Category: Technology

Global ransomware attacks are on the rise, according to a report issued by Malwarebytes. The study shows a massive surge from July 2022 to June 2023, with the United States bearing the brunt of these attacks. The organization noted that of the 1,900 reported ransomware attacks collected, over 43 percent originate in the U.S, an increase of 75 percent from last year’s findings.

Germany, France and the UK also experienced an uptick in deployed ransomware, but at a lower rate than the United States. The report details 48 separate ransomware groups that attacked American companies, governmental organizations and garden variety consumers during the aforementioned time period. Even worse? Healthcare and educational institutions were disproportionately impacted. For instance, dental insurer Managed Care of North America (MCNA) experienced a breach back in March and the New York City Department of Education was hit in June.

It’s worth noting that the study conducted by Malwarebytes shows only reported incidents, so the actual number of attacks could be much higher than 1,900. The whole point of a ransomware attack is to, well, exact a ransom, so some organizations make the payout and keep things quiet.

What exactly is a ransomware attack? It’s malware expressly designed to deny users and organizations access to files on a computer. The software locks everything up tight and when you pay the ransom, you receive a decryption key to regain access to the files. It’s a digital shakedown.

The biggest global offender is a ransomware gang called Clop, long-suspected to have ties to Russia. The criminal organization has evolved in the past year, capitalizing on zero-day software vulnerabilities to amp up the scope of its attacks. Back in June, the group took advantage of one of these vulnerabilities in enterprise file transfer software to breach the servers of hundreds of companies, including the largest US pension fund.

Malwarebytes says this transition to zero-day software exploits, instead of phishing emails and virus-laden downloads, could “signal a change in the game” and explain the increase in reported incidents.

As for the rest of the world, France’s numbers doubled in the past year, with a disproportionate number of attacks levied at governmental institutions. The UK experienced 200 attacks from 32 separate groups with an alarming uptick in frequency. Last year, the country reported a single ransomware attack per month. In this most recent year, it was eight per month.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/global-ransomware-attacks-at-an-all-time-high-and-the-us-is-the-primary-target-191550845.html?src=rss 

Google thinks it has a way to get more hybrid workers into the office: eliminate the commute when they do need to leave home. CNBC says it has learned of a summer promotion that lets full-time staff book stays at the Bay View campus’ hotel for $99 per night through September 30th. The offer is meant to help employees “transition to the hybrid workplace,” according to the offer. Workers can theoretically have the benefits of both the office and home while never having to travel far.

We’ve asked Google for comment. A spokesperson talking to CNBC says the firm routinely offers employee specials for its facilities.

The catch, as you might guess, is that employees have to pay for the hotel stays themselves. While the roughly $3,000 per month needed to take up the offer isn’t out of line with apartment rentals and includes full service, it still amounts to paying to live at work without a substantial discount. Google team members have to either forego a home of their own or effectively pay rent for two places. The hotel offer is also only truly useful for people working at Bay View, which primarily houses ad-related teams. Those who still have to work at the older campus can’t benefit.

The hotel special comes as Google steps up pressure on remote workers it wants to come back. The tech giant started returning some employees to its offices in 2022, when it mandated three days a week for affected people. Some balked at the prospect, though, arguing that in-person work led to high living costs and reduced productivity. Google wasn’t deterred, though, and this June started considering office presences in performance reviews.

The escalating tensions now come with the prospect of regulatory action. YouTube contractors who voted to unionize have accused Google and its contracting firm Cognizant of abusing return-to-office policies to stifle labor organization, and filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/googles-latest-bid-to-push-hybrid-work-is-a-99-rate-at-its-on-campus-hotel-193058151.html?src=rss 

GameStop is pulling the plug on its crypto locker after only a year. An alert posted this week to the company’s website (viaGame Developer) says GameStop Wallet will be no more after November 1st. The retailer says its decision was “due to the regulatory uncertainty of the crypto space.”

The gaming retailer’s iOS and Chrome Extension lockers, billed as a “self-custodial Ethereum wallet,” will be removed on November 1st. The retailer recommends that customers have access to their Secret Passphrase to retrieve their NFTs by October 1st. “Any customer with access to their Secret Passphrase has the ability to recover their account in any compatible wallet,” the company wrote.

Like many companies in 2021 and 2022, GameStop invested heavily in NFTs in hopes of essentially printing money through digital collectible sales. Backed by a $100 million fund (in partnership with Immutable X) to provide developer incentives, the retailer aggressively pursued a Web3 future under then-CEO Matt Furlong.

