Snowden's Surveillance Leaks Made People Less Likely to Read About Surveillance

A new Oxford University study has published empirical evidence showing that government mass surveillance programs like those exposed by Edward Snowden make us significantly less likely to read about surveillance and other national security-related topics online.

The study looks at Wikipedia traffic before and after Snowden's surveillance revelations to offer some new insight into the phenomenon of “chilling effects,” which privacy advocates frequently cite as a damaging consequence of unchecked government surveillance. What it found is that traffic on “privacy-sensitive” articles dropped significantly following what author Jon Penney describes as an “exogenous shock” caused by revelations of the NSA's mass surveillance programs and the resulting media coverage.

The articles were chosen based on keywords from a list of terms flagged by the Department of Homeland Security, used for monitoring social media for terrorism and “suspicious” activity. For example, Wikipedia articles containing the 48 terrorism-related terms the DHS identified—including “al-Qaeda,” “carbomb” and “Taliban”—saw their traffic drop by 20 percent.

The results also mirror a similar MIT study from last year which found that users were less likely to run Google searches containing privacy and national security-related terms that might make them suspicious in the eyes of the government.

Perhaps even more alarmingly, the study seems to show a long-term drop in article views on these topics that lasts well past the initial shock of Snowden's revelations, suggesting that people's' calculations about what to read on Wikipedia may have been permanently affected.

“It means that the NSA/PRISM surveillance revelations, covered by media in June 2013, are associated in the findings not only with a sudden chilling effect but also a longer term, possibly even permanent, decrease in web traffic to the Wikipedia pages studied. This indicates a possible chill,” writes Penney.

While the study makes a convincing argument, identifying chilling effects empirically has always been tricky. There are plenty of other factors that can influence behavior online that may not necessarily have to do with being afraid of the government, for example. But given the specific timeframe and the huge amount of other evidence showing that surveillance tends makes citizens more prone to self-censorship and conformity, Penney's study seems to at least be an anchor point for future arguments that these programs have caused harm.

Snowden's Surveillance Leaks Made People Less Likely to Read About Surveillance

Letters to the Editor: Cheaters, Poop, and Naturopaths

Hello Motherboard readers, it’s me again, Motherboard’s weekend editor Emanuel Maiberg. Thank you for joining us on what is so far not a horrible weekend.

I was worried that you stopped writing to us at first, but it turns out a bunch of your letters were simply pulled into the black hole that is our spam folder.

Luckily, Motherboard’s editorial staff was brave enough to go in there and wade through emails from Chinese vendors trying to sell us vertical oil tanks and totally legit offers to get rich quickly by disclosing our banking information. We emerged on the other side, covered in sewage, like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, with your precious correspondence in hand.

Coincidentally, we got a few emails about sewage and poop and the differences between them, so let’s get right into it.

RE: 'Rainbow Six Siege' Scandal Shows Cheating Still Undermines eSports

I read the article on cheating in Rainbow Six Siege by Leif Johnson.

The first thing that usually comes to mind is a cheater app running on the host machine, which in today's tech age is not the only, nor most effective, way to cheat. All I would need is a second host hooked up to display off screen and stream the Twitch feeds onto that from my teammates/competitors. Most people have multiple email and user accounts on various services and this would be very easy to setup. If there is a way for a spectator to watch live, what is stopping the players? If people are really dedicated and want to mask their IP they can use services like TOR, or use the neighbor's WiFi on the second device, possible shooting them a few bucks. Who can say, without a doubt, that his neighbor is not actually watching if he claims he is? The only way around it, that I can see, would be to put a delay on the streams of players so it would appear live to all but the actual players themselves.

The article itself is well written and very objective with the evidence, which is refreshing in today's pandering and force-fed biases in most media outlets. This was one article that has restored some faith that journalism (real journalism) is not a dead art. So if you see this Mr. Johnson, or Mr. Editor, Thank you.

Cheers,

Jeremy Grier

Dear Mr. Grier,

Thank you so much for the kind note and the information. Cheating in video games is something that I’m personally very interested in and hope to cover more of Motherboard in the future.

