XenoPhage - Slashdot User

Ubisoft Working On a New Anti-Piracy Tool 377

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday July 28, 2009 @06:30AM from the surely-to-be-welcomed-with-open-arms dept.

Ubisoft recently revealed that their game sales have seen a 50% drop over the past quarter, blaming the overall market slowdown and piracy (particularly on the DS) for the low numbers. They also announced that four of their games, including Splinter Cell: Conviction and Red Steel 2, would be delayed until 2010. The company's CEO, Yves Guillemot, now says they are working on a new anti-piracy tool that should be ready by the end of 2009. He didn't offer any details about how it would be implemented.

Comment Re:Queue "Piracy" reasoning (Score 1) 310

by XenoPhage on Friday July 17, 2009 @11:39AM (#28730617) Attached to: US Videogame Sales Have Biggest Drop In 9 Years

I completely agree, thus my post.. Typically these types of reports turn into blamefests about piracy and those damn kids and whatnot.. In reality, the economy sucks and there just aren't that many truly decent games coming out.

I miss the days of shareware when you could try a game before buying it. Nowadays, you spend $40-$60 on a new game for your shiny console and if you hate it, you're pretty much screwed. Most places have a no exchange policy, so the only real alternative is to sell it used. GameStop will be happy to give you $10 for that $60 game you bought 5 minutes ago...

In the end, I find myself having a problem justifying buying any game I haven't directly played. So, I end up not buying any. This is probably a very good thing for my wallet, but not such a great thing for game developers. :)

Comment Re:It's "CUE" you dumbfuck (Score 2, Funny) 310

by XenoPhage on Friday July 17, 2009 @11:24AM (#28730401) Attached to: US Videogame Sales Have Biggest Drop In 9 Years

Stop trying so hard. The word with the obvious spelling is the right choice.

captcha: souped

Sorry to offend your sensibilities. I blame way too much network tuning and programming.

Comment Queue "Piracy" reasoning (Score 3, Insightful) 310

by XenoPhage on Friday July 17, 2009 @11:12AM (#28730177) Attached to: US Videogame Sales Have Biggest Drop In 9 Years

Watch.. this will turn into a big "See? Piracy is ruining the gaming business" blamefest... It's easier to blame piracy rather than crappy game design.. Of course, I'm sure the economy is playing a part as well. Although, from what I've read, people are reluctant to give up their hobbies, even in the face of a bad economy.

Remote Kill Flags Surface In Kindle 630

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday May 14, 2009 @10:14AM from the because-they-can dept.

PL/SQL Guy writes "The Kindle has a number of 'remote kill' flags built in to the hardware that, among other things, allow the text-to-speech function to be disabled at any time on a book-by-book basis. 'Beginning yesterday, Random House Publishers began to disable text-to-speech remotely. The TTS function has apparently been remotely disabled in over 40 works so far.' But what no one at Amazon will discuss is what other flags are lurking in the Kindle format: is there a 'read only once' flag? A 'no turning the pages backwards' flag?"

Comment Re:Spacewalk (Score 1) 209

by XenoPhage on Monday April 27, 2009 @08:32AM (#27728523) Attached to: Cross-Distro Remote Package Administration?

Even with Oracle, it's still a decent solution and works fairly well. I've had it up and running since the 0.1 release.

It has its problems, not least of which is the absolute resource hog that Oracle is, but it's better than having to log into every machine when an update comes out.

Hawking Expecting To Make Full Recovery 103

Posted by timothy on Tuesday April 21, 2009 @03:02PM from the buck-up-little-camper dept.

explosivejared writes "Yesterday we discussed the medical scare that physicist Stephen Hawking was going through. Happily, his website has posted a succinct statement that he is being kept for observation, but he is comfortable and expecting a full recovery."

Vista Post-SP2 Is the Safest OS On the Planet 1010

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday April 14, 2009 @05:18PM from the color-me-skeptical dept.

pkluss noted Kevin Turner, COO of Microsoft making the proclamation that "Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we've ever built. It's also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It's the safest and most secure OS on the planet today."

