Nintendo Conducted Invasive Surveillance Operation Against Homebrew Hacker

Leaked Nintendo documents have revealed a frightening surveillance operation carried out against a hacker who was researching exploits for the 3DS handheld. TorrentFreak reports: During the past 24 hours, various Twitter accounts (1,2) have been posting snippets from documents that were recently leaked from Nintendo. While there are numerous items of interest, the most shocking revelations involve Neimod, a hacker who…

Nintendo Leak Reveals Extreme Measures Taken To Track Hackers

An internal Nintendo leak has revealed measures the company took when approaching a 3DS homebrew hacker. The measures are rather extreme and apparently include surveillance of the individual in question, as well as internal presentations and instructions on how to approach him. From a report: This comes courtesy of prominent Twitter Nintendo leaker Eclipse. According to documents unearthed by Eclipse –…

Foreign Hackers Cripple Texas County’s Email System, Raising Election Security Concerns

Last week, voters and election administrators who emailed Leanne Jackson, the clerk of rural Hamilton County in central Texas, received bureaucratic-looking replies. “Re: official precinct results,” one subject line read. The text supplied passwords for an attached file. But Jackson didn’t send the messages. From a report: Instead, they came from Sri Lankan and Congolese email addresses, and they cleverly hid…

‘GamerGate’ Proponent Kills Ex-Girlfriend, Commits Suicide

41-year-old Rudy Ferretti “was known in the male-dominated retro gaming community as a champion gamer — and as a raging misogynist who ferociously harassed women,” writes blogger David Futrelle. “He once made a homebrew game in which the goal was to kill women. “Last week, he allegedly gunned down his former girlfriend Amy Molter before turning his gun on himself.” Wired…

Remembering the Golden Age of Computer User Groups

Slashdot reader #16,185 wrote regularly for the newsletter of a small-town computer users group. Now they’ve written an article for Ars Technica reminding readers that “The Homebrew Computer Club where the Apple I got its start is deservedly famous — but it’s far from tech history’s only community gathering centered on CPUs.” Throughout the 70s and into the 90s, groups around…

Linus Torvalds Likes His New AMD Threadripper System

This week Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel re-created their keynote conversation for a special all-virtual edition of the Open Source Summit and Embedded Linux Conference North America. ZDNet reports:
While COVID-19 has slowed down many technologies, while speeding up other tech developments, it hasn’t affected Linux development much at all. “None of my co-developers have been hugely impacted either. I was worried…