Nuclear Monster

  • Keita Takahashi is the beloved creator of Katamari Damacy, and he is working on a new project, Wattam. That game finally has a page on Steam you can go to and wishlist so that the store notifies you when it is ready for your money to receive the game or pre-order it when it is released for Windows next year. It is supposed to be destined for consoles as well, but no word as to which or when. Go and participate in modern capitalism.

  • That’s Carmen Rojas’ headline to her very important article about writers calling for protecting people based on their income and spending:

    When we frame the value of people through their ability to toil in fields, clean houses, cook in kitchens, and care for children, we as a country are choosing to value their work over their humanity. We must choose different in order to do better.

  • To check if your information was stolen in that Equifax attack you have to attempt to sign up for a year of free credit monitoring through a service called TrustedID Premier that Equifax is providing out of the goodness of their hearts in order to get you subscribed to something you’ll have to pay for eventually:

    1. Go here
    2. Click on the button that says “Begin Enrollment”
    3. Enter the information you’re asked for.

    If you’re given a date to enroll in the service your information was possibly stolen, it isn’t very clear if that is a guarantee or not. As over one hundred million accounts worth of data were stolen, it is extremely likely that yours will be too.

    If you actually want this service you’ll have to come back to the same site on that day you’re given in order to sign up, because they’re staggering the sign-ups with this shitty enrollment program.

    These services can’t really do much to protect you from people using your social security number and other personal information in order to sign up for services like cell phone plans and damaging your credit. The only thing that can actually prevent damage to your credit is getting your credit frozen which then makes doing anything that involves credit a nightmare.

    This is an absolutely garbage response from Equifax to anyone affected by this attack. Credit agencies are some of the worst businesses and their executives should all be shot into the sun.

    At this point my strategy is to just assume that my social security number is freely available to anyone who wants it and I constantly monitor the credit bureaus to check for any new accounts opened in my name.

    The only legitimate place to get a free credit check is through AnnualCreditReport.com. Many other places attempt to sign you up for a monitoring service that also can’t do anything to protect you in the event that your information is stolen. I also use a service called Credit Karma that pulls reports once a month. Their business is to provide you with credit card offers (that you should never sign up for) in exchange for the data. They’re scum too, but at least they’re upfront about what kind of scum they are.

  • Bloomberg’s Anders Melin:

    Three Equifax Inc. senior executives sold shares worth almost $1.8 million in the days after the company discovered a security breach that may have compromised information on about 143 million U.S. consumers.

    The credit-reporting service said late Thursday in a statement that it discovered the intrusion on July 29. Regulatory filings show that three days later, Chief Financial Officer John Gamble sold shares worth $946,374 and Joseph Loughran, president of U.S. information solutions, exercised options to dispose of stock worth $584,099. Rodolfo Ploder, president of workforce solutions, sold $250,458 of stock on Aug. 2. None of the filings lists the transactions as being part of 10b5-1 pre-scheduled trading plans.

    Equifax said in the statement that intruders accessed names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and driver’s-license numbers, as well as credit-card numbers for about 209,000 consumers. The incident ranks among the largest cybersecurity breaches in history.

     

  • Speaking of games that have left a void and been inexpertly filled by well-intentioned developers. The Neo Geo classic disc tossing game that’s basically pong if it involved a gruff euro beach 90’s future aesthetic,  Windjammers, has been riffed on so many times. It’s actually been thrilling to see who gets the closest to surpassing the original game because it was so difficult to get a hold on many Neo Geo games legitimately.

    Those days are over, as long as you have a PlayStation 4 or (surprisingly) a PlayStation Vita. DotEmu has brought the original game back out on these Sony platforms for $15, with some pretty big updates to multiplayer and leaderboards that go beyond your typical ROM-in-an-emulator package but don’t seem to change the art or gameplay. Buying one version also nets you the other with Sony’s cross-buy promotion.