Tag: Business For Sale

Hackers put a back door in a code library that powers 79% of websites

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On Sunday some malicious actors tried to install a back door into the PHP code library, a server-side programming language that powers 79% of sites on the internet, including Facebook and Wikipedia. The attack recalled one of the worst government hacks in history , on SolarWinds, the IT management software used by many government agencies and large U.S. companies. The SolarWinds attackers—widely thought to be employed by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service—planted malware in the SolarWinds system that sends out updates to end users. As in the SolarWinds attack, the PHP hackers targeted the code base of a widely used library so that the changes they made would impact instances of the software run by end users. The hackers attempted to install a back door that would have allowed them to remotely execute changes to the PHP code after it was put into use by websites. Since they might have activated malware, the hackers may have been able to take control of websites, freeze them, or take them offline. The PHP exploit was first reported by the BleepingComputer blog. The hackers made two additions to the PHP Git repository on Sunday. The attackers signed the first addition using the name of the PHP library’s creator, Rasmus Lerdorf, and the second was made using the name of well-known PHP maintainer Nikita Popov, likely to avoid suspicion. They also tried to disguise the major change to the code base they proposed as something trivial by labeling the additions “Fix Typo.” The work of the hackers was discovered and reversed during a standard review process on Sunday. Still, this was no trivial event. Popov said in an email to the PHP developer community that Sunday’s incident was likely the result of the git.php.net server being compromised, rather than just a single Git account. The PHP maintainers have now decided to migrate the official PHP source code library over to GitHub. “We have decided that maintaining our own git infrastructure is an unnecessary security risk, and that we will discontinue the git.php.net server,” Popov explains in the email. Read More …

‘Roblox’ isn’t just a gaming company. It’s also the future of education

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Roblox , which recently made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange, has quickly become one of the most valuable video game companies in the world.  As I write this article, Roblox has effortlessly overtaken household video game names such as Take-Two (maker of Grand Theft Auto ) and Electronic Arts (EA) (maker of Battlefield and FIFA ) in terms of market cap, while only making a fraction of the incumbents’ revenues and none of their profits. And there is good reason for this change in pecking order. Unlike Take-Two and EA, Roblox is not just a gaming company. It is a virtual playground for nearly 200 million monthly users, with two-thirds of those users being of school-going age. Read More …

Microsoft acquiring Discord for $10B would be a huge bet on gaming—and a smart one

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While Zoom has become the be-all and end-all of staying connected over the past year, for gamers the first point of call has been Discord. This free voice, video, and text communication service may not have stolen headlines like Zoom, but the platform has seen user growth surge over the last year. Now, it has around 150 million users relying on the service to chat, meet, share, and play games. This growth appears to have caught the eye of Microsoft, with recent reports suggesting that it is interested in acquiring Discord for the colossal price of nearly $10 billion. Assessing the interest The driving force behind Microsoft’s interest in Discord may be that it would increase the company’s exposure to the global gaming market. Although Discord is not a developer or a platform where people directly play games, the service has become a central social hub for millions of gamers. If the acquisition occurs, Microsoft will likely seek to embed Discord and its millions of active users into an ecosystem of Microsoft products. The most comparable move would be Amazon’s acquisition of Twitch for just under $1 billion in 2014 . It was mutually beneficial: Amazon was able to incentivize Twitch’s users to sign up for Prime while encouraging Prime subscribers to watch and follow users on Twitch. Twitch now hosts 91% of all video game streaming , dwarfing competition from YouTube and Facebook, and attracts more than 2 million viewers at any given time of any given day. Microsoft will likely look to create a similar symbiotic relationship between Microsoft Game Pass—a monthly subscription that gives users access to a vast library of games—and Discord’s premium service Nitro, which provides an enhanced experience through upgraded video and upload functions and access to a global bank of emojis and avatars. The tech giant is also building an online gaming service, Project xCloud, that will let users stream Xbox games to any device with a screen and an internet connection. This could one day make expensive hardware, such as consoles, unnecessary. Microsoft could potentially integrate this service within Discord, since the platform already offers popular streaming options for users, paving the way for the post-console era of gaming. But if it is to succeed, Microsoft will need to learn from the mistakes of the past. Understanding the challenges Microsoft acquired Mixer, an upstart competitor to Twitch, in 2017 and spent as much as $30 million on deals with high-profile streamers such as Ninja to lure users to the platform. But the service failed to attract viewers and streamers in equal measure. Compounded by a lackluster user experience, it quickly ran out of steam and was shut down permanently last year . Read More …

