Weekend tech reading: TeamViewer allegedly hacked, Overwatch hits 7m players, Nexus 6P gets cheaper

Matthew DeCarlo

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TeamViewer allegedly hacked, but the developer points the finger elsewhere Users of TeamViewer, a service for remote computer access and desktop sharing, are accusing the company of being hacked after several reports of people’s computers being breached and even PayPal and bank accounts emptied. Reddit users were some of the first to notice the breaches weren’t limited to a few incidents and in some cases, date back a few weeks. Digital Trends (also, What to do if your TeamViewer is hacked)

An unprecedented look at Stuxnet, the world’s first digital weapon In January 2010, inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency visiting the Natanz uranium enrichment plant in Iran noticed that centrifuges used to enrich uranium gas were failing at an unprecedented rate. The cause was a complete mystery -- apparently as much to the Iranian technicians replacing the centrifuges as to the inspectors observing them. Wired (also, Shades of stuxnet spotted in newly found ICS/SCADA malware)

Nexus 6P gets $80 discount at Amazon, BestBuy, more If you’re after an Android device with all the latest hardware, a great camera, a large display, stock Android with fast updates, and a high-quality design, you shouldn’t look much further than the Nexus 6P. It’s one of the best smartphones of the year. TechSpot Review. Starts at $419 on Amazon and BestBuy. B&H Audio adds $50 gift card to the deal.

Police are filing warrants for Android's vast store of location data In February 2015, a man with a painter’s mask and a gun walked into a Bank of America office in Ramona, California, and walked out with more than $3,000. Police tried to track down the bank robber, but the mask prevented a positive ID and the trail went cold. Until, in November of the same year, someone matching his description robbed the same bank again. The Verge (also, U.S. court says no warrant needed for cellphone location data)

IBM has been awarded an average of 24 patents per day so far in 2016 The media tends to focus on the crazy things Google, Facebook, and Apple patent, but they’re still dwarfed by more traditional companies like IBM and Samsung when it comes to the number of patents they’re awarded each year. Through the first half of 2016, IBM has, yet again, been the leader in technology patents, averaging roughly 23.6 patents awarded each day. Quartz

Introducing DeepText: Facebook's text understanding engine Text is a prevalent form of communication on Facebook. Understanding the various ways text is used on Facebook can help us improve people's experiences with our products, whether we're surfacing more of the content that people want to see or filtering out undesirable content like spam. With this goal in mind, we built DeepText, a deep learning-based text understanding engine that can understand with near-human accuracy the textual content of several thousands posts per second, spanning more than 20 languages. Facebook

"Super Mario Brothers" is hard Completing a game of "Super Mario Brothers" can be hard -- very, very hard. That's the conclusion of a new paper from researchers at MIT, the University of Ottawa, and Bard College at Simon’s Rock. They show that the problem of solving a level in "Super Mario Brothers" is as hard as the hardest problems in the “complexity class” PSPACE, meaning that it's even more complex than the traveling-salesman problem, or the problem of factoring large numbers, or any of the other hard problems belonging to the better-known complexity classNP. MIT

Overwatch hits 7 million players More than 7 million players have joined Overwatch's fight for the future, Blizzard Entertainment announced today. Since the game launched worldwide on May 24, players have logged more than 119 million hours, making the launch one of the "most successful" of all time. Eleven million payloads have been delivered, with players swapping out heroes 326 million times. IGN

Michael Dell bought his company too cheaply If you own a stock that you think is worth $10 a share, and I also own that stock and I think it's worth $20 a share, I can try to convince you that I'm right. I can make predictions about the company's future prospects and earnings, and build a discounted cash flow model to prove that the stock really is worth $20. And you can make different assumptions about the future, and build different models, and try to convince me that $10 is the right number. Bloomberg

The impossible task of creating a "Best VPNs" list today For the security minded, one of the scariest revelations from the now three-year-old Snowden leaks had nothing to do with accommodating ISPs (shocking) or overreaching and often vague anti-terrorism practices and policy (an even bigger shock, right?). Instead, when news trickled out about matters like the National Security Agency’s Vulcan data repository or its Diffie-Hellman strategy, online privacy advocates found themselves quaking. Ars Technica

Ridealong: The underground fight clubs of Dark Souls III When Dingle arrives at the circular ruins outside the old church, the first thing he sees is a man in a crown, holding a flaming torch -- it is the man he must kill. But the crowned man shows no fear, he simply waves and beckons him over. Dingle is curious. He approaches with caution and looks into the grassy arena below, where he sees two dark spirits -- red phantoms like himself -- taking swings at each other. Rock Paper Shotgun

