Nuclear Monster

  • Speaking with the Financial Times’ Tim Bradshaw, Sony’s Andrew House confirmed the rumors of an upcoming upgrade to the Playstation 4:

    Andrew House, president and global chief executive of Sony Interactive Entertainment, told the Financial Times that the “high-end PS4” would be more expensive than the current $350 version.

    “It is intended to sit alongside and complement the standard PS4,” he said. “We will be selling both [versions] through the life cycle.”

    The new console, which is codenamed “Neo”, will target hardcore gamers, he said, as well as consumers with a 4K television set looking for more high-resolution content.

    You should probably still hold off on buying one since pricing information (beyond that it will be more expensive) and other details were not revealed, and won’t be announced at E3 next week.

    It’ll be very interesting if this is the final console generation for a long time and we end up with a more iPhone-like annual or bi-annual console upgrade cycle that maintains software compatibility.

  • Somehow I’ve never posted about The Katering Show, a comedy cooking show featuring a “…food intolerant and an intolerable foodie.” Lets remedy that and you can watch the entirety of their first season on YouTube.

    The show is amazingly funny if you enjoy British or colonial-british humor.

    Unless you’re in Australia and have access to iView, which I assume is a koala bear reenacting a show for you, season 2 of The Katering Show is only available in the US through a new (pay, with a free trial available) service called Fullscreen.

  • Wait, what?

    Nick Lee:

    Finally, Android on the iPhone
    You heard me. The holy war is over, brethren. At Tendigi, we’ve designed and built a case that allows iPhone devotees to sample the best Mountain View has to offer. Join me as I outline the steps taken to achieve this feat, as well as the numerous pitfalls encountered along the way.

    Okay, that sounds interesting. I’d love some straightforward method of being able to try out modern versions of Android without having buy Android hardware.

    It must have been extremely complicated to get this done in software!

    I ended up having to port (or outright build) the following components for Android:

    […]

    screenstreamer: A daemon I wrote that connects to the usbmuxd service, transmitting the screen’s contents to the iPhone and emulating touch events on the Android side. This is where the magic happens. While there are many ways to capture the screen on Android, I achieved the best performance by connecting to the SurfaceFlinger service and reading screenshots from it. For more information, see this header file and this presentation. The droidVncServer repository on GitHub also contains some helpful pointers.

    Are you kidding me? This is the equivalent of VNC streaming a Windows 10 desktop to an Android phone and saying that you got Windows 10 to run on an Android phone. The “Final product” image is a thick ass backpack that contains off-the-shelf Android hardware strapped onto an iPhone and looks like crap. If this were from a 14 year old at a school science fair that would be incredible.

  • Valve’s first foray into home computing hardware, the Steam Machine collaborations with various computer makers, have sold fewer than 500,000 units since they were released last November. A figure estimated by Ars Technica via the number of Steam Controllers sold which includes Steam Machines as a portion of that total:

    Half a million might not sound like a bad sales number for a brand new hardware platform, but it starts to look pretty tepid in the context of the wider gaming market. Both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One sold over a million consoles in their first day on the market in 2013. After just over seven months on store shelves, Microsoft was up to about 5.5 million Xbox One sales and the PS4 had racked up 10.2 million worldwide sales. That’s what a successful gaming hardware launch looks like these days.

    Valve is often guilty of starting something and then just giving up on it without iterating to find success. Their cousins at Microsoft would have had the same issue if they gave up on the original Xbox which sold only 24 million consoles over its first 7 years and was another system frequently referred to as a failure.

    Sales figures of hardware over the course of a few months aren’t necessarily going to make or break a company, but I believe that Valve still needs SteamOS.

    Quantum Break, the remastered Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, Forza Motorsport 6: Apex, the upcoming games Halo Wars 2 and ReCore are all exclusive to Windows 10’s built-in app store. SteamOS and Steam Machines continue to be a hedge against Microsoft’s built-in Windows app store restrictions that Valve will need to remain competitive in the event of even more anti-competitive changes to Windows.

    Liam Dawe of Gaming on Linux is right on about the lack of advertising hurting sales of the nascent Steam Machines and SteamOS/Linux games:

    We are facing real issues, like a lack of bigger platform-pushing titles and performance. Valve do need to up their own advertising a bit too, not just of Steam Machines, but of new Linux releases. They give big homepage banners to plenty of new Windows releases, but only a few SteamOS releases have been graced with such advertising. Valve haven’t even managed to get their own VR device with HTC on Linux yet, they need to up their own game.

  • Fascinating attack on unmoderated package managers for programming libraries (via former TimeDoctor contributor, Vogon)  that would work just as well on unmoderated app stores:

    In the second part of 2015 and the early months of 2016, I worked on my bachelors thesis. In this thesis, I tried to attack programming language package managers such as Pythons PyPi, NodeJS Npmsjs.com and Rubys rubygems.org. The attack does not exploit a new technical vulnerability, it rather tries to trick people into installing packages that they not intended to run on their systems

    […]

    So basically we create a fake package that has a similar name as a famous package on PyPi, Npmjs.com or rubygems.org. For example we could upload a package named reqeusts instead of the famous requests module.

    It ends up being very successful:

    In two empirical phases, exactly 45334 HTTP requests by 17289 unique hosts (distinct IP addresses) were gathered. This means that 17289 distinct hosts executed the program above and sent the data to the webserver which was analyzed in the thesis. The number of HTTP requests is for various reasons higher than the number of distinct IP addresses. The main reason is that pip executes the setup.py file twice on installation. Don’t ask me why.