Posted by: xSicKxBot - 09-28-2018, 06:37 PM - Forum: Windows
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‘Digital Peace Now’ campaign launches this weekend
This Saturday, 60,000-plus people will be converging on New York’s Central Park for the seventh Global Citizen Festival, a marquee gathering for worldwide changemaking and social good.
Microsoft will be there, on stage, as a partner to Global Citizen. We’re excited to announce that this year’s festival is going to be the launchpad for Digital Peace Now, a campaign to encourage world leaders to achieve digital peace.
The world’s digital citizens, and the digital world in which we all participate, have to be protected. You can help by joining the Digital Peace Now movement.
This is the time, this is the moment, when we must take action to protect the digital world where we live, work and learn. Last year, close to a billion people were victims of a cyberattack or digital crime. But if you haven’t fallen victim to a digital attack yet, you probably know a victim. New research, being announced today, shows people like you are concerned and want to take action.
We know that nation-states are behind the worst digital attacks against both innocent people and the infrastructure that underpins societies – energy, transportation, health care, food and water. A peaceful digital global society is something truly worth fighting to achieve. Not least because virtually every digital attack ripples beyond its intended target and harms the lives of innocent citizens.
For example, the 2017 “WannaCry” attack – a true wake-up call – tore through cyberspace, hijacking more than 300,000 computers across 150 countries, including computers used by families, hospitals, governments and businesses. WannaCry was followed closely by “NotPetya,” an attack estimated to have caused $10 billion in damage ranging far beyond the initial targets in Ukraine.
WannaCry and NotPetya were our wake-up moments; they raised an alarm: if we don’t act now, global cyberattacks will continue to inflict grave economic harm and risk human lives and well-being.
At Microsoft, we are fighting to prevent digital attacks. We are not alone; others in industry and government have joined us in this fight. Now we need to amplify the voice of the people who cherish all that the digital world has given us – the digital citizens – all of you – who can make a difference by acting now to tell those in power that we want and demand digital peace.
Digital Peace Now is going to be all about people – people banding together in one collective voice to tell their world leaders that the internet must be a peaceful, shared community. Not a battlefield.
Also on Saturday, we’ll be launching the Digital Peace Now Petition and urging everyone – including anybody reading this – to head to digitalpeacenow.org and sign the petition:
We, as Digital Citizens, will not stand by silently as governments weaponize our shared online community — endangering individuals, organizations, and entire countries. In our digital world we create, connect, express ourselves and improve our lives and the lives of others. Our online community must not be a battlefield. We demand Digital Peace.
Together, we will use our voices and our votes to defend the global digital society on which we depend. Our world leaders must act now to protect us.
There is no peace without Digital Peace.
The effort to achieve Digital Peace cannot be done by any company acting alone. We’re proud to launch this initiative with the founding members of the Digital Peace Campaign Advisory Board – ICT4Peace, Civicus and Observer Research Foundation. Achieving digital peace also must involve a coalition of governments, nonprofits, industry leaders, civil-society entities and global organizations. But most importantly, we need people like you to stand against those that endanger digital peace.
We all are digital citizens. We demand digital peace. Join us.
How to Create SSH Tunneling or Port Forwarding in Linux
SSH tunneling (also referred to as SSH port forwarding) is simply routing local network traffic through SSH to remote hosts. This implies that all your connections are secured using encryption. It provides an easy way of setting up a basic VPN (Virtual Private Network), useful for connecting to private networks over unsecure public networks like the Internet.
You may also be used to expose local servers behind NATs and firewalls to the Internet over secure tunnels, as implemented in ngrok.
SSH sessions permit tunneling network connections by default and there are three types of SSH port forwarding: local, remote and dynamic port forwarding.
