“Minecraft” players who like to download customized skins for their character avatars don’t need to worry about malware anymore, developer Mojang said Wednesday. The company said it resolved the issue by releasing a patch that removes all of the information from skin files except the actual image data itself.
The studio’s assurances came one day after cybersecurity company Avast claimed hackers were distributing malicious software via skins created in the PNG file format and uploaded to “Minecraft’s” official website. The virus could potentially reformat a person’s hard drive or destroy their backup data. It estimated nearly 50,000 “Minecraft” accounts were infected. That is a pretty low number, though, when compared to the game’s 74 million active players worldwide.
“The malicious code is largely unimpressive and can be found on sites that provide step-by-step instructions on how to create viruses with Notepad,” Avast said. “While it is fair to assume that those responsible are not professional cybercriminals, the bigger concern is why the infected skins could be legitimately uploaded to the ‘Minecraft’ website. With the malware hosted on the official ‘Minecraft’ domain, any detection triggered could be misinterpreted by users as a false positive.”
While people who upload skins could potentially slip extra code into the PNG files, Mojang points out that code can’t be run or read by the game itself. “Additionally, even if you found the code within the file and chose to run it, your antivirus software should detect and block the attempt,” it added.
“Minecraft” is one of the biggest games in the world, having sold more than 144 million copies since its launch in 2009. Microsoft bought both it and Mojang for an estimated $2.5 billion in 2014. Its next big update will add a variety of ocean-themed creatures, blocks, and items. It comes out later this year.
Once the Honeymoon effect finally wore off for the new Pacific Rim Movie, and I gradually put together in my head what the sequel’s story was, one important question rang in my head: have we run out of original plot lines? I don’t have anything against Pacific Rim Uprising, as it’s not a movie that anyone (or that I would recommend anyone) goes to watch for its gripping story; there’s about 50 years of giant robot fighting movies with original stories from Japan. However, it is something I do want to address simply because it’s growing increasingly hard for me to work out what audience Pacific Rim is beginning to cater for. The level of nods and winks towards the series’ spiritual past in anime would lead anyone to believe that it’s a nostalgia piece, designed to either bring in current fans of the mecha genre, or even to draw in new fans.
But at the same time, this movie isn’t anything like its acclaimed ‘origins’. If anyone was to watch the likes of Evangelion, the Gundam Series, or even the more recent Aldnoah Zero,based on what theysaw from Pacific Rim Uprising (despite all the emphasis put on reminding us that its roots are inherently Japanese), they’d see a huge difference. I noticed the same disparity watching it; the plot was more hastily put together, and less character development was shown – instead opting for oddly placed monologues.
The surviving characters from the previous movie weren’t developed, but left as stagnant background characters, and the plot wasn’t as much an engaging and cohesive story, but seemed more of a vessel to carry characters to the next giant robot fight. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what I could best relate this series to in relation to the background material it was supposedly derived from – until I was reminded of another robot fighting movie that has its origins in cult animated shows. I’m sure a lot of fans of Pacific Rim are going to get very, very mad at me for making this assumption, but Pacific Rim feels like the Transformers of Evangelion. I’m not saying this is a bad thing: the live action Transformers movies have their place (or at least we infer they have their place based on the profit Michael Bay makes from them), and this ‘place’ is probably not too far from the place the Pacific Rim series currently resides, but the relationship is irrefutable now I’ve seen it.
The previous movie, despite it being ‘A big dumb robot fighting movie’, was an interesting spin on the ‘monster vs robot’ fighting genre. I would have found it hard to hate Pacific Rim no matter what state it came out in simply because one of my favourite directors of all time, Guillermo Del Toro, directed it. He did a decent job with setting up the world, the characters, and the story-line in an engaging perspective of a well-known trope of international cinema, brought to a western audience. This interesting and diverse world also passes over into Pacific Rim Uprising, set several years following the events of the first film, in a world that is slowly recovering and developing from the previous ‘Kaiju’ invasion. As far as excuses to have giant mecha suits fight each other, this is probably the most engaging, if not believable, set-up. The special effects, just like the first movie, are top-notch, and equally the designs of the monsters and the Jaegers deserve commendation. The Jaegers especially seem decidedly… Japanese, while also in-keeping with their own designs and clear influences from other cultures.