It’s always been a weird scene and it will keep getting weirder now that there’s more money on the line in the form or professional, organized competition.

Thank for taking the time to write to us.

Emanuel Maiberg, Motherboard weekend editor.

RE: We Need to Stop Treating Naturopaths Like They’re Medical Doctors

Dear VICE and Kate,

Frankly I was surprised by your choice to publish this article. It reads like typical mainstream media journalism—very much on the surface and pro-establishment. VICE being the supporters of medicine outside of the establishment (cannabis) I am not sure how this article, which lacked any sort of quality research component snuck through the hands of your normally critical way of interpreting society's issues. I would hazard a guess the author's only research was recycling the ideas of other articles.

FACT: Doctor prescribed medicine is a lead cause of death around the world, and so using this opportunity to get down on Naturopathy instead of looking at the other major issues implicit in this trial:

The ambulance driven by the Alberta Health Services was not equipped with critical emergency equipment even though it should have been. The dispatcher sent an ambulance from a jurisdiction further away. Other key evidence was obscured. Also meningitis is a condition that eludes the diagnosis of many doctors and medical tests. The list goes on. But somehow the take-home is about how Naturopathy is not legitimate. This type of journalism only sets back society's evolution and recycles the old adages of a system that actually cannot be fully trusted to take of the people but still pretends that it can and punishes and threaten people who want to evolve this dialogue.

Thank you.

Kat McKernan

Dear Ms. McKernan,

Thanks for the note. As the author of the piece, I wanted to respond directly.

Naturopaths can certainly benefit some people, especially through the lifestyle advice they give their patients on diet and exercise, which I mention in my piece. But my goal here was to highlight that many of the services they advertise are still not backed by scientific studies. You mention cannabis in your email. Whatever your views on medical marijuana, there is an active field of research into whether it can help some patients. In contrast, many of the services offered by naturopaths, such as “detoxing,” have no science behind them, and have been debunked many times.

The case in Alberta was sad for everyone. But it seems important now that doctors, government, and naturopaths themselves consider why some patients would seek out alternative therapies for a sick child.

Thanks for taking the time to write.

Kate Lunau, Editor of Motherboard Canada

To Whom It May Concern,

After reading this article, I was thoroughly disappointed by the author's point of view about Naturopaths. I am currently in Naturopathic Medical school in Portland OR after which I will be able to prescribe drugs just like MDs, at least in Oregon.

But that's not the point. The fact is, this author's opinion, which unfortunately is the same as many out there who misunderstand the profession, is about what one Naturopath, whom I know nothing about, made a bad decision regarding treating this child. The first principle of Naturopathic Medicine is First, Do No Harm.

Saying that naturopathy is pseudo-science is the over-generalization of the decade, and the author needs to get her facts straight.

At accredited colleges of Naturopathic Medicine that LICENSE Naturopathic Doctors (there are 6 of them between US and Canada), students are learning the same basic sciences and pharmacology as MD students. The difference is that there are so many more hours spent working on alternative therapies so that we don't prescribe pharmaceuticals in every situation and create unnecessary side effects. That said, there are emergency situations where conventional medicine should absolutely be used, such as in the case with meningitis. Unfortunately this was overlooked in this case.

Obviously this naturopath didn't do a proper job diagnosing this serious life-threatening condition, but this is no way should be a reflection on all licensed naturopathic doctors who are saving people's lives and helping them recover from acute and chronic illnesses everyday (many of which were caused by pharmaceutical side effects).

Tell your author to get her shit straight. Saying that all naturopaths practice pseudoscience is like saying that all founders of sandwich conglomerates are pedophiles just because Jared from Subway was molesting children.

Not to mention she should read about all the studies that claim that at least 40 percent of all medical practices are deemed unnecessary if not unsafe. It takes 15-20 years for new research to take effect where the rubber meets the road in the clinic. There are countless diseases and deaths caused by doctors (many of them MDs). But of course you wouldn't mention that.

I don't really care if you publish this letter or not, but at least let the author read it.

