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New Ghostbusters Video Game in the Works 204

Posted by Zonk from the for-real-this-time dept.
Next month's issue of Game Informer has a big, familiar symbol on its cover. On their website, they tease the announcement of a brand-new Ghostbusters video game. This isn't some knock-off, either: "Harold Ramis, Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd are getting back together and revisiting their roles to make a sequel to Ghostbusters 1 and 2 - in video-game form, and we've got the first details. Both Aykroyd and Ramis are teaming up for scriptwriting duties and are going far beyond just the typical licensed add-your-voice-to-the-game-you-had-nothing-to-do-with formula" Commentary on the announcement provided by Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
Google

Google Honors Veterans Day, Finally 693

Posted by kdawson from the that-wasn't-so-hard-was-it dept.
theodp writes "It took nearly a decade, but Google has done a turnabout and is honoring Veterans Day with a special holiday design for its famous logo. Users who log onto Google's home page are greeted with three World War I-era helmets capping the letters 'o' and 'e' in Google's name. The decoration is a marked departure for the company, which has come under fire from veterans' groups for ignoring American holidays such as Veterans Day and Memorial Day since Google's inception in 1999."
The Courts

Hans Reiser Interview on ABC's 20/20 482

Posted by CmdrTaco from the murder-makes-linux-mainstream dept.
baegucb_18706 noted that ABCs 20/20 has a lengthy article on the saga of the Hans Reiser murder trial. I'm not sure if this article provided any information that you might not have known if you read the earlier wired interview, but it's still a really strange story.
The Media

Time Magazine Person of the Year — It's You 244

Posted by kdawson from the who-me? dept.
Thib writes to point out that Time Magazine has picked you — or us, or the Internet — as Person of the Year because you control the Information Age. From the article: "But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes."
Media

Azureus' HD Videos Attempt To Trump YouTube 117

Posted by Zonk from the one-upsmanship dept.
tedgyz writes "Wired has an article describing a high definition video service from Azureus. It looks like many of the highlights of our previous discussion about service commercialization are panning out. The new Zudeo site, made by the masterminds behind the bittorrent service, aims to be a platform for movie-makers and professionals. Will distancing itself from the homespun efforts of YouTube prove successful, or lead to the service being ignored?" From the article: "With high-definition video cameras available for less than $1,000, and with the rapid adoption HDTVs in the home, it's clear that high-definition entertainment has a future. But the visual clarity of internet video tends to be less than stellar, mostly because the bandwidth costs associated with serving large, high-quality video files is prohibitively expensive. However, the BitTorrent protocol enables content distributors like Azureus to share large files using much less bandwidth."

Bomb Explodes At PayPal Headquarters 551

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the disgruntled-customers dept.
Pooua writes to tell us that an explosive device left outside of PayPal headquarters exploded last night. The explosion was powerful enough to knock out one of their plate glass windows but thankfully that was the only casualty of the blast. Perhaps they should have offered employee protection instead?

MySpace Accounts Compromised By Phishers 86

Posted by kdawson from the even-the-wary-beware dept.
An anonymous reader writes, "Netcraft has discovered that the social networking site MySpace appears to have been compromised by phishers who have presented a spoof login form on the main site. This modified login form submits the victim's username and password to a remote server hosted in France." From the article: "The hackers have engineered a fake login form on MySpace's own web site. Netcraft has notified MySpace of the issue, although it currently remains live. Because the fraudulent login page is hosted on MySpace's own servers and does not exhibit any signs of external content, such as cross-site scripting or open redirects, it is convincing and even security-conscious users are at risk of becoming victims. The attack is launched from a profile page, where the username is login_home_index_html, and uses specially-crafted HTML in order to hide the genuine MySpace content from the page and instead display its own login form." This Washington Post story from a few months back explains what's in it for the phishers.

