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"We are doing three longer-term projects," Howard said. "We'll talk about them in future. They are different from anything we have done before, while also being a Bethesda-style game." Holmes asked Howard again. And he said, "I teased enough. I'll get in trouble." Much of the talk was a victory lap for Fallout 4, which had a team of 100 people and was in the works for four years, following the debut of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim role-playing game in 2011. Howard said he was grateful for the success of Fallout 4, an open world game with 100,000 lines...

Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center on Wednesday announced that it paid approximately US$17,000 to resume normal operations after digital extortionists knocked its computer systems offline. The Los Angeles hospital discovered its computer network infected with ransomware earlier this month. Ransomware is a form of malware that scrambles data and key files on a system and demands a ransom be paid for a digital key to unscramble the data. After paying a ransom of 40 bitcoins, or $17,000, to the extortionists, the hospital was able to bring its electronic medical record system online, HPMC said. Bitcoins are a digital currency favored by...

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The Linux Foundation has launched the Zephyr Project, to foster an open source, small footprint, modular, scalable, connected, real-time OS for IoT devices. Normally we think of the Linux Foundation as being all about Linux. But as the organization has matured, it has expanding its scope to embrace an ever-wider range of open source standards and software. Despite the existence and widespread use of minimalistic Linux implementations including uClinux, OpenWrt, Brillo, and Ubuntu Core, the exponential proliferation of smart, connected devices -- such as light bulbs, thermostats, security cameras, sensors, and many others -- has fueled intense interest in minimizing...

In 2003 Sreenivasa Rao Vadalasetty helped write a report for the SANS Institute that was titled "Security Concerns in Using Open Source Software for Enterprise Requirements." To some that title today is almost laughable. The report stated:"Though the open source has potential to be more secure than its closed source counterpart, it should not be taken for granted that open source is more secure because there are some constraining factors. Despite the fact that the source code is available for everyone, several vulnerabilities in open source remain undiscovered ...." In a survey done by Black Duck Software last year, the...

... so Apple doesn't need to place a back door on its product Using an obscure law, written in 1789 — the All Writs Act — the US government has ordered Apple to place a back door into its iOS software so the FBI can decrypt information on an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. It has finally come to this. After years of arguments by virtually every industry specialist that back doors will be a bigger boon to hackers and to our nation's enemies than publishing our nuclear codes and giving the keys to all of...

Gartner has released its smartphone stats for Q4 2015 and the news is especially bad for Microsoft. In Q4 2014, the software giant owned 2.8 percent of the smartphone market -- not great, but still good enough for around 10 million units sold. In the same quarter of 2015, however, Windows Phone sales fell to 4.4 million, giving the OS a mere 1.1 percent of the total market. That means that it's basically in a death spiral, as consumers and app developers alike lose interest. Microsoft's rumored Surface Phone now looks like its last hope to rescue the division. The...

Apple lost market share in the final months of 2015 Apple is losing market share to handset makers in emerging markets, according to Gartner research Sales of Apple Inc.'s iPhone dropped for the first time in the fourth quarter last year, as the company lost market share in an arena that is increasingly being taken over by phone makers in developing countries. In the final quarter of 2015, iPhone sales dropped 4.4%, cutting Apple's AAPL, -1.90% market share to 17.7% from 20.4% in the same quarter of 2014, according to technology research company Gartner. Overall, global smartphone sales for all...

“Today, Apple is issuing an updated version of iOS 9.2.1 for users that update their iPhones via iTunes only,” Matthew Panzarino reports for TechCrunch. “This update will restore phones 'bricked' or disabled by Error 53 and will prevent future iPhones that have had their home button (or the cable) replaced by third party repair centers from being disabled. Note that this is a patched version of iOS 9.2.1, previously issued, not a brand new version of iOS.” “The update is not for users who update their iPhones over the air (OTA) via iCloud,” Panzarino reports. “If you update your phone...

Apple is fighting the FBI over a court order requiring the tech giant to unlock a terrorist’s iPhone — but it appears the company had no problem breaking into at least 70 other protected smartphones. The October refusal bewildered New York prosecutors, who claimed the iPhone maker "complied" with at least 70 other requests to unlock suspects' phones, Motherboard reported at the time. Each request was made under the All Writs Act, a 1789 statute that grants federal courts broad power to issue "necessary or appropriate" writs. "(Apple) had an established procedure to routinely take any of these requests, comply...

