Monthly Archives: December 2015

Chances are you haven’t realized it, but your PlayStation 4 got a little bit more powerful. The PlayStation 4 comes with an octa-core CPU. Until now, game developers could leverage six of them while the other two ran the operating system. But Sony recently unlocked the 7th core for games, or at least part of it.

Sony hasn’t communicated about the move yet, but some developers are already taking advantage of the 7th core. For instance, audio middleware maker Firelight Technologies released a new version of its sound effects engine FMOD.

In particular, the changelog mentions the 7th core, as spotted by Eurogamer — “PS4 – Added FMOD_THREAD_CORE6 to allow access to the newly unlocked 7th core.”

FMOD runs on every platform out there — PlayStation 2, 3, 4, Portable and Vita, Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Wii, Wii U, 3DS, iOS, Android, OS X, Windows, Linux and more. It has been integrated in many popular game engines, such as the Unreal Engine, Unity, the CryEngine, Source and more. In other words, Firelight Technologies knows how to optimize its audio engine for all platforms.

As a reminder, Microsoft did the exact same thing earlier this year, letting developers leverage the 7th core on the Xbox One.

Both the PS4 and Xbox One have been using this core for some system tasks, such as voice commands. It looks like game developers will have to share this core with these tasks.

So what does it mean if you have a PlayStation 4? All the games you already have use 6 cores. They’ve been optimized to run on 6 cores, and they won’t take advantage of the new core without a new patch. There isn’t much incentive to spend time updating existing games if they run fine on 6 cores.

As for new games, they can now take advantage of the 7th core if it’s not too late during the development. Game engine developers will all update their engines to leverage this new feature.

But remember that GPU power is more important than CPU power on the PS4 and Xbox One. Game developers have been offloading tasks to the GPU. So today’s change isn’t earth-shattering, but games might run a little bit smoother.

Via: techcrunch

Chinese electronic toy maker VTech, has been hacked, revealing the information of 5 million customers. The database of the company’s Learning Lodge app store, which allows customers to download apps, e-books and learning games, was breached on November 14 HKT (Hong Kong Time). The hack was discovered on November 24 and customers were notified on November 27.

VTech makes a wide variety of children’s toys, including the VTech Tote ‘n Go Laptop, pictured above. The company’s customer database holds a slew of user profile information. The personal identifiers mentioned in the company’s report include names, e-mail addresses, passwords, secret questions and answers for password retrieval, IP addresses, mailing addresses and download histories. The database also contains kids’ information, including names, genders and birth dates.

“It is important to note that our customer database does not contain any credit card information and VTech does not process nor store any customer credit card data on the Learning Lodge Web site,” the company said in a statement. “To complete the payment or check-out process of any downloads made on the Learning Lodge Web site, our customers are directed to a secure, third-party payment gateway.”

Serious Risks

We turned to Mark Bower, global director of product management at HP Enterprise Data Security, to get his thoughts on the breach. He told us there are regulations in place about the collection, storage and use of data involving children — but perhaps they need to be rethought, as compliance may not be enough to protect today’s children’s data from advanced threats.

“In the United States, the regulation is called COPPA, Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule, which is regulated by the FTC. There are specific controls that must be adhered to in collecting and using children’s data, and several companies have been fined to date for non-compliance,” Bower said. “Breach of children’s data in itself has many serious risks, as you could imagine, and anyone collecting such data must take steps to protect it from advanced attacks as in this case.”

Will KidSAFE Help?

The COPPA regulation relates to ensuring consent to collect data for the most part, but the rule is quite specific about limiting the disclosure of information, Bower said. However, compliance may not take into account the inevitable breach scenario after which it’s too late, he added.

“Programs designed to allow vendors to meet COPPA, like kidSAFE, don’t go far enough against modern attack vectors,” Bower said. “KidSAFE requires only basic protections.”

From Bower’s perspective, the breach reminds us how important security controls are for protecting children’s data from being breached. If the data itself is not secured, it is at risk of theft irrespective of access controls and firewalls. Breach after breach has proven this beyond any doubt, he said.

“Perhaps this is a call to action to revise and enhance kidSAFE and COPPA in light of this breach,” Bower said. “The risk can be mitigated easily today. Leading vendors who truly value the security of their customer, and more importantly sensitive children’s data, can get ahead of the attack and compliance challenges in one swoop by adopting modern data-centric security to secure the data in use, in motion and in transit — not just the increasingly translucent IT perimeter.”

Via: enterprise-security-today