Edge of Nowhere review
June 8, 2016 18:24
Need to know
What is it? A third-person Lovecraftian action game.
Expect to pay: $40
Developer: Insomniac Games
Publisher: Oculus
Reviewed on: Oculus Rift (required), Intel Core i7-4770K, GTX Titan Black
Link: Official site
There’s a dark cave early on in Edge of Nowhere, Insomniac’s third-person action adventure for the Oculus Rift, that made me question my sense of reality. Indiscernible screeches and whispers sound off in my periphery and I snap my head to the direction of each in twitchy instinct. During those brief seconds of head motion, small figures and shapes flash directly in front of my eyes. The darkness dissolves and the facade of a house appears on the far cave wall. My hackles rise and I get a little queasy, but not due to motion sickness.
Without VR, the scene wouldn’t have the same impact. Instead of naturally reacting to the slow dissolution of my perceived reality, I’d be staring at a 2D plane, maybe excited and intrigued by the creepy light display, but not truly unnerved. It’s the only effective scene of the entire game, though. Edge of Nowhere quickly abandons chasing surreal experiments in VR in favor of familiarity: climbing ice walls, throwing rocks to distract dull monsters, and telling a routine Lovecraftian story—the result is a mundane action platformer compromised, not enhanced, by VR.
Closer to the edge
Edge of Nowhere places you in the role of Victor Howard, a man in search of his fiancee, Ava Thorne, who went missing on a research expedition in Antarctica. If the plot sounds familiar, then don’t expect to be surprised. Forbidden knowledge, supernatural cases of impostor syndrome, and tentacles all come into play. This is a hybrid Lovecraft adventure that pulls from every arctic mishap under the midnight sun, and in doing so, fails to establish any intrigue or identity of its own. Journals strewn about the environments dole out story in cliched strokes, recounting unimaginable horrors and hinting at the protagonist’s questionable sanity. Surreal interludes play with the nature of reality, turning twisting underground arctic tunnels into narrative funhouses where Howard recounts his backstory in a welcome variety of backdrops—an old university lecture hall, the Chilean jungle, and so on. But soon the scene dissipates and it’s back to hoofing up winding ice walls and holding up on the joystick through monotonous Antarctic caverns.
The climbing is limited and frustrating. When I slowly ascend an ice wall and prepare to leap from it to a nearby ledge, I doubt myself less than I do the platforming mechanics. Sometimes my character leaps way too far and I miss an ice wall entirely, which means repeating the climbing section up until that point. Navigating long stretches of ice walls doesn’t call for much interaction beyond moving the stick around and jumping on occasion. In Tomb Raider or The Climb, another Rift game, I have to at least spot my line up and around craggy cliffsides—they build an illusion of improvisation. In Edge of Nowhere, I just follow the wide, boring blue path to its inevitable conclusion, which is still easy to mess up.
I just follow the wide, boring blue path to its inevitable conclusion, which is still easy to mess up.
The climbing sequences are clearly outlined by a flat ice texture, a lumpy blue that isn’t much to look at in VR. The camera positions itself as precariously as possible—high angles that remind you where the ground is, somewhere in the mist below. On occasion it’ll bring some icicles into the foreground, but it didn’t take long for an icicle two inches from my face to become as routine as a tentacled manbeast snapping my neck. There’s really not much to gain from Edge of Nowhere in VR—I hardly ever wanted to inspect the environment, the creatures, or quieter set pieces. Using your sightline to point the headlamp is cool, but to accommodate for sitting down in VR and to avoid the motion sickness traditional free camera controls can induce, all of the action is funneled down a very narrow path. It’s even more linear than the linear games of its ilk, which would be fine if there were variety in Edge of Nowhere’s environments, but it depends far too much on its primary palettes: ice and goo.
And ice about to break
Between ice walls and story scenes, Edge of Nowhere pits you against an ancient race of creatures in small stealth arenas. There are a few ways to deal with enemies: sneaking by is a slow, viable method. You can or throw rocks at static spiky plants to attract patrolling monsters toward them and then throw another rock to excite the spikes and impale the curious. I just mowed them down with my shotgun for the most part. Combat scenarios are tense at first—your tools are limited, arenas are tight, and most enemies can suck your face off without issue—but once you have it all figured out, they’re a cinch to deal with.
