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Comment Re:why NSA hate? (Score 1) 125

by eigenstates (#31023934) Attached to: Google and NSA Teaming Up
They let people in the NSA look at /. Who knew?

Aside from that quip- 'the good guys' would probably want to do things in the open like the Linux community does. Sharing data and methodology and so on. I do not see a lot of that coming from the NSA. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
Social Networks

Game Distribution Platforms Becoming Annoyingly Common 349

Posted by Soulskill from the looking-at-you-games-for-windows-live dept.
The Escapist's Shamus Young recently posted an article complaining about the proliferation of distribution platforms and social networks for video games. None of the companies who make these are "quite sure how games will be sold and played ten years from now," he writes, "but they all know they want to be the ones running the community or selling the titles." Young continues, "Remember how these systems usually work: The program sets itself up to run when Windows starts, and it must be running if you want to play the game. If you follow this scheme to its logical conclusion, you'll see that the system tray of every gaming PC would eventually end up clogged with loaders, patchers, helpers, and monitors. Every publisher would have a program for serving up content, connecting players, managing digital licenses, performing patches, and (most importantly) selling stuff. Some people don't mind having 'just one more' program running in the background. But what happens when you have programs from Valve, Stardock, Activision, 2k Games, Take-Two, Codemasters, Microsoft, Eidos, and Ubisoft? Sure, you could disable them. But then when you fire the thing up to play a game, it will want to spend fifteen minutes patching itself and the game before it will let you in. And imagine how fun it would be juggling accounts for all of them."
OS X

Apple Patches Massive Holes In OS X 246

Posted by timothy from the well-it-wouldn't-be-polite-to-patch-windows dept.
Trailrunner7 writes with this snippet from ThreatPost: "Apple's first Mac OS X security update for 2010 is out, providing cover for at least 12 serious vulnerabilities. The update, rated critical, plugs security holes that could lead to code execution vulnerabilities if a Mac user is tricked into opening audio files or surfing to a rigged Web site." Hit the link for a list of the highlights among these fixes.

Comment Re:Before you get all excited... (Score 1) 300

by eigenstates (#30821866) Attached to: Open-Source JavaScript Flash Player (HTML5/SVG)

"for, say, internet video sites to work."

And that is about it- no JS or SVG needed. The thing I think the demo is shooting for is the only thing people keep saying Flash does that HTML5 doesn't- the rendering of vectors in cutesy marketing pleasing animations. Evidently it does so pretty well.

And with the notion of Workers, it looks like HTML5 might be firing towards the AIR market as well.
Businesses

Former Exec Says Electronic Arts "Is In the Wrong Business" 180

Posted by Soulskill from the inspiring-internet-outrage-is-a-bad-business-model dept.
Mitch Lasky was the executive vice president of Mobile and Online at Electronic Arts until leaving the publisher to work at an investment firm. He now has some harsh things to say about how EA has been run over the past several years, in particular criticizing the decisions of CEO John Riccitiello. Quoting: "EA is in the wrong business, with the wrong cost structure and the wrong team, but somehow they seem to think that it is going to be a smooth, two-year transition from packaged goods to digital. Think again. ... by far the greatest failure of Riccitiello's strategy has been the EA Games division. JR bet his tenure on EA's ability to 'grow their way through the transition' to digital/online with hit packaged goods titles. They honestly believed that they had a decade to make this transition (I think it's more like 2-3 years). Since the recurring-revenue sports titles were already 'booked' (i.e., fully accounted for in the Wall Street estimates) it fell to EA Games to make hits that could move the needle. It's been a very ugly scene, indeed. From Spore, to Dead Space, to Mirror's Edge, to Need for Speed: Undercover, it's been one expensive commercial disappointment for EA Games after another. Not to mention the shut-down of Pandemic, half of the justification for EA's $850MM acquisition of Bioware-Pandemic. And don't think that Dante's Inferno, or Knights of the Old Republic, is going to make it all better. It's a bankrupt strategy."
Google

Submission + - Google hacked through 0-Day PDF hole? (computerworld.com)

Submitted by eigenstates
eigenstates writes: Not much of a scoop here- "Security researchers hinted earlier today that the attacks against Google, Adobe and dozens of other major firms were conducted using malicious PDFs that exploited one or more vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader."

"These kinds of targeted attacks using PDFs have been going on for quite a while," said Hypponen. "There's nothing new technically in any of these attacks, including the ones against Google and Adobe."

The interesting things here are that both companies have know about the security breaches for weeks and that everyone, including Adobe, has known about the PDF exploits for months. Why a) Were people on secure computers still allowed to use Reader for PDF? b) Why did it take so frikking long to patch Reader?

Here decision makers, a gift: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software

Sumatra is my choice for reader.

Comment API? (Score 1) 216

by eigenstates (#30657562) Attached to: Adobe Security Chief Defends JavaScript Support

Why not just invent a new language exactly like javascript for Reader to use and then only expose the public API, which is similar to javascript. Make sure that main code base is securely sealed though so that when developer is trying to debug their script for some mystical, incomplete error message from the base classes it will be impossible. Call it something like actionPDFscript.

I am sure it will be a big hit.

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