Maybe she's compassionate enough to realize that there are a lot of doctors (MDs and NDs alike) busting their asses to help sick people, and everyone makes mistakes.

Sincerely,

Angela Hardin, Future Antivax Hack Witch Doctor

Dear Angela,

Thanks for your note. I do recognize that most doctors, nurses, and naturopaths are working hard for their patients, and want nothing more than to make sure they get healthy and stay that way. In the case of this Alberta toddler, there are questions about how the naturopath handled it, and they’ve been raised in court (see more info here). As you say in your letter, there are times when conventional, science-based medicine must be used. But there’s no denying we’re seeing a mistrust of it, and a creep towards pseudoscience, which can have serious consequences for the most vulnerable patients, including kids.

It’s something that doctors, naturopaths, and anyone who treats patients should be concerned about.

Many thanks,

Kate

RE: Turns Out That Using Human Poop to Fertilize Crops Isn't Such a Great Idea

Guys,

It is statements like the title that confuses the public and farmers. I will attach a couple of reports for your review.

The correct description of what you are calling “Human Poop” is Industrial, Hospital/Medical, Storm and Household waste.

When you state “Human Poop” you are part of the sewage deception or con that the sewage industry and EPA are a masters at.

Just for grin read any two of the attached and keep this little known regulation 40 CFR 261.30(d) and 261.33 (4), every US industry connected to a sewer can discharge any amount of hazardous and acute hazardous waste into sewage treatment plants. In fact they are required to. Now those darn sludge heads will state that there is no need to worry, pretreatment of that hazardous waste is strictly enforced. Now read the EPA’s Office of Inspector General’s Report No. 14-P-0363 / 09/2014 and see what bald face liars they are.

The proponents you speak of are making money on sewage. Naturally they would be for it. Now, go ask your neighbor if they know what bio solids or sewage sludge is or what it contains.

Sincerely,

Craig Monk.

Dear Craig,

Thanks for getting in touch about our piece on biosolids! As editor on that one, I wanted to write you back.

I see what you're saying: the use of "Human Poop" in the title could be confusing, although it was meant here as a catchall phrase for sewage, which includes waste water and excrement. As you say in your letter, there is some controversy about the use of biosolids on farmers' fields, and their levels of contamination.

We at Motherboard do not wish to be part of a sewage deception.

Sincerely,

Kate

That’s it for this week. If you want to share your thoughts with us, we’d love to read them. You can contact us here.

Letters to the Editor: Cheaters, Poop, and Naturopaths

Humans Care More About Climate Change if They Know They're Responsible

Climate change denial is still a huge problem among elected representatives, to say nothing of the general populace, and even when our elected leaders do try to act to combat climate change, their efforts often leave much to be desired. While it’s easy to blame the problem on scientific illiteracy, a lot of research has shown that even when individuals are educated about climate change and its effects, this knowledge does little to change their concern about the problem—they are still more likely to stick to political narratives than scientific ones.

However, a new study coming out of the University of Michigan suggests that what people know about climate change can make a difference. Namely, people who understand that climate change is largely caused by human activity are more likely to be concerned about climate change and its effects.

According to the researchers, the problem with previous studies that didn’t find links between greater knowledge about climate change and increased concern about it had more to do with the metrics previous researchers were using to measure "knowledge." Most previous research measured knowledge about climate change using a single, self-assessed scale, whereas the University of Michigan survey contained questions about climate change divided into three general categories of knowledge: physical, causes, and consequences.

"Physical knowledge" included things like knowing that burning oil produces CO2 or that CO2 is damaging to plants. "Causes knowledge" addressed human contributions to climate change, and questions about the predicted outcomes of climate change fell under "consequences knowledge." Finally, the survey asked participants to self-evaluate personal traits like how concerned they were about climate change, how much they cared about looking after themselves and others, and how much they cared about environmental stewardship.

The team found that all 2,500 participants in each of the six countries (US, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and China) seemed to be “reasonably well informed about climate change,” particularly when it came to the knowledge of its consequences (the weakest area was "physical knowledge"). Moreover, the team found that knowledge of the causes of climate change was correlated with higher levels of concern about climate change across all countries, something it chalked up to a feeling of responsibility given that climate change is largely driven by human activity.