Opera Launches Facial Gesture Capability 199

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday April 01, 2009 @08:42AM from the because-they-can dept.

cstrep writes "Eight years ago, Opera introduced Mouse Gestures as a way to speed up your interaction with the browser, and focus on what's important: Content. In 2005, Voice Navigation was introduced, and more recently we've worked with Nintendo to create a browser that takes full advantage of the 'Wiimote' and later, the touchscreen in the DSi. Today Opera introduces Face Gestures, a revolutionary technology designed to make interacting with Opera easier on computers with cameras. Face Gestures lets you perform frequent browsing operations with natural and easy to make face gestures. By using an internal technology dubbed 'Face Observation Opera Language,' we are able to recognize pre-determined facial expressions and match them to commands on the Opera browser."

Internet-Caused Mistrials Are On the Rise 414

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday March 18, 2009 @10:15AM from the jurors-with-blackberrys dept.

The NYTimes is running a tip-of-the-iceberg story about how the age of Google is resulting in more mistrials as the traditional rules of evidence, honed over many centuries, collide with the always-on Internet. Especially when jurors carry the always-on Internet in their pockets. (We discussed one such case recently.) "The use of BlackBerrys and iPhones by jurors gathering and sending out information about cases is wreaking havoc on trials around the country, upending deliberations and infuriating judges. ... Jurors are not supposed to seek information outside of the courtroom. They are required to reach a verdict based on only the facts the judge has decided are admissible, and they are not supposed to see evidence that has been excluded as prejudicial. But now, using their cellphones, they can look up the name of a defendant on the Web or examine an intersection using Google Maps, violating the legal system's complex rules of evidence."

Comment Took down the links, not the content.. (Score 5, Informative) 273

by XenoPhage on Monday March 09, 2009 @09:05AM (#27120105) Attached to: Adobe's ADEPT DRM Broken

There is of course, Google Cache ...

Or, you can just get it from pastebin:

http://pastebin.com/f1cb3663c

and

http://pastebin.com/f26972321

Comment don't be a dick, in other words (Score 2, Insightful) 158

by CleverNickName on Saturday February 28, 2009 @01:39PM (#27023693) Attached to: Doctorow Suggests Simple EULA Solution

This is why my motto (and fundamental rule for life) is Don't be a dick: it's simple to understand, and reasonable people can agree on what it means.

Apple's Mac OS X Update Breaks Perl 264

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @11:23AM from the how-will-i-regex-now dept.

mir writes "It looks like if you use CPAN to install modules, Apple's latest security update might just have broken your Perl. According to Tatsuhiko Miyagawa 'The Security Update brings (old) IO.bundle with version 1.22 but your IO.pm has been updated to the latest 1.23 on CPAN shell. (But hey, 1.23 was released in 2006...Why do you bring that ancient version back, Apple!?)'."

Submission + - Conficker/Downadup mitigation

Submitted by

XenoPhage

on Friday January 23, 2009 @01:20PM

XenoPhage writes: "I'm working on possible mitigation scenarios for a potential Conficker/Downadup outbreak. One of the ideas we have is to "poison" our own DNS caches, effectively redirecting any infected clients to a local server. The thought is that this would help identify infected systems as well as prevent them from receiving updated instructions from command and control. The question is, however, how to do this, as well as what possible side effects will we encounter. Is this method absolutely taboo and should be avoided at all costs, or is this a valid method of detection/mitigation?"

Comment Re:Seriously... (Score 1) 693

by XenoPhage on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @10:06AM (#26432183) Attached to: iTunes DRM-Free Files Contain Personal Info

I don't see the problem. I didn't want them to remove DRM so I could ignore the copyright on the music, I wanted them to remove it so I could use it on any device I wanted to listen to it on. They did that; now I can, as far as I'm concerned, we're all good now.

I completely agree. Since the announcement of this change, I have seriously considered purchasing digital music via itunes rather than buying CDs. The way I see it, if I can choose the songs I want rather than getting stuck with an entire CD, I'm more likely to buy more music. It's definitely a win for the music industry this way.

Presumably, without the DRM, I can convert these files to the format of my choice? Though I don't think I'll have to as I'm pretty sure rockbox plays AAC...

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