In this article, we will demonstrate how to quickly and easily setup a SSH tunneling or the different types of port forwarding in Linux.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 09-28-2018, 10:47 AM - Forum: Windows
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Sea of Thieves ‘Forsaken Shores’ free update now available
At gamescom 2018, we gave a first glimpse at Forsaken Shores, our latest free content update coming to Sea of Thieves. As part of our ongoing commitment to deliver new Sea of Thieves content throughout the year and beyond, Forsaken Shores offers our biggest update yet at no charge for those who own the game or access it through Xbox Game Pass. There has never been a better time to set sail and adventure with other pirates in the Sea of Thieves community.
Today, Forsaken Shores invites players to venture into a new volcanic region called The Devil’s Roar. This perilous and challenging area of the Sea of Thieves will have players encountering volcano eruptions raining down hot rocks and flowing lava, terrifying earthquakes, unpredictable geysers that can fling players into the air and dangerous super-heated water around islands.
Also new to Forsaken Shores is the Row Boat, which will be key to assisting the navigation of this dangerous new region, but also enriching all journeys across every area of the world. Players can also take on new Devil’s Roar Voyages, with increased challenge that allows players to reap greater rewards.
This permanent new content will be introduced into Sea of Thieves with a time-limited campaign, running for four weeks from today, September 27, where players will be able to discover exactly what happened to the first crew that managed to make their way to The Devil’s Roar. As part of the campaign, players can also find new quests with the Merchant Alliance, taking on Cargo Runs across the world, keeping their cargo safe and delivering it in pristine condition for the highest rewards. Cargo Runs will arrive in week three of the campaign and remain a permanent fixture of the Merchant Alliance moving forward.
This Forsaken Shores campaign and content update will be available free and without charge to all Sea of Thieves players who have bought the game across the Xbox One family of devices or on Windows 10 PC, or who have access to it as part of Xbox Game Pass. Simply download and install the latest Sea of Thieves update to get access. And don’t worry, if you’re unable to take part in the time-limited campaign, all the features introduced with this campaign will remain in the Sea of Thieves world for everyone to see and experience.
In celebration of the launch of Forsaken Shores, the Xbox team asked Matt Berry to deliver our most epic update yet. Matt eschewed the traditional tropes of a pirate performance and instead, bellowed out each point out in his unique fashion. The second the first syllable was uttered on set there were smiles all round, so we hope you have as much fun watching the above video as we had making it.
We are also proud to announce that Sea of Thieves will officially support Traditional Chinese as an official language option starting on November 8. We believe that by enabling the game in more languages, more players will be able to enjoy Sea of Thieves the way they are most comfortable, so they can fully immerse themselves in their very own pirate adventure.
Thank you to the entire Sea of Thieves community for your patience in waiting for Forsaken Shores. The team worked tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure that Forsaken Shores lives up to our collective quality and performance standards. We cannot wait to explore the Devil’s Roar with you. See you on the seas.
New to Sea of Thieves? Join the adventure at xbox.com/seaofthieves, and visit the Sea of Thieves website at SeaofThieves.com to embark on an epic journey with one of gaming’s most welcoming communities.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 09-28-2018, 03:41 AM - Forum: Lounge
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The Week's Best Xbox One Digital Game Deals
A new selection of digital Xbox One games is on sale this week. The discounts are remarkably good, especially if you're into Warner Bros., Lego, or first-party games published by Microsoft. You'll need an Xbox Live Gold subscription to get some (though not many) of the discounts. Let's take a look at this week's deals before they go back to regular price on October 1.
There's a Lego sale on Xbox One this week--and if you're into these games, you'll find no shortage of titles to choose from, including Lego Jurassic World, Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Lego The Incredibles. Each one is marked down between 10 and 50 percent, depending on how long it's been available.
Sea of Thieves is discounted to $39 / £32.50 just in time for the release of its expansion. Strategy fans can command the action on faraway battlefields in Halo Wars 2 for $20 / £15. And if you're planning to play Mega Man 11 when it comes out next week, you can get the first 10 installments with Mega Man Legacy Collection 1 & 2 Combo Pack for just $15 / £20.