"What we found was that culture [political narratives, historical relationships to nature, etc.] plays a relatively small role, and that knowledge about climate plays a larger one [in making people concerned about climate change]," said Joseph Arvai, a University of Michigan professor of sustainable enterprise and the lead author of the study. “Our research clearly shows that education and decision support aimed at the public and policy makers is not a lost cause."

Humans Care More About Climate Change if They Know They're Responsible

UK Hospitals Are Feeding 1.6 Million Patients’ Health Records to Google’s AI

DeepMind, the Google-owned A.I. famous for turning your photos into LSD-addled Lovecraftian nightmares, is being given real-time access to the medical information of more 1.6 million people in the UK, under a data sharing pilot program between Google and the UK's National Health Service (NHS) that was hinted at earlier this year.

The program, called Patient Rescue, provides the company with a stream of sensitive records from all patients of three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS Trust, according to a copy of the information sharing agreement obtained by New Scientist. That includes historical patient records from the past five years, as well as real-time data on hospital visits, test results, diagnoses, addictions, and more.

The scale of the sharing program was apparently misrepresented to the public, originally announced as an app to help hospitals monitor patients with kidney disease with real-time alerts and analytics. But since those patients don't have their own separate dataset, Google has argued it needs access to all patient data from the participating hospitals. The main idea is that by comparing patient data with millions of other cases, DeepMind could aid diagnostic decisions and predict diseases in their early stages.

Naturally, this doesn't sit well with anyone who is understandably leery of Google and the monopoly-like power they wield over the world's information. Aral Balkan, a software designer and privacy advocate called it “fucked up beyond belief” that the NHS would agree to “giving a corporation that farms people access to personal health records.” It's currently unclear whether there is any way for patients of Royal Free hospitals to opt-out of the real-time data sharing.

The agreement says the data can only be retained until the project's end date in late September 2017. But it notably doesn't prevent Google from doing all kinds of analytics on that data in the meantime—which is probably why the company has so charitably provided its services to the NHS for free.

It's the first time Google has gained direct access to medical information under such a program, and speaks to the data behemoth's desire to establish a foothold in the health industry the same way it intends to do for transportation, city infrastructure, and pretty much everything else.

UK Hospitals Are Feeding 1.6 Million Patients’ Health Records to Google’s AI

'World of Warcraft' in Unreal Engine 4 Looks Fancy, But It's not Better

People have really been missing classic World of Warcraft lately. The bulk of the news centers on the forced closure of Nostalrius Begins, a private server that simulated the experience of playing during the MMORPG's earliest years, and now YouTuber "Daniel L" is turning heads by reimagining the game's original zones using the Unreal 4 engine. Tree by tree, stone by stone, Daniel is recreating it all, and his work is often a wonder to behold.

His latest project is easily his finest, although he's careful to point out that it's still an early build. It's Duskwood, a spooky zone familiar to most Alliance players; a place where werewolves skulk around marble crypts and ghouls frolic beneath the canopy of eldritch oaks. With Daniel's reimagining, the darkness is both alluring and suffocating, and the torches lining Duskwood's paths give off a realistic light that reminds me of nights on camping trips when I've imagining sinister origins for the sounds I hear beyond the reach of the campfire's flames.

This darkness works in Daniel's favor. It's mainly a work of mood, which he uses to good effect with the music from Blizzard's own version. His earlier creations, though, have focused on sunnier climes like neighboring Elwynn Forest and Westfall, where the difference of his vision and that of Blizzard is most readily apparent.

That's not always a good thing. While undeniably beautiful and skillful, his reimaginings in these places have the curious effect of highlighting the strengths of Blizzard's cartoonish aesthetic and why it's worked so well for 11 years compared to a more realistic approach. The lighting effects in particular are often magical, but on the whole the work bears the stamp of games that too readily show their age in a few years' time. It lacks something of the real game's color and liveliness.

