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Comment Exult and Pentagram (Score 1) 381

by kravlor (#26264223) Attached to: Resurrecting Old Games, What Works?

I think one of the best examples of this topic has to be the Exile project, which has successfully created a cross-platform, open source, modern-day engine to play Origin Software's classic Ultima VII and Ultima VII:Serpent Isle games.

In a similar vein is the Pentagram project, which aims to make a similar engine (and repeat the same daunting reverse-engineering task) for Ultima VIII. If you are an Ultima fan, and *haven't* heard of these projects, go and download them right now. :)
Television

Submission + - HD-DVD or Blu-Ray: which is more F/OSS friendly?

Submitted by filbranden
filbranden writes: I'm no expert on the formats for hi-def DVDs, and I have no opinion on which is better. But I wonder which of them is more open and friendlier to F/OSS. That means, which of them has less DRM, which is less patent-encumbered, are there open source software players for any of them? HD-DVD? Blu-Ray? Both? None of them?
Censorship

Submission + - Beijing Police Launching Animated Web Patrols (geoffrobinson.net)

Submitted by
geoffrobinson
geoffrobinson writes: "And by "animated" they mean cartoons. From the Associated Press:

Police in China's capital said Tuesday they will start patrolling the Web using animated beat officers that pop up on a user's browser and walk, bike or drive across the screen warning them to stay away from illegal Internet content. Starting Sept. 1, the cartoon alerts will appear every half hour on 13 of China's top portals, including Sohu and Sina, and by the end of the year will appear on all Web sites registered with Beijing servers, the Beijing Public Security Ministry said in a statement. China stringently polices the Internet for material and content that the ruling Communist Party finds politically or morally threatening. Despite the controls, nudity, profanity, illegal gambling and pirated music, books and film have proliferated on Chinese Internet servers.
"
Security

Submission + - Another Sony rootkit ( and its not Bioshock )

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: F-Secure is reporting that the drivers for Sony Microvault USB sticks uses rootkit techniques to hide a directory from the Windows API

This USB stick with rootkit-like behavior is closely related to the Sony BMG case. First of all, it is another case where rootkit-like cloaking is ill advisedly used in commercial software. Also, the USB sticks we ordered are products of the same company — Sony Corporation. The Sony MicroVault USM-F fingerprint reader software that comes with the USB stick installs a driver that is hiding a directory under "c:\windows\". So, when enumerating files and subdirectories in the Windows directory, the directory and files inside it are not visible through Windows API. If you know the name of the directory, it is e.g. possible to enter the hidden directory using Command Prompt and it is possible to create new hidden files. There are also ways to run files from this directory. Files in this directory are also hidden from some antivirus scanners (as with the Sony BMG DRM case) — depending on the techniques employed by the antivirus software. It is therefore technically possible for malware to use the hidden directory as a hiding place.
Communications

Submission + - Deceased Malayan hit with $218 trillion cell bill (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by Suraci
Suraci writes: Published Sunday 12th August 2007 03:56 GMT

What otherworldly ectoplasms lurk in the oblivion of such an unholy place as accounts receivable?

A Malaysian man who paid off a $23 wireless bill and disconnected his late father's cell phone back in January has been stiffed for subsequent charges on the closed account, MSNBC has reported. Telekom Malaysia sent Yahaya Wahab a bill for 806,400,000,000,000.01 ringgit, or about $218 trillion, for charges to the account, along with a demand from the company's debt collection agency that he settle the alleged debt within 10 days, or get a lawyer.

Bring it on, bean counters. Funereal topcoats, ghostly visages and all.

"If the company wants to seek legal action as mentioned in the letter, I'm ready to face it," Yahaya claimed. "In fact, I can't wait to face it."

No one apparently at Telekom Malaysia is quite sure whether the bill was a mistake, or, cryptically, if Yahaya's father's phone line was used illegally after his death. This correspondent not long ago got his sh*t pushed in by Verizon for $117 in roaming charges during a week-long conference in Montreal, but even at Verizon's ultimate 'screw you' rate of $4.99 per roaming minute, yours truly would have to clock 43.7 trillion pure, hardcore roaming minutes to ring up $218 trillion in charges, or roughly 727 billion Verizon-hours of internet surfing and chit-chat. The $218 trillion total is roughly 17 times the GDP of the United States.

Yahaya, from northern Kedah state, said he nearly fainted when he saw the new bill, and here at El Reg we're curious what supernatural force allowed the grim reapers inhabiting the nether regions of collections and legal to avoid a similar state of semi-conscious disbelief.

