cjmnews - Slashdot User

Bruce Schneier On Airport Security 582

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @02:16PM from the he-should-know dept.

the4thdimension writes "Bruce Schneier has an opinion piece on CNN this morning that illustrates his view on airport security. Given that he has several books on security, his opinion carries some weight. In the article, Bruce discusses the rarity of terrorism, the pitfalls of security theater, and the actual difficulty surrounding improving security. What are your thoughts? Do you think that we can actually make air travel (and any other kind of travel, for that matter) truly secure?"

Is Code Auditing of Open Source Apps Necessary? 108

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday December 23, 2009 @12:45PM from the but-I-thought-there-were-no-bugs dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Following Sun Microsystems' decision to release a raft of open source applications to support its secure cloud computing strategy, companies may be wondering if they should conduct security tests of their customized open source software before deployment. While the use of encryption and VPNs to extend a secure bridge between a company IT resource and a private cloud facility is very positive — especially now that Amazon is beta testing its pay-as-you-go private cloud facility — it's important that the underlying application code is also secure. What do you think?"

EA Flip-Flops On Battlefield: Heroes Pricing, Fans Angry 221

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday December 02, 2009 @07:50AM from the put-your-money-where-your-gun-is dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Ben Kuchera from Ars Technica is reporting that EA/DICE has substantially changed the game model of Battlefield: Heroes, increasing the cost of weapons in Valor Points (the in-game currency that you earn by playing) to levels that even hardcore players cannot afford, and making them available in BattleFunds (the in-game currency that you buy with real money). Other consumables in the game, such as bandages to heal the players, suffered the same fate, turning the game into a subscription or pay-to-play model if players want to remain competitive. This goes against the creators' earlier stated objectives of not providing combat advantage to paying customers. Ben Cousins, from EA/DICE, argued, 'We also frankly wanted to make buying Battlefunds more appealing. We have wages to pay here in the Heroes team and in order to keep a team large enough to make new free content like maps and other game features we need to increase the amount of BF that people buy. Battlefield Heroes is a business at the end of the day and for a company like EA who recently laid off 16% of their workforce, we need to keep an eye on the accounts and make sure we are doing our bit for the company.' The official forums discussion thread is full of angry responses from upset users, who feel this change is a betrayal of the original stated objectives of the game."

How The Matrix Online Went Wrong 144

Posted by Soulskill on Monday July 27, 2009 @06:17AM from the not-like-this dept.

As the July 31st deadline for The Matrix Online's closure looms, Gamer Limit is running a story discussing the game's shortcomings, as well as some of the decisions that led to its failure. Quoting: "I honestly thought the writers must have absolutely hated the remaining cast of The Matrix Trilogy or something, because they constantly seemed to go out of their way to phase out existing characters in favor of newer ones. The cast overall basically made me, as a player, feel distant from the main storyline and made the entire game feel like a Matrix side story instead of the continuation it was meant to be. ... When MxO first launched there was an entire team dedicated to playing the game as Agents and other key characters as a means to further in-game events and directly interact with players, giving players the feeling that they truly were making a difference. After the SOE buyout of the game the LESIG team was reduced to playing minor characters before eventually being phased out and replaced with a Live Event Team (LET) comprised purely of volunteers."

0 A.D. Goes Open Source 88

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday July 15, 2009 @01:40PM from the good-on-ya dept.

DoubleRing writes "Wildfire Games has announced that it will be moving its previously closed development process for 0 A.D. to open source. All code will be released under the GPL and all art under CC-BY-SA. 0 A.D. is a historically-based RTS, and while it's not yet complete, this trailer is purportedly actual gameplay footage. With a codebase of over 150k lines of C++ code plus 25k lines in development tools, this is looking like a fairly promising entrant into the open source RTS field. The screenshots are definitely pretty, to say the least."

China Bans Gold Farming 293

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday June 29, 2009 @03:10PM from the shooting-yourself-in-the-foot dept.

InformationWeek is reporting that the Chinese government has declared a ban on the sale of virtual goods for real currency. This move is poised to shut down a several billion yuan a year business that has been growing by leaps and bounds every year. "The trading of virtual currency for real cash employs hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and generates between $200 million and $1 billion annually, according to a 2008 survey conducted by Richard Heeks at the University of Manchester. He estimates that between 80% and 85% of gold farmers are based in China. [...] Game companies typically forbid gold farming but committed virtual currency traders find ways around such rules. Some game companies have recognized the futility of trying to ban the practice and have built virtual commerce into their game infrastructure."

Comment Re:Thanks, Shill! (Score 1) 309

by cjmnews on Sunday May 17, 2009 @02:31AM (#27984793) Attached to: Gartner Tells Businesses to Forget About Vista

Highlander 2 doesn't exist. It was never made, never released. Just move on to Highlander 3 then the TV show, then stop. Don't go any farther.

You were warned!

Opting Out Increases Spam? 481

Posted by timothy on Thursday April 23, 2009 @06:35PM from the damned-either-way dept.

J. L. Tympanum writes "I used to ignore spam but recently I have been using the opt-out feature. Now I get more spam than ever, especially of the Nigerian scam (and related) types. The latter has gone from almost none to several a day. Was I a fool for opting out? Is my email address being harvested when I opt out? Has anybody had similar experience?"

Ad Block Plus Filter Maintainer "rick752" Dies At 56 385

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday April 06, 2009 @10:18AM from the guy-who-made-the-intertubez-liveable-again dept.

A user on Reddit pointed out that Richard "rick752" Petnel, maintainer of one of the most popular filter lists for Ad Block Plus, has passed away at age 56. In an article last year Petnel described a bit of what he was up against in the ad world. "'I'm playing against some pretty big players,' he said, explaining his reluctance to step forward. 'I don't want to be harassed. . . . I don't want to be bribed. I started it because I was frustrated with getting my computer infected from ads -- malware and spyware and all that stuff,' he said. 'I kind of went overboard with it. But you have to admit, it's pretty amazing, right?'" Update 15:05 GMT by SM: updated to reflect Rick's status as maintainer of the most popular Ad Block Plus filter as opposed to Ad Block Plus itself.

Comment They seemed to miss something... (Score 1) 214

by cjmnews on Saturday March 14, 2009 @11:40AM (#27192725) Attached to: Site Compatibility and IE8

There are little things that could be fairly important where they don't render things correctly. Just search and you'll find quite a few examples and work arounds.

The most basic one I can't understand is by a basic inset or outset button renders with a solid black line in IE8? The work around is to color each side of the border individually with the custom color you need to make it look inset or outset.

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