Those are some of our picks for the best Xbox One games on sale this week. You can find more in the list below, or check out the full list of discounted titles here.
It’s still a bit unsettling to see a Microsoft speaker at a Linux Foundation conference. Yet, at the recent Linux Security Summit, Ryan Fairfax, Microsoft’s head of OS development for Azure Sphere, quickly put the audience at ease with his knowledge of tuxified tech. His presentation on “Azure Sphere: Fitting Linux Security in 4 MiB of RAM” fits into the genre of stories in which developers are challenged to strip down their precious code to the spartan essentials for IoT.
As we saw last year in Michael Opdenacker’s presentation about reducing the Linux kernel and filesystem for IoT, Linux can be made to run — just barely — in as little as 4MB of RAM. That was Microsoft’s target for Azure Sphere OS, the open source Linux-based distribution at the heart of the Azure Sphere platform for IoT. Azure Sphere also includes a proprietary crypto/secure boot stack called the Microsoft Pluton Security Subsystem, which runs on an MCU, as well an Azure Sphere Security Service, a turnkey cloud service for secure device-to-device and device-to-cloud communication.
Last week, Seeed launched the first dev kit for Azure Sphere. The Azure Sphere MT3620 Development Kitfeatures MediaTek’s MT3620, a 500MHz Cortex-A7/Cortex-M4F hybrid SoC that runs the lightweight Azure Sphere OS on a single -A7 core. The SoC’s 4MB of RAM is the only RAM on Seeed’s Grove compatible dev board. Other SoC vendors besides MediaTek will offer their own Cortex-A/Cortex-M SoCs for Azure Sphere, says Microsoft.
Major shrinkage
Fitting an entire Linux stack into 4MB was a tall order considering that “most of us hadn’t touched Linux in 10 years,” said Fairfax. Yet, the hard part of creating Azure Sphere OS was not so much the kernel modification, as it was the development of the rest of the stack. This includes the custom Linux Security Module, which coordinates with the Cortex-M4’s proprietary Pluton security code using a mailbox-based protocol.
“We decided early on to go with Linux,” said Fairfax. “Most of our changes to the kernel were small, and the core Linux features ‘just worked’ even with limited resources. That’s a credit to the effort of the community and flexibility of the kernel.”
Fairfax’s team started working on Azure Sphere in secret in 2016 after struggling to convince Microsoft leadership that working with a Linux kernel “was viable,” said Fairfax. The project was unveiled in April 2018, and the first public preview will be released soon.
One of the main goals of Azure Sphere was to bring security to the MCU world where “security is basically nonexistent,” said Fairfax. Microsoft somewhat confusingly refers to the MediaTek MT3620 as an MCU rather than an application processor due to its inclusion of Cortex-M4 MCU cores. In part, this may be a marketing ploy since Microsoft intends to compete directly with the Cortex-M oriented Amazon FreeRTOS.
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Azure Sphere OS sits on top of the MCU’s Pluton stack, architecturally speaking, and the base layer is a security stack based on Arm TrustZone. This is followed by the custom Linux kernel, which in turn is topped by a cloud services update connectivity layer. The top level is for POSIX and real-time I/O app containers.
The custom kernel is currently based on mainline Linux 4.9. Patches are merged upstream every month, and there are plans to upgrade to LTS branches yearly.
The first step in reducing the kernel was “to avoid putting text into memory,” said Fairfax. To do this, the OS depends a lot on Execute-In-Place (XiP) technology, which is commonly integrated in MCU flash controllers. “XiP lets you take a flash region and map it into the address space in read only, but also in a mode where you can execute it as code.”
In addition, “we tuned the kernel to make things modular so we could turn things off,” explained Fairfax. “We tuned cache sizes and patched to tweak default sizes.”
The team turned off a lot of the memory tracking options and things like kallsyms. They reluctantly cut sysfs, which saved almost 1MB, but for Fairfax was the coder equivalent of the writer’s challenge to kill your darlings. In the end, much of the kernel space was taken up by the network stack and hardware drivers.”
