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Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Sniper Elite V2 is a 2012 tactical shooter video game by Rebellion Developments for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It is a remake of Rebellion's 2005 game Sniper Elite. The game takes place in the same timeframe and location - the Battle of Berlin in April 1945 - but now the main character, an American Office of Strategic Services officer, must either kill or capture scientists involved in the German V-2 rocket programme.

Gameplay

Sniper Elite V2 is a third-person shooter that stresses employing stealth, rather than using brute force. Fairburne uses several WWII-era weapons, including sniper rifles, a silenced Welrod pistol, machine guns and German and Soviet hand grenades (which can be also used to make tripwire booby traps). One of the main features of the title is the realistic ballistics, involving factors such as bullet drop, wind strength, and the effect of holding one's breath when attempting a shot. Sniping gameplay is from a first person scope view, whereas movement and use of all other weapons is in third person view.
A major difference from the first game is the introduction of a controversial ‘X-Ray Kill Cam’, which activates when the player makes a particularly extreme shot. The view then follows the path of the bullet in slow motion before slowing further as it reaches its target, whereupon the target’s body is rendered as an anatomical cutaway to show the bullet’s passage through the body and the damage it causes to organs and bones. Other new elements include being able to mark enemy fighters to highlight their position along with target information, and a white-outlined figure which marks the point where enemy soldiers last spotted the player so that players can make their escape.

Source: http://sniperelitev2.com

It is no secret that homes are ever-increasing hotbeds of new technology such as set-top boxes, game consoles, wireless routers, home automation devices, tablets, smart phones, and security cameras. This innovation is breeding heterogeneity and complexity that frustrates even technically-savvy users’ attempts to improve day-to-day life by implementing functionality that uses these devices in combination. For instance, it is impossible for most users to view video captured by their security camera on their smartphone when they are not at home. Heterogeneity across devices and across homes also makes it difficult to develop applications that solve these problems in a way that work across a range of homes.

To simplify the management of technology and to simplify the development of applications in the home, we are developing an "operating system" for the home. HomeOS provides a centralized, holistic control of devices in the home. It provides to users intuitive controls to manage their devices. It provided to developers high-level abstractions to orchestrate the devices in the home. HomeOS is coupled with a HomeStore through which users can easily add obtain applications that are compatible with devices in their homes and obtain any additional devices that are needed to enable desired applications.

Source: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/homeos/


Tuesday, May 1, 2012

A recently reported flaw that allowed an attacker to drastically reduce the number of attempts needed to guess the WPS PIN of a wireless router isn't necessary for some Arcadyan based routers anymore.

Last year it was exposed that the WiFi Protected Setup (WPS) PIN is susceptible to a brute force attack. A design flaw that exists in the WPS specification for the PIN authentication significantly reduces the time required to brute force the entire PIN because it allows an attacker to know when the first half of the 8 digit PIN is correct.

The lack of a proper lock out policy after a certain number of failed attempts to guess the PIN on many wireless routers makes this brute force attack that much more feasible.

Some 100,000 routers of type Speedport W921V, W504V and W723V are affected in Germany alone. What makes things worse is the fact that in order to exploit the backdoor, no button has to be pushed on the device itself and on some of the affected routers, the backdoor PIN ("12345670") is still working even after WPS has been disabled by the user. The only currently known remedy for those models is to disable Wi-Fi altogether. Since all Arcadyan routers share the same software platform, more models might be affected.

Last year, Tactical Network Solutions develop and released Reaver , which is a WPA attack tool  that exploits a protocol design flaw in WiFi Protected Setup (WPS). Reaver has been designed to be a robust and practical attack against WPS, and has been tested against a wide variety of access points and WPS implementations.On average Reaver will recover the target AP's plain text WPA/WPA2 passphrase in 4-10 hours, depending on the AP.

Source: TheHackerNews