"And now you have another generic looking MMO," said YouTuber Vitobet1500 in a comment on one of Daniel L's older videos. "The thing about WoW is that you know it's WoW by the look of it. It has a personality. Just look at Tera, it looks like a generic game. But when you see a WoW screenshot you instantly know that it's WoW."

World of Warcraft itself has visually evolved itself over the years, of course, chiefly through texture updates that would have left my PC crying for mercy in 2004. Most of this work, though, is in the end-game expansion zones that brand-new players don't immediately see. Sometimes that work is astounding. Even after seeing the dungeons of a yet newer expansion, I'm still not entirely over my awe of the temples in WoW's 2012 Mists of Pandaria expansion, which invite many minutes of admiration for their detail while still seeming very much a part of that world that so wow'd us a decade ago.

As for Daniel L.'s vision? Considered in the context of the heritage of Warcraft, it's a little too unreal.

'World of Warcraft' in Unreal Engine 4 Looks Fancy, But It's not Better

The Best Apple Watch App Is Windows 95

The Silicon-valley mantra of "innovation at all costs" can have its perks, but it often means abandoning things which were already great—like Windows 95. Indeed, it might be the fact that this monument to perfection was so wantonly cast aside by its creators in favor of a newer, not-quite-as-good version of the same thing that explains the trend in retrofitting today’s latest technology to run this particular '90s-era operating system.

The latest in a long list of modern devices running this ancient software is brought to us by Nick Lee, who recently installed Windows 95 on his Apple watch.

As Lee details in a blog post, the Apple Watch has a lot of computing power crammed into a small amount of space: a 520 MHz processor and 512 MB of memory. It’s processor alone is 25-times faster than the popular 386 processor that was probably powering your PC two decades ago, and 512 MB was the size of many computers’ hard drives when Windows 95 was released—their memory capacities were even smaller.

Given the far superior computing power of his wristwatch, Lee wrote that he “was confident” that it was capable of running Windows 95. I won’t get too into the weeds about just how he did it, but essentially Lee used Apple’s WatchKit (an app developing tool) to patch a different app that allowed him to emulate Windows 95 on the watch. If you want all the details to try it for yourself, Lee gives step-by-step instructions here and has posted the code to GitHub.

The Best Apple Watch App Is Windows 95

This Grid-Scale Battery Is Based on Train Cars and Good Old Gravity

A California start-up named Advanced Rail Energy Storage (ARES) has a clever idea for storing electrical power at the most extreme scales, e.g. those of the power grid itself. It's a battery of sorts, but a battery that doesn't resemble anything we'd normally associate with the term. Rather than chemicals, ARES stores power as gravity.

The key components of ARES storage scheme include a really big hill and a few railroad cars. Energy to be stored in the system is first used to pull the rail cars via electric locomotives to the top of the hill, where it persists as potential energy. So long as the cars are at the top of the hill, the initial energy expended to get them up there remains trapped within the system. To recover that energy, the cars are simply lowered down the hill, turning built-in motor-generators in the process. This power is collected and then returned to the grid.

So, energy goes in and then it comes back out. Up and down. Earlier this month, ARES won approval from the Bureau of Land Management for a lease in southern Nevada featuring some train tracks on a hill and connectivity to the local power provider, which in turn will provide ARES with a means to connect to the greater western US power grid.

A fair question to ask is what's the point? We're not actually generating any power here and are most likely losing it, at least to some extent. But generation isn't the goal. What ARES is after is grid stabilization at very large scales (up to 50 megawatts with the Nevada project)—as the grid becomes more diversified, smoothing its peaks and valleys becomes a more and more vital task. Sometimes it's cloudy, and sometimes the wind doesn't blow.

So, if on some day the wind was really blowing and wind farms were really kicking the power out, ARES locomotives would automatically kick in, pulling several rail cars to the top of the hill. Should the grid dip, the cars would then be lowered back down the hill, returning about as much power to the grid as they removed.

