Hasta La Gadget!

Newly unsealed grand jury documents revealed that two Sudanese nationals allegedly attempted to launch thousands of distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks on systems across the world. The documents allege that these hacks aimed to cause serious financial and technical harm to government entities and companies and even physical harm in some cases.

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) unsealed charges against Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer and Alaa Salah Yusuuf Omer that resulted in federal grand jury indictments. The two are allegedly connected to more than 35,000 DDoS attacks against hundreds of organizations, websites and networks as part of a “hacktivism” scheme as part of the cybercrime group Anonymous Sudan and a for-profit cyberattack service.

Even though Anonymous Sudan claimed to be an activist group, the pair also held some companies and entity’s systems for ransom for rates as high as $1,700 per month.

Both face indictments for their role in the coordinated cyberattacks including one count each of conspiracy to damage protected computers. Ahmed also faces three additional counts of damaging protected computers and could receive a statutory maximum sentence of life in federal prison, according to court records filed last June in the US Central District Court of California.

The brothers’ activities date back to early 2023. The two used a distributed cloud attack tool (DCAT) referred to as “Skynet Botnet” in order to “conduct destructive DDoS attacks and publicly claim credit for them,” according to a DoJ statement. Ahmed posted a message on Anonymous Sudan’s Telegram channel, “The United States must be prepared, it will be a very big attack, like what we did in Israel, we will do in the United States ‘soon.’”

One of the indictments listed 145 “overt acts” on organizations and entities in the US, the European Union, Israel, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Skynet Botnet attacks attempted to disrupt services and networks in airports, software networks and companies including Cloudflare, X, Paypal and Microsoft that caused outages for Outlook and OneDrive in June of last year. The attacks also targeted state and federal government agencies and websites including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Pentagon and the DoJ and even hospitals including one major attack on Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles causing a slowdown of health care services as patients were diverted to other hospitals. The hospital attack led to the hacking charges against Ahmed that carry potential life sentences.

“3 hours+ and still holding,” Ahmed posted on Telegram in February, “they’re trying desperately to fix it but to no avail Bomb our hospitals in Gaza, we shut down yours too, eye for eye…”

FBI special agents gathered evidence of the pair’s illegal activities including logs showing that they sold access to Skynet Botnet to more than 100 customers to carry out attacks against various victims who worked with investigators including Cloudflare, Crowdstrike, Digital Ocean, Google, PayPal and others.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) was one of Anonymous Sudan’s victims as part of the hacking-for-hire scheme, according to court records and an AWS statement. AWS security teams worked with FBI cybercrime investigators. Security teams discovered the attacks were coming from “an array of cloud-based servers, many of which were hosted at a US server-hosting provider.” The discovery helped the FBI determine that the Skynet Botnet attacks were coming from a DCAT instead of a botnet that forwarded the DDoS to its victims through cloud-based servers and open proxy resolvers.

Perhaps the group’s most brazen and dangerous attack took place in April of 2023 that targeted Israel’s rocket alert system called Red Alert. The mobile app provides real time updates for missile attacks and security threats. The DDoS attacks attempted to infiltrate some of Red Alert’s Internet domains. Ahmed claimed responsibility for the Red Alert attacks on Telegram along with similar DDoS strikes on Israeli utilities and the Jerusalem Post news website.

“This group’s attacks were callous and brazen — the defendants went so far as to attack hospitals providing emergency and urgent care to patients,” US Attorney Martin Estrada said in a released statement. “My office is committed to safeguarding our nation’s infrastructure and the people who use it, and we will hold cyber criminals accountable for the grave harm they cause.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/two-sudanese-brothers-accused-of-launching-a-dangerous-series-of-ddos-attacks-215638291.html?src=rss

Hades II just got its first major update, which is all the reason I need to jump back into the inspired roguelite. Supergiant Games is calling the Olympic Update “practically mountain-sized”, likely because there’s a new region set in the mountains of Olympus.

