Posted by from MMO Champion
This Week in WoW - April 26, 2024
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
Catch up on all the latest World of Warcraft news from the last week—mark your calendars for the next content update for
Dragonflight—Dark Heart, take a dive into Dragonflight Season 4, learn more about the
Cataclysm Classic Pre-Expansion, and more!
Dark Heart and WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria Ahead
Mark your calendars for the release of the next content update for Dragonflight—Dark Heart—on May 7 and for the World of Warcraft Remix: Mists of Pandaria event on May 16 at 10:00 a.m. PDT globally!
Dragonflight: Dark Heart
The Dark Heart content update launches, May 7 and ushers in the final chapter of the Dragonflight expansion setting the stage for the story in the upcoming expansion, The War Within™.
Draenei and Troll characters can also embark on new questlines to lay claim to their new heritage armors, Kul Tiran Humans can select from six new hair colors, maximum-level characters will gain access to all Dragonflight quests regardless of Renown—and more.
World of Warcraft Remix: Mists of Pandaria
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Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the blast-from-the-past department: A now-abandoned USB worm that backdoors connected devices has continued to self-replicate for years since its creators lost control of it and remains active on thousands, possibly millions, of machines, researchers said Thursday. ArsTechnica: The worm -- which first came to light in a 2023 post published by security firm Sophos -- became active in 2019 when a variant of malware known as PlugX added functionality that allowed it to infect USB drives automatically. In turn, those drives would infect any new machine they connected to, a capability that allowed the malware to spread without requiring any end-user interaction. Researchers who have tracked PlugX since at least 2008 have said that the malware has origins in China and has been used by various groups tied to the country's Ministry of State Security.
For reasons that aren't clear, the worm creator abandoned the one and only IP address that was designated as its command-and-control channel. With no one controlling the infected machines anymore, the PlugX worm was effectively dead, or at least one might have presumed so. The worm, it turns out, has continued to live on in an undetermined number of machines that possibly reaches into the millions, researchers from security firm Sekoia reported. The researchers purchased the IP address and connected their own server infrastructure to "sinkhole" traffic connecting to it, meaning intercepting the traffic to prevent it from being used maliciously. Since then, their server continues to receive PlugX traffic from 90,000 to 100,000 unique IP addresses every day.
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the very-annoying department: Captchas that aim to distinguish humans from nefarious bots are demanding more brain power. WSJ: The companies and cybersecurity experts who design Captchas have been doing all they can to stay one step ahead of the bad actors figuring out how to crack them. A cottage industry of third-party Captcha-solving firms -- essentially, humans hired to solve the puzzles all day -- has emerged. More alarmingly, so has technology that can automatically solve the more rudimentary tests, such as identifying photos of motorcycles and reading distorted text. "Software has gotten really good at labeling photos," said Kevin Gosschalk, the founder and CEO of Arkose Labs, which designs what it calls "fraud and abuse prevention solutions," including Captchas. "So now enters a new era of Captcha -- logic based."
That shift explains why Captchas have started to both annoy and perplex. Users no longer have to simply identify things. They need to identify things and do something with that information -- move a puzzle piece, rotate an object, find the specter of a number hidden in a roomscape. Compounding this bewilderment is the addition to the mix of generative AI images, which creates new objects difficult for robots to identify but baffles humans who just want to log in. "Things are going to get even stranger, to be honest, because now you have to do something that's nonsensical," Gosschalk said. "Otherwise, large multimodal models will be able to understand."
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the edge-case department: Some Android-powered TVs can expose the contents of users' email inboxes if an attacker has physical access to the TV. Google initially told the office of Senator Ron Wyden that the issue, which is a quirk of how software is installed on these TVs, was expected behavior, but after being contacted by 404 Media, Google now says it is addressing the issue. From the report: The attack is an edge case but one that still highlights how the use of Google accounts, even on products that aren't necessarily designed for browsing user data, can expose information in unusual ways, including TVs in businesses or ones that have been resold or given away.
"My office is mid-way through a review of the privacy practices of streaming TV technology providers. As part of that inquiry, my staff discovered an alarming video in which a YouTuber demonstrated how with 15 minutes of unsupervised access to an Android TV set top box, a criminal could get access to private emails of the Gmail user who set up the TV," Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the brutally-honest department: Europe is less hard-working, less ambitious, more regulated and more risk-averse than the US, according to the boss of Norway's giant oil fund, with the gap between the two continents only getting wider. FT: Nicolai Tangen, chief executive of the $1.6tn fund, told the Financial Times it was "worrisome" that American companies were outpacing their European rivals [non paywalled link] on innovation and technology, leading to vast outperformance of US shares in the past decade. "There's a mindset issue in terms of acceptance of mistakes and risks. You go bust in America, you get another chance. In Europe, you're dead," he said, adding that there was also a difference in "the general level of ambition. We are not very ambitious. I should be careful about talking about work-life balance, but the Americans just work harder."
His views are significant as the oil fund is one of the largest single investors in the world, owning on average 1.5 per cent of every listed company globally and 2.5 per cent of every European equity. Its US holdings have increased in the past decade while its European ones have declined. US shares account for almost half of all its equities compared with 32 per cent in 2013. The leading European country -- the UK -- represented 15 per cent of its equity portfolio a decade ago but just 6 per cent last year.
In the days after the April 19 release of The Tortured Poets Department, the latest album from Taylor Swift, I came across a presentation explaining the artist’s relationship with 1975 frontman Matty Healy. It is over one hundred pages long, and it’s not the only presentation, video, or article of its kind. Fans are… 
A Lego YouTuber has recreated the housebuilding scene from Rockstar Games’ open-world western, Red Dead Redemption II, complete with the catchy tune, a curious bird, and a pesky cougar. 
Arrowhead Game Studios has enjoyed handing down some tough and consequential major orders for the Helldivers 2 community to beat, but its latest might be one of its thorniest yet. You see, major orders tend to focus the entirety of the player base on a single objective or set of goals, such as killing billions of… 
Last week, journalist co-op 404 Media reported on Spy Pet, a site that was mining billions of Discord messages from nearly 620 million users and selling access to that data for as little as $5. After investigating the matter, Discord has announced that the accounts connected to that repository have been banned and the… 
It's not far from the sign marking the exact latitude and longitude of the Earth's core. 
Tesla was recently forced to recall every Cybertruck it’s ever built — all 3,878 of them — because the cover on the accelerator pedal could come loose, causing unintended acceleration. As it turns out, though, you don’t even need to be old enough to get your driver’s license to deal with unintended acceleration… 
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, made a lot of money in its last financial quarter. However, its virtual reality and augmented reality division, Reality Labs, lost over $3 billion. That means that since June 2022, the metaverse-focused division has lost a billion dollars per month, and Meta expects to continue losing… 
Stellar Blade is a good game. If you wanted Nier: Automata without all the heady themes, then Shift Up’s latest PS5-exclusive character action game fits the bill perfectly. It doesn’t tell as good a story as PlatinumGames’ 2017 character action game, and its characterization isn’t as deep either, but there is one… 
Don’t shoot the messenger, but even if you’ve played your Xbox consistently for the past four years and you think you know it inside and out, you may still be surprised by what your console is capable of. Just like the PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch, the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S have a bevy of hidden… 
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