John Boyega’s performance was decent, if not a bit cliched. It is refreshing for a movie to avoid ‘Americanising’ its British actors by forcing them to put on contrived American accents; a trait unfortunately found in other blockbusters (I’m looking at you, Star Wars). His supporting actress, Cailee Spaeny also performed admirably in a rather illustrious debut role in cinema. Burn Gorman and Charlie Day, like in the 2013 Original Pacific Rim, once again presented perhaps the highlights of the movie for me in their performance, even if Charlie Day’s performance is essentially Charlie Kelly from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia with a PhD in Molecular Biology. The new additions to the cast (the sci-fi high school starter pack straight out of Ender’s Game) aren’t as well written. To the credit of their actors, they perform the roles believably, but they feel like a generic excuse to have a mentor-student relationship between Boyega and Spaeny’s characters, because that’s still ‘in fashion’ right now. I think the lack of emphasis on their character development is best conveyed when one of them dies in battle, and… that’s it. One other character slaps the floor, and the rest of the cast makes an awkward shuffle, but nothing else. Their death isn’t even mentioned again in the entire movie, so I guess I’ll take that as free rein not to even count it as a spoiler. It must leave a bad taste in your mouth when even the movie you’re acting in forgets you before the end credits have started to roll. Let’s hope the pay check wasn’t forgotten.
The fight scenes are good, and the CGI is top-notch, but let’s be honest, the story isn’t really what everyone goes to watch it for these days, is it? Kind of like Transformers, but with a better plot and more Japan. It is an action movie with explosions, guns and giant aliens that fight each other and somewhere down the line, the earth is in danger for some reason. Sit back, enjoy this very entertaining movie, and bathe in the pyrotechnics, just don’t stare too closely at the bits in-between.
With a laugh Hastings Lego enthusiast and builder Tim Stevens said the most challenging part of working with his two remarkable 1.8m long castle and battle-themed creations was not so much the construction.
“It's getting them there in one piece,” he said.
Tim Stevens, Hastings, is part of local Lego building group linked to a national group preparing for the first big Lego exhibition to be staged in Hawke's Bay this weekend.
“There” is the Taradale High School venue for the inaugural Hawke's Bay Brick Show 2017 – a Lego exhibition for all ages sponsored by Napier Toyworld which will feature about 30 remarkable and imaginative creations from local Lego aficionados as well as top builders from throughout the country.
“It is the first one to be staged here and it is going to something pretty special,” Mr Stevens said.
Tim Stevens prepares one of his two major displays for this weekend's big Lego show in Napier. Photo / Warren Buckland
The show has been organised by about 30 members of the Hawke's Bay branch of Well-LUG (Wellington Lego User Group) which has branches in the greater Wellington region, Palmerston North, Wairarapa and now the Bay.
“We started the branch here about a year ago,” Mr Stevens said, adding that now being able to stage a national-scale show of the world's most popular building brick would cement it in place – and likely attract more members.
Like most, he got the Lego bug when he was only 3 or 4 and like the creations he began to build, it grew from there.
“I remember standing in a store staring at all the sets on the wall and wishing I could have everything.”
He couldn't, but has ended up with about “a thousand men and a couple of hundred horses” – he has always been drawn toward the battle themes and “castle stuff” with figures and horses.
“I'm not the best builder. Some of what people will see at the show is quite incredible.”
There will be everything from a giant train set, Minecraft and Lord of the Rings settings as well as what the club terms ‘MoC's – my own creation.
“There is no limit to what can be built and there are going to be a lot of different things to see.”