A lightweight Linux Security Module
Initially, the Azure Sphere OS team tried using SSH server with a fixed root password for security, but they quickly realized that this “was not going to cut it long term,” said Fairfax. To reduce the attack surface, they experimented with different security models, including “baking things into the file system and leveraging set UID and SGID to create predictable environments.”
These approaches caused some IPC problems and were otherwise flawed because “they put all the burden at build time,” said Fairfax. “Any mistake would propagate through the system and leave you vulnerable.”
Fairfax and his team revisited existing Linux technologies that might help make permissions more granular and “create a model where apps can access resources with the principle of least privilege,” said Fairfax. They finally decided on a stripped-down version of the Linux Security Model (LSM), a set of kernel extensions that “would reduce attack surface by taking certain features completely off the table. There’s no shell or user account management, which really isn’t relevant for an IoT device, and there’s no sophisticated job and process management.”
Fairfax also added fields that created an app identity for every task. “Applications and kernel modules can use these new fields for extended access control,” said Fairfax. “Values are immutable — once set, they inherit by default.”
The developers “experimented a lot with file systems,” said Fairfax. They tried the read-only cramfs with XIP patches, as well as writable file systems like ext2, jfffs, and yaffs, but “they all took hundreds of kilobytes to initialize, or about 1/16th of the total system memory available.” In the end, they ported the ultra-lightweight littlefs from Arm’s Mbed OS to Linux as a VFS module.
One problem with securing a Linux IoT device is that “Linux treats the entire GPIO infrastructure as a single resource,” said Fairfax. “In the real world not everything connected to your chip has the same sensitivity. I might have one GPIO pin that toggles an LED saying I’m connected to the network, which is not super sensitive, but another GPIO might open the solenoid on my furnace to start gas flow, which is more worrisome.” To compensate, the team added access control to existing features like GPIO to provide more granular access control.
User and application model
If Azure Sphere’s kernel is not radically different than any other extremely reduced Linux kernel, the user mode differs considerably. “The current Linux model is not designed for resource constrained environments,” said Fairfax. “So we built a custom init called the application manager that loads apps, configures their security environments, and launches them. It’s the only traditional process that runs on our system — everything else is part of an application.”
Azure Sphere applications are self describing and independently updatable. In fact, “they’re actually their own independent file systems,” explained Fairfax. “They run isolated from each other and cannot access any resource from another app.”
There are initially four pre-loaded system applications: network management, updates, command and control via USB, hardware crypto and RNG acceleration. GDBServer is optional, and OEMs can “add one or two apps that contain their own business logic,” said Fairfax.
One Azure Sphere rule is that “everything is OTA updatable and everything is renewable,” said Fairfax. In addition, because “quick OTA is critical” in responding to new threats, the team is aiming for OTA security patch updates within 24 hours of public disclosure, a feat they achieved with the Crack virus. Microsoft will manage all the OS updates, but OEMs control their own app updates.
The Microsoft team tried hard to find a way to run containers, including using LXC, but “we couldn’t get it to fit,” said Fairfax. “Containers are great, but they have some serious RAM overhead.” They also tried using namespaces to create self-contained apps but found that “many peripherals such as GPIO don’t play right with namespaces.”
For now, “we have pivoted off of containers and are focused on isolating apps and making sure that our permission model is sane,” said Fairfax. “We ensure that a buffer overrun in an application only gives you what that application can already do. We build each app as its own file system so they mount or unmount as part of install or uninstall. There’s no copying of files around for installation.
“Each application has metadata in the file system that says: ‘Here’s how to run me and here’s what I need,” continued Fairfax. “By default, all you get is compute and RAM — even network access must be declared as part of the manifest. This helps us reason about the security state and helps developers to do least privilege in apps.”
