Significant Flash exploit mitigations are live in v18.0.0.209 Whilst Project Zero has gained a reputation for vulnerability and exploitation research, that's not all that we do. One of the main reasons we perform this research is to provide data to defenders; and one of the things that defenders can do with this data is to devise exploit mitigations. Sometimes, we'll take on exploit mitigations ourselves. Recently, we've been working with Adobe on Flash mitigations, and this post describes some significant mitigations have landed over the past couple of Flash versions. Google Project Zero

Dear Google Mail team I've said very nice things about your spam filter in the past, but I'm afraid I am going to have to take it all back. I'm currently going through the spam for the last week, and have gone through about a third of it. Something you did recently has been an unmitigated disaster. Of the roughly 1000 spam threads I've gone through so far, right now 228 threads were incorrectly marked as spam. Linus Torvalds

How Electronic Arts lost its soul Trip Hawkins is sitting in a leather armchair in the center of a large co-working room in downtown San Mateo that is mostly empty of people. He is lean, in his early 60s, his hair dark, slick and neat. He is dressed in smart pants and an expensive-looking open-necked shirt. He speaks quietly but intensely about the company he founded more than 30 years before, the game publisher he built into one of the most successful in the world, before he left to embark on a risky gamble to reinvent the console business. Polygon

Top tier CPU air coolers Q3 2015: 9-way roundup review Brace yourselves, summer is coming. As it happens every summer, the sales of advanced cooling solutions tend to increase this time of the year. This year a little more than usual, as many enthusiasts likely found the perfect excuse for an upgrade in light of the new Windows 10 release. Rising temperatures are a concern for both the casual user...and the advanced enthusiast... AnandTech

Which movies get artificial intelligence right? In the opening scene of the 1982 film Blade Runner, an interrogator asks an android named Leon questions "designed to provoke an emotional response." According to the movie, empathy is one of the few features that distinguish humans from artificial intelligence (AI). When the test shifts to questions about his mother, Leon stands up, draws a gun, and shoots his interviewer to death. Science

Spike Aerospace updates S-512 supersonic jet design Ever since the retirement of Concorde, the aviation industry has looked forward to the rebirth of civilian supersonic air travel. The question is, will it be an airliner or something else? Spike Aerospace is betting that it will be a business jet - to be specific, the Spike Aerospace S-512 supersonic jet, which was unveiled as a concept in 2013. The company has now released its latest design. Gizmag

Desktop graphics card comparison guide rev. 31.7 These days, there are so many graphics card models that it has become quite impossible to keep up with the different configurations. Therefore, we decided to compile this guide to provide an easy reference for those who are interested in comparing the specifications of the various desktop GPUs in the market as well as those already obsolescent or obsolete. Tech ARP

The untold story of the man who saved the Xbox from oblivion. Twice Even among video game obsessives, the name Rick Belluzzo probably doesn't ring a bell. The onetime president of Microsoft didn't get any of the recognition bestowed on his colleagues who, at one time or another, were the faces of the Xbox. Belluzzo's tenure at the company lasted just three years, until Steve Ballmer, the chief executive officer at the time, decided he didn't need a president. Bloomberg

Apple Music tracks don't work with the new iPod Shuffle or Nano Thinking about a new iPod to take advantage of offline listening in Apple Music? You'll want to hold off for now. In an attempt to curb piracy, tracks downloaded for offline listening in Apple Music will not work on the new iPod Shuffle or Nano, reports 9to5 Mac. Apple Music tracks will work on an iPod Touch because Apple will be able to remove the locally stored tracks if the user cancels their subscription. Mashable (also, Who's actually buying iPods these days?)

The icy mountains of Pluto New close-up images of a region near Pluto's equator reveal a giant surprise: a range of youthful mountains rising as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface of the icy body. The mountains likely formed no more than 100 million years ago – mere youngsters relative to the 4.56-billion-year age of the solar system – and may still be in the process of building. NASA

"Thank you for calling tech support, now please die" I felt unmoored and directionless after my high school job at Babbage's dissolved at the end of 1997. I'd met my wonderful wife there – we'd go on to get married in 2003 – but Babbage's had been the only job I'd known. When the doors finally shut, I wasn't sure what to do. I skipped the typical teenager process of wandering around the mall filling out dozens of applications for various stores... Ars Technica

The murky genius of Fallout: New Vegas Fallout 3 wasn't a bad game - far from it - but its successor Fallout: New Vegas was most definitely better. This was a sequel that righted Fallout 3's few wrongs, setting players loose in a grittier, grimier, morally murkier nuclear wasteland, a world far removed from the Disneyland apocalypse of its predecessor, where the light side was zany and the dark side was only ever awful rather than crushingly bleak. Eurogamer

Bitcoin trends in the first half of 2015 It's already past the halfway mark in 2015 and we thought it would be a good time to provide an overview of the trends that we're seeing in Bitcoin this year. While the price of bitcoin is down 9% year-to-date, if you look below the surface it is clear that Bitcoin had a strong first half and is making great strides as digital money for people around the world and a payment network for innovation. Coinbase

An identity thief explains the art of emptying your bank account Nightfall in Minsk means Dmitry Naskovets begins working the phone. At 24, Naskovets is tall and skinny, and still looks like the college kid he recently was. He's in his apartment's kitchen, in a respectable neighborhood off the second ring road in the capital of Belarus. He starts around 6 p.m. and usually doesn't quit until three the next morning. Bloomberg