But the effort sputtered as consumer backlash grew towards nonfungible tokens. The retailer forged an ill-fated partnership last September with the now-defunct FTX, only to be terminated two months later when the exchange collapsed. GameStop announced additional layoffs in December with Axiosreporting that its cryptocurrency division was hit hardest. The company simultaneously backpedaled from its NFT marketplace, with Furlong reassuring investors that it had “proactively minimized exposure to cryptocurrency.” However, he did leave some wiggle room by saying the retailer continued to see a long-term future for “digital assets in the gaming world.” Furlong was fired in June.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gamestops-nft-wallet-will-shut-down-in-november-164252057.html?src=rss 

Coinbase has filed a motion to dismiss a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit in which the agency accused the company of illegally running an unregistered national securities exchange, broker and clearing agency. Coinbase claims that, because it doesn’t deal in securities, the SEC has no authority over its operations.

“Our core argument is simple — we do not offer ‘investment contracts’ as that term has been construed by decades of Supreme Court and other binding precedent,” Coinbase’s chief legal officer Paul Grewal wrote in a series of tweets. “By ignoring that precedent, the SEC has violated due process, abused its discretion and abandoned its own earlier interpretations of the securities laws. By ignoring that precedent, the SEC has trampled the strict boundaries on its basic authority set by Congress.”

The SEC filed its lawsuit in June. It said Coinbase raked in billions of dollars since at least 2019 by “unlawfully facilitating the buying and selling of crypto asset securities.”

In its motion to dismiss, Coinbase cited a separate SEC case. A judge ruled in July that Ripple Labs’ XRP was not considered a security when sold on exchanges (though institutional sales of XRP fell under securities regulations, the judge determined).

However, that particular point may not work in Coinbase’s favor. This week, a different judge disagreed with the Ripple ruling and said the SEC could proceed with a case against Terraform Labs and its CEO Do Kwon. That includes claims involving sales made on exchanges and allegations of a multi-billion dollar fraud. As Bloomberg notes, neither the Ripple nor the Terraform suit is a controlling precedent in the Coinbase case.

Intriguingly, Coinbase has argued the cryptocurrencies that are sold on its platform are more like baseball cards than securities. It makes the case that baseball cards are commodities that people buy and sell in the hope they will grow in value.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/coinbase-wants-its-sec-lawsuit-dismissed-arguing-it-doesnt-deal-in-securities-170056685.html?src=rss 

VR technology has come a long way from the early Virtuality systems that inhabited our local malls in the ‘80s and ‘90s, with modern headsets offering 4K resolution, Dolby Atmos surround sound, and motion-sensing controllers. But even the most convincing optical and auditory illusions can’t fully fool our inner ears.

“If you want to feel these big sensations, you’ve got to have the infrastructure first,” University of Chicago PhD student, Romain Nith, told Engadget. “You’ve got to go to theme parks, ride roller coasters, or you need bungie cords pulling you from the ceiling.” And while the sensations are really like what they’re simulating (because you’re really being thrown around), “you can’t have that in your living room.”

The JumpMod Haptic Backpack prototype, on the other hand, can effectively fool its user’s sense of proprioception to make jumping in VR feel much more lifelike with a device the size of, well, a backpack. It has been developed by Nith and his research team from the University of Chicago’s Human-Computer Integration Lab, which is headed by Pedro Lopes, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science. The HCI Lab’s research focuses on using technology to “borrow parts of the body for input and output, rather than adding more technology to the body” and, as such, has generated a veritable menagerie of novel devices exploring that concept.

“I think the next generation of devices is not going to be defined by how small they are, or how implanted they are in the body… but more about how deeply they integrate with your body,” Lopes told Engadget. He points to the functional issues of dealing with Google Maps in 2007 — specifically the need to physically print them out for them to be useful. “Now when that runs on your smartphone, the device that can move with you, in your pocket, you can access information anywhere, anytime,” he said. “All of a sudden that makes a lot of sense. So every jump of these paradigms allows you to do something new.”

“We’re looking at the body and trying to create technology that really hybridizes with you,” Lopes continued, using smartwatches as an example, which rely on small spinning motors to create the notification vibration. “That is one of the reasons smart watches are so big.”

Instead, a small electrical charge can elicit the same tingling sensation without the need for a “big rotating mass type of device,” Lopes explained. “The sensations, the functionality, ends up being the same and the device looks very different.”

JumpMod takes a similar approach, rapidly shifting the position of a weight worn by the user to fool their senses rather than hoist the user wholesale to practically recreate the sensation. The untethered device is designed to modify the user’s sense of jumping, when used with a VR program, by rapidly lifting and lowering a 2-kilogram weight (which doubles as the device’s power cell) in time with their physical movement. Adjusting the speed of weight’s motion impacted the user’s perceived jump momentum, enabling the team to create sensations of higher and broader jumps, softer and harder landings and being pulled up or down.

