Two global issues will help shape people’s memories of this time in history – Covid-19 and the increased use of the internet by malign actors to disrupt society. It’s disturbing that these challenges have now merged as cyberattacks are being used to disrupt health care organizations fighting the pandemic. We think these attacks are unconscionable and should be condemned by all civilized society. Today, we’re sharing more about the attacks we’ve seen most recently and are urging governments to act.

In recent months, we’ve detected cyberattacks from three nation-state actors targeting seven prominent companies directly involved in researching vaccines and treatments for Covid-19. The targets include leading pharmaceutical companies and vaccine researchers in Canada, France, India, South Korea and the United States. The attacks came from Strontium, an actor originating from Russia, and two actors originating from North Korea that we call Zinc and Cerium.

Among the targets, the majority are vaccine makers that have Covid-19 vaccines in various stages of clinical trials. One is a clinical research organization involved in trials, and one has developed a Covid-19 test. Multiple organizations targeted have contracts with or investments from government agencies from various democratic countries for Covid-19 related work.

Strontium continues to use password spray and brute force login attempts to steal login credentials. These are attacks that aim to break into people’s accounts using thousands or millions of rapid attempts. Zinc has primarily used spear-phishing lures for credential theft, sending messages with fabricated job descriptions pretending to be recruiters. Cerium engaged in spear-phishing email lures using Covid-19 themes while masquerading as World Health Organization representatives. The majority of these attacks were blocked by security protections built into our products. We’ve notified all organizations targeted, and where attacks have been successful, we’ve offered help.

These are just among the most recent attacks on those combating Covid-19. Cyberattacks targeting the health care sector and taking advantage of the pandemic are not new. Attackers recently used ransomware attacks to target hospitals and healthcare organizations across the United States. Earlier in the pandemic, attacks targeted Brno University Hospital in the Czech Republic, Paris’s hospital system, the computer systems of Spain’s hospitals, hospitals in Thailand, medical clinics in the U.S. state of Texas, a health care agency in the U.S. state of Illinois and even international bodies such as the World Health Organization. In Germany, we recently saw the resulting threat to human health become tragic reality when a woman in Dusseldorf reportedly became the first known death as a result of a cyberattack on a hospital.

Today, Microsoft’s president Brad Smith is participating in the Paris Peace Forum where he will urge governments to do more. Microsoft is calling on the world’s leaders to affirm that international law protects health care facilities and to take action to enforce the law. We believe the law should be enforced not just when attacks originate from government agencies but also when they originate from criminal groups that governments enable to operate – or even facilitate – within their borders. This is criminal activity that cannot be tolerated.

The good news is that we’re not alone. Our voice at Microsoft is just one of many speaking up from the multi-stakeholder coalition that will be needed to make progress. In today’s virtual Paris Peace Forum event addressing an audience of international leaders, Brad will discuss these issues with France’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves le Drian, Ambassador Guilherme de Aguiar Patriota of Brazil and Ambassador Jürg Lauber of Switzerland. Ambassador Patriota is chair of the UN’s Group of Governmental Experts, and Ambassador Lauber is chair of the UN’s Open-Ended Working Group – both important bodies in determining the future of cyberspace.

In the leadup to this year’s Paris Peace Forum, more than 65 health care-related organizations have joined the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace. They include organizations like Merck working on vaccines, top hospitals like Hospital Metropolitano in Ecuador, and government health institutes like Poland’s National Institute of Public Health. There is no question the attacks we’ve seen in recent months are creating energy for action across the health sector. The Paris Call remains the largest multi-stakeholder coalition addressing these issues, and its first principle is the prevention of malicious cyber activities that threaten indiscriminate or systemic harm to people and critical infrastructure.

In May, a 136-strong group of the world’s most prominent international law experts, in what has become known as the Oxford Process, issued a statement making it clear that international law protects medical facilities at all times. In August, the Oxford Process issued a second statement emphasizing that organizations that research, manufacture and distribute of Covid-19 vaccines are also protected.

Earlier this year, the CyberPeace Institute and International Committee of the Red Cross led an effort by 40 international leaders calling on governments to stop the attacks on healthcare. They included former secretary of state Madeline Albright, Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town Desmond Tutu, former Member of the European Parliament Marietje Schaake and former Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon among many others.

Organizations are also taking steps to protect themselves. In April, we announced that we were making AccountGuard, our threat notification service, available to health care and human rights organizations working on Covid-19. Since then 195 of these organizations have enrolled in the service and we now protect 1.7 million email accounts for health care-related groups. Any health care-related organizations that wish to enroll can do so here.

