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Nintendo

Man Fined $1.5 Million For Leaked Mario Game 287

Posted by Soulskill from the sorry-about-your-luck dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A Queensland man will have to pay Nintendo $1.5 million in damages after illegally copying and uploading one of its recent games to the internet ahead of its release, the gaming giant says. Nintendo said the loss was caused when James Burt made New Super Mario Bros Wii available for illegal download a week ahead of its official Australian release in November of last year. Nintendo applied for and was granted a search order by the Federal Court, forcing Burt to disclose the whereabouts of all his computers, disks and electronic storage devices in November. He was also ordered to allow access, including passwords, to his social networking sites, email accounts and websites."
Security

L0phtCrack (v6) Rises Again 120

Posted by Soulskill from the old-dogs-new-tricks dept.
FyreWyr writes "L0phtCrack — now 12 years old — used to be a security 'tool of choice' for black hats, pen-testers, and security auditors alike — that is, until it was sold by L0pht to @stake, then Symantec, to be released and subsequently dropped as LC 5. As an IT security consultant, I used this tool to regularly expose vulnerabilities or recover data when there were few other options available. Eventually, I let it go as tech evolved away. Now, after being returned to its original developers, version 6 was released this week with fresh features: support for 64-bit multiprocessors, (current) Unix and Windows operating systems, and a number of other features, including enhanced handling of NTLM password hashes and support for rainbow tables. Interested parties, especially consultants, will find this shiny new version sports a hefty price tag. It raises doubts in my mind whether it can effectively compete with open source alternatives that go by similar names, but as I found earlier versions so useful, its re-emergence seems worth the mention."
Cellphones

Classic Doom Coming To the iPhone Next Month 90

Posted by Soulskill from the hurt-me-plenty dept.
Two months after releasing an iPhone port of Wolfenstein 3D, id's John Carmack brings an update to the similar effort underway to bring classic Doom to the iPhone as well. He provides some detailed information on the development process, and says they're aiming for a release some time next month. "One of the things I love about open sourcing the old games is that Doom has been ported to practically everything with a 32 bit processor, from toasters to supercomputers. We hear from a lot of companies that have moved the old games onto various set top boxes and PDAs, and want licenses to sell them. We generally come to some terms in the five figure range for obscure platforms, but it is always with a bit of a sigh. The game runs, and the demo playbacks look good, but there is a distinct lack of actually caring about the game play itself. Making Doom run on a new platform is only a couple days of work. Making it a really good game on a platform that doesn't have a keyboard and mouse or an excess of processing power is an honest development effort."
Censorship

Cory Doctorow Draws the Line On Net Neutrality 381

Posted by kdawson from the preserving-the-next-google-from-cradle-strangulation dept.
Nerdposeur points out that Cory Doctorow has a compelling piece in The Guardian today, arguing that network neutrality is not only crucial for the future of the Internet, but is what the ISPs owe to the public. He asks, "Does anybody else feel like waving a flag after reading this?" "If the phone companies had to negotiate for every pole, every sewer, every punch-down, every junction box, every road they get to tear up, they'd go broke. All the money in the world couldn't pay for the access they get for free every day... If they don't like it, let them get into another line of work — give them 60 days to get their wires out of our dirt and then sell the franchise to provide network services to a competitor who will promise to give us a solid digital future in exchange for our generosity."

Comment This isn't as cut and dry as you think. (Score 4, Informative) 180

by shineyboy (#27967357) Attached to: 3D Realms Sued Over Failed <em>Duke Nukem Forever</em> Plans

What most people don't realize is that Take 2 NEVER paid 3D Realms directly for development on DNF. 3D Realms self-funded ALL 12 years of development. The money they're suing them for was for publishing rights purchased from GT Interactive and Infogrames several years ago. This is completely separate from 3D Realms.