The device itself is completely untethered and can operate both indoors and out. In the demo above, the researcher team used the backpack to improve its user’s timing when jumping rope and even took JumpMod to a basketball court to show how it could be used to help (or hinder) players in a game of one-on-one. The current iteration is built to generate as much force as comfortably possible, in order to maximize the generated sensation, so it does tend to be rather loud and heavy.

“We probably don’t have to drive it as fast, which generates less noise, and probably don’t even need all the weight that we have, which would make for a slimmer backpack,” Lopes said. “Where does that sensation start to occur? Is that at 100 grams, is it at 300 grams? We optimized it for maximum power, rather than for a minimal device. That’s the kind of stuff one would do if one were to commercialize [the technology].”

Technically, the device doesn’t even need to be worn, it could theoretically be implanted into the backs of theater seats. “I think that the tension here in VR is really interesting,” Lopes said. “ If you go to the Disney theme park, they play these super-immersive VR scenes, you’re on a motion platform and when the scene jumps, the motion platform goes up.” Lope argues that a similar sensation could potentially be produced at a fraction of the infrastructure requirements using JumpMod.

“There’s lots of proto-motion platforms for VR, some with special shoes, some move around, some rotate but none of them have really paid off,” Lopes said. “It’s a really difficult challenge where, if you want to create an involuntary force and involuntary movement, you need a big infrastructure. We are interested in whether that’s possible, but honestly, we don’t even know if it is.“

The “involuntary” aspect of these devices and technologies is an ethical sticking point for the field, and one which Lopes’ lab has studied frequently. His students have developed passive systems that allow one user to dictate the hand motions of another, or use electrical muscle stimulation to improve the users’ dexterity — artificially boosting their reaction speeds and shaping their finger positions on a guitar fretboard. They can even be controlled through an exoskeleton to properly form the words of American Sign Language. However, all of those devices require the user to relinquish some degree of control over their bodies to let the machines do their things.

“We call it ‘optimizing agency,’” Lopes said. For most of the projects in his lab, “agency is not super critical.” Stakes are low when allowing a robot to guide your finger positionings when learning to play guitar or have one physically guide your head using electrical muscle stimulation during a workplace safety training experience. “We apply the [EMS pads] to the neck muscles,” Lopes reassured Engadget, which gently buzz the user to make them look around their office space, “so they know where the fire extinguisher is, where the fire exit is.”

Lopes does concede that physically instigating a user to turn their head by externally stimulating their nervous system could be construed as “making people completely lose their sense of agency,” however he notes that his lab consistently includes user overrides for all EMS-related devices. “In all these, we design some form [of override] to keep you in control. For example, in the case of [the head actuation study], if you push against the device, it senses that you’re pushing against the direction that it’s starting to move your head and turns off.”

“I think there’s more research to be done there, more complex ways to tackle this,” he continued. “Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are really interesting because you can kind of detect what people are thinking, what their goal is, and then you don’t even have to activate the system if it’s not needed.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-jumpmod-haptic-backpack-makes-virtual-leaps-more-realistic-160003718.html?src=rss 

Call of Duty cheaters are now being named and shamed in real-time when they’re kicked out of a game. The latest season of CoD: Modern Warfare II and CoD: Warzone season five went live this week, and the update includes an addition to the Ricochet anti-cheat system.

When Ricochet detects and removes a “problem player,” the game will notify everyone in the match of such an occurrence right in the kill feed. That will let all players know for sure that they’ve been dealing with a cheater and also that Activision’s systems were able to spot that person and boot them from the game.

It’s not super novel for a game to tell players that someone has been kicked out for cheating. I recently played some BattleBit Remastered — a fun, low-poly riff on the Battlefield series — and the game notified me whenever a cheater was banned.

Still, this is a welcome update from Team Ricochet, which has been trying all kinds of tactics to mess with cheaters and to try and catch suspected hackers out. Over the last couple of years, Call of Duty has made cheaters unable to see enemies and taken their guns away. More recently, Team Ricochet has been deploying clones of real players against detected and suspected cheaters. If a potential hacker interacts with one of these clones, they’ll make it obvious that they’re cheating.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/call-of-duty-is-publicly-shaming-cheaters-in-the-kill-feed-154544553.html?src=rss 

Arturia has officially begun its annual summer sale, offering steep discounts on a vast array of digital instruments, effects and sound bank packs. The average discount is 50 percent, so you can pick up the well-regarded Pigments synthesizer for $100 instead of $200 or the infamous Dist Coldfire distortion effect plugin for $50 instead of $100.