Future plans call for revisiting namespaces to create “something like a container,” and there’s a plan to “reduce cap_sys_admin or make it more granular,” says Fairfax. He also wants to explore integrating parts of SELinux or AppArmor. More immediately, the team plans to upstream some of the work in memory improvements and file systems, which Fairfax says “are applicable elsewhere even if you’re talking about something like a Raspberry Pi.”
You can find more information about Azure Sphere on Microsoft’s product page, and you can watch the complete presentation below.
New Video Applications Will Represent Majority of Edge Traffic by 2020, Survey Finds
In an effort to identify early edge applications, we recently partnered with IHS Markit to interview edge thought leaders representing major telcos, manufacturers, MSOs, equipment vendors, and chip vendors that hail from open source, startups, and large corporations from all over the globe. The survey revealed that edge application deployments are still young but they will require new innovation and investment requiring open source.
The research investigated not only which applications will run on the edge, but also deployment timing, revenue potential and existing and expected barriers and difficulties of deployment. Presented onsite at ONS Europe by IHS Markit analyst Michael Howard, the results represent an early look at where organizations are headed in their edge application journeys.
Key findings which were presented onstage at ONS Europe by IHS analyst Michael Howard, indicate:
Video and other big-bandwidth applications and connected things that move drive top services, expected revenue.
A selection of images submitted to the #MemoriesInDNA project.University of Washington
People who have submitted photos to the #MemoriesInDNA project have selected images of family members, favorite places and tasty food that will be preserved for years in the form of synthetic DNA. Now this collection — which currently contains more than 3,000 images and is still growing — will be headed to the final frontier: space.
The Lunar Library will also contain pages stored as analog microfiche on thin sheets of nickel (dime for scale). The team is still working on how the DNA contents of this library will be stored.Arch Mission Foundation
The Arch Mission Foundation, which creates archives that can survive for a long time in space, announced today that it will be partnering with researchers at the University of Washington, Microsoft and Twist Bioscience to include media stored in DNA in its newest shipment, which is destined to go to the moon in less than two years.
Researchers at the Molecular Information Systems Lab at the University of Washington and Microsoft plan to provide both the #MemoriesInDNA project and a DNA archive of e-books for this mission. The Arch Mission Foundation’s Lunar Library will also include instructions for how to sequence DNA and how to access the contents of the archive.
To prepare the DNA for its life in space, the researchers have been developing new methods to package and protect the information it stores.
“Sending DNA into space is a great opportunity for us to make our storage system more robust,” said Luis Ceze, a professor in the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “How can we protect the DNA so that it will still be readable thousands of years into the future?”
Researchers at the Molecular Information Systems Lab plan to provide both the #MemoriesInDNA project and a DNA archive of e-books for this mission.Dennis Wise/University of Washington
Storing electronic data in DNA molecules saves a lot of storage space. Data centers require acres of land and account for nearly 2 percent of the total electricity consumption in the United States, but DNA molecules can store information millions of times more compactly using less energy.
“DNA is so dense that we can store a lot of information in a single gram,” said Ceze. “This is huge because room is so limited in space missions.”
The basic process converts digital data’s strings of ones and zeroes into the four basic building blocks of DNA sequences: adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. The team is working with Twist Bioscience to create synthetic DNA molecules in a lab. This DNA doesn’t come from living organisms. Instead, it is synthesized from scratch base by base (letter by letter).
In space, stray cosmic rays could break DNA strands, making them unreadable. So Ceze and his team have been working on methods to ensure that they can still decode all the information, even if some of the DNA degrades.
The first method, called physical redundancy, involves adding multiple copies of each strand of DNA to the archive. So if one copy is destroyed, there are still many other copies with the same information. The team is considering adding billions of copies of each strand to account for degradation over time, Ceze said.
The second method, called logical redundancy, attaches information about the data within the DNA itself, like adding information about how two puzzle pieces go together. That way if all copies of a DNA strand go missing, the researchers can piece together what was lost and still get all of the data.
