and where nothing really happens. By this time, these people’s kids had all grown up, and for this line of work there were way more exciting and inclusive conferences to attend, like DEFCON and HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth). Anyone female or non-white would’ve already felt alienated by getting stuck in their company’s RSA booth. Worse, if you were young in an industry that looked richer than god and promised triumph over threats that would’ve been five years old — five years ago.

So on the days they didn’t have to wear suits and stand in an RSAC booth for work, a group of young pranksters came together to ask just how much pranking could be done on the conference’s expo floor.

The answer to that question was, a lot.

RSAC in the 5-year span around 2010 struggled for relevance in its keynotes and talks the same way it does today. But the conference was expanding into China, and its expo floor was turning into a sales-forward infosec circus sideshow. Companies such as Dell, Microsoft, Intel, MacAfee, Cisco and HP had booths alongside hundreds of smaller security vendors, along with the FBI, DHS and NSA. Every one of them would do practically anything to attract attention and get bodies in their booth. They staffed their expensive little patch of carpet with clueless salespeople tasked with running demos and contests on hacking that were beyond their skillsets.

For the prankster hackers calling themselves “Team Sadface” — named for the looks they left on the faces of salespeople — this was a playground.

Crashing demos was easy for them, but boring. One year, members of Team Sadface arrived to the conference with fake FBI challenge coins. These tokens hail from a military tradition, indicating special achievement and membership. In hacking culture, these small, heavy coins bear the insignia or emblem of an organization and are awarded to winners of hacking contests, or those who earn (or prove) membership into a hacker crew or group. The coins also prevent name dropping and insulate against untrustworthy outsiders. While in conversation with a group of people at a European hacking conference a few years back, I mentioned my association with a certain crew — and was relieved I had my coin on me when I was demonstrably challenged to prove it.

As you’d imagine, Team Sadface was really proud of its FBI challenge coins. Unfortunately, the coins only saw use once or twice — when Team members would show up at the FBI booth, present the coin, and say they were here to collect their prize. People staffing the FBI booth reacted as you’d expect; confused. Prize? What contest? Team Sadface would wait patiently as one FBI employee would go get someone who might know, who would go get someone who might know… All in fun, to see if maybe some kind of cool prize would be produced. Because unlike the DHS and NSA, the FBI actually has really great conference schwag, like patches. It was a no-go, but apparently everyone really liked the coins.

Violet Blue – photo by Roberto Baldwin / Engadget

Nowadays, the RSAC conference expo floor doesn’t have any hacking contests — but it used to. Nor are any prize drawings done on-site. But during this short time frame, which was team Sadface’s heyday, there were lots and lots of hacking contests for prizes. In the booths, sales and marketing staff didn’t stand a chance against players who took the industry’s challenges seriously.

Not unlike today’s bizarre “hackers are evil, come meet this celebrity hacker” marketing at RSA, the contests back then were framed with slogans and concepts that mixed PR with a near-pathological confusion of good guy versus bad guy. One was framed to would-be contestants with the challenge, “Do you have what it takes to be a cyber criminal?” To people who actually knew what it took to be a cyber-criminal, this sounded like someone in marketing was either crazier than a shithouse rat, or was desperately trying to remake the world to meet their own expectations.

Most of the contests were Flash games (and I’m guessing every hacker who just read that line is now grinning from ear to ear). One Flash game had a “random acts of crime” counter — the more crimes, the higher your score — and this was apparently easy to reverse. Easy for Team Sadface, that is. For some of these contests, they explained to me, the payloads to walk up and win first place would even be preloaded for deployment from their phones.

One booth game framed the player as a botnet herder with a set amount of exploits to assign to different countries on a global map, with each country earning different amounts of money (points). The goal was to make as much money as possible with the least amount of expenditure; scores and winner names were racked up on the booth’s leaderboard throughout the day.

Leaderboard notables: DarkTangent (founder of DEFCON), Dual Core (hackers/hip-hop duo) and “Beautiful Liability

For this game, Team Sadface ditched their business suits so they would be considered unimportant by the salespeople (and they were). First, they pretended to play the game. While one would play badly and lose, another Team member would take photos of their friend losing — photos that included information other than their loser friend eating shit on a stupid Flash game.

The next day of the expo, Team Sadface pretended to play the game four times throughout the day, which happened to be the times awards were being handed out for top scores on the board. They won each time, and by the end of the day had amassed a group of fans, attendees in suits, who were coming back to the booth to cheer them on. On the last day of the expo, Team Sadface returned for a final round of winning, and to leave the board in hacker style. They left a final prank, rewriting the board with impossibly high scores (containing “1337”) and tagging the name fields with the handles of other hackers as winners.