The 50 megawatts of the Nevada facility is not huge—enough to power 15,000 or so homes for an hour—but ARES imagines large regional facilities capable of storing 2 to 3 gigawatts. The scalability of a such a system seems intuitive enough: more tracks, more cars, more grid.

Of course, one might wonder what advantage there is to doing this with train cars vs. literally any other thing that can be raised or powered, such as water (as in pumped-storage hydropower). ARES answer is efficiency: the system is able to recover 80 percent of the power that it takes in. That might not seem too impressive, but it's better than most car batteries, at least. And then part of the answer is the aforementioned scalability. This is a limiting factor in water-based storage schemes in that it's challenging to find workable sites and water supplies.

Once ARES' final environmental compliance reports are in, construction of the Nevada facility should take about eight months.

This Grid-Scale Battery Is Based on Train Cars and Good Old Gravity

New MIT Tool Quickly Roots Out Hidden Web App Security Bugs

It's a funny time for software testing. As more and more software is replaced by web applications—the cloud, that is—software bugs have more and more come to mean security holes. That is, interacting with software now so often means exposing data, which means trusting the builders of said software to entirely new degrees. And, as builders, we really need to not fuck that up.

Software testing—or debugging—is intense, tedious, and imperfect. Hence, software is full of bugs. Hence, software producers offer sometimes very large cash bounties to people that can find those bugs. A funny time.

Computer scientists from MIT have developed a new automated tool that can quickly comb through many thousands of lines of code written using the popular web framework Ruby on Rails looking for security vulnerabilities. In testing 50 popular RoR web applications, the tool, which will be presented at the International Conference on Software Engineering in May and is known simply as Space, was able to come up with 23 previously undiagnosed vulnerabilities. The longest it took to debug any program was 64 seconds.

And, as someone that does software testing on a semi-regular basis, I can say that 64 seconds essentially translates to 0 seconds. Performing a static analysis of code—where it's analyzed and inspected without actually running the program—at any kind of scale is a complicated, time-consuming ordeal.

Things get even more difficult when we start talking about contemporary web applications because so much of the code behind them is pulled in from external libraries and frameworks. This was the problem faced by the MIT group: Even very simple functionality in Ruby on Rails applications, like assigning values to variables, tends to be defined in often-vast external libraries. When all of these external resources are drawn in, the resulting pile of code gets to be very large.

“The program under analysis is just huge,” explains MIT computer science and engineering professor Daniel Jackson in a statement. “Even if you wrote a small program, it sits atop a vast edifice of libraries and plug-ins and frameworks. So when you look at something like a Web application written in language like Ruby on Rails, if you try to do a conventional static analysis, you typically find yourself mired in this huge bog. And this makes it really infeasible in practice.”

To solve the problem, the researchers attacked the RoR libraries themselves. The various operations defined within them were rewritten such that instead of doing actual computational operations, they returned symbolic expressions explaining what exactly those operations do.

"So we didn't revise the old code," Joe Near, now a postdoc researcher at the University of California, Berkeley and the lead researcher behind the tool, told me. "For a subset of the APIs, we threw it out and replaced it. The new versions don't let you actually run the web application; they only let you analyze it."

The effect is that as code is fed into the Ruby on Rails interpreter, that interpreter offers the helpful line-by-line description of the program's functionality in very clear, precise terms. With this in hand, static analysis becomes a much more reasonable task.

To make this reasonable task into an automated task, Near looked at the general nature of web applications and the various ways in which they allow users to have access to their data. He came up with seven different methods, and, for each, came up with a model describing what operations a user can perform on data. Using the rewritten libraries, he was able to develop a means of testing to see whether or not a given web app adheres to those models. When an app breaks the rules, there is likely to be a resulting security flaw.

Even without complete access to their underlying code, Near was able to analyze 50 web apps using Space. For a programmer familiar with their own code (and with complete access to it, obviously), the tool should be no sweat.

New MIT Tool Quickly Roots Out Hidden Web App Security Bugs

Even Fake Hackers Can Make A Lot of Money on the Internet

On the internet, just like nobody knows you are a dog, nobody knows you’re not really a famous hacker—and famous hackers can make a lot of money.

