MMORPG Developers Warned of Security Risks 91

Posted by Zonk from the not-always-just-a-game dept.
phantomfive writes "According to an article on ZDNet, hackers are now targeting players of MMORPGs (mainly WOW), stealing their passwords, then selling their gold/equipment for money in the real world. Microsoft security development engineer Dave Weinstein warned developers of the new dangers their titles face at the company's annual Gamefest event." From the article: "Online game accounts are already on sale in the black market next to stolen credit card accounts, fraudulent passports, fake work papers and other illegal items gathered by identity theft. In fact, some game accounts can be worth up to $10,000. 'For a lot of the customers out there, there is more store value on their MMO characters than there is on the credit card with which they pay for the account,' said Weinstein."

Google Upgrades Blogger 109

Posted by Zonk from the bout-time dept.
thetan writes "Google has announced the first major upgrade to Blogger since taking over the creaking old platform. Still in beta, the new service offers a tie-in to your Google Account, dynamic pages, separate comment feeds, new layouts, an apparent merger with Google's Page Creator for WYSIWYG editing, integration of feeds, public/private access control and — of interest to bloghackers — tag-based labels for categories. Take the tour."

New Version of Mac OS X Leopard Leaked 359

Posted by Zonk from the bad-day-for-big-cats dept.
the linux geek writes "InfoWorld has an article informing us that an early beta of Mac OS X 10.5 has been leaked. This appears to be the same build Steve Jobs previewed at WWDC, and contains most of the new features, including Time Machine and Spaces." From the article: "Attendees at last week's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) received copies of the beta ware and had to sign legally binding agreements not to let Leopard stray onto file-sharing networks. Perhaps someone didn't read the not-so-fine print? MacUser reports that this version of Leopard is indeed legit, unlike a fake one that was reportedly making its rounds last week. The version of Leopard available on BitTorrent is 4.3GB, containing 93 files."

EU Patent Wars to Resume 184

Posted by CowboyNeal from the back-for-more dept.
replicant108 writes "Ciaran O'Riordan of the FSFE gives a concise analysis of why the EU Software Patent Wars will resume this winter. Apparently the pro-patent side have changed their strategy — this time they plan to bypass the legislative powers and target the judiciary instead. The goal is to transfer power from the national courts (which often rule against software patents) to a specially-created European Patent Court which will be controlled by the pro-software patent EPO!"

Pirate Party Launches Commercial Darknet 661

Posted by CowboyNeal from the nothing-to-see-here dept.
CrystalFalcon writes "The Swedish Pirate Party has launched a commercial, high-capacity darknet, on an unprecedented scale and bandwidth. This service lets anybody send and receive files anonymously without being tracked or traced. 'There are many legitimate reasons to want to be completely anonymous on the Internet,' says Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of the Pirate Party. 'If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check.'"

Google Makes Peace With Media Companies 67

Posted by CowboyNeal from the olive-branches dept.
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Google is bringing some of the biggest media companies into its camp and sharing revenue with them, after drawing their ire last year with moves to search video and books, the Wall Street Journal reports. From the article: 'Google's improved relationships with media and entertainment companies reflects the confidence those companies have gained in online distribution in the past year, amid rapid growth in Americans' consumption of Web video and other Internet content. But just as importantly, it illustrates a coming of age in Google's approach to the owners of content it wants to search.' Google has hired executives from the media world to conduct the negotiations. One of them, David Eun, formerly of Time Warner and NBC, said, 'The biggest challenge is explaining to them we're friend and not foe.'" Just don't use google as a verb. Pretty please?

Dell Issues Laptop Battery Recall 170

Posted by CowboyNeal from the seat-warmers dept.
zoogies writes "The New York Times is reporting that Dell is now issuing a laptop battery recall — for notebooks sold between April 2004 and July 18, 2006. According to the article, 'The recalled batteries were used in 2.7 million computers sold in the United States and 1.4 million sold overseas. The total is about 18 percent of Dell's notebook production during the period in question.' This seems to go along with a June Slashdot story on an exploding Dell laptop, and a July Slashdot story on a Dell investigation into its exploding laptops. Curiously, there is nothing yet on Dell Support's product recall page about this latest recall."

