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Music

Submission + - Activision blocks Rock Band guitar patch

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: While Xbox 360 owners can use any Xbox 360 guitar to play Rock Band, PlayStation 3 owners only other option (the Guitar Hero 3 guitar) was not compatible when Rock Band launched. Harmonix created a patch to fix this, only to have Activision block the patch. According to a Harmonix employee on the official Rock Band forums:

"Two weeks ago, Harmonix created a software patch for the Sony PLAYSTATION 3 version of Rock Band that allowed for guitar compatibility and support for third party peripherals, including enabling use of Activision's Guitar Hero III controller with Rock Band. The compatibility patch was submitted, approved and had been scheduled for release by Sony on Tuesday, December 4. Unfortunately, Activision objected to the compatibility patch's release. The patch remains with Sony, but we have been told that it will unfortunately not be released due to Activision's continued objection."
Book Reviews

CSS Pocket Reference 87

Posted by samzenpus from the read-all-about-it dept.
Michael J. Ross writes "For Web developers who appreciate the value of separating Web content from its presentation, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has proved a godsend, because it allows all of the styling of a Web site to be organized in CSS files separate from the site's semantic content, in HTML files (possibly dynamically generated). Yet to make this styling power possible, CSS must incorporate a long list of syntax elements, including hundreds of selectors, properties, and values. Thus it can be quite handy for the developer to have on hand a concise summary of CSS, such as the CSS Pocket Reference, authored by Eric A. Meyer." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.
Security

Submission + - Did New Life Church innovate security? (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
evil_arrival_of_good
evil_arrival_of_good writes: "History was made on December 9, 2007. A template, model, and archetype of social innovation occurred, enabled by a novel moral framework.

The circumstances were horrifying and certainly unwanted by those who made the leap forward. The event was an intentional mass murdering spree by a forgettable loner who targeted the church services of New Life Church. The church had armed security personnel. Not corporate, and not state sponsored, but volunteer members of the congregation. One of the guards, a woman by the name of Jeanne Assam, confronted the murderer and shot him several times. The murderer died from a self-inflicted gun shot.

Portions of Jeanne Assam's account were published in the Denver Post: here

"I give the credit to God, and I mean that. I say that very humbly. God was with me, and the whole time I was behind cover — this has gotta be God — because of the firepower he had versus what I had was God," Assam said. "And I did not run away. I did not think for a minute to run away. I just knew that I was given the assignment to end this before it got too, too much worse. I just prayed for the Holy Spirit to guide me. I just said, 'Holy Spirit, be with me.' My hands weren't even shaking."

Police officials praised Jeanne Assam's actions at a news conference, calling her "a real hero". Pastor Brady Boyd said during a televised news conference that "a hundred" people might have been shot if Ms. Assam, the security guard, had not stopped the gunman as he entered the church after shooting people in the parking lot.

Positive and progressive milestones of this series of events:
1 ) A group bounded by morality and spirituality ( a church ) condoned and intentionally pursued armed security.
2) This was not gun use along the lines of "Wild West" anarchy, but deliberate and designed rules in which only certain people are allowed to carry guns and provide security response. New Life Church did not condone a simplistic pro-gun stance.
3) A member of the spiritual group fired a weapon in the church, at a murderer.
4) The church leadership endorsed the security action.
5) Representatives of the state, the government police apparatus, endorsed and praised the security action.
6) The security guard was a woman.
7) Pacifism is not hardwired to the sacred, and violence is not absolutely associated with the criminal. The intent, and the choice of targets, determines the murderer and the hero.


This qualifies as social progress because sub-state actors owned the process of security. "Security" was not given its usual untouchable status, and assigned to government or corporate henchmen who do it more to pay their bills while having little solidarity with those they "police". Security was by the subculture, for the subculture.

The last decades of the 20th century have seen the rise of power in sub state groups, and even more rhetoric that either endorses or condemns the trend. Many proponents initially assumed the sub state beneficiaries of the trend would be peasant, indigenous, and communistic class groupings. The trend is proving to be even more egalitarian, with post-nationalism and post-mono-culturalism favoring and fitting perfectly the bourgeoise members of organized religions. As the state collapses in its ability to win wars or provide meaningful services, a new landscape of terror and opportunity will emerge. The groups with mobility or means to change, bounded by a functional moral code but practicing no moral absolutism, access to new technology, and an ability to "mash-up" traditions into novel designs; these will have a chance for a better day as others die in the heat or at the hands of new social terrors.

For further reading on the fall of the State, and rise of communities, please see Security: Power To The People by John Robb.

Note on author's lifestyle in relation to the content of this post: Lives in inner city Seattle, does not own a gun and most likely would never want to. The author of this blog is not religious. New Life Church is associated with suburbia and use of guns are usually associated with guns rights advocates. The author is neither suburban nor an NRA supporter."
Security

Submission + - DNS attack ushers in new era of Phishing 2.0 (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by Bergkamp10
Bergkamp10 writes: Researchers at Google and the Georgia Institute of technology are studying a new virtually undetectable form of attack that exploits 'open recursive' DNS servers, which are used to tell computers how to find each other on the Internet by translating domain names like google.com into numerical Internet Protocol addresses. Some 17 million open-recursive DNS servers are on the Internet, and unlike other DNS servers they answer all DNS lookup requests from any computer on the net, making them the perfect target for would be hackers and attackers. Criminals are apparently using these servers in tandem with new attack techniques to develop a generation 2.0 of phishing. Here's how an attack would work. A victim would visit a Web site or open a malicious attachment that would exploit a bug in his computer's software. Attackers would then change just one file in the Windows registry settings, telling the PC to go to the criminal's server for all DNS information. If the initial exploit code was not stopped by antivirus software, the attack would give attackers virtually undetectable control over the computer. Once they'd changed the Windows settings, the criminals could take victims to the correct Web sites most of the time, but then suddenly redirect them to phishing sites whenever they wanted — during an online banking session, for example. Because the attack is happening at the DNS level, anti-phishing software would not flag the phoney sites.

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