This viral TikTok perfectly explains how the COVID-19 vaccines work

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A few weeks ago, several epidemiologists and doctors who usually take to Twitter to share news articles, studies, and reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began sharing the same TikTok meme. The TikTok video is a short skit by an actor named Vick Krishna who turns the mundane process of vaccination into a good-versus-evil thriller to explain how the mRNA vaccine works. It’s been viewed 6 million times on TikTok alone, and has been shared on other social platforms and in text messages where it’s harder to measure its reach. I immediately sent the video to everyone in my life who had displayed even the slightest tone of skepticism in regard to the COVID-19 vaccine. Most people who show a little wariness toward the new vaccines are not anti-vaccine, per se, they just want to fully understand what it is they’re having injected into their body. Unfortunately, there are few resources that plainly explain vaccine technology . And in the absence of good and easily understood explainers , misinformation thrives. But Krishna’s video isn’t just a good explainer of how the technology works. It’s also entertaining enough to go viral, a rare achievement for wholesome health information on social platforms that are designed to promote salacious, outrageous, and enraging content—the very stuff that pandemic-related misinformation is made of. Last May, Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University and an expert on disinformation, eloquently laid out the problem : Algorithms enable COVID-19 misinformation to spread quickly and reach millions, while facts about the pandemic and health languish, seen by a only a few. “Do we need to have an enormous pro-vaccine movement waste tons of resources on that [content] just because social media has decided to preference the voices and positions of people who will go online and advocate for dangerous or mistaken points of view? What would be the value in that?” Donovan said. “Nevertheless, that’s one of the only solutions on the table.” More commonly, memes about the vaccine tend to play on negative tropes. For instance, there is a seemingly harmless TikTok meme, best identified as “me after I get the COVID-19 vaccine,” where people show videos of themselves rhythmically convulsing or barking like a dog or feigning other strange side effects. These are meant to be playful, but they actually play on anti-vaccine ideas that the shots are in some way harmful. This meme has been replicated and reposted an incalculable number of times on TikTok and Instagram Reels, then reposted on YouTube and Twitter Read More …

AI researchers are creating ‘Minecraft’ structures that build themselves

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When a group of AI researchers started using Minecraft to simulate cellular growth, even they were startled by the sophistication of the structures—such as a jungle temple with a fully-functioning arrow trap—they were able to create. Their goal was to build complex Minecraft structures by having each block learn to communicate with the ones around it, mimicking how the human body develops from a single cell in a process called morphogenesis. That model worked out even better than they anticipated, with one block growing into exactly the kinds of objects it was trained to create. In addition to the jungle temple, the system generated immaculate castles, stylish apartments, and even a caterpillar that regenerates after being cut in half. Sebastian Risi, an AI researcher at IT University Copenhagen, says this work could be a foundation for more ambitious projects to come, including a version of Minecraft that simulates evolution. He conducted the research along with his ITU Copenhagen colleagues Shyam Sudhakaran, Djordje Grbic, Siyan Li, and Elias Najarro; University of York’s Adam Katona; and Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Claire Glanois.) “We have the basic components now,” Risi says. “It’s just about figuring out how to connect them all.” From one cell to another The Minecraft project’s underlying concept, called cellular automation, has been around since the 1940s. It’s the idea that cells in a system can live, die, or reproduce according to a set of rules. John Conway’s Game of Life , which dates to 1970, is probably the best-known example. But in those early systems, the researchers had to program the rules themselves, a process that eventually becomes impractical as the systems become more complex. This new Minecraft simulation works differently. Instead of coding the rules by hand, the researchers used neural networks to train each cell on what a set of finished structures should look like. Each cell figures out what type of Minecraft block to become by looking at the cells around it, then passes that information along to its neighboring cells so they in turn can figure out what to become next. “We only told it what it has to grow, but we didn’t tell it exactly how it has to grow it,” Risi says. Excited to share our work on Morphogenesis in Minecraft! We show that neural cellular automata can learn to grow not only complex 3D artifacts with over 3,000 blocks but also functional Minecraft machines that can regenerate when cut in half ????????=???????? PDF: https://t.co/hi573xzWIG pic.twitter.com/m19572pcIe — Sebastian Risi (@risi1979) March 17, 2021 This type of intercellular communication roughly approximates the way in which human cells work together toward a common goal, which Risi says is part of what makes the research exciting. The exact language our cells communicate is still somewhat of a mystery ; Risi hopes that by visualizing the messages that each cell sends—something the researchers hope to do in the future—they can help biologists understand more about how the body works. “It’s difficult to study those things in nature because it’s hard to extract those exact messages that cells pass,” he says Read More …