Enemy senses are made obvious through ‘vision’ cone textures displayed on the floor beneath them, and sounds you make—shooting and swinging your pickaxe—cause a similar bubble of noise. Getting spotted either means spending all your shotgun ammo or dying, waiting for openings in enemy patrols, and going through the same motions again. Rocks and ammo are handed out generously enough, so I abandoned stealth almost entirely in favor of gathering enemies around a spiky bulb for a group impalement or opting for a shotgun shower. It rendered the arena layouts of chest-high walls meant for hiding meaningless, but I enjoyed the shooting anyway.
Tunnel visionHolding a trigger lets you aim by looking with the headset, and it feels as snappy and accurate as mouse-aim. The shotgun is loud and powerful, like it’ll fly out of Howard’s arms with every shot. Problem is, because of the constricted tunnel design a sitting VR game requires, almost all of the action happens in front of you. There’s no need to worry about threats from behind. As a result, the combat is just a tension-free matter of attrition: always inching forward, avoiding (or dissolving) enemies in repetitive, constricted patterns, broken up by long stretches of climbing the same blue ice walls.
In VR, where the priority is preserving the illusion, Edge of Nowhere shatters it often.
This isn’t to say Edge of Nowhere is without exciting moments. One large monster is quite the spectacle in VR, and before I acclimated to jumping around, the more dangerous leaps hit my gut with the same impact as waking suddenly from a falling dream. Naturally, the effect lost strength after repeating the same set piece sequences over and over due to getting caught on an invisible piece of the environment or misreading the crumbling walkway below and jumping at the incorrect ledge. In VR, where the priority is preserving the illusion, Edge of Nowhere shatters it often.
The unoriginal narrative concept is driven by mediocre platforming, shallow stealth and combat, and wholly constricted by the narrow (literally) requirements to get an action adventure working in VR. It’s intriguing as an attempt to fit a traditional game genre into an emerging medium, but because Edge of Nowhere doesn’t nail the fundamentals of its climbing and combat, it’s not a great signal light to seek out in the early days of VR. There’s fun to be had in the occasional spectacle, just be sure to fortify your patience ahead of time.
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SolarWinds quer preencher a lacuna de visibilidade da TI híbrida
June 8, 2016 16:56
A SolarWinds lançou uma ferramenta que promete ajudar empresas a preencherem a lacuna de visibilidade da TI híbrida. Agora, o Network Performance Monitor (NPM) 12 passa a integrar os recursos NetPath e Network Insight. Com isso, a solução dá aos administradores de rede um mapa visual para análise de ambientes híbridos.
De acordo com a provedora, a ferramenta permite visualizar o desempenho não só nas redes da empresa, como também nos provedores de serviço e nos fornecedores da nuvem. Isso, no caso, permite que os profissionais de TI entreguem o desempenho de aplicativo esperado pelos usuários.
A solução se endereça a um desafio das organizações. Segundo a SolarWinds, 79% das companhias brasileiras migraram parte da infraestrutura para a rede, mas 64% declararam que nunca migrarão todos os serviços para fora do local físico.
“Em ambientes de TI híbrida tão complexos, os administradores de rede precisam ver detalhes de desempenho e identificar congestionamentos em todas as redes que conectam serviços e aplicativos essenciais, estejam eles no local ou na nuvem”, pondera.
Enquanto o NetPath oferece ampla visibilidade, o Network Insight permite o monitoramento abrangente dos ambientes de balanceamento de carga, que oferecem aos profissionais de TI uma inteligência mais profunda da rede, incluindo insights visuais e dinâmicos no desempenho de aplicativos e no fornecimento de serviços.
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What We Want From Watch Dogs 2
June 8, 2016 14:23
Ubisoft’s open world techno-thriller – Watch Dogs – had its lovers and haters upon release. Here’s what we hope Ubisoft will improve upon in the sequel.