With a new region, comes new story elements. The studio says “hours of new dialogue” has been added to the game. The area will also feature two new allies, but Supergiant remains mum on their identities. In other words, you’ll have to traverse Olympus to find out. I’d bet some Obol Points that they are Greek Gods of one type or another, given the region.

The update also includes a new main weapon, two animal companions and “dozens of new cosmetic items” to liven up Crossroads. There’s even a world map now, which will be displayed when moving from one region to another. That’s a small flourish, but a pretty fun one.

There are also dozens of quality-of-life improvements that’ll pop up throughout the game. These include faster weapon attacks, new special moves, a more responsive dash and a refined aiming system. Finally, the game now runs on Macs, so long as the computer boasts an Apple M1 chip or later.

Despite the boatload of new features, the game’s still in early access. Supergiant says this won’t be the last major content drop while still remaining in early access, as another big update hits early next year. So we have that to look forward to. The first game was in early access for nearly two years as it slowly transformed into the game we know and love today. Hades II has only been around five months.

For the uninitiated, Hades II is a roguelite hack-and-slash action game with fluid controls, a diverse array of upgrades and a story that expertly weaves itself into every unsuccessful run. There’s also a cute cat you can pal around with. It’s quite obviously a sequel to the mega-hit Hades, which was the first video game to ever win a Hugo Award.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/hades-iis-first-major-update-adds-a-new-region-main-weapon-and-native-mac-support-183541832.html?src=rss

Arcane season 2 is coming to Netflix on November 9, and Riot Games is drumming up the hype by releasing various content in its current and upcoming video game titles. All of this content will come out within the coming months.

Riot will release Ambessa Medarda, the Noxian general first seen in the show’s first season, as an upcoming Champion in League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics (TFT), League of Legends: Wild Rift, Valorant, and Legends of Runeterra.

In standard League of Legends news, the Bridge of Progress will become available in the ARAM game mode as part of an Arcane-themed update. Other additions include a Jinx skin of a new “Exalted” tier that will allow players to experience her Arcane story. It’s not the only skin as there will be an Arcane Brawler Vi skin and more.

TFT will introduce several Arcane characters as Champions, including Powder, with abilities based on what they have in the show. There will also be some cosmetics, including Arenas and Tacticians like Chibi Caitlyn. As for players who look forward to the PvE game mode Tocker’s Trials, they can rejoice as it’s making a return.

Singed and Warwick, two Champions available in Wild Rift, will receive gameplay updates. Previously announced Champion Heimerdinger will be made playable in Wild Rift after being playable in League of Legends and Legends of Runeterra. Warwick will also be playable in Legends of Runeterra. There won’t be much content beyond an Arcane-themed cosmetic bundle for Valorant.

While Riot’s fighting game 2XKO isn’t out yet, it will feature an Arcane-inspired Jinx skin. Said skin is coming on November 11. 2XKO will be released next year.

Of course, Riot isn’t confining the hype to its games. There will be merch coming out soon as November 9 approaches. Some of the products include apparel from Uniqlo and Blackmilk, collectibles from Funko and Tokidoki and Fenty Beauty makeup. If these aren’t enough to satisfy you, Riot promises plenty more is arriving.

Arcane season 2 is set to debut on Netflix on November 9, with Act One coming first. Act Two comes out on November 16, while Act Three will arrive on November 23. Keep your popcorn close at hand when the days come.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/riot-games-is-hyping-up-arcanes-second-and-final-season-across-its-various-titles-170501998.html?src=rss

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is just around the corner, with a release date of October 25, and Microsoft has temporarily removed the $1 Xbox Game Pass 14-day trial from stores —‚ again. Some gamers may remember that Microsoft pulled a similar stunt last year just before Starfield’s release. Essentially, this keeps players from trying out a big new release like Black Ops 6 without paying for a full subscription.

The trial’s removal happened on October 8, but it was only caught by The Verge today. The most likely primary reason is to prevent gamers from playing through the campaign without paying the full price. Of course, even millions of $1 sales wouldn’t be profitable for Microsoft.

A decision like this isn’t without reasons, as Microsoft is hoping to increase the number of Game Pass subscriptions. Since the number of new subscribers over the last two years has slowed, Microsoft hopes that removing the trial forces gamers to purchase a full Game Pass plan to enjoy Black Ops 6.

The Game Pass trial isn’t back yet, so those who want to dip their toes into the water before plunging in will have to wait. It’s also good to remember that the trial used to be for a whole month before its current 14-day form.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/microsoft-removes-the-1-xbox-game-pass-trial-just-before-call-of-duty-black-ops-6-155058295.html?src=rss

A year after it was first teased, Analogue says it’s nailed its most complicated project yet: rebuilding the Nintendo 64 from scratch. The Analogue 3D will ship in Q1 2025 — it was originally slated for 2024 — and pre-orders start on October 21 at $250.

Like all of the company’s machines, the Analogue 3D has an FPGA (field programmable gate array) chip coded to emulate the original console on a hardware level. Analogue promises support for every official N64 cartridge ever released, across all regions, with no slowdown or inaccuracies. If it achieves that goal, the Analogue 3D will be the first system in the world to perfectly emulate the N64, though other FPGA and software emulators get pretty close.

The company has been selling recreations of retro consoles for over a decade, starting with high-end, bespoke takes on the Neo-Geo and NES. Over time it’s gradually shifted over to more mass-market (though still high-end) productions, with versions of SNES, Genesis and Game Boy all coming in at around the $200 mark. All of the company’s systems support original physical media, rather than ROMs.

Analogue’s original unique selling point was its use of FPGA chips. Rather than using software emulation to play ROMs, Analogue programs FPGA “cores” to emulate original console hardware, and its consoles support original game media and controllers. Compared with software emulation (especially in the early ’10s when Analogue got started), FPGA-based consoles are more accurate, and don’t suffer from as much input lag.

FPGA emulation has come a long way over the past decade. Where Analogue was once the only route into the world of FPGAs for most people, there’s now a rich community of developers and hardware manufacturers involved. The open-source MiSTer project, for example, has accurately emulated almost every video game thing produced up to the mid ’90s. And plenty of smaller manufacturers are now selling FPGA hardware for very reasonable prices. The FPGBC is one good example: It’s a simple DIY kit that lets you build a modern-day Game Boy Color for a much lower price than an Analogue Pocket.

Terasic

Amid all these developments, Analogue occupies a strange spot in the retro gaming community, which has evolved into an open-source, people-powered movement to preserve and play old games. It produces undeniably great hardware that doesn’t require expertise to use, but its prices are high, and its limited-run color variants of consoles like the Pocket have both created FOMO in the community and been a consistent target for scalpers. Analogue is, in many ways, the Apple of the retro gaming hardware space.

With that said, it’s hard to deny that the Pocket has brought more players into the retro gaming world and attracted talent to FPGA development. And if Analogue comes through on its promise here, the Analogue 3D will be another huge moment for video game preservation, and could be the spark for another half-decade of fantastic achievements from the FPGA community at large.

Breaking the fifth-gen barrier

While the FPGA emulation of the first few video game generations is largely a solved problem, there’s a huge leap in complexity between the fourth generation (SNES, Genesis, etc.) and the next. Strides have been made to rebuild the PlayStation, Saturn and N64 in FPGA, but there is no core for any fifth-gen console that has fully solved the puzzle. The current state of the MiSTer N64 core is pretty impressive, with almost every US game counted as playable, but very few games are considered to run flawlessly.

So how did Analogue solve this? The studio does have a talented team, but it importantly has a leg-up when it comes to hardware. The Analogue 3D has the strongest version of the Intel Cyclone 10GX FPGA chip, with 220,000 logic elements. For context, the MiSTer project’s open-source DE-10 board has a Cyclone V FPGA with 110,000 logic elements, while the Analogue Pocket’s main FPGA offers 49,000 elements. There’s a lot more to an FPGA than its logic elements, but the numbers are illustrative: The 3D’s FPGA is undoubtedly the most powerful Analogue has ever used, which clearly gave it more flexibility in designing its core.