Those two ingredients, mixed with the fact that the public has become painfully aware of the damaging consequences of stuff like ransomware and, to a lesser degree, denial of service (DDoS) attacks that take down apps or websites and cost several hundred dollars in maintenance costs, have created a new kind of online threat: the fake hacker.

Earlier this week, the security firm CloudFlare outed a group of hackers, or an individual, who was pretending to be the infamous hacking gang Armada Collective. This imposter was apparently making money off of empty threats of crippling DDoS attacks.

“While the actual members of the original Armada Collective appear locked up in a European jail, with little more than some bitcoin addresses and an email account some enterprising individuals are drafting off the group's original name, sowing fear, and collecting hundreds of thousands of extorted dollars,” CloudFlare’s founder Matthew Prince wrote in a blog post.

With his blog post, Prince hoped that companies and individuals who received the hackers’ threats would know better and simply not pay. If his blog post got enough attention, Prince hoped, it would sink old posts about the feared, and real, Armada Collective.

[tweet text=""The Armada Collective" tells shakedown targets to Google them.@CloudFlare just sunk them. https://t.co/oaqXXAdnx6 http://pic.twitter.com/HwXtQuQgXw" byline="SecuriTay" user_id="SwiftOnSecurity" tweet_id="724728050517037056" tweet_visual_time="April 25, 2016"]

That strategy seems to have worked, but now, whoever was behind the new fake Armada Collective has just started pretending to be another infamous hacking group, the Lizard Squad.

In the last few days, hundreds of organizations have received email threats from someone calling themselves Lizard Squad and demanding a ransom in order to avoid a crippling DDoS attack, according to both Prince and another DDoS mitigation firm Radware.

“We are the Lizard Squad and we have chosen your website/network as target for our next DDoS attack. Please perform a google search for ‘Lizard Squad DDoS’ to have a look at some of our previous ‘work,’” reads the email, shared with Motherboard by Radware’s Daniel Smith. “We are willing to refrain from attacking your servers for a small fee. The current fee is 5 Bitcoins.”

There you go. Somebody burns your fake identity? Just make a new one. The good news is that it took just a couple of days for CloudFlare and Radware to figure this out, thanks to the fake hackers reusing the same language in the email and some of the same email addresses. And so far, none of the targets appear to have paid, Prince told me.

The problem with these kind of attacks is that they’re ridiculously easy. All one needs is an email address and a bitcoin address, and, as Prince explained, neither of those leave very a significant trail that could lead to an arrest. In other words, this is almost a perfect crime.

The bad news for the imposters is that there aren’t really that many infamous DDoS hacking groups, so at some point they’ll run out of names. But it’s kind of amazing that in this day and age, you can make money just by pretending to be a hacker. That’s how popular hackers and ransoms have become.

“Attackers now know that the general population is uneducated and fears both [DDoS for Ransom and Ransomware],” Smith told me.

The best counter to this trend, for Prince, is simply better education.

“We just have to get information out there when attackers are real attackers versus when they’re just blowing hot air,” he said.

Hopefully that’s enough to tell the real hackers from the fake ones. The dogs, on the other hand...

Even Fake Hackers Can Make A Lot of Money on the Internet

Sega Opens ROM Hacking Pandora’s Box with Genesis Mods on Steam

Image: Lone Devil's Workshop.

When publishers allow modders to tinker with their games through Steam’s Workshop, a community hub for mods and goofs, they're taking a bit of a risk. In the cases of Half-Life 2, Fallout and Cities: Skylines, it breathes new life into the games, enthusiasm kept going by players tweaking the worlds to suit their often chaotically entertaining vision. But opening up your doors doesn’t guarantee that everyone will take their shoes off. Sega will quickly discover that the practice can be a real conundrum. Its Genesis & Mega Drive Collection, a platform for classics like Golden Axe, Gunstar Heroes and Shinobi, enabled mods on Steam this week.