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Cellebrite Optimizes Forensic Triage Via Rapid and Controlled Extraction
June 8, 2016 14:17
Wednesday, June 08, 2016 (09:37:20)
Cellebrite Optimizes Forensic Triage Via Rapid and Controlled Extraction
Cellebrite introduces an enhanced version of UFED InField solution. The new platform agnostic software solution delivers simplified, secure forensics data access and control while streamlining investigative workflows as part of a multi-tier forensic architecture. An intuitive user interface and new selective extraction capabilities make accessing specific live device data quick and easy. These new capabilities accelerate investigations by allowing agencies to increase access by extending the reach of extraction capabilities to investigators, unify investigative teams by connecting lab and field personnel around the evidence collection process, and secure digital evidence that they can defend in court.
“Today, mobile forensics is touching every single type of crime we investigate, from petty theft, to high-profile, complex homicide investigations,” said Sgt. Frank Pace, Phoenix Police Department Digital Forensics Investigative Unit. “As a profession, we are at a point that we need to integrate digital forensics, related training and policies into our culture and processes. Every officer, investigator and prosecutor is going to need that to be effective in their job.”
Field tested and proven, the InField solution allows officers and investigators at every level and in any location to securely access and perform forensically sound logical and physical extractions of mobile device or SIM card data by timeframe, data types or relevant persons with minimal training. Whether accessed via in-car workstations, laptops, tablets or self-service kiosks located at a station, this single-purpose, frontline solution supports the widest variety of device types with intuitive workflows that prevent errors or contamination of evidence. The InField software runs across hardware platforms, including the UFED Infield Kiosk and UFED TK. The new enhanced version now enables:
Real-time Access to Qualified Digital Evidence
Field users can select and extract only the relevant data needed based on time range or specific subject information. The Quick Copy feature encourages digital consent by allowing officers and investigators the ability to copy only specific evidence from witnesses and/or victim’s phones, leaving personal data private.
Centralized Management & Control
UFED InField simplifies the end-to-end visibility to and management of software updates, configuration modifications, user permissions and usage statistics by crime types and devices processed to ensure evidence is properly managed and protected.
Evidence Integrity
Built on the proven UFED platform, InField enables the real-time, forensically sound extraction of mobile device data and produces defensible evidence investigative stakeholders can stand behind.
“Designed to work on our form factors or an agency’s existing laptops, UFED Infield delivers new and improved digital forensics workflows and the actionable intelligence necessary to quickly and effectively focus investigative efforts, reduce case backlogs and significantly shorten case cycle times,” said Ron Serber, Cellebrite Global Co-CEO
To see firsthand how InField’s new capabilities can benefit your field organization, visit us online at www.cellebrite.com/law_enforcement.
- Posted by: Cellebrite
- Topic: News
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Join Forces: Teaming Up Online (Explorer Junior Library: Information Explorer Junior)
June 8, 2016 14:10
Learn how to collaborate with other people using the Internet.
Credores aprovam plano e Officer segue luta pela reestruturação
June 8, 2016 12:55
Os credores aprovaram o plano de reestruturação e a Officer Distribuidora segue a luta para se reerguer. A companhia entrou com pedido de recuperação judicial em outubro de 2015 como um esforço para tentar administrar suas dívidas.
“Com a aprovação esperamos gradualmente retomar nossas relações comerciais com fornecedores e revendas ampliando a malha e diversidade de produtos”, afirmou Luiz Comazzetto, CEO da companhia, em comunicado.
Pelo projeto aprovado na segunda-feira (06/07), a distribuidora oferece “um pagamento de até R$ 10 mil a todos os seus credores, que hoje são mais de 1,2 mil” até saldar os débitos junto a 91% dos credores. No documento ao mercado, a empresa sinaliza uma dívida da ordem de R$ 300 milhões.
Para o saldo remanescente, a empresa prevê um pagamento acelerado de até sete anos após um período de carência para os credores que colaborarem oferecendo prazo de pagamento.