The sale applies to nearly every standalone digital instrument and effect, so check the site to find something up your alley. The sale also includes sound banks, which are basically packs of presets available in a number of musical genres. You can pick up a pack of 32 presets for just $5 or a more extensive pack of 150 presets for $15.

However, this sale is only for individual instruments and effects, so it doesn’t include combo packs like the V Collection 9. Each synthesizer within the collection, like the Solina V and Vox Continental V, is on sale, but buying the whole pack at full price is still the better deal, as each synth is $100 and the pack is $600. The same goes for effects bundles.

The sale also doesn’t include hardware instruments, like the PolyBrute or the MatrixBrute. Those are still full price via Arturia, though you could find deals at retail outlets. Arturia’s summer sale lasts until August 15th, so make haste if you want to catch some discounts. The company does regularly offer similar site-wide sales if you miss out. The next one will likely be for the holidays.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/arturias-summer-sale-is-here-with-deep-discounts-on-instruments-and-effects-161851712.html?src=rss 

Just like pretty much every other major tech company, Amazon is placing a heavy focus on generative artificial intelligence. CEO Andy Jassy noted on Amazon’s latest earnings call that every division has multiple generative AI projects in the works.

“Inside Amazon, every one of our teams is working on building generative AI applications that reinvent and enhance their customers’ experience,” Jassy said. “But while we will build a number of these applications ourselves, most will be built by other companies, and we’re optimistic that the largest number of these will be built on [Amazon Web Services]. Remember, the core of AI is data. People want to bring generative AI models to the data, not the other way around.”

To that end, Jassy said that AWS provides services and infrastructure that can help its customers power generative AI apps, as The Verge notes. The AWS CodeWhisperer system, for instance, aims to speed up developers’ workflows by suggesting snippets of code they can use directly in the code editor.

As for the ways that Amazon plans to use generative AI in its consumer-facing products and services, Jassy was slightly more coy, but underlined the importance of the technology to all facets of the company moving forward.

The projects “range from things that help us be more cost effective and streamlined in how we run operations in various businesses to the absolute heart of every customer experience in which we offer,” he said. “And so it’s true in our stores business. It’s true in our AWS business. It’s true in our advertising business. It’s true in all our devices, and you can just imagine what we’re working on with respect to Alexa there. It’s true in our entertainment businesses, every single one. It is going to be at the heart of what we do. It’s a significant investment and focus for us.”

We might learn more about some of Amazon’s consumer-focused generative AI efforts when it reveals new devices on September 20th. The company will inevitably have a range of Alexa-powered products to show off. Meanwhile, considering what Google and Microsoft have been doing with gen AI chatbots, it wouldn’t be a shock to see Amazon start offering one of its own on its storefront.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/every-amazon-division-is-working-on-generative-ai-projects-142836534.html?src=rss 

QuakeCon is returning to an in-person event on August 10th, and id Software might have a re-release to mark the occasion. Historically reliable leaker billbil-kun claims id will unveil a remastered version of Quake II when QuakeCon kicks off next week. Details of the upgrade aren’t available, but the classic sequel would make its way to PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Switch. The title would be available through Microsoft’s Game Pass on launch.

An enhanced version of Quake from 2021 might provide some clues as to what to expect. That remaster added support for widescreen resolutions as high as 4K, new character models and upgraded visual effects like dynamic lighting, depth of field and antialiasing. The refresh also bundled every official expansion while adding a new campaign created by Wolfenstein: The New Order developer MachineGames.

This won’t be the same as Quake II RTX, provided the rumor is accurate. The 2019 tweak was meant to showcase NVIDIA’s newer computer GPUs with ray-traced lighting and improved textures, but didn’t include truly new content or hardware-agnostic visual improvements.

Quake II was originally released in 1997 and represented major strides forward in technology and gameplay over its predecessor. It introduced a semi-open world, objective-based gameplay and visual effects upgrades like colored lighting. The very first release was heavily focused on the single-player mode (competitive online play even took place on single-player maps), but it quickly became a go-to game for multiplayer thanks to updates and third-party upgrades like ThreeWave’s Capture the Flag.

An introduction won’t be surprising.given that a Quake II Remastered game went through South Korea’s game rating authority in June. Billbil-kun also saw documents for North American (ESRB) and European (PEGI) ratings. As it stands, id, Bethesda and Microsoft have incentives to keep producing Quake remasters — they keep the first-person shooter in the limelight and make it playable on modern platforms without resorting to unofficial modifications and ports.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/quake-ii-remaster-might-debut-at-quakecon-next-week-141123462.html?src=rss