The recent discovery of previously unknown life forms in the hinterlands of deepest Africa lends hope that science may yet elucidate the inscrutable nature of the number-crunchers. Of course, Montreal is not exactly on the banks of the river Styx, but if a math-challenged gringo can extrapolate from that mobile billing clusterf*ck, the bean counters at Telekom Malaysia surely can do better.
Microsoft

Submission + - Converting from XP to Ubuntu (ittoolbox.com) 1

Submitted by
madgreek
madgreek writes: "Here is a short story about my switch to Ubuntu from XP at work. I have been Microsoft free for 3 months now at a Microsoft heavy shop. Few people know I am using Open Office and Linux. I create countless documents that people open using Word, Excel, PPT and nobody can tell that they were created using Open Office. http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/madgreek/archives/o pen-source-and-microsoft-free-17339"
United States

Submission + - Highway 35W Collapses into Mississippi (wcco.com)

Submitted by
dcapel
dcapel writes: "In what has been called the worst engineering disaster in decades, a bridge of highway 35W, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has collapsed into the Mississippi. The collapse took place during late rush-hour traffic, so an estimated 50 cars were on the bridge at the time. There is no evidence for terrorist involvement, but an engineering or safety flaw of immense proportions must have been involved. As someone who was working only blocks away at the time, this happened entirely too close to home."
The Internet

Submission + - Classified US military info available over P-to-P

Submitted by StonyandCher
StonyandCher writes: Millions of documents, both government and private, containing sensitive and sometimes classified information are floating about freely on file sharing networks after being inadvertently exposed by individuals downloading P2P software on systems that held the data, members of a U.S. House committee were told Tuesday.

Among the documents exposed: The Pentagon's entire secret backbone network infrastructure diagram, complete with IP addresses and password change scripts; contractor data on radio frequency manipulation to beat Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) in Iraq; physical terrorism threat assessments for three major U.S cities; information on five separate Department of Defense information security system audits.
Businesses

Submission + - Renewable energy wrecks environment? (eurekalert.org)

Submitted by voidstarstar
voidstarstar writes: Renewable does not mean green. That is the claim of Jesse Ausubel of the Rockefeller University in New York. Ausubel argues that the land use incurred by wind farms, dams and biomass fields are going to wreck the environment. On the other hand, "Nuclear energy is green," he claims, "Considered in Watts per square meter, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors." So should we start building lots of nuclear power plants?
Worms

Submission + - The Computer Virus Turns 25 in July 1

Submitted by bl8n8r
bl8n8r writes: In July of 1982, an infected Apple II propogated the first computer virus onto a 5-1/4" floppy. The virus, which did little more than annoy the user, Elk Cloner, was authored in Pittsburgh by a 15-year-old high school student, Rich Skrenta. The virus replicated by monitoring floppy disk activity and writing itself to the floppy when it was accessed. Skrenta describes the virus as "It was a practical joke combined with a hack. A wonderful hack." Remember, he was a 9th grader when he did this.
The Courts

Submission + - Imprisonment without trial proposed in UK (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: According to a BBC article, the head of the UK Association of Chief Police Officers has asked for terrorism suspects to be held "for as long as it takes" to finish an investigation, without being charged, without being given a trial, and with no upper limit to the time this could go on for. I, for one, would be more afraid of the police than of the terrorists if they were given this power.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft DRM protection for Zune hacked (doom9.org)

Submitted by
Abdul
Abdul writes: "A new version of FairUse4WM v1.3 Fix2 from Doom9 is available that allows you to remove the DRM license protection from songs and music downloaded from Microsofts Zune Marketplace allowing you to play them on any portable media player. This version uncovers individual keys from Microsofts DRM blackbox components (IBX), up to version 11.0.6000.6324 (Windows Media Player 11). Users have had success using the software.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=127943"
Windows

Submission + - Programs cannot be uninstalled in Vista

Submitted by
Corson
Corson writes: "I am surprised nobody seems to have reported this on /. yet. Possibly after one of the latest updates in Windows Vista, two strange things happened: first, the Uninstall option is no longer available in the Control Panel when you right-click on older programs (most likely, those installed prior to the update in question, because uninstall works fine for recently installed programs; the Uninstall button is also missing on the toolbar at the top); second, some programs are no longer shown on the applications list in Control panel (e.g., Yahoo Messenger). A Google search returns quite a few hits on this issue (e.g., here, here, here, and here) but everybody seems to be waiting patiently for a sign from Microsoft. But M$ seem to have no clue or they would have fixed it already. I am just curious how many of you are experiencing this nuisance."
Announcements

Submission + - Italian Parlament moves to Linux

Submitted by 10am-bedtime
10am-bedtime writes: According to la Repubblica, the Italian Parlament is moving to GNU/Linux. Aside from cost savings of three million EUR (mostly for Microsoft Office licenses), the advantages are freedom from the "chains of proprietary software", and transparency and security, which are "encumbent upon a public institution".

I think if the land of Da Vinci, Pacioli, and Machiavelli is making the transition, others might do well to take heed and listen, lest they be bocciati by the future...
Security

Submission + - Secretly monopolizing the CPU without being root

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This year's Usenix security symposium includes a paper that implements a "cheat" utility, which allows any non-privileged user to run his/her program, e.g., like so

cheat 99% program

thereby insuring that the programs would get 99% of the CPU cycles, regardless of the presence of any other applications in the system, and in some cases (like Linux), in a way that keeps the program invisible from CPU monitoring tools (like 'top'). The utility exclusively uses standard interfaces and can be trivially implemented by any beginner non-privileged programmer. Recent efforts to improve the support for multimedia applications make systems more susceptible to the attack. All prevalent operating systems but Mac OS X are vulnerable, though by this kerneltrap story, it appears that the new CFS Linux scheduler attempts to address the problem that were raised by the paper.

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