Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Real Time Strategy (Games)

Blizzard Won't Stop World of StarCraft Mod 129

Posted by Soulskill from the uncrossing-wires dept.
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

Posted by Soulskill from the find-out-precisely-how-bad-you-are dept.
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

Posted by samzenpus from the duck-and-cover dept.
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

Posted by timothy from the vlc-generally-rocks dept.
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."
Encryption

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

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
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

by zeridon (#28353463) Attached to: Palm Pre Does Not Get US Tethering Either

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 ...
Government

Submission + - Australia ratifies Kyoto (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: From BBC news:

Australian Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd has been sworn in as prime minister, following a landslide victory in parliamentary elections last week. Immediately after the ceremony, he signed documents to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, reversing the previous administration's policy.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7124236.stm
Security

Submission + - eBay Still Has Login Vulnerabilities?

Submitted by
Atario
Atario writes: "This morning I checked my email to find several apparent eBay-alike spam messages in my Inbox. This reminded me that I needed to leave feedback for something on the actual eBay. So I went there, only to find that I could no longer log in. Long story short, I realized that those "fake" eBay emails were the real thing — and were sent from my eBay account! Horrified, I contacted their help people and got my password reset, and some mass eBay emails following up to those who had been spammed, saying that I hadn't done it. Going to my account, I saw that the attackers had sent a "visit our happy and good-spirit Chinese web site and buy electronics" spam to 30 different people. (Only the first six came to me, because those used a general "contact an eBay-er" mechanism, whereas the rest used a "ask seller a question" one; apparently the latter doesn't automatically send you a copy in email automatically.) At any rate, whoever this was was able to change my password and send messages as me; this, to me, implies that they were able to crack my password and log in as me. This would mean either (1) inside job with DB access or (2) eBay is vulnerable to brute-force login-attempt attacks, which is something so easy to defeat (increasing attempt delays), they would need to be ashamed for about aleph-null years were this the case. So, what does Slashdot think: eBay is infested with Chinese spammers as employees, or they can't get security minimally right after all these years?"
Space

Submission + - NASA, Russia test sex in space (guardian.co.uk) 1

Submitted by azuredrake
azuredrake writes: According to The Guardian, both NASA and the Russian space agency have tested the feasibility of sex in space with human astronauts as the so-called "guinea pigs". While the purpose behind this research was to ascertain whether families could be sent on colonization missions together in zero-g, it's still amusing to think that two humans were sent up into space with government funding to copulate repeatedly on video. Of course, leave it up to the American government to come up with a mission codename like "STS:XX".

Slashdot Top Deals

An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.

Close