News

You know things are bad when you cannot afford to pay employees, but to miss payroll over the holidays seems just that much worse. However, that is what has happened to Red5 the developers behind Firefall. As is usually the case this event is not the first indication of financial troubles. In November the company laid off about 40 employees and then another 2-3 around the 23rd of December. Red6 was founded in 2005 and contained a number of Blizzard employees. Red5 was bought by a Chinese Publisher called The9 around 2010.

You have to love how easy it is to find information out in the wilds of the internet. In the last couple of weeks a number of cloud-databases have been found to be leaking data to the interment due to an almost total lack of security. The latest one seems to be a group of 191… Million voters in the US. Yup, if you have voted in any election since 2000 your personal information is out there on the open internet. The information that is out contains names, addresses, party affiliation and voter ID numbers… it is not as bad as it could be, but it is still bad.

There is a report that over the holidays several retailers disabled the EMV (Chip and Pin) functionality of their card readers. The reason for this? They did not want to deal with the extra time it takes for a transaction. With a standard card swipe (mag-swipe) you are ready to put in your pin and pay in about three seconds. With EMV this is extended to roughly 10 seconds. Of course when you add in all of the other items that retailers throw in (are you are rewards member?) your checkout time can be lengthened quite a bit.

As 2015 comes to a close the advanced copies of movies are in transit to different groups and agencies. Many of these are for awards or accolades of some sort and almost without exception, copies of these (called screeners) end up on the internet available for download. This year has seen a bonanza of screener news including tracking one copy of the Hateful Eight to the Co-CEO of a production finance company, Andrew Kosove. As you might imagine things got more than a little interesting after this was uncovered.