O CEO acredita que, dentro “uma estimativa conservadora”, a empresa deve faturar R$ 200 milhões em 2016, com expectativa de retomar lucratividade em 2018.
A Officer já foi a maior distribuidora de TI do Brasil, com faturamento anual da ordem de US$ 2 bilhões. Nos últimos anos, uma conjunção de fatores internos e externos, colocou a companhia em uma espiral negativa.
Na terça-feira (07/06), Comazzetto publicou um artigo em sua página no LinkedIn. No texto, tratou dos desafios pelo qual a companhia passa. “Decidir pelo pedido de Recuperação Judicial foi muito mais difícil e árduo do que qualquer executivo por melhor e mais preparado que ele seja possa imaginar!”, escreveu.
“Infelizmente, a empresa passou por vários momentos difíceis do mercado, do país, da distribuição e a busca pela liderança a qualquer custo, trouxeram ela até esse grave quadro”, dimensiona o executivo, salientando que o cenário turbulento não faz jus ao passado da companhia.
Ao longo dos últimos meses, a Officer enxugou drasticamente seu quadro de funcionários e fechou escritórios ao redor do país. Na outra ponta,começou a trabalhar parcerias com fabricantes que melhoravam sua rentabilidade.
“Vamos continuar lutando para honrar esse plano e pela continuidade dessa distribuidora fascinante e querida por todo mercado! Afinal, somos Officer e desistir nunca foi uma opção! E mais um capítulo da nossa rica história vem pela frente!”, concluiu o executivo.
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ANALISTA DE T.I.
June 8, 2016 10:28
ANALISTA DE T.I.
Não Divulgado
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| 8 jun 2016
Rua Dr. Pergentino Maia, 1017 – Messejana, Fortaleza – CE, 60840-045, Brasil
Emprego
Descrição da Vaga
Local da Vaga: FORTALEZA – CE (Somente para residentes na UF local da vaga)
Salário: Enviar Pretensão Salarial.
Outras Vantagens: VT, Refeição no local.
Quantidade de Vagas: 1
Resumo das Atividades a serem Executadas:
Instalar e customizar softwares, administrar sistemas e configurar procedimentos de segurança de rede. Atualizar, validar e enviar relatórios. Desenvolver e gerar relatórios com conexão ao banco de dados. Desenvolver e extrair consultas médias / complexas, automatizar o envio de relatórios / tarefas.
Experiência com suporte em empresa de médio porte. Amplo conhecimento em rotinas operacionais de backup, telefonia, câmeras e rede estruturada. Conhecimentos em ERP de gestão básico, como gerar relatórios e manutenções e gerenciamento de LOGs de erros.
Conhecimento e Experiência Necessários:
Necessário habilidades com Excel avançado + VBA, PowerPoint, Crystal Reports, CMS Avaya, SQL (Oracle / MySQL).
Servidores Windows 2003, estações, rede, e-mails.
Pré-requisitos
Experiência anterior e conhecimento em manutenção de computadores em geral, suporte em software de estações e servidores 2003, configurações de rede e internet.
Desejável:
– Servidores Linux.
– Linguagem Sql Oracle.
– Banco de dados Oracle.
– Conhecimento em Sistema ERP.
– Conhecimento no sistema Winthor da TOTVS.
Colocação da Vaga
– CLT
Escolaridade
– Ensino Superior completo Tecnologia da Informação ou áreas correlatas.
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Five Years Later, Activision Brings Back Call Of Duty XP Convention
June 8, 2016 10:22
In 2011, Activision and Infinity Ward hosted a convention for Call of Duty fans called Call of Duty XP that took place in Los Angeles and allowed participants to get hands-on with the then unreleased Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Activision just revealed it’s bringing the convention back this September and will let players try out both Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Modern Warfare Remastered. Call of Duty XP will also host the Call of Duty World League Championship.
