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Hot Topic’s Massive Data Breach, VMWare’s Trust Breach, and GOG’s Games
Data breaches! Trust breaches! And where to find all the best old video games, all in one email. This one. Right here.
It’s November 18th—61 years ago today the touch-tone phone was invented. No more of those circular dials! It’s a heavy news week so let’s not yap too much up top, and let’s get down to business:
Another Week, Another VMware/Broadcom Story
Love VMware? Awesome. A lot of you do. Hate Broadcom? You’re not alone. That’s why Broadcom is trying to stop the mass user exodus by applying a new tier to their pricing system that might as well be called “Heyyyy, C’mon Guyssss! Come Back!”.
That’s because Broadcom nixed perpetual licenses and implemented a (DEEP YAWN) subscription model—which caused many to rethink their relationship with VMware, as costs began to skyrocket.
This new tier is called (drum roll please) vSphere Enterprise Plus. This brings the full tier list, from smallest to largest, to 4 different options: vSphere Standard, vSphere Enterprise Plus, vSphere Foundation, and their flagship product… VMware Cloud Foundation.
Will this approach work? Maybe. Ars Technica notes that many have switched to competitor’s products, namely Microsoft’s Hyper-V. "This new option will find many customers where they are—and in my opinion make them rethink any migration options," says Rick Vanover, Veeam's product strategy VP.
1 in 5 Workers Are Monitored by Bosses
We’re not suggesting total and complete anarchy (that’s for our sister online community Molotovs-R-Us to decide), but a recent report from Software Finder found that 1 in 5 workers are being surveilled by their bosses.
As you can imagine, this isn’t popular.
73% of those who are being tracked are more likely to distrust their employer.
36% of monitored employees are actively job hunting - double the rate (18%) of untracked workers.
A revealing 17% of tracked employees admit to deploying "mouse jigglers” (incredible name) to get around programs that track activity.
The bigger the company, the more likely the surveillance: 25% of large firms, 23% at medium companies, 18% at small companies, and 8% at “micro-firms”.
Despite these red flags, 50% of managers using tracking software plan to expand their surveillance infrastructure in the coming year. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is attempting to implement legislature that protects worker’s privacy rights. However, it may be all bark and no bite, as the fight hasn’t gone much further than a sternly worded warning.
Hot Topic Leaks Personal Data of 350 Million Customers: Largest Breach in Retail History
Hot Topic—aka your local mall’s finest purveyors of My Chemical Romance swag, Funkopop figurines, and XXL Nightmare Before Christmas t-shirts—has been the subject of a data leak that affects 350 million Americans. Email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, card expiry dates and other partial credit card data was all leaked.
It appears that a hacker named “Satanic” is taking responsibility for it, after a user by that name posted on BreachForums asking a ransom of $100,000 from Hot Topic or $20,000 to purchase the info outright. “Satanic” recently lowered the price to a measly $3,500.
While this is devastating news to the millions of Americans who enjoy pants with 30 zippers on them and misremembered nostalgia from the late 1990s, it is perhaps more devastating that “Satanic” appears to have used a cheap malware program to steal credentials to access Hot Topic’s cloud environments, according to Hudson Rock.
GOG’s Got Your Games
PC gaming platform GOG has a pretty interesting goal: to save video games from extinction! Before you start imagining a Jurassic Park-esque theme park full of the likes of Q-Bert and the kid from Bully, did you know that 87% of all video games released before 2010 are no longer able to be played? This harrowing fate is exactly what GOG is trying to save us from.
Their aptly named Preservation Program just launched with 100 games including Diablo and Resident Evil 1, 2, and 3 (Editor’s note: RE4 is where its at). Since so many games are never updated by their publishers after release, it often means that they are stuck on the systems they were designed for on launch. On top of that, entire storefronts are often erased: try buying a game for the WiiU in 2024 and you’ll see what we mean.
It’s worth taking a look at, as this goes beyond a simple emulation project and appears to be almost an archeological way of cataloguing older games. Thank GOG. GOG is good. Praise be unto GOG.
👨💻 Job Opportunities
CVS is looking for a software engineer. But what they really need is someone to to make those CVS receipts shorter! Wakka wakka. In any case: Python, JavaScript, SQL, and Typescript knowledge are a huge plus, as is experience with MongoDB which sounds like an obscure Jamaican rapper.
It’s always interesting when a “business-business” job comes through here. CherryRoad own 50+ newspapers across America and they’re looking for an Oracle Cloud consultant! And the position requires traveling 25% of the time, too. Awesome job for anyone who still reads the papers or fancies themselves a miniature, digital William Randolph Hearst.
Salesforce—aka the be-all, end-all of sales pipelines—is looking for a strong candidate to be their Lead Network Engineer. This is a real “white whale” job for someone who is a veritable Swiss Army Knife of computer languages, as the position requires strong knowledge of “TCP/IP networking, architecture and core technologies, such as BGP, OSPF, ISIS, DNS, HTTP, etc.” We haven’t even heard of the programming language “etc”!
🛩 Industry Moves
Finland’s Nokia — once the world’s premier cellphone maker, now merely just the pride of Espoo — has bought Rapid, owner of the world’s largest API hub and marketplace. No financial information was released about the deal, but this “selling shovels in a goldrush” approach is a welcome departure from their “why aren’t we Apple?” mindset of the last 20 years.
Sweden brings a lot to the table—with IKEA, it actually brings the table, too—when it comes to successful tech startups. Klarna was once leading the pack but stumbled due to a (paraphrasing here) weird couple of quarters, bookended by the war in Ukraine and investment anxiety in the months that followed. Readying their American IPO, the company was once valued at $45.6B just a few years ago is now today valued at a more realistic $14.6B.
Are you a car? Huge congrats if you are and you’re reading this. Even bigger congrats if you’re a Rivian car, as your maker has just signed a massive $5.8B deal with Volkswagen to produce better software for more affordable electric vehicles; VW’s own EV software has been, as the German’s say, “irgendwie scheiße”. Rivian’s tech will help underpin offerings for Audi, Porsche, and Scout also, which are all under the VW group umbrella.
💽 Data Upload
Did you learn everything you hoped to? We hope so.
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