An anonymous reader writes: Epic Games, the creators of Unreal Engine, has been a longstanding supporter of VR. They were on board way back when Oculus sparked the VR industry in 2012 with a Kickstarter that would snowball into a rekindling of consumer virtual reality. Having been one of the first major game engines to support VR headsets like the Rift, the company has been aggressively positioning Unreal Engine as the go-to tool for VR developers. Now they're taking a massive next step, showing the first look at bringing developers themselves inside of virtual reality to craft games with the full set of UE4 tools at their fingertips. That means that developers can place and manipulate objects from right within a world in progress; the video demo in the linked story is impressive.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

South Korea defence ministry says North Korea's planned long-range rocket launch could come as soon as Sunday.

It has been a while, but I finally got around to fixing a bugin my script for putting kippo text logs into a kippo-formatted MySQL database. In this case, it was a bug that caused the sensor column in the sessions table to be NULL instead of the correct value. I just used updated script to analyze 2.8M login attempts from 2015in one of my kippohoneypots. I first wrote about the script here. Ive also moved some of my tools including this script to github. You can find the latest version here. I think I may have another bug that was reported by a user a while back to fix, Ill try to get to that in the next month. In the meantime, I welcome thoughts and comments by e-mail or in the comments.

---------------
Jim Clausing, GIAC GSE #26
jclausing --at-- isc [dot] sans (dot) edu

(c) SANS Internet Storm Center. https://isc.sans.edu Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Former first lady and widow of ex-president Hafez al-Assad died in hospital in Damascus, state news agency reports.

Qbertino writes: With the ever-looming cyberpunk future in close proximity, I'm starting to wonder if it isn't time to get myself familiar with crypto currency as a means of trade. Bitcoin is all the hype, but the blockchain has flaws, in that it isn't as anonymous as one would hope for — you can track past transactions. Rumors of Bitcoin showing cracks are popping up and also there are quite a few alternatives out there. So I have some questions: Is getting into dealing with crypto currency worthwhile already? Is Bitcoin the way to go, or will it falter under wide use / become easily trackable once NSA and the likes adapt their systems to doing exactly that? What digital currency has the technical and mind-share potential to supersede bitcoin? Are there feasible cryptocurrencies that have the upsides of Bitcoin (such as a mathematical limit to their amount) but are fully anonymous in transactions? What do the economists and digi-currency nerds here have to contribute on that? What are your experiences with handling and holding cryptocurrency? And does Bitcoin own the market or is it still flexible enough for an technology upgrade?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some time last week my iPhone started prompting me frequently to re-enter my iCloud password. And then my Watch started doing the same, about once a minute — with a little tap on the wrist each time.

Obviously I did re-enter my password — and have done so a dozen or so times now — but it doesn’t seem to matter.

So I stopped wearing my Watch and have switched to a mid-sixties Hamilton that my Dad gave me. (He had gotten it as a high school graduation present.)

I’m no watch aficionado — but I do appreciate a good and attractive watch (which this is), and I appreciate even more an old watch that’s a family thing.

Here’s the thing, though: the Apple Watch contains a hundred miracles of engineering and design, surely, but serious problems with software and services can turn even the most incredible hardware into something you just sit on your desk and ignore.

Syrian foreign minister warns against ground intervention after Saudi Arabia offers to send troops to fight ISIL.

script which notifies you what xmms2 is playing

Base class for runnable unit tests using Moose introspection

Cursor Extension for Mojo::Pg

Nearly transparent SSL encapsulation for IO::Socket::INET.

character encodings in Perl

a tied scalar which executes a callback everytime it is used

character encodings in Perl