Garrett M. Graff has this article for Wired about the Mirai botnet denial-of-service attack, saying that it was powered by angry Minecraft server operators and players:
As the 2016 US presidential election drew near, fears began to mount that the so-called Mirai botnet might be the work of a nation-state practicing for an attack that would cripple the country as voters went to the polls. The truth, as made clear in that Alaskan courtroom Friday—and unsealed by the Justice Department on Wednesday—was even stranger: The brains behind Mirai were a 21-year-old Rutgers college student from suburban New Jersey and his two college-age friends from outside Pittsburgh and New Orleans. All three—Paras Jha, Josiah White, and Dalton Norman, respectively—admitted their role in creating and launching Mirai into the world.
Originally, prosecutors say, the defendants hadn’t intended to bring down the internet—they had been trying to gain an advantage in the computer game Minecraft.
[…]
VDOS was an advanced botnet: a network of malware-infected, zombie devices that its masters could commandeer to execute DDoS attacks at will. And the teens were using it to run a lucrative version of a then-common scheme in the online gaming world—a so-called booter service, geared toward helping individual gamers attack an opponent while fighting head-to-head, knocking them offline to defeat them. Its tens of thousands of customers could pay small amounts, like $5 to $50, to rent small-scale denial-of-service attacks via an easy-to-use web interface.
A similar service was used to attack the ioquake3 master server in the past. It was surprisingly easy for it to be launched on an ongoing basis.
Bennett Foddy’s torturous game of uphill ruination is finally available to everyone today. I still love it, and hate it, as you do. Here’s what I said about Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy back in October:
A few months ago I saw this short video clip that Bennett Foddy posted on twitter of what looked like a man in a kettle rotating some kind of sledgehammer parallel with the camera and everyone in reply was very impressed with the animation on display. I was baffled but similarly impressed “What the fuck is Bennett working on?”
This is the guy that made QWOP, GIRP, and other games that also have intentionally bizarre control schemes that elicit feelings of frustration. When I first played QWOP I thought it was some kind of hilarious one-off joke. It’s almost impossible to play because the Q W O and P keys on your keyboard control the individual thigh and calf muscles on a runner’s legs. Then with GIRP and the other games, well, you start to learn that Foddy is not going away, this is just who he is.
Today I’ve played some of his latest triumph in frustration, the full title is “Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy”, and holy shit I want to throw my computer out of the window. The newest achievements in torture from the lord of input darkness is that your protagonist is indeed a man in a kettle and that sledgehammer is there to help you slowly drag yourself up a mountain. All of the control is through your mouse now, so a quick grab of a ledge just requires moving the mouse cursor over that ledge in such a way that the hammer doesn’t impact anything else along the way and then pulling your kettle dude up by lifting him with the hammer along the ledge.
Go too quickly and you’ll launch your character into the air, which sounds desirable for a faster ascent of this mountain but doing that in a controlled manner is extremely difficult.
As much like his past nightmares as Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy is, the audio clips of the developer virtually egging you on to continue are so different from anything he’s ever done before. The game also plays jazz music, which I find incredibly grating. When I fell down just now before writing this post he threw up a song with a title specifically about failure, and Foddy also read some choice quotes from authors and poets about how failure is when you give up instead of continuing to try.
A developer speaking to the player outside of a commentary mode isn’t entirely original, The Beginner’s Guide from the developer of The Stanley Parable also features a developer speaking to the player but it wasn’t so direct and clearly designed to infuriate anyone playing the game.
I’m not sure how much more of Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy I can tolerate, but it’s definitely worth playing when it comes out on December 7th for Windows and macOS via Steam and the Humble Store. I’d only advise against it if you’re prone to destroying computer hardware.
Chuck Jones writing in the Washington Post:
At the Carrier plant on the west side of Indianapolis, we’re coming up on a bitter anniversary. One year ago this week, President-elect Donald Trump stood before hundreds of cheering workers and declared that he had saved our jobs from moving to Mexico. It was a symbolic moment that cemented Trump’s campaign image as a working-class champion — a blue-collar billionaire who would stand with workers, not CEOs.
I have been a worker at the Rexnord plant in Indianapolis for 48 years, and president of United Steel Workers Local 1999 for more than 30. As the leader of the union representing the Carrier workers, I was part of the negotiations with the company regarding the coming layoffs when Trump intervened. Standing in front of the president-elect at Carrier during Trump’s first victory rally after the 2016 election, I realized that he was delivering a powerful message of hope not only to Carrier workers, but also to all working people in America: You finally have a president who will fight for the interests of ordinary workers, Trump seemed to say.
A year later, we feel betrayed. Carrier has announced that more than 600 workers are being laid off, with the last line scheduled to work their final shift right after the holidays.
The workers at Carrier aren’t the only ones who feel victimized by Trump’s false promises. United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company, is laying off another 700 workers right up the road from the Carrier plant in Huntington. And Rexnord, another plant in Indianapolis, just closed its doors, too. Workers at both plants hoped that Trump would come to the rescue, but he never showed up.
Apple has another serious software flaw, this one isn’t a security vulnerability but it causes some iOS devices (iPhones, iPads) with third-party apps installed that use local notifications to get stuck in a reboot loop on December 2nd. iOS 11.2 is out now and resolves the issue along with adding other features like Apple Pay Cash to send money to your friends and family, and resolves other issues. If you’re already experiencing the reboot loop then Apple has some steps for you to do before updating.
Other workarounds include setting your time back by a day or disabling notifications for the apps that cause it, but it’s better to just update.
Some people have an idea that staying on an older version of the software is more stable or more secure, this is always a bad idea in our day of networked devices that are constantly under attack from governments and other bad actors.
It must really be crappy to be on the teams responsible for these issues this week but it’s difficult to blame anyone specifically for them. With the root exploit it looks like a reasonable mistake that could happen to anyone. We don’t have all the details of the December 2nd bug yet, but both of these issues require an extremely specific set of things to go wrong before they happen. I have no doubt that Apple’s QA processes will change to include testing for these kinds of issues, but there isn’t any perfect software. What they have done well is the delivery mechanism for getting those updates out to users.
When Android has issues like these they are difficult to resolve because so many different companies have to get involved in order for updates to get released to end-users. I don’t envy anyone trying to resolve that issue at Google.