The event takes place September 2-4, with tickets going online for sale on June 11 at 10:00 AM. Here’s the breakdown of the ticket tiers:
Enlisted Ticket ($49): General Admission seating for three days of the Call of Duty World League Championship as well as access to Call of Duty XP gameplay and activities
Veteran Ticket ($129): General Admission seating for three days of the Call of Duty World League Championship, access to Call of Duty XP gameplay and activities, the $80 digital Legacy edition of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and a Care Package with exclusive Call of Duty XP swag
Prestige Ticket ($199): Scheduled activities and gameplay, VIP line for activities and gameplay, Player Meet and Greets, access to the VIP lounge, parking pass, premium seating for the Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare multiplayer reveal and Call of Duty World League Championship, a $100 Digital Deluxe version of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and a Care Package with exclusive Call of Duty XP swag
Besides being able to get hands-on time with Infinite Warfare, Call of Duty XP will also reveal new DLC content for Black Ops III and feature a VR experience centered around the Jackal, the fighter jet you’ll be piloting in Infinite Warfare. According to Activision, there will also be a museum on site dedicated to the franchise and a “surprise musical guest.”
Be sure to check out our interview with Infinity Ward about embracing sci-fi.
Our Take
It’s a testament to Activision’s belief in Call of Duty’s staying power that the series is going to have yet another convention centered around. We’re curious to see if more franchises follow this trend in the future.
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Hacker Lexicon: What Is Password Hashing?
June 8, 2016 10:16
Digital megabreaches have lately become so commonplace as to be almost indistinguishable on the alarm scale—a hundred million passwords stolen from one social media service one day, a few hundred million more the next. It all becomes a depressing blur. But not all password disasters are equally disastrous. And the difference between a Three Mile Island and a Hiroshima sometimes comes down to an arcane branch of cryptography: hashing.
TL;DR Hash is both a noun and a verb. Hashing is the act of converting passwords into unreadable strings of characters that are designed to be impossible to convert back, known as hashes. Some hashing schemes are more easily cracked than others.
When hackers compromise a company to access its collection of users’ passwords, what they find and steal isn’t stored in a form that’s readable by humans—at least if the company has even a pretense of security. Instead, the cache of passwords is often converted into a collection of cryptographic hashes, random-looking strings of characters into which the passwords have been mathematically transformed to prevent them from being misused. This transformation is called hashing. But just what sort of hashing those passwords have undergone can mean the difference between the thieves ending up with scrambled text that takes years to decipher or successfully “cracking” those hashes in days or hours to convert them back to usable passwords, ready to access your sensitive accounts.
A hash is designed to act as a “one-way function”: A mathematical operation that’s easy to perform, but very difficult to reverse. Like other forms of encryption, it turns readable data into a scrambled cipher. But instead of allowing someone to decrypt that data with a specific key, as typical encryption functions do, hashes aren’t designed to be decrypted. Instead, when you enter your password on a website, it simply performs the same hash again and checks the results against the hash it created of your password when you chose it, verifying the password’s validity without having to store the sensitive password itself.
“A hash usually takes an input, does something with it, and what comes out looks like random data,” says Jens “Atom” Steube, the creator of the popular hash-cracking software Hashcat. “When you input the same data again, the data that comes out will be exactly the same. And that’s how a service knows that the input was correct.”
Strong Versus Weak Hash
In theory, no one, not a hacker or even the web service itself, should be able to take those hashes and convert them back into passwords. But in practice, some hashing schemes are significantly harder to reverse than others. The collection of 177 million LinkedIn accounts stolen in 2012 that went up for sale on a dark web market last week, for instance, had actually been hashed. But the company used only a simple hashing function called SHA1 without extra protections, allowing almost all the hashed passwords to be trivially cracked. The result is that hackers were able to not only access the passwords, but also try them on other websites, likely leading to Mark Zuckerberg having his Twitter and Pinterest accounts hacked over the weekend.
By contrast, a breach at the crowdfunding site Patreon last year exposed passwords that had been hashed with a far stronger function called bcrypt, the fact of which likely kept the full cache relatively secure in spite of the breach. That’s according to Rick Redman, a penetration tester at the firm KoreLogic who runs a password-cracking competition at the annual Defcon hacker conference. “The strength of the hash is the insurance policy. It tells you how much time users have to change their passwords after a data breach before they come to harm,” Redman says. “If it’s just SHA1, there is no window…If it’s bcrypt, you have time to run away and change all your passwords.”