The wild years of Team Sadface at RSA weren’t limited to computer hacking. One company’s publicity scheme centered on a timed contest to hack physical locks. The event was based around Master Lock’s “directional” padlocks: If you could open the lock in 5 minutes, you’d win.

But there was just one problem: Sadface crew included and liaisoned with the best lock pickers and safe crackers around, and these locks (which store the combination in a mechanical hash) were actually terrifically secure. Simply hacking these locks wasn’t going to be an option. Nor could Team Sadface pre-pick the contest locks, as they’d done previously with a different lock opening contest on the expo floor.

Again out of business suits and aiming to not be taken seriously, Team Sadface played a few rounds with the locks to lose, asking “really dumb” questions and hanging out to see what they could see.

They noticed that in between the contest sessions, each lock would need to be reset. The annoyed and flustered salesperson who reset the codes didn’t have a private area to perform the resets, and sat in the same place each time. He also didn’t notice the Team Sadface member in t-shirt and jeans who looked over his shoulder each time, and relayed the codes to other members. After that, the Team “won” eight or nine times.

The salespeople knew something was up. Salesmen told the exuberant winners of their lock cracking contest to come pick up their prizes at the end of the expo. Naturally, Team Sadface showed up to claim their pirate’s booty — and were met with a woman who wasn’t having any of it. She told them, “We don’t know what you did. But we know you did something. No prizes for you.” One Team member recalled the exchange with a huge smile saying, “She was stone cold. I have so much respect for her.”

* Disclosure: I am a former member of Survival Research Laboratories.

Researchers grow crops in simulated Martian and Lunar soil

Researchers from the Dutch Wageningen University and Research Center announced on Tuesday that they had successfully cultivated 10 food crops in soil that simulates what astronauts would encounter both on the Moon and on Mars. The team managed to harvest tomatoes, peas, rye, garden rocket, radish and garden cress — a much better result than the team’s initial experiments in 2015 which saw only a few individual plants even germinate.

“The total above-ground biomass produced on the Mars soil simulant was not significantly different from the potting compost we used as a control”, Dr Wieger Wamelink said in a statement. Though their results have yet to be peer reviewed, the team reportedly managed its success by making the “alien” soil a bit more Earthlike. Lunar soil, for example, is extremely hydrophobic and Martian soil — based on what we know from satellite analysis, at least — isn’t much better. However, by adding stuff like freshly cut grass and manure to the simulated soils, the researchers managed to significantly increase yields.

First tomato on Mars soil simulant is getting ripe

Posted by Food for mars and moon on Saturday, September 5, 2015

“That was a real surprise to us,” Wamelink continued. “It shows that the Mars soil simulant has great potential when properly prepared and watered. The biomass growth on the moon soil simulant was less than on both other soils, about half of the biomass. Only the spinach showed poor biomass production.”

While this is an exciting development in exoplanetary colonization, it’s not like we can just shoot some seeds and Miracle-Gro at the red planet ahead of a manned mission and hope for the best. Martian soil is rich in heavy metals. There are plenty of plants that can grow in such soil without ill effect, but they tend to concentrate these toxins, making them inedible to humans. To that end, the research team is launching a crowdfunding campaign to finance its third round of experiments, which will focus on ensuring that the food grown on Mars won’t poison the astronauts that eat it.

Via: Washington Post

Source: Phys.org

‘XCOM 2’ gets its first DLC pack on March 17th

2K has revealed a launch date for the first XCOM 2 downloadable content: March 17th. Titled Anarchy’s Children, the add-on pack will come with more than 100 “exotic” goodies, which you can use to deck out your soldiers. This includes new armor, helmets and masks, as well as fresh hair styles, face paintings and decals.

Additionally, 2K said it is working on a patch that’ll bring performance enhancements and gameplay bug fixes to XCOM 2, but there’s no word on when this going to be released. In the meantime, at least you can get the Anarchy’s Children DLC for $5 via Steam next week, or free if you’ve already purchased the $20 Reinforcement Pack.

Apple Pulls ‘FlexBright’, Says iOS Apps That Adjust Display Temperature Aren’t Allowed

Earlier this week, we shared a blue-light reduction app called FlexBright, which worked similarly to Apple’s own Night Shift mode. Apple initially approved the app, which was able to adjust the screen temperature for the entire iPhone, but after it garnered attention following our post, Apple pulled it from the App Store.