USA Today has altered their logo to support Apple’s fight against U.S. government overreach. The United States government has demanded that Apple take an unprecedented step which threatens the security of their customers.The United States government is asking Apple to hack their own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect their customers -- including tens of millions of American citizens -- from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals. The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect Apple’s users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make their users less safe.Apple opposes this order, which...

Microsoft keeps shouting about the millions of users that have switched to Windows 10, and soon the company will have another 4 million to bray about. The US Department of Defense is the latest big name to give Windows 10 the seal of approval apparently unconcerned with the privacy and telemetry issues that have put off others. 4 million enterprise upgrades for Windows 10 is a real feather in the cap for Microsoft, and the aim is to get each system running the latest version of the operating system inside a year. The DoD has also announced that it is...

The funny thing about working in engineering is that your education is never really over. Innovation is constantly reshaping the concepts and processes you find in various areas of engineering, so the professionals focused on these fields have to be on their toes to learn the latest and greatest advancements. A decent chunk of this learning is done through experience, but sometimes you need to jump start it with a course or two. And who better to do that with than MIT, Boeing and NASA? That’s right: The biggest names in engineering are teaming up to develop the ultimate systems...

Gather around young’uns: Back in the antediluvean early 90s, when the digital world was young, a motley group of technologists and privacy advocates fought what are now, somewhat melodramatically, known as the Crypto Wars. There were many distinct battlefields, but the overarching question over which the Crypto Wars were fought was this: Would ordinary citizens be free to protect their communications and private files using strong, truly secure cryptography, or would governments seek to force programmers and computer makers to build in backdoors that would enable any scheme of encryption to be broken by the authorities?

A 2015 court case shows that the tech giant has been willing to play ball with the government before—and is only stopping now because it might ‘tarnish the Apple brand.’ Apple CEO Tim Cook declared on Wednesday that his company wouldn’t comply with a government search warrant to unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino killers, a significant escalation in a long-running debate between technology companies and the government over access to people’s electronically-stored private information. But in a similar case in New York last year, Apple acknowledged that it could extract such data if it wanted...

By the end of 2015, the Backblaze datacenter had 56,224 spinning hard drives containing customer data. These hard drives reside in 1,249 Backblaze Storage Pods. By comparison 2015 began with 39,690 drives running in 882 Storage Pods. We added 65 Petabytes of storage in 2015 give or take a Petabyte or two. Not only was 2015 a year of growth, it was also a year of drive upgrades and replacements. Let's start with the current state of the hard drives in our datacenter as of the end of 2015 and then dig into the rest later on. Hard Drive Statistics...

Up to 46,000 Internet-accessible digital video recorders (DVRs) that are used to monitor and record video streams from surveillance cameras in homes and businesses can easily be taken over by hackers. According to security researchers from vulnerability intelligence firm Risk Based Security (RBS), all the devices share the same basic vulnerability: They accept a hard-coded, unchangeable password for the highest-privileged user in their software -- the root account. Using hard-coded passwords and hidden support accounts was a common practice a decade ago, when security did not play a large role in product design and development. That mentality has changed in...

Microsoft will remove Managed Accounts from the standalone Skype communications application from March 30 this year and replace them with standard personal accounts. Skype Managed Accounts is a feature that allows a central administrator to create and maintain accounts for the program. It is aimed at business users, and part of the web-based Skype Manager administration utility. But Managed Accounts will soon be transitioned into standard personal Skype accounts, subject to Microsoft's consumer terms of use, the company said. Allocated Skype credits, subscriptions and numbers will be moved to the personal accounts. Administrators will need to ensure that a valid...

Apple has sold $12billion in bonds as part of another scheme to lower its tax bill. The tech giant got itself further into debt even though it has $215billion in the bank, more than the US Treasury. California-based Apple sold the bonds under a complicated scheme which is reportedly designed to ensure that it does not have to pay US tax on its profits earned abroad. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3451420/Apple-s-latest-tax-avoidance-ruse-Tech-giant-issues-12bn-bonds-doesn-t-money-low-tax-offshore-havens-pay-dividends.html#ixzz40UDgg2HK Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

I'm looking to purchase a new computer and would like some advice.