As well as the displays the show will feature a Lego play area for kids to get creative in. Lego, Mr Stevens said, was a good “hands-on” physical way for youngsters to get creative and learn design and build general motor skills in understanding art, shapes and construction.
And as he explained, it didn't take a lot of four-by-two blocks (two attachment studs on one side and four on the other) to make something different.
As the Lego sites illustrate, if you have just two of them they can be arranged in 24 different ways.
But if you have six blocks you can arrange them 915 million different ways – yep, 915 million.
“No I haven't worked that out myself,” Mr Stevens said with a laugh.
“I think they used a computer to come up with that.”
The Hawke's Bay Brick Show 2017 will be open on Saturday and Sunday at Taradale High School between 9am and 5pm with a $2 admission, and kids under 3 free.
Students at Maraekakaho School have been using two popular children's pastimes to help their community become more prepared for an emergency.
The students have been using online video game Minecraft and Lego building blocks to map their community; locating its hazards, vulnerabilities and resources that could be useful in an emergency.
This is part of a research project to trial the use of these two popular pastimes for disaster risk reduction and explore if these are effective tools for children to use.
Researchers from the University of Auckland, Auckland University of Technology (AUT) and East Coast LAB (Life at the Boundary) developed a series of lessons and activities for the students to learn more about natural hazards, vulnerabilities and resources.
Year 6 student Raiha said they had started off in the classroom “mapping our hazards and resources on really big maps using lots of stickers, pins, and string”.
The students were then divided into groups to build their maps using Minecraft and more than 10,000 Lego blocks.
“I really enjoyed playing on Minecraft to build the map of our school and learning about the hazards that have affected us in the past,” Year 5 student Jodi said.
A group of 12 students have been documenting the process on video. It will be released online once the project has been completed.
Researchers are also working with other members of the community to help develop a Community Resilience Plan with the Hawke's Bay Civil Defence emergency management group.
This is part of a two-year research project funded by the Resilience to Nature's Challenge strand of the National Science Challenge.
For more information visit: www.eastcoastlab.org.nz/our-science/our-projects/participatory-technology/
Where there was once a derelict market in the Sunny Hill neighborhood of Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, now sits a skate park. Rollerblades, skateboards, and BMX bikes make a constant clatter as kids and teens roll up and down the half-pipes, quarter-pipes, and ramps. The popular public space is very much a brick-and-mortar endeavor, but it owes its existence to Minecraft, whose parent company was bought by Microsoft in 2014. In the process, the Redmond, Wash., company absorbed an innovative social project involving the United Nations.
The $2.5-billion acquisition made waves in the video game industry as Microsoft moved in to scoop up the immensely popular world-building platform from Swedish company Mojang. Despite initial fears in the rabid Minecraft community, the game continued to grow in popularity and spun off a deeply discounted education version for schools.
The pedagogical potential is precisely what captured the attention of Deirdre Quarnstrom, who was intimately involved with the acquisition as chief of staff to Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft Xbox. She is now the general manager of Minecraft Education, and an early booster of one of Mojang’s Minecraft side projects: Block by Block.
Deirdre Quarnstrom, Director of Minecraft: Education Edition demonstrates the new Code Builder feature at the Microsoft Education event at Center 415 on Tuesday, May 2, 2017, in New York. (Andrew Kelly/AP Images for Microsoft)
The $2.5-billion acquisition made waves in the video game industry as Microsoft moved in to scoop up the immensely popular world-building platform from Swedish company Mojang. Despite initial fearsin the rabid Minecraft community, the game continued to grow in popularity and spun off a deeply discounted education versionfor schools.
“It’s somewhat unique in the gaming industry to have a very popular videogame reaching outside the entertainment space and being involved in things like urban planning,” she told GeekWire.
In 2012, before the acquisition, a Swedish architect and the parent of a Minecraft devotee came to Mojang with an idea. What if Minecraft, with its digital Lego-like tools making for easy mock ups of buildings, were used in an urban design workshop with everyday people? Architect software like Google Sketchup or AutoCAD is far too sophisticated for laypeople, but they are the ones whose input urban planners are always seeking when it comes to new designs for infrastructure, whether a new mass transit station or a proposed public park.