At a time when the world is united in wanting an end to the pandemic and anxiously awaiting the development of a safe and effective vaccine for Covid-19, it is essential for world leaders to unite around the security of our health care institutions and enforce the law against cyberattacks targeting those who endeavor to help us all. You can learn more about what Microsoft is doing to advance cybersecurity here.

Tags: COVID-19, cyberattacks, cybersecurity, Microsoft AccountGuard

Indie publishers QubicGames, Klabater and All In! Games have teamed up to offer a special Black Friday sale on the Nintendo Switch eShop.

Several games will be discounted over the next couple of weeks, with the sale starting today and ending on 30th November. You can find all of the discounts on a new webpage dedicated to the sale here, but we’ve got a list of the highlights for you below:

· DEX – $19.99 to $7.99 USD (60% off)

· Metamorphosis – $24.99 to $9.99 (60% off)

· Red Wings Aces of the Sky – $19.99 to $4.99 (75% off)

· We. The Revolution – $19.99 to $4.99 (75% off)

· Help Will Come Tomorrow – $19.99 to $3.99 (80% off)

· Big Pharma – $29.99 to $5.89 (80% off)

· Tharsis – $11.99 to $4.79 (60% off)

· Hyperparasite – $17.99 to $3.59 (80% off)

· Blazing Beaks – 14.99$ to 1.99 (86% off)

If you visit the link, you’ll notice that you can also take part in competitions to win free games and eShop vouchers, as well as a custom-painted Switch console. The sale and competitions are live for residents in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

Enjoy!

© Nintendo Life

It varies from person to person, of course, but your favourite console generation is often the one you played most in childhood — in that impressionable pre-to-early teen sweet spot where a foundation of gaming memories are formed. That’s when you play the classics you return to later in life for the sheer pleasure of seeing old friends and blasting though a comfortingly familiar game using muscle memory. For many of us, the 16-bit era cemented our love for video games, and later this month the Super Famicom turns 25.

With the anniversary fast approaching, we’d like your help to assemble the top 50 Super NES games ever. We recently asked asked you to rank the top 50 Wii games, and the ordering of this list will be similarly fluid, dictated by the games’ User Ratings in the Nintendo Life Games database and therefore subject to change even after publication. Once an entry reaches a minimum number of ratings, it becomes eligible for our Top 50 SNES games list.

Below you’ll find a partial list of the SNES library. Feel free to let us know in the comments anything missing that you’d like to rate — preferably games you think could make the top 50 — and we’ll do our best to accommodate additions. To rate any title, simply scroll through the alphabetical list to find the game you want (or type the title into the search bar at the top to save your scrolling finger), click the star to bring up a rating of 1-10, and click the score you feel it deserves — job done! If you’ve previously rated your SNES games, just put your feet up; those scores are already logged. And if you need a reminder on a particular game, feel free to click the game title and check out our vintage reviews and screenshots.

We’ll publish the results around the anniversary, but in the meantime happy rating!

Thank you for rating your favourites (or otherwise). Feel free to discuss your favourite Super Nintendo games below, and we’ll reveal the results next week.

We’ve already compiled the Best 3DS games, the Best Game Boy games, the Best GameCube games, the Best Nintendo DS games and the Best N64 games, so check out those lists if you can’t get enough of Nintendo’s copious back catalogue. If you’re after something less retro and more modern, we’ve also got the Best Switch games (so far) available for your perusal.

Users of MFi heading aids are reporting problems using their audio devices with the iPhone 12, with some also experiencing static issues along with difficulty in pairing them with the new smartphones.

Launching later this month on Switch is Tiny World Racing, a cute little top-down racer that may well provide some cost-efficient multiplayer fun.

The game has players blasting their way through a variety of environments in 20 tracks across five different tournaments. You’ll come up against settings like crumbling castles and volcanic islands, either alone in a Tournament mode or with friends in local split-screen multiplayer.

Features:
– Tournament Mode – Compete with your opponents across 4 tracks to win the gold, silver or bronze cup
– Quick Race – Dive into your favourite track without the pressure of a whole tournament
– Local Multiplayer – Grab a few friends and battle it out from the comfort of your couch

It launches on 27th November and will be priced at just £2.69 / $3.99. A launch discount will lower this to £1.34 / $1.99, so early buyers will be able to jump in for a very low price indeed.

What do you think? Worth a go for the price? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.

The Custom Translator journey to be on the leading edge of machine translation technology continues.

In early August 2020, we started our Custom Translator upgrade from Long Short-Term Memory (aka LSTM) based neural machine translation architecture (or V1) to our Microsoft Translator’s state-of-the-art Transformer based architecture (or V2). V2 is the same translation architecture which powers the standard uncustomized Translator API, as well as translation in Microsoft Office 365, Speech, Bing.com/translator, Edge, and more.