Windows Mobile Security Software Fails the Test 106

Posted by CowboyNeal from the running-the-gauntlet dept.
boebert_ms writes "Windows Mobile security software is insecure and buggy, according to a report from Airscanner. In a paper posted at msmobiles.com, roughly 20 different Windows Mobile programs (e.g. MS Money, Password Master 3.5, etc) were examined and found to have a wide range of issues from broken protection schemes to poor encryption algorithms, and more. The paper goes into some details about each program and their flaws and also provides some tips on how to protect your data."

Pac Manhattan Creator Speaks Out! 36

Posted by Zonk from the wakka-wakka dept.
simoniker writes "Frank Lantz, who used to work at game developer Gamelab and helped create Pac Manhattan, the real-life version of Pac-Man set in the streets of New York, has been talking in detail about his new company, area/code, which has been set up to create 'large-scale, real-world games'. Lantz comments: 'I've also always felt that digital games were more properly understood as a subset of games, rather than as a subset of computer media. In other words, for me Counter-Strike has more in common with tennis and golf than people tend to think. Ditto for World of Warcraft and Chess.' Is the next wave of innovation in gaming going to occur nowhere near the video game screen?"

An 'Ethical Hacker' On Protecting Your Identity 159

Posted by Zonk from the what-with-the-who-now dept.
qwqwss writes "Canada.com is running an article by Terry Cutler, a 'certified Ethical Hacker', who wants to get the word out to people on protecting their identities from a growing number of risks. The piece covers shopping online, keeping your personal information contained, and avenues of inquiry if your identity is stolen."

Sega Genesis Collection for PSP and PS2 73

Posted by Zonk from the love-the-sega-voice dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Sega has announced what may be the coolest retro collection yet in a compilation of 30 Sega Genesis games for the PSP and PS2. 1up has a great breakdown of the games in the collection, which features everything from the Phantasy Star games to the Golden Axe games, to the Shinobis, to the Vectormans. Pretty cool stuff." From the article: "Sega's doing its part to give these games context with numerous unlockable interviews with the original developers and a museum with trivia on the disc. According to Sega, the games will be reproduced with 'the utmost accuracy to the originals as possible' by developer Backbone Entertainment. And as a special cool bonus, the PSP version will allow -- for the first time ever -- wireless multiplayer for several of the games. "

Google Code Jam Registration Opens Today 129

Posted by CowboyNeal from the best-and-brightest dept.
Bamfarooni writes "Registration for Google Code Jam 2006 opens today. The event consists of 3 online rounds (September 5-6, September 14 and September 19,) in which participants compete to solve three coding problems faster and more accurately than their competitors. If you've got what it takes, and more of it than anyone else, then you can take home up to $10k for your code-fu."

15 Websites That Changed the World 298

Posted by Zonk from the shake-it-up dept.
nuke-alwin writes "To mark the web's 15th anniversary, The Guardian is reporting on 15 websites that changed the world. Everything from commercial sites like eBay and Amazon to social collaboratives like Wikipedia and Slashdot made the list." From the article's comments on Blogger: "Content was once made by companies for passive consumption by people. After Blogger, people were the content. They wrote about and read about their friends, their opinions, their cats. (There was a lot about cats in the early blogs.) None had a huge audience but collectively they were massive. Now you see TV networks saying: 'We've gotta get on the web because that's where the audience is,' says Williams."

New 'No Military Use' GPL For GPU 1109

Posted by Zonk from the damn-the-man dept.
Tina Gasperson writes "GPU is a Gnutella client that creates ad-hoc supercomputers by allowing individual PCs on the network to share CPU resources with each other. That's intriguing enough, but the really interesting thing about GPU is the license its developers have given it. They call it a 'no military use' modified version of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The developers told Newsforge why they did it, with commentary from OSI and FSF." Newsforge is also owned by OSTG, Slashdot's parent company.

68% of UK Universities and Colleges Use Firefox 215

Posted by Zonk from the british-insight dept.
An anonymous reader writes "mozillaZine is reporting that over two-thirds of British universities and colleges have installed Mozilla or Firefox on their campus computers. They cite an open source survey by OSS Watch that also shows rising support for Mozilla Thunderbird, Moodle and Octave, though a decline for OpenOffice and LaTeX. Predictably, all open source offerings are blown away by Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office's 100% deployment rates."

Slashdot Top Deals