Many of the available mods are what you'd expect. Sprite, sound, and pallette swaps for cosmetic changes. You can play as characters from Sonic’s extended universe, hear the yammering from Sonic Boom over Sonic 2, whatever this Sonic the Hedgehog: Helen Keller Edition is, or say fuck it, let’s play as Nintendo's Kirby in Sonic because I don’t have time for society’s rules.

Some mods are more substantial, fixing bugs, adding more checkpoints in Ecco the Dolphin or even making Comix Zone easier in case you are a chump. There are even some ports of infamous bootleg Genesis games, such as a Sonic game that stars Super Mario, and this is where things start to drift into shady territory.

It appears Sega didn’t provide any of its own specific tools through Workshop, meaning that modders can go wild with the ROMs (Read-only memory), the game software stored on the original game cartridges. ROM hacks, a proud tradition of modding old games, have existed for decades, and many users seem to be uploading pre-existing ones from the basins of the web. An even bigger legal headache on top of the pirated variations of Sega Genesis games, modders have also uploaded other commercial Genesis games that aren’t available on the platform. The internet caught wind of one user adding Contra: Hard Corps, a game which belongs to Konami. It has since been taken down.

Video game ROMs, hacks, and pirated software is nothing new online. Whatever files Steam and Sega strike down from Workshop is likely available elsewhere. What makes this situation surreal is that, before being reported, modders can upload all sorts of grey zone copyright material within Sega’s own platform, something akin to walking into a McDonald’s and finding someone giving away Burger King chicken fries at one of the tables. At the time of writing there are versions of Donkey Kong Country, Wolfenstein and Angry Birds (none of which have anything to do with Sega) available on the Genesis & Mega Drive Collection. They will likely be removed, and something will likely be added in their place.

I say we keep things simple, and upload more mods like this one, which changes the death noises from Streets of Rage 2 to Tim Allen’s catchphrase grunt from Home Improvement.

Sega Opens ROM Hacking Pandora’s Box with Genesis Mods on Steam

‘Space Hulk: Deathwing’ Looks Like the Shooter Warhammer 40,000 Deserves

Games Workshop, the company that makes the fantasy tabletop game Warhammer and its futuristic counterpart Warhammer 40,000(as in the year 40,000), has been on a bit of a licensing tear for the last couple of years. What was once a closely guarded intellectual property, translated into great video games like Dawn of War and not so great games like Fire Warrior, is now licensed with abandon.

There are Warhammer 40,000 endless runners, battle chess, and lane strategy games, none of which do justice to one of the most influential franchises in gaming, or capture its essence: a future where there is only war, spread across an entire universe.

That’s why I’m cautiously optimistic about Space Hulk: Deathwing, a new first-person shooter from Streum On Studio. It’s based on the Space Hulk boardgame (which is spun off the traditional Warhammer 40,000 tabletop game) and slated for release later this year.

I was skeptical when it was first announced three years ago because it was yet another Warhammer 40,000 game, and increasingly so as we’ve seen so little of it since. However, publisher Focus Home Interactive finally dropped a trailer showing some Space Hulk: Deathwing gameplay this week, and it’s encouraging.

Some observations:

• Space Hulk: Deathwing is being made with Unreal Engine 4, and it obviously looks very beautiful. Unreal engine really good at rendering dark, spacey, bloody environments and big guns, which is a perfect match for Warhammer 40,000 visual palette.
• Space Hulk: Deathwing seems to have the style and structure of Left 4 Dead, meaning a player and three friends go from level to level, taking on huge numbers of enemies. It’s about managing crowds and surviving, only here the crowds are aliens (“Genestealers“) instead of zombies.
• Space Hulk: Deathwing is all about shooting and killing, and it doesn’t look like it sucks!

And that’s really what’s exciting about it. As a tabletop game Warhammer 40,000 lends itself to the strategy genre, but rarely does it capitalize on the potential and thrill of putting players in the boots of a space marine. Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine came pretty damn close, but even that was in 2011.

If Space Hulk: Deathwing is anything like this trailer, it could finally be the shooter Warhammer 40,000 deserves.

‘Space Hulk: Deathwing’ Looks Like the Shooter Warhammer 40,000 Deserves