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Real Time Strategy (Games)

Blizzard Won't Stop World of StarCraft Mod 129

On Wednesday we discussed news of an impressive-looking mod for StarCraft II that transformed the game into a WoW lookalike, which quickly drew a copyright infringement warning from Activision Blizzard. The company has now released an official statement green-lighting the mod for continued development. "'It was never our intention to stop development on the mod or discourage the community from expressing their creativity through the StarCraft II editor,' Blizzard said in a statement. 'As always, we actively encourage development of custom maps and mods for StarCraft II, as we've done with our strategy games in the past.' Blizzard went on the say that it's looking forward to seeing development of the mod continue, and that it has invited Winzen to the company's campus to meet the game's development team."
The Internet

Blizzard Previews Revamped Battle.net 188

Blizzard updated the official StarCraft II site today with a preview of how the revamped Battle.net will function. They emphasize the social features, competitive matchmaking system, and the ease of sharing mods and maps. Quoting: "When the legacy Battle.net service introduced support for user-created mods such as DotA, Tower Defense, and many others, these user-created game types became immensely popular. But while Battle.net supported mods at a basic level, integration with tools and the mod community wasn't where it needed to be for a game releasing in 2010. The new Battle.net service will see some major improvements in this area. StarCraft II will include a full-featured content-creation toolkit — the same tools used by the StarCraft II design team to create the single-player campaign. To fully harness the community's mapmaking prowess, Battle.net will introduce a feature called Map Publishing. Map Publishing will let users upload their maps to the service and share them with the rest of the community immediately on the service. This also ties in with the goal of making Battle.net an always-connected experience — you can publish, browse, and download maps directly via the Battle.net client. Finding games based on specific mods will also be much easier with our all-new custom game system, placing the full breadth of the modding community's efforts at your fingertips."
Image

Police Called Over 11-Year-Old's Science Project 687

garg0yle writes "Police in San Diego were called to investigate an 11-year-old's science project, consisting of 'a motion detector made out of an empty Gatorade bottle and some electronics,' after the vice-principal came to the conclusion that it was a bomb. Charges aren't being laid against the youth, but it's being recommended that he and his family 'get counseling.' Apparently, the student violated school policies — I'm assuming these are policies against having any kind of independent thought?"
Media

Lack of Manpower May Kill VLC For Mac 398

plasmacutter writes "The Video Lan dev team has recently come forward with a notice that the number of active developers for the project's MacOS X releases has dropped to zero, prompting a halt in the release schedule. There is now a disturbing possibility that support for Mac will be dropped as of 1.1.0. As the most versatile and user-friendly solution for bridging the video compatibility gap between OS X and windows, this will be a terrible loss for the Mac community. There is still hope, however, if the right volunteers come forward."
Linux

Ubuntu 9.10 Officially Released 744

palegray.net writes "The latest version of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) has been released. Offering numerous enhancements for both desktop and server environments, this release includes notable features like Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud images, the Ubuntu One 'personal cloud,' and Linux kernel version 2.6.31. Please be sure to use a release mirror close to your geographic location to help reduce the stress on Ubuntu's primary servers; using BitTorrent for downloads can help alleviate the load even more. If your organization has adequate network and server resources, please consider hosting a mirror as well."
Encryption

Submission + - 512-bit RSA factoring in your spare time (unitedti.org)

An anonymous reader writes: The 512-bit RSA signing keys for several Texas Instruments (TI) calculators have been factored, allowing the installation of custom software, including operating systems. A forum member at unitedti.org reportedly used sophisticated factoring software developed by the open source GGNFS and Msieve projects. After the original poster cracked the key for the TI-83, the unitedti.org community mounted a distributed computational effort, quickly obtaining several more keys. Also mentioned were some interesting statistics:

-The factorization took, in total, about 1745 hours, or a bit less than 73 days, of computation. (I've actually been working on this since early March; I had a couple of false starts and haven't been able to run the software continously.)
-My CPU, for reference, is a dual-core Athlon64 at 1900 MHz.
-The sieving database was 4.9 gigabytes and contained just over 51 million relations.
-During the "filtering" phase, Msieve was using about 2.5 gigabytes of RAM.
-The final processing involved finding the null space of a 5.4 million x 5.4 million matrix.

This case is particularly notable, as the goal was to compromise live keys. Furthermore, the goal was accomplished using modest resources within only a few weeks. Invoking the DMCA, TI immediately moved to suppress the propagation of the keys, resulting in an even wider distribution.

Comment So fuckin' what (Score 1) 232

First of all i am not a layer
Second i work in exactly the telecom env
third i am not in the us but in Europe

so taking all that in mind i still got a suckin idiotik phone that is used only as a phone (it does it's job as a phone) as are most of the people in the telco business (excluding managers). In my personal opinion the moment you can use your phone as a regular Modem you are basically unstoppable. And you know using a modem to connect is nothing new revolutionizing or whatever.

Some people said you are going to draw more bw ... then why they are seling unlimited. If it is unlimited it means UNLIMITED. It does not mater that you are one of the measly 0.5% that uses more than 2 TB a month because you know how and can make good use of it.

Also take in mind the following: As much as i despise the Iphone and similiar stuff for claiming being a phone they really are marketed as a multimedia computing platform ... so phone features are just a bonus not main driver (if you don't know/care/dare to use the other features ... well you need simpler "stick that can talk". Any Goddamn forsaken stupid app that can leach at tremendous rates even being deployed on a "phone" is not a wise move and they've called it upon themselvs so they've got to live with it

Everybody oversells, telcos oversell enormously and of course win enourmously.

End point of the topis is "If i can get to the modem i can and i will use it and nobody can prove otherwise"

PS: excuse my typing mistakes ... it's a bit late and i am up for about 60 hours already ...

Security

'Cybot' Development For Network Defense 51

lwbrown writes with this excerpt from Government Computer News about a concept being explored at Oak Ridge National Laboratory: "UNTAME is the product of a long-term program by the division's Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research Group to develop futuristic security functionality for increasingly large, complex environments. The cybots differ from traditional software agents in that they form a collective and are aware of the condition and activities of other cybots in the collective. 'You give it a mission and tools to work with, such as mobility and intrusion sensors, and it uses those tools and cooperates with other cybots to accomplish the mission," said Lawrence MacIntyre, one of the project's developers.'"
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - Linux Info Share For Geeks Site ShareMyApps.org (sharemyapps.org)

EmErgE writes: "We would like to present you a new service, it's called Share My Apps and it allows you to share information about your GNU/Linux system with other people.

It's a site that allows you to create a profile and display information such as installed packages, the amounts of memory, processor type, the Linux distribution in use, the wallpaper and many more similar interesting things.

After creating your profile you will be able to search, vote and comment applications, systems and users and share your experiences with others."

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I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

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