Geek News

Now that the 2018 Winter Olympics are over, we're now learning who was responsible for hacking the games' systems ... and the culprit won't surprise you at all. US intelligence officials speaking anonymously to the Washington Post claimed that spies at Russia's GRU agency had compromised up to 300 Olympics-related PCs as of early February, hacked South Korean routers in January and launched new malware on February 9th, the day the Olympics began. They even tried to make it look like North Korea was responsible by using North Korean internet addresses and "other tactics," according to the American sources. It's unclear if Russia was directly responsible for the chaos during the opening ceremony, which disrupted internet and broadcast systems to the point where some guests couldn't even print their tickets. However, the new evidence suggests Russia was in a prime position for such an attack. It also has the motivation: the country hasn't been sh...

Twitch is temporarily putting the brakes on its new rules for hate speech, harassment and sexual material. The livestreaming service has postponed the enforcement of new rules from February 19th to March 5th in order to "better explain some sections" in the wake of feedback. The company hasn't explained just what those sections are (we've asked Twitch to elaborate), but there's a good chance it's addressing both streamers' oversight of their viewers as well as acceptable clothing. As Polygon explained , streamers like Forsen are worried that Twitch's call for a "good faith effort" to stop viewer-instigated harassment could put them on the hook for whatever fans do, no matter how little the streamer is involved. That's not likely what Twitch intended (this is mainly to prevent streamers from encouraging or willfully ignoring harassment), but the language doesn't explicitly state that. Likewise, some streamers have complained tha...

Bungie previously promised to both tackle complaints about diminishing rewards in Destiny 2 and to be more transparent going forward, but it's apparent the studio still has some work to do. Players have discovered that the game is throttling the number of tokens it hands out for Faction Rallies (where you pledge allegiance and collect tokens in hopes of scoring a rare weapon at a discount) when you loot Lost Sectors. The company had actually patched this in as of mid-December, but it wasn't clear what had changed until the Rallies resumed weeks later, on January 16th. The company has since acknowledged the throttling and updated the December patch notes to reflect the throttling that's taking place. It had made the change after discovering that players were earning ridiculous token counts without having to fight anyone -- up to 500 an hour. The throttling is "too disruptive," however, and it's now exploring changes that would properly reward players w...

SoftBank has more than just a large stake in Uber -- it'll soon have some direct control as well. Recode sources understand that Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure is taking one of SoftBank's two slots on Uber's board of directors in the "next few weeks." The other slot is reportedly slated to go to Rajeev Misra, the leader of the SoftBank Vision Fund that took charge of the Uber deal. Neither Uber nor SoftBank has commented on the apparent scoop. Uber is still looking for both an independent chairman and three independent directors. It's not completely surprising that Claure would grab a spot on Uber's board. As the head of Sprint, he's arguably SoftBank's most prominent American executive. However, it also raises the possibility of further collaboration between Uber and one of the largest American carriers. Sprint has preloaded Uber's app in the past, and it wouldn't be out of the question to see more tie-ins or policy decisions that serv...