Why Microsoft's Zune Scares Apple to the Core 574

Posted by Zonk from the core-apple-get-it-wakka-wakka dept.
BoredStiff writes "Computerworld has an article examining Microsoft's plans to launch a competitor to the Apple iPod, the wireless media player called Zune. The article lists five reasons why Apple may fear the Zune, and why it won't be as easily smacked down as the dozens of mp3 players before it have been. The Zune isn't just a music player, the article argues. Think of it as a portable, wireless, hardware version of MySpace. With the Zune, Microsoft is trying to launch a consumer media 'perfect storm.'" From the article: "Microsoft will make the movement of media between Windows, Soapbox and the Zune natural and seamless. The Zune interface is just like a miniature version of the Windows Media Center user interface and is very similar to some elements of Vista. Apple fans are overconfident in the iPod because Apple once commanded 92% of music player market share, a number that has since fallen to around 70%. About 30 million people own iPods. But Microsoft owns more than 90% of the worldwide operating systems market (compared with Apple's roughly 5%), representing some 300 million people. The company expects to have 200 million Vista users within two years."

WGA — Too Many False Positives 268

Posted by kdawson from the customers'-genuine-disadvantage dept.
An anonymous reader writes, "Microsoft insists that its Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy program is nearly flawless. But that's not the impression you get when you visit the company's WGA Validation Problems forum. Ed Bott at ZDNet went through 137 problem reports submitted there during a two-week period, each one accompanied by the output from the official Microsoft diagnostic utility, and found that 42% of the people reporting problems were actually running Genuine software. From the article: 'One large group consists of people who, for some unexplained reason, were displaying cryptographic errors related to digital signatures. The problem is so common, in fact, that Microsoft representatives have a canned response they paste into replies to forum visitors who appear to be showing false positives caused by these errors.' In a related story, the first WGA errors from Windows Vista and Office 2007 have appeared in the wild."

Study Finds World Warmth Edging to Ancient Levels 534

Posted by Zonk from the is-it-warm-in-here-or-is-it-just-me dept.
Krishna Dagli writes to mention a decades-long study by NASA scientists. According to the research, global temperatures are reaching highs not seen in thousands of years. From the article: "One of the findings from this collaboration is that the Western Equatorial Pacific and Indian Oceans are now as warm as, or warmer than, at any prior time in the Holocene. The Holocene is the relatively warm period that has existed for almost 12,000 years, since the end of the last major ice age. The Western Pacific and Indian Oceans are important because, as these researchers show, temperature change there is indicative of global temperature change. Therefore, by inference, the world as a whole is now as warm as, or warmer than, at any time in the Holocene. According to Lea, 'The Western Pacific is important for another reason, too: it is a major source of heat for the world's oceans and for the global atmosphere.'"

David Brin Laments Absence of Programming For Kids 355

Posted by Zonk from the watch-johnny-run-run-johnny-run dept.
An anonymous reader writes "David Brin is an award-winning science fiction writer who has often written on social issues such as privacy and creativity. Now, he's written an essay for Salon.com titled 'Why Johnny Can't Code'. He discusses his son's years-long effort to find a way to use his math book's BASIC programming examples. All they were ever able to find, however, were either children's versions (on the Mac) or 'advanced' versions which attempted to support modern programming requirements (and which required constant review of the user's manual). Ultimately, they ended-up buying an old Commodore 64 on Ebay — Yes, for those of you under the age of 30, 'personal' computers like the Apple II and C64 used to all include BASIC in their ROMs."

RIAA Says It Doesn't Have Enough Evidence 208

Posted by Zonk from the need-to-work-on-that-evidence-stuff dept.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In Elektra v. Wilke, the Chicago RIAA case in which defendant Paul Wilke has moved for summary judgment, the RIAA has responded to the summary judgment motion by filing a motion for 'expedited discovery', alleging that it needs expedited pretrial discovery because it does not have sufficient evidence to withstand Mr. Wilke's motion. The RIAA's lawyer said: 'Plaintiffs cannot at this time, without an opportunity for full discovery present by affidavit facts essential to justify their opposition to Defendant's motion.' The motion and supporting affidavit are available online."

Microsoft To Enable User-Created Xbox 360 Games 303

Posted by samzenpus from the play-nice dept.
simoniker writes "Talking on the eve of its Gamefest event in Seattle, Microsoft has revealed XNA Game Studio Express, a new product which will allow indie developers and students to develop simultaneously on Xbox 360 and PC, and share their games to others in a new Xbox 360 'Creators Club'. XNA Game Studio Express will be available for free to anyone with a Windows XP-based PC, and will provide them with what's described as "Microsoft's next-generation platform for game development." In addition, by joining a "creators club" for an annual subscription fee of $99, users will be able to build, test and share their games on Xbox 360, as well as access a wealth of materials to help speed the game development progress."

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