Minecraft-as-civic-participation went so well in Sweden that the architect brokered an introduction between Mojang and UN-Habitat, the United Nations lead agency for cities. The result was a memorandum of understanding whereby Mojang would help UN-Habitat deploy Minecraft in cities where the agency was coordinating the renovation or creation of public spaces. They called it Block by Block.
“We were amazed that people were interested in using a video game for something that felt so serious,” Mojang COO Vu Bui told GeekWire.
“In project after project I am amazed how quickly people can learn the tool and start expressing themselves,” UN-Habitat’s Pontus Westerberg told GeekWire. “Even people with no previous computer experience can pick it up in half a day or less. We’ve worked with people from slums all over the world. It’s a great empowering experience for them.”
While anyone can learn Minecraft — the team was impressed that older Haitian men redesigned their fishing docks with no prior computer experience — tech-savvy youth have a natural advantage. That gives them a more powerful voice compared to traditional public input processes. “If we have a couple of teens paired with adults in their 30s or 40s, usually the one sitting at the keyboard holding the mouse is one of the young ones,” Bui explained.
He recalled one of the Haiti projects as particularly empowering for young women, where teenage girls stood up at the public meeting to defend their proposal. “We push that their must be youth and equal gender representation,” Bui said. “We don’t want our workshops to be middle-aged men.”
Once Microsoft took over, the tech giant shepherded the ad-hoc arrangement between Mojang and UN-Habitat into a formally incorporated 501(c)3 non-profit, the Block by Block Foundation. Both Quarnstrom and Bui sit on the board of the foundation, which now operates with a roughly $2 million annual budget funded by royalties from Minecraft merchandise sales, settlements from Minecraft licensing disputes, and individual donations — Microsoft employees chief among them.
Quarnstrom is a hands-on board member, visiting sites around the world, including the Pristina skatepark, to personally vet projects before signing off on the roughly $100,000 that Block by Block contributes in licenses and funds for consultants to run the public meetings.
In Anaheim, she watched the children of immigrant workers build a vision for a neighborhood park in two hours. In Hanoi, she listened to teenage girls articulate a vision for better lighting on their route to school.
“It’s pretty eye-opening to the architects, landscape architects, and city planners to see how valuable and enthusiastic the input is from the community,” she said. “Even in the developed world when running a public input process, it’s hard to make the connection with blueprints, but when you provide them with a 3D virtual model of the space [the audience] becomes much more engaged.”
The journey from the virtual world to the real world sometimes leaves Quarnstrom bewildered at Minecraft’s versatility. “Sometimes it feels a little surreal to me when I’m on the phone with three or four city planners as the representative of a video game,” she said. “But it’s because the game does have an impact.”
Kids who have never experienced the online gaming platform Minecraft can apply for a free summer camp called Minecraft 101. The camp, which will be held at Montana State University, is for youth who will enter grades 4 through 7 this fall.
Minecraft is known as a fun and interactive platform that increases creativity, critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Students will be led through hands-on design challenges that allow them to practice spatial skills while they craft their own online worlds and explore science, technology, engineering and math.
Minecraft 101 is free for accepted applicants. However, no travel funds or overnight lodging is provided. The camp lasts from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on two consecutive days.
Two identical sessions will be offered on Aug. 14-15 and Aug. 16-17. Students can indicate which session is better, but instructors cannot guarantee placement in a specific session.
The camp is hosted by the MSU departments of education, electrical and computer engineering, and physics; and the Montana Engineering Education Research Center (MEERC), with funding from the National Science Foundation. To download an application, visit MSU Academic Technology and Outreach at ato.montana.edu/minecraft. The deadline to apply is Friday, May 11.
For more information, contact Nicole Soll with MSU Continuing, Professional and Lifelong Learning atNicole.soll1@montana.edu or 406-994-6550.
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