Most people assume this is a typical publisher-developer relationship, but it's not. Take2 doesn't own the rights to the game or any of the content in it... only the rights to publish it whenever it's done. 3D Realms ran out of money, asked them for some, were denied, and had to close down for lack of funds and all their employees are now looking for new employment in a horrific economy.

It's a shame 3DR couldn't have gotten it together sooner.

Comment NCsoft's Dungeon Runners (Score 1) 389

by shineyboy (#21299615) Attached to: What Are The Best Free Games Online?

[Disclaimer: I work on this game. Not a marketing shill, I just make art for it and actually enjoy playing the game for free.]

Dungeon Runners is a totally goofball free-to-play casual MMORPG for people that don't have 8 hours a night to devote to WOW raids. :) It's designed to be fun to play in 15 to 30 minute chunks if that's all you have. There's an optional $5/mo subscription for stacking potions, a bank and premium items, but all the actual world content and dungeons is available to everybody. We have a large amount of free players that enjoy it without ever paying a dime.
Editorial

Submission + - Psychiatry from a Geek's Perspective?

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Slashdot has covered articles about Asperger's syndrome, autism, and how it might relate to the (somewhat stereotypical) geek mindset. I've been diagnosed as borderline autistic, so in a similar vein, I've found myself in an unusual position when it comes to getting therapy. I'm very analytical, investigative, and detail-oriented, so when I'm the patient of a psychiatrist, psychologist, or therapist, I feel like I'm coming in at a very different angle than other patients. I want to fully grok the pharmacology of the medications prescribed to me and how they interact with my nervous system. I analyze all of the methods and suggestions my therapist offers. I'm told that working with me as a patient is quite interesting (and often enjoyable), contrasted against many patients who are unaware of the therapy process or have no interest in it or its effects. I see the brain as the machine that coordinates my life, therapists as debuggers, and pharmaceuticals as hardware tweaking.

I'm extremely curious to know if other geeks have this mindset, or have any interesting experiences or viewpoints. There are other questions that can be considered, as well: are you very self-analytical? Perhaps you avoid therapists and attempt to diagnose and debug your own mis-programming?

There's a book online about hacking your body's energy management system. Meditation is also along the lines of hacking your psyche, and there's the OpenEEG project, which is worth noting.

I think there's a lot of unexplored territory here, at least considering that it hasn't been explored by people with a coding/hacking mindset. Do you hack your own mind? If so, then how?

Providing a lot of detail would probably generate the best discussion, so be careful; anything that you might not want future employers to know about you, post anonymously!
Security

Submission + - Keeping Emails (abc.net.au)

Submitted by
mgv
mgv writes: "In a rather fascinating admission, the government of Western Australia has stated that they do not back up email for longer than three months. This came to light when the director general was identified as having email communications with Mr Brian Burke, the ex-premier of Western Australia (equivalent to a state governor). Mr Burke is more famous for the time he spent in prison for corrupt deals with companies, whose subsequent collapse cost the state government around $600 million dollars. However, this leaves the interesting question of the missing emails. Which poses questions for Slashdot: What can be done to get the emails? How many mail servers can even be configured to delete the body of a message, but not the headers? And what justification could there be for a 3 month message deletion policy? It seems hard to believe that anything this recent is gone, especially when the government claims it still has the email headers, just not the body of the messages. For the record, the government uses microsoft exchange server."
Editorial

Submission + - How to find a job?

Submitted by
boxxa
boxxa writes: "My graduation is approaching soon and I have begun the job search that many students go into. Since I wish to get out of the area where I am currently in school, the job hunt has gone online. My question is what type of jobs are posted online? My resume is on Monster.com and I carry quite a background with expierence in networking which is the career path I have chosen, but all the calls I seem to get are low level tech and PC jobs. Has anyone else experienced this? Is Monster.com and other sites like Yahoo! Jobs mostly recruiters and other low level postings for the lazy person to find while the larger companies in the US are waiting for people to find their postings in different places? Lastly, what other alternatives are there to finding jobs around the US?"

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