To see the difference between those hashing schemes, consider how password hash-cracking works: Hackers can’t reverse a hashed password created with a function like SHA1. But they can simply try guessing passwords and running them through the same function. When they find a matching hash, they know they’ve hit on the right password. A hash-cracking program working on a large database of hashes can guess many millions or billions of possible passwords and automatically compare the results with an entire collection of stolen hashed passwords to find matches.
“What a password cracker does is not black magic. It does the same thing as the legitimate login system,” says Hashcat creator Steube. “It computes the hash of some input and compares the garbage that comes out [to a hash.] If it matches, the password was correct. The more often it can do that, the higher your chances are to find the password.”
Cracking the Hash
Hash-cracking schemes have for decades been locked in a cat-and-mouse game with the security community’s attempts to make hashing more secure. Switching from normal computer processors or CPUs to graphics processors or GPUs allowed password crackers to exploit those chips’ ability to perform many simple tasks in parallel, accelerating their guessing as much as a thousandfold. Hash-crackers have developed so-called “rainbow tables,” immense lists of pre-computed hashes for every possible password. And modern password crackers don’t merely guess passwords at random, but use “dictionary attacks” to cycle through real words, collections of known common passwords from past breaches, and to use statistical analyses of those passwords to find patterns that allow new passwords to be guessed faster. (LinkedIn’s 177 million passwords will no doubt give password crackers plenty of new material to study for developing future hash-cracking techniques.)
Securing the Stash
The security world has responded with its own tricks to slow, if not altogether stop, password hash-cracking. To prevent pre-computation, hashing schemes now use a trick called “salting,” adding random data to a password before hashing it and then storing that “salt” value along with the hash. (LinkedIn didn’t even go that far with its 2012 password collection.) And modern hashing techniques like bcrypt and Argon2 don’t simply run a password through a function like SHA1, but do so thousands of times, rehashing the resulting data again and again. Those functions require that data is stored in memory and then accessed again, creating a bottleneck: the work can’t be split into many parallel tasks by a GPU without having to access memory at each step.
After a password breach hits, it’s difficult to determining how securely the stolen passwords were hashed. Companies rarely reveal what hashing functions they’ve used. And even when they have, leaked passwords can be more vulnerable than they seem: Hacked hookup site Ashley Madison’s collection of 36 million leaked passwords were hashed with bcrypt, but 15 million were also somehow stored on the company’s servers with much weaker hashing, allowing crackers to derive 11 million of the passwords in days compared to the decades bcrypt would require.
All of that means your passwords’ security still depends mostly on you. Use complex, hard-to-guess passwords (or better yet, passphrases or random strings chosen by a password manager application) that won’t be quickly guessed by hash-cracking programs. Don’t reuse passwords between services, which could endanger all your accounts if a single one is successfully cracked. And regardless of what a company says after it reveals a security breach, change your password. Hashing schemes are clever. But don’t bet your security that hash-crackers won’t outsmart them.
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Social Media Audits: Achieving Deep Impact Without Sacrificing the Bottom Line (Chandos Publishing Social Media Series)
June 8, 2016 10:09
Social media is quickly becoming important to most businesses, but many managers, professionals, and marketing experts are unsure about the practicalities of social media marketing and how to measure success. Social Media Audits gives people dealing with social business in their working life a guide to social media marketing, measurement, and how to evaluate and improve the use of social media in an organizational context. This book consists of three parts, the first of which introduces the reader to concepts and ideas emerging in social media. The second part considers the need to shift from traditional ‘shout marketing’ to a more conversational, social approach to customers. The third part moves the discussion towards a systematic approach to evaluating social media activities.
- Offers guidance on the use of social media and measuring the success of social media in a business environment
- Provides practical information on what social media can do for business and how it can be used
- Aimed at those who use social media in their workplace