The August release enabled customers to use the dictionary (phrase or sentence) document type to build custom models on top of the V2 platform for a quick translation quality improvement over the V1 platform.

Today, Custom Translator completed the full V2 platform upgrade to deliver an even bigger translation quality gain than before. Customers can now build custom models with all document types (Training, Testing, Tuning, Phrase Dictionary and Sentence Dictionary) using full text documents, like Office documents, PDFs, HTML and plain text.

With this release, enterprises, small and medium sized businesses, app developers, and language service providers can build advanced custom neural translation systems that respect their defined business terminology and seamlessly integrate those systems into existing or new applications, workflows, and websites to attract customers and grow the business.

We put every new baseline language model through a rigorous human evaluation process to ensure the translation quality continues to meet high standards on generic input across all domains. However, with custom trained specialized translation systems, customers can achieve much higher adherence to the domain-specific terminology and style by training a custom translation system on previously translated, in-domain documents. These previously translated documents allow Custom Translator to learn the preferred translations in context, so Translator can apply these terms and phrases when the context calls for it, and produce a fluent translation in the target language, respecting the context-dependent grammar of the target language.

Benefits of the upgrade

We use BLEU score (a standard way in the research community) to measure the translation quality of a newly trained baseline model. A one or two BLEU point gain is a worthy achievement. The Custom Translator V2 platform upgrade will deliver significant improvements when compared to the previous V1 platform. The bar chart below depicts the translation quality BLEU score improvement for some domains and the impact of training dataset size.

Sample domains translation quality BLEU score when using standard Translator, Custom Translator V1, and Custom Translator V2.
Training dataset size in thousands (‘auto-28k’ means 28,000 parallel sentences for the automotive domain)

It is important to note that actual quality improvement is dependent upon customer data quality, training dataset size, and domain coverage.

“We’re hoping that translation through a neural network will not only boost quality and speed, but also offer advances in the evaluation of big data,” said Nikolas Meyer-Aun, Head of Quality and Supplier Management for Languages at Volkswagen AG

Custom Translator will offer FREE upgrade to V2. You can retrain one model per project in a workspace to the V2 platform at no charge. When you view a project, you should see a message if you still have free upgrade credit for that project. The offer starts today and ends on January 31, 2021. After January 31, 2021, normal training charges apply for each retraining.

You can learn more about the upgrade to version 2 in the FAQ below.

FAQ

1. What are you releasing in V2?
   We are releasing a Custom Translator platform upgrade (V2) to deliver significant translation quality improvements using Microsoft’s state-of-the-art neural machine translation architecture. The user experience remains the same as in V1. There is nothing new to learn, just better translations. For a quick refresher, please watch this Quick-Start video.
2. What is the benefit of upgrading a currently deployed model to the V2 platform?
   Significantly improved translation quality; the Custom Translator V2 platform upgrade will deliver significant improvement over standard Translator and the previous V1 platform. The bar chart above shows the translation quality BLEU scores for some common domains and the impact of training dataset size.
3. How do I use my FREE upgrade to V2 credit?
   When you view a project details, a free credit message becomes visible (see images below) and will continue to be visible until you either successfully retrain a model or the offer ends on January 31, 2021.
   

   

   

   

4. How do I upgrade my deployed (or undeployed) custom models to the V2 platform?
   If you have a deployed or undeployed dictionary-only model that was retrained after August 3, 2020, it has already been upgraded to the V2 platform. Otherwise, you should launch a new model training. Once the new model is successfully trained, the “Swap” button will be visible. Click “Swap” to deploy the new model. Note: “Swap” button enables no-downtime deployment. That is, all translation requests will continue to be served by the previous model until the new model is deployed and functional, then the new model will serve new translation requests and the previous model will be undeployed.
5. Can I continue to re-deploy V1 custom models after the V2 platform upgrade?
   Yes. We understand there may be reasons customers would want to continue using models trained on the V1 platform. V1 models can run on the V2 platform. In the future, V1 models will not be re-deployable. Note: Once you retrain a V1 model, the new model will be on the V2 platform. The “Model” tab will show all new (V2) and previous (V1) models.
6. I’m new to customizing translations, how do I get started using Custom Translator?
   To build a custom model, watch the Quick-Start video above and refer to the documentation on docs.microsoft.com: https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/cognitive-services/translator/custom-translator/overview

What you can do with Microsoft Custom Translator

Build custom models with your domain specific terminology and translate real-time using the Microsoft Translator API.

Use Microsoft Custom Translator with your translation solutions to help globalize your business and improve customer interactions.

For more information on Microsoft Translator solutions please visit: https://www.microsoft.com/translator/business.