For example, to store two numbers — two and three — researchers would also store the information that two plus three equals five. So if something happened to the number two, the numbers five and three would still exist. That logic could be reversed to conclude that the missing information is five minus three — or two.
Now that the team is working with the Arch Mission Foundation, it has a strict deadline to finalize all packaging and storage plans: The Lunar Library is expected to be delivered to the surface of the moon by 2020.
“We’re proud that this partnership with Arch continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible in increasingly exciting ways and remarkable directions,” said collaborator Karin Strauss, a senior researcher at Microsoft and a UW affiliate associate professor of computer science and engineering. “This is an incredibly exciting project and we have a great multidisciplinary team working on it: coding theorists, computer architects, engineers and molecular biologists, all coming together to make this new technology a reality.”
An image of the moon (top right) that is included in the #MemoriesInDNA project.University of Washington #MemoriesInDNA
For more details about how to include your own images in the #MemoriesInDNA project, visit the project website or email lunarlibrary@memoriesindna.com. Note: To be included in the DNA image collection, photographs cannot be copyrighted by any other party and must be free of violent or inappropriate content. The image dataset will be preserved in DNA indefinitely and shared with researchers worldwide.
Two brothers Sean and Daniel Diaz are forced to run away from home after a tragic incident. In fear of the police, Sean & Daniel head to Mexico while attempting to conceal a sudden and mysterious supernatural power. Now totally responsible for his much younger brother, Sean begins to realize that his decisions will impact their lives forever. Experience the first episode of this highly-anticipated sequel.
Fallout 76 Still Won't Get Cross-Play After Sony Starts Allowing It
Sony made the big-time announcement today that it will finally allow cross-play between PlayStation 4 and competing consoles like Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. Cross-play support is currently live, but only for one game: Fortnite.
In its statement announcing cross-play, Sony said cross-play support for Fortnite is just the start of the company's wider plans. This has led to discussion and speculation about what other games may support cross-play. Bethesda's Fallout 76 won't be one of them.
"Folks, chill," Bethesda marketing boss Pete Hines said on Twitter. "I work with a lot of devs and games for whom this is important going forward. Fallout 76 does not support crossplay, for a number of reasons. I have no idea if it ever will. But I assure you it is not on our radar right now as we focus on B.E.T.A. and launch."
Bethesda has been saying for a long time now that Fallout 76 will not support cross-play. However, after Sony made its announcement, Hines tweeted, "Well done, Sony," using the clapping hands emoji. Some fans saw this an indication of hope that Fallout 76 will support cross-play, but it won't, at least not right away.
Unlike previous entries in the Fallout series, Fallout 76 is an always-online, multiplayer-focused game. A beta for the game kicks off in October, first on Xbox One. The full game launches on November 14 for Xbox One, PS4, and PC.
As for Sony's big cross-play announcement, the company said it recognises that cross-play adds "significant value" for players. As such, it decided, after a "comprehensive evaluation process," that it would allow cross-play for select third-party games, beginning with Fortnite.
Video: A classic postmortem of the trailblazing Ultima Online
In this 2018 GDC session, key team members Raph Koster, Starr Long, Richard Garriott de Cayeux & Rich Vogel talk about the things that went wrong and right during the development and operation of the trailblazing MMORPG Ultima Online.
Ultima Online is Kind Of A Big Deal in the history of game development, not least of which because it was among the first wave of massively multiplayer RPGs with graphics (i.e. not MUDs) that helped lay the foundation for industry-shaping hits like World of Warcraft.
But of course, there’s so much more to be learned from the story of Ultima Online. Kal Ort Por! The death of Lord British. Simulated ecologies. Playerkillers. The Bank of Britain. City sieges. Weddings. Sports events. Players who were orcs. Living the Virtues. As the game turns 20 this year, there’s never been a better time to look back at how it was built.
In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.
Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.
Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent company Informa.
