Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror
Piracy

Ubisoft's Authentication Servers Go Down 634

Posted by kdawson
from the single-point-of-well-you-know dept.
ZuchinniOne writes "With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."
Games

EVE Online Battle Breaks Records (And Servers) 308

Posted by Soulskill
from the blame-it-on-the-torrents dept.
captainktainer writes "In one of the largest tests of EVE Online's new player sovereignty system in the Dominion expansion pack, a fleet of ships attempting to retake a lost star system was effectively annihilated amidst controversy. Defenders IT Alliance, a coalition succeeding the infamous Band of Brothers alliance (whose disbanding was covered in a previous story), effectively annihilated the enemy fleet, destroying thousands of dollars' worth of in-game assets. A representative of the alliance claimed to have destroyed a minimum of four, possibly five or more of the game's most expensive and powerful ship class, known as Titans. Both official and unofficial forums are filled with debate about whether the one-sided battle was due to difference in player skill or the well-known network failures after the release of the expansion. One of the attackers, a member of the GoonSwarm alliance, claims that because of bad coding, 'Only 5% of [the attackers] loaded,' meaning that lag prevented the attackers from using their ships, even as the defenders were able to destroy those ships unopposed. Even members of the victorious IT Alliance expressed disappointment at the outcome of the battle. CCP, EVE Online's publisher, has recently acknowledged poor network performance, especially in the advertised 'large fleet battles' that Dominion was supposed to encourage, and has asked players to help them stress test their code on Tuesday. Despite the admitted network failure, leaders of the attacking force do not expect CCP to replace lost ships, claiming that it was their own fault for not accounting for server failures. The incident raises questions about CCP's ability to cope with the increased network use associated with their rapid growth in subscriptions."

Student Faces Prison for Disrupting Oil Auctions

Submitted by pickens
pickens writes "Hugh Pickens writes:

The NY Times reports that last December Tim DeChristopher went to a federal auction of oil and gas leases offered in the Bush administration's closing days and even then the subject of protests and lawsuits — and bid on contracts that he had neither the money nor intent to actually fulfill. "My intention was to cause as much of a disruption to the auction as I could," says DeChristopher, a 27-year-old student at the University of Utah. "Making that decision — that keeping the oil in the ground was worth going to prison — that was the decision I made." DeChristopher is now charged with two felony counts of interfering with an auction and making false statements on bidding forms even as most of the specific leases DeChristopher protested — many of them near national parks or monuments — have not only been deferred or taken off the table by federal land managers in the Obama administration but also scathingly disavowed. "There was a headlong rush to leasing in the prior administration that led to the kinds of shortcuts we have demonstrated," says Obama's Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. DeChristopher praised Salazar's decision, saying it represents government taking a "serious stance in the defense of our land and climate." Federal prosecutors argue that whether DeChristopher was on some level correct in opposing the leases is irrelevant and DeChristopher now faces up to five years in prison on each of the two counts and up to $750,000 in fines. DeChristopher's attorney has asked the judge to allow a so-called necessity defense at the trial.enabling DeChristopher to argue that he faced a "choice of evils" that justified breaking the law. "Bush and the [Bureau of Land Management] should be on trial here," says DeChristopher's lawyer."
Bug

T-Mobile loses all information stored on Sidekicks->

Submitted by stigmato
stigmato writes "T-Mobile's popular Sidekick brand of devices and their users are facing a data loss crisis. According to the T-Mobile community forums, Microsoft/Danger has suffered a catastrophic server failure that has resulted in the loss of all personal data not stored on the phones. They are advising users not to turn off their phones, reset them or let the batteries die in them for fear of losing what data remains on the devices. Microsoft/Danger has stated that they cannot recover the data but are still trying. Already people are clamoring for a lawsuit. Should we continue to trust cloud computing content providers with our personal information? Perhaps they should have used ZFS or btrfs for their servers..."
Link to Original Source

'Whatever' America's Most Annoying Word, Poll Says

Submitted by nandemoari
nandemoari writes "In a poll conducted by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, the word "whatever" received 47 per cent, almost half, of the total votes when subjects were asked to choose from a list of the most annoying popular phrases. It beat out equally ambiguous phrases "you know" and "it is what it is," which placed second and third, respectively."

Abraham Lincoln didn't die in vain. He died in Washington, D.C.