Out of box exploitation Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) vendors refer to the initial startup process of a new computer as the ‘out-of-box experience,’ or OOBE. While the process varies by OEM vendor, the experience is the same: wait for pre-loaded software to start up and force you to click through product registration and 30 day trial prompts. Duo (pdf)

Doom is asking important questions that other FPSes aren't How do you improve on a classic? The answer is you don't. If we're talking about a genuine classic, something that not only was created to the very highest standard of its time but has held up well ever since, then that by definition isn't something you can make much better. Even if you fine-tune some of the rough edges or update the presentation or whatever, you're not going to re-capture what it was like to experience that thing in the first place. PC Gamer

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First rule of remote desktop sharing applications: Uninstall/disable when you aren't actively in a meeting.
 
I know I say I'm an atheist, but a lot of guff misses me in the computer area. Something told me not to use teamviewer; I use a different vnc program for my computer repair business. Just like I turned off updates and found out how in windows 10 when the october updates and others ruined computers. I just don't have time to go there and reload windows for them and these are often poor people who don't pay. I didn't use teamviewer because I didn't want to lie to them and use the free version for business, which you could. My vnc requires one visit to the customers home to open up ports in their router and computer firewalls, each being somewhat difficult to figure out and customers get nervous it takes so long. Uverse gateways, comcast with hundreds of routers, dsl, different versions of antivirus firewalls, etc. I know, shove it. Then like comcast changed it. But it was worth it. Teamviewer goes thru port 80 not requiring any firewall changes. Might be that I have a guardian angel, or I'm very wise and see thru time a little. Anticipation.
 
I know I say I'm an atheist, but a lot of guff misses me in the computer area. Something told me not to use teamviewer; I use a different vnc program for my computer repair business. Just like I turned off updates and found out how in windows 10 when the october updates and others ruined computers. I just don't have time to go there and reload windows for them and these are often poor people who don't pay. I didn't use teamviewer because I didn't want to lie to them and use the free version for business, which you could. My vnc requires one visit to the customers home to open up ports in their router and computer firewalls, each being somewhat difficult to figure out and customers get nervous it takes so long. Uverse gateways, comcast with hundreds of routers, dsl, different versions of antivirus firewalls, etc. I know, shove it. Then like comcast changed it. But it was worth it. Teamviewer goes thru port 80 not requiring any firewall changes. Might be that I have a guardian angel, or I'm very wise and see thru time a little. Anticipation.

I had a dream once, about a girl. Woke up and thought to myself, "That was interesting." Met the same girl just hours later as she walked down the street. Totally blew my mind.

As fate would have it, the chick was an absolute nightmare and I couldn't wait to be rid of her by the end of the day.

Moral of the story: random thoughts and images manifest themselves in the world all the time. Sometimes your gut can look like a savant. Other times it blatantly lies just to **** with you.
 
I know I say I'm an atheist, but a lot of guff misses me in the computer area. Something told me not to use teamviewer; I use a different vnc program for my computer repair business. Just like I turned off updates and found out how in windows 10 when the october updates and others ruined computers. I just don't have time to go there and reload windows for them and these are often poor people who don't pay. I didn't use teamviewer because I didn't want to lie to them and use the free version for business, which you could. My vnc requires one visit to the customers home to open up ports in their router and computer firewalls, each being somewhat difficult to figure out and customers get nervous it takes so long. Uverse gateways, comcast with hundreds of routers, dsl, different versions of antivirus firewalls, etc. I know, shove it. Then like comcast changed it. But it was worth it. Teamviewer goes thru port 80 not requiring any firewall changes. Might be that I have a guardian angel, or I'm very wise and see thru time a little. Anticipation.

I had a dream once, about a girl. Woke up and thought to myself, "That was interesting." Met the same girl just hours later as she walked down the street. Totally blew my mind.

As fate would have it, the chick was an absolute nightmare and I couldn't wait to be rid of her by the end of the day.

Moral of the story: random thoughts and images manifest themselves in the world all the time. Sometimes your gut can look like a savant. Other times it blatantly lies just to **** with you.


They say you can only dream about people you have already seen.
 
I had a dream once, about a girl. Woke up and thought to myself, "That was interesting." Met the same girl just hours later as she walked down the street. Totally blew my mind.

As fate would have it, the chick was an absolute nightmare and I couldn't wait to be rid of her by the end of the day.

Moral of the story: random thoughts and images manifest themselves in the world all the time. Sometimes your gut can look like a savant. Other times it blatantly lies just to **** with you.
I like that. You had a dream and she was a nightmare. Pun intended?
 
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