Nuclear Monster

  • 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.

  • Money in the Bank

    The decades-old institution of civil asset forfeiture just got amazingly worse through the new practice of  seizing cash in bank accounts at a whim without any due process:

    Now, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol has a device that also allows them to seize money in your bank account or on prepaid cards.

    It’s called an ERAD, or Electronic Recovery and Access to Data machine, and state police began using 16 of them last month.  

    Here’s how it works. If a trooper suspects you may have money tied to some type of crime, the highway patrol can scan any cards you have and seize the money.

    […]

    News 9 obtained a copy of the contract with the state. 

    It shows the state is paying ERAD Group Inc., $5,000 for the software and scanners, then 7.7 percent of all the cash the highway patrol seizes.  

    Yow.

    Also, this is the second website I’ve seen today that still requires Flash to watch their videos. Chrome makes an OK sandbox for that garbage but everyone should stop supporting it. 

  • Online DRM-free retailer Gog announced Gog Connect. Gog Connect connects your Gog account to your Steam account and receive DRM-free Gog versions of some games if you already have them on Steam.

    The list of supported games is short at just 23 currently, but Gog have said they will change the list up frequently by adding games and removing old ones. Unfortunately you will need to revisit the Gog Connect page when new games are added in order to receive DRM-free Gog copies.

  • E. Fylladitakis writing for Anandtech has this excellent review of the Corsair Lapdog. It is either the best or worst possible name for a product that connotates this:
    an actual dog that might fit on your lap if it deigns you worthy

    …but is actually this keyboard and mouse ergonomic nightmare for playing FPS games on a couch the right way:

    the corsair lapdog will let anyone put it on its lap

    Although it looks cool, it is actually going to cost you upwards of $200. $120 for the Lapdog, and a bunch more for the mouse and keyboard since only two Corsair keyboard models are going to fit. Though you could probably get away with not using a Corsair mouse.