FlexBright developer Sam Al-Jamal told MacRumors he had worked with Apple through several app rejections to get FlexBright into the App Store and that no private APIs were in use, something that was seemingly confirmed by the app’s approval, but further review from Apple led to FlexBright’s removal. Al-Jamal has shared Apple’s explanation with MacRumors following an “exhausting discussion” with the Cupertino company. “The bottomline is [Apple] won’t allow apps to change screen colors,” he said.

The FlexBright app adjusted the temperature of the screen to make it more yellow, like Night Shift in iOS 9.3
Al-Jamal was given two technical reasons behind FlexBright’s removal from the App Store. First, the app was using custom-created classes based on non-public APIs.

I recreated three classes based on non-public APIs. Even though these are custom classes that I created, but essentially they’re using the same methods as in their non-public APIs.

Second, the app was using silent audio to keep FlexBright running in the background, a frowned-upon tactic that can result in battery drain. Late last year, the Facebook app for iOS was using excessive battery life, something caused in part by a silent audio component.

FlexBright masked the silent audio with a music player to “justify the background music activity,” something that Apple approved twice even though the music playing function doesn’t appear to work.

We labeled it as a new feature to “rest/close your eyes for few minutes and listen to some music”. Now Apple says this is not the intended purpose of the app and they won’t allow this approach.

Apple asked Al-Jamal to remove the blue light filter to get FlexBright back on the App Store, but he declined so that users who have already purchased the app can keep the feature. “For all intended purposes, FlexBright is dead,” he said. He does plan to go on to make a new app that will detect eye fatigue based on screen brightness and time spent on an iOS device.

The developer behind FlexBright was using some questionable features to get the app to function, but its ability to slip past the App Store review process even through multiple rejections again puts a spotlight on Apple’s inconsistencies and failures when it comes to reviewing apps. MacStories recently shared an in-depth look at the App Store review process, highlighting the problems and frustrations developers face, which rightly points out that the current review process is “harming the quality of apps on the App Store.”

Tag: App Store
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iPhone SE Case Renderings From Spigen Support iPhone 5s-Style Design

We’re just two weeks away from the rumored launch date of the 4-inch “iPhone SE,” but due to mixed rumors and a lack of part leaks, we still don’t know exactly what the device will look like. Rumors suggest an iPhone 5s-style body with an iPhone 6-style curved glass front panel, two concepts that are difficult to merge.

Design drawings and early case leaks out of China haven’t been helpful thus far, also offering up conflicting information on the final design, but renderings from an established, well-known case manufacturer may help shed some light on what we can expect.

Spigen is an accessory company that often has some of the first cases available for new iOS devices, and the iPhone SE is no exception. The company is working on cases for the 4-inch iPhone, and case renderings obtained by MacRumors suggest Spigen expects a design that’s nearly indistinguishable from the iPhone 5s.

The device continues to have the same general shape as the iPhone 5s, with round volume buttons, a power button located at the top of the device, and a pill-shaped flash. Design drawings have suggested the iPhone SE could perhaps have a camera that protrudes slightly, something that can’t be determined from the Spigen renderings.

Spigen’s cases wrap around the front of the screen, making it unclear how the display of the iPhone SE differs from the display of the iPhone 5s. The edges of the iPhone SE are also not visible, so any slight differences in curvature would be difficult to determine from the rendering.

MacRumors has heard from multiple well-known case manufacturers that the iPhone SE will be the same size as the iPhone 5s, several of whom have been confident in that assessment, but how that ultimately meshes with rumors of an iPhone 6-style display remains to be seen.

Early cases are often accurate and serve as a solid indicator of what an upcoming iOS device might look like, but on occasion, case makers get design details wrong. As mentioned above, we have seen iPhone SE cases with distinctly different styles, so there is some disagreement on design between accessory makers.

Spigen’s position as a well-known case manufacturer with a lot to lose may mean the company has put more resources into sussing out the look of the iPhone SE, but given all of the conflicting information, the design of the device may remain in question until it debuts on March 21.

Related Roundups: iPhone 5se, iPhone SE
Tag: Spigen
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messageLOUD – an app that reads your texts and emails to you, so you can focus on driving

Overview messageLOUD is an app that reads your texts and emails to you in an effort to keep your focus on the road; not on your phone. Developer: messageLOUD Price: