Know Something :-)

2017-05-21T14:46:00.000+05:30

Game

A game is a structured form of play, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool. Games are distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more often an expression of aesthetic or ideological elements. However, the distinction is not clear-cut, and many games are also considered to be work (such as professional players of spectator sports or games) or art (such as jigsaw puzzles or games involving an artistic layout such as Mahjong, solitaire, or some video games).
Key components of games are goals, rules, challenge, and interaction. Games generally involve mental or physical stimulation, and often both. Many games help develop practical skills, serve as a form of exercise, or otherwise perform an educational, simulational, or psychological role.
Attested as early as 2600 BC, games are a universal part of human experience and present in all cultures. The Royal Game of Ur, Senet, and Mancala are some of the oldest known games.

Definitions

A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome." (Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman)
"A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal." (Greg Costikyan) According to this definition, some "games" that do not involve choices, such as Chutes and Ladders, Candy Land, and War are not technically games any more than a slot machine is.
"A game is an activity among two or more independent decision-makers seeking to achieve their objectives in some limiting context." (Clark C. Abt)
"At its most elementary level then we can define game as an exercise of voluntary control systems in which there is an opposition between forces, confined by a procedure and rules in order to produce a disequilibrial outcome." (Elliot Avedon and Brian Sutton-Smith)
"A game is a form of play with goals and structure." (Kevin J. Maroney)
"to play a game is to engage in activity directed toward bringing about a speciﬁc state of affairs, using only means permitted by speciﬁc rules, where the means permitted by the rules are more limited in scope than they would be in the absence of the rules, and where the sole reason for accepting such limitation is to make possible such activity." (Bernard Suits)
"When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation." (Jane McGonigal)
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2017-05-18T14:40:00.004+05:30

Ransomware Virus

Ransomware is a type of malicious software that carries out the cryptoviral extortion attack from cryptovirology that blocks access to data until a ransom is paid and displays a message requesting payment to unlock it. Simple ransomware may lock the system in a way which is not difficult for a knowledgeable person to reverse. More advanced malware encrypts the victim's files, making them inaccessible, and demands a ransom payment to decrypt them.The ransomware may also encrypt the computer's Master File Table (MFT) or the entire hard drive. Thus, ransomware is a denial-of-access attack that prevents computer users from accessing files since it is intractable to decrypt the files without the decryption key. Ransomware attacks are typically carried out using a Trojan that has a payload disguised as a legitimate file.While initially popular in Russia, the use of ransomware scams has grown internationally; in June 2013, security software vendor McAfee released data showing that it had collected over 250,000 unique samples of ransomware in the first quarter of 2013, more than double the number it had obtained in the first quarter of 2012. Wide-ranging attacks involving encryption-based ransomware began to increase through Trojans such as CryptoLocker, which had procured an estimated US$3 million before it was taken down by authorities, and CryptoWall, which was estimated by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to have accrued over $18m by June 2015.

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Ransomware Attack: This is the Total Paid and How the Virus Spread...

As of Monday evening, $57,282.23 in ransom had been paid to the hackers behind the "WannaCry" malware attack, which took down computers across the world Friday and over the weekend, according to Elliptic, a Bitcoin forensics firm tracking the event.

Payments have trickled in from around the world, including a relatively large payment that researchers believe originated from the Russian government or a Russian business.

The total will likely rise, however. As the chart below shows, payments increased Monday morning, days after the worst of the attack was slowed with a kill switch.

Payments have mostly originated from Europe, Russia, Korea, and Taiwan, according Chainanalysis, another firm that tracks Bitcoin transactions.

Paying the ransom will likely not save those infected, say cybersecurity researchers. Following payment, infected files are not automatically returned into the possession of the computer owner.

Instead, communication with the hackers overseeing the attack must occur. Then, an operator manually decrypts the files. Just sending the ransom gives the hackers "no idea if you've paid or not," said Jonathan Levin, co-founder of Chainanalysis.

In total, payments to cover about 190 computers have been made, a far cry from the approximately 300,000 infections believed to occur to date.

A major reason for the difference is that a kill switch — a way of stopping the malware from taking control of a computer — was discovered on Friday, slowing the malware's spread.

The map below, made from a dataset provided to NBCNews.com by MalwareTech, the security group that discovered the kill switch, shows how the malware was stopped on Friday.

Each location shows a computer that was infected but that did not have its files taken hostage because the kill switch prevented the attack. This map gives a general sense of how the malware spread.

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2017-03-17T13:57:00.002+05:30

8 Incredible Spy Technologies!!!

1.Bond, James Bond

Killer umbrellas, stick-on fingerprints and lock-picking cellphones — James Bond and his nemeses certainly used their share of bizarre spy gadgets over the years.
But many of the most far-out devices seen in old movies have been made obsolete by incredible leaps in today's consumer technology, said Vince Houghton, a historian and curator at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.
"A modern smartphone does more than most people could do 10 years ago on 10 different things," Houghton told Live Science.
For instance, nowadays, "wires," like those used to catch mobsters plotting on tape, are now entirely wireless, and they're so tiny that they can be concealed in earrings, buttons and even patches under the skin, Houghton said.
And although most of today's cutting-edge spy technology is classified, knowledge of a few bizarre techniques does get leaked. From eavesdropping techniques to programmed kitties, here are some of the most incredible real-world spy technologies.

2.Cold War-era gadgets

Spying is almost as old as human civilization. Both the ancient Babylonian law called Hammurabi's Code and the Bible's Old Testament described espionage as a way to gain an edge on adversaries, Houghton said. The rise of modern nations, however, caused espionage gadgets to flourish.
During the Cold War, the golden era of James Bond's spy gadgets, a real-life Bulgarian assassin used an umbrella to fire a toxic pellet of the poison ricin into a Soviet defector in London. The Soviets also developed a lipstick gun known as the "kiss of death," which fired a single bullet at close range, Houghton said.

3.Oops, kitty kitty

During the Cold War era, a few outlandish ideas made it past the drawing board. Unlike animals, which have cochleae in their ears that filter out noise, listening devices were historically bad at filtering out background noise. So, in the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. spies got the bright idea to use an animal's cochlea to spy on the Soviets. They implanted a microphone into a cat's ear canal, a radio transmitter next to the skull, and a battery into its abdomen, and turned its tail into an antenna. Then, they spent hours training it to hop through obstacle courses. Unfortunately for the spies, the high-tech kitty often wandered off in search of food.

"Cats don't really do what you want them to," Houghton said.

So the team went back to the drawing board, retrained the cat to ignore its hunger signals and plopped it down in a park across from the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. As soon as it tried to cross the street, it got run over by a taxi.

"They had their multimillion-dollar cat there, smooshed on the street," Houghton said.

For decades, the CIA also spent millions to fund Operation Stargate, which aimed to use psychics to reveal Soviet secrets. The program was disbanded during the Clinton administration. The agency also funded the notorious MKULTRA program, which aimed to harness psychedelic drugs like LSD for mind control, Houghton said.

4.Visual microphone

The government doesn't develop all the strangest spy technologies.

Scientists at the University of Texas created a way to reconstruct conversations simply by taking pictures of the environment in which the words were spoken, according to a presentation at the 2014 SIGGRAPH conference. The sound spying system takes advantage of the fact that sound waves produce minute, invisible-to-the-naked-eye vibrations that can still be caught on camera. These vibrations can then be analyzed to recreate the original sounds. The new technique now means that, theoretically, anyone who can snap photos or video of a room could recreate conversations that occurred there — without having to bug the place or put their ear to the door.

5.Hacked medical implants

It's not just a plot point on Showtime's "Homeland"; medical devices that can be wirelessly controlled and battery operated — such as insulin pumps, implantable defibrillators and pacemakers — can be hacked. At a 2011 Black Hat Security Conference in Las Vegas, hacker Jerome Radcliffe showed that it was possible to hack his own insulin pump. A few years earlier, hackers raised the possibility that wirelessly controlled pacemakers could also be hacked. So far, no one has documented a case where malicious forces have fiddled with someone's implanted medical device — at least that we know of. But the risk has spurred the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a watchdog agency within the government, to urge the Food and Drug Administration to require the companies that make such medical devices to eliminate these vulnerabilities.

7.I see you

International spies aren't the only ones who have an interest in watching other people. Companies that want to know more about the people who buy their products could one day use a creepy combination of tailored marketing and surveillance. The company Almax has developed a bionic mannequin called EyeSee that could be placed in clothing stores. Behind the mannequin's dead eyes hides a camera that uses facial-recognition software that can identify a shopper's age, race and gender. The idea is to deduce what kinds of consumers buy certain products.

8.Unbreakable codes?

Ultimately, the goal of most espionage organizations around the world is to create perfectly secure communications. Some think that quantum encryption — which uses the principles of particle physics to ensure that a message is readable only to its intended recipient — may be the key to creating codes that can't be broken.

"At this point, the [National Security Agency] can listen to anything they want to, regardless of what encryption is used," Houghton said. "Quantum encryption would be the first time you could create a completely unbreakable code."

Today, quantum encryption is still in the proof-of-concept phase, as far as we know. However, the technology is now getting practical enough that governments are probably very interested, he said.