While we can’t verify Analogue’s claim of 100 percent compatibility by looking at a spec sheet, the company does have a good track record of programming fantastic FPGA cores, so it’s likely it’ll get incredibly close.

Kris Naudus for Engadget

Of course, if you just wanted to play N64 games accurately, you could plug an N64 into any TV with a composite or S-Video connector, or use one of many boxes that converts those formats into HDMI signals that modern TVs require.

The problem with running an N64 on a modern TV is that its games run at a wide range of resolutions, typically from 320 x 240 up to (very rarely) 640 x 480, the max output. There are countless oddball resolutions between, and some games run below 320 x 240. This is a nightmare for modern displays. Some will scale to a full screen very nicely — both of the common resolutions I listed multiply neatly to 4K, albeit with pillarboxing. The situation gets more confusing with PAL cartridges, which can run at fun horizontal resolutions like 288 and 576. There’s also the issue that the vast majority of these games were designed with the CRT displays of old in mind, taking advantage of the quirks of scanlines to, say, make a checkerboard pattern look translucent.

This makes playing N64 games on a modern TV a bit of a hassle. There are fantastic retro upscalers like the RetroTINK series, but when plugging in a game for the first time, you wind up deciding between integer and “good enough” scaling, dealing with weird frame rates and tweaking blending options to get the picture just right. Many people enjoy this fine-tuning and customization aspect, and all power to you! But it’s undoubtedly a barrier to entry, and much of the hard work done on upscaling has been focused on 2D gaming, rather than 3D.

Analogue says its scaling solution will solve many of these issues. The Analogue 3D supports 4K output, variable refresh rate displays, and PAL and NTSC carts. On top of those basics, it’s building out “Original Display Modes” to emulate the CRT TVs and PVMs of old. Calling ODMs filters feels a little reductive, as they’re a complicated and customizable mix of display tricks, but essentially you pick one and it changes the way the picture looks, so….

ODMs were used effectively on the Analogue Pocket to emulate various Game Boy displays. Perhaps the most impressive example is a Trinitron ODM that came to the Pocket in 2023 that, when used with the Analogue Dock, does a pretty incredible job of turning a modern TV into a high-end Sony tube TV. We don’t have a ton of information on which ODMs are coming to the 3D, but I will share the very ’90s ad for the feature below:

Analogue

The final piece of the image-quality puzzle is frame rate. The N64’s library is full of some spectacularly slow games. My memory may be scarred from growing up in a PAL region, which meant, while the US and Japan’s NTSC consoles were outputting a blistering 20 fps, I was chugging away at 16.66 fps. But even in the idealized NTSC world, lots of games outright missed their frame rate targets comically often. As an example, the majority of Goldeneye’s single-player campaign plays out between 15-25 fps, while a four-player match would typically see half that number. And let’s not speak of Perfect Dark.

These glacial frame rates are far less noticeable on a CRT than they are on modern displays with crisp rows of pixels updating from top to bottom. While the ODMs go some way to replicating the feel of an old TV, they can’t change the underlying technical differences. The Analogue 3D does support variable refresh rate output, but that won’t do much when a game is running at 12 fps, and instead is intended to help the system run like the original N64 did at launch. 

In its initial press push last year, Analogue told Paste magazine that you’ll have the option to overclock the 3D’s virtual chips to run faster — “overclocking, running smoother, eliminating native frame dips” — but the company hasn’t mentioned that in its final press release. Instead, Analogue CEO Christopher Taber told Engadget that its solution “isn’t overclocking, it’s much better and more sophisticated.” It revolves around Nintendo’s original Rambus RAM set up, which is often the bottleneck for N64 performance. Solving this bottleneck “means that games can run without slowdown and all the classic issues the original N64 had,” he explained. 

By default, though, the Analogue 3D is set up to run exactly like original hardware, albeit with the RAM Expansion Pak attached. “Preserving the original hardware is the number one goal,” Taber explained. “Even when bandwidth is increased, it’s not about boosting performance beyond the system’s original capabilities — it’s about giving players a clearer window into how the games were designed to run.” 

Analogue

The hardware

Analogue has a rich history of making very pretty hardware, and the Analogue 3D is clearly no exception. As with the Super Nt, Mega Sg, and Duo, the 3D calls back to the basic form of the console it’s based on, while smoothing out and modernizing it somewhat. It’s an elegant way to pull on nostalgia while also being legally distinct enough to avoid a lawsuit. (Analogue’s FPGA cores and software also don’t infringe on any Nintendo IP.)

The Analogue 3D has a similar shape to the N64, but the front pillars have been erased, the four controller ports match the housing and the power/reset buttons are slanted inwards to point toward the cartridge slot. Despite the tweaks, it still undoubtedly evokes a Nintendo 64. Around the back, you’ll find a USB-C port for power, two USB ports for accessories like non-standard controllers, an HDMI port and a full-sized SD card slot.

Analogue

A new operating system from Analogue, 3DOS, will debut with the system. It looks like a blend of the AnalogueOS that debuted on the Pocket and the Nintendo Switch OS, with the homescreen centered on a large carousel of square cards. The screenshots Analogue provided show options for playing a cartridge, browsing your library or viewing save states and screenshots. Some N64 games have the ability to save data to the cartridge, while others rely on a Controller Pak, but the ability to quickly save progress as a memory, as introduced with the Pocket, will be useful nonetheless. 3DOS can also connect to the internet over the console’s built-in WiFi chip for OS updates, which is a first for Analogue.

While you can browse your library in 3DOS, you won’t actually be able to load any game that isn’t physically inserted into the cartridge slot: The Analogue 3D only plays original media. It’s also worth noting that the Analogue 3D also doesn’t have an “openFPGA” setup like the Analogue Pocket did, which opened the door to playing with a wild array of cores that emulate various consoles, computers and arcades. It doesn’t usually take long for someone to jailbreak Analogue consoles to play ROMs (or other cores) via the system’s SD card slot, but this is not officially supported or sanctioned by Analogue.

The console comes with a power supply (with a US plug), USB cable, an HDMI cable and a 16GB SD card. As per usual, no controller will be packed in — it’s up to you if you want to use original hardware or something more modern. I managed to make at least one reader extremely mad (I’m sorry, Brucealeg) last time I wrote about the Analogue 3D and called the N64 controller a mistake. Personally, though, it feels really rough using one in 2024.

Analogue/8BitDo

If you enjoy the three-paddled original controller, the 3D has four ports for you, and the system will also support the myriad Paks that plug into those controllers. For everyone else, there’s Bluetooth Classic and LE support along with two USB ports for wired controllers. Accessory maker 8BitDo has created what seems to be a variant of its Ultimate controller specifically for the Analogue 3D. (Analogue’s CEO, Taber, is also 8BitDo’s CMO, and the companies have collaborated on controllers for many consoles at this point.) 

The 8BitDo controller looks like a fairly happy middle ground between old and new, with an octagonal gate around the thumbstick, and nicely raised and sized C-buttons. It has a Rumble Pak built in, which works on both the Analogue 3D and Nintendo Switch. It’s available in black or white hues that match the console, and sells separately for $39.99.

Pre-orders for the Analogue 3D open on October 21 at 11AM ET, with an estimated ship date of Q1 2025. It’s unclear how many will be available, but if past launches are any indication, you should be ready to click buy as close to 11AM as possible if you want a hope of being in the first wave of shipments.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/analogues-4k-remake-of-the-n64-is-almost-ready-and-its-a-big-deal-150033468.html?src=rss