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Games

Submission + - Cow Clicker: The Essence of Facebook Games (bogost.com)

mjn writes: "Game designer and academic Ian Bogost announces Cow Clicker, a Facebook game implementing the mechanics of the Facebook-games genre stripped to their core. You get a cow, which you can click on every six hours. You earn additional clicks if your friends in your pasture also click. You can buy premium cows with 'mooney', and also use your mooney to buy more clicks. You can buy mooney with real dollars, or earn some free bonus mooney if you spam up your feed with Cow Clicker activity. A satire of Facebook games, but actually as genuine a game as the non-satirical games are. And people actually play it, perhaps confirming Bogost's view that the genre of games is largely just "brain hacks that exploit human psychology in order to make money", which continue to work even when the users are openly told what's going on."
Microsoft

Submission + - New Token Attack Owns All Windows Versions (threatpost.com)

Trailrunner7 writes: Microsoft's problems with Token Kidnapping [.pdf] on the Windows platform aren't going away anytime soon. More than a year after Microsoft issued a patch to cover privilege escalation issues that could lead to complete system takeover, a security researcher plans to use the Black Hat conference spotlight to expose new design mistakes and security issues that can be exploited to elevate privileges on all Windows versions including the brand new Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.
Researcher Cesar Cerrudo said the vulnerabilities can be exploited to bypass new Windows services protection to help in post-exploitation scenarios too where an attacker is able to run code after exploiting a vulnerability in a Windows service but he is not able to compromise the whole system due to these protections. One of the issues Cerrudo plans to present at Black Hat even allows him to bypass one of the Microsoft's fixes for previous Token Kidnapping vulnerabilities on Windows 2003.

Idle

Submission + - Optimus Prime made of junk cars in China (dvice.com)

rmaureira writes: An awesome 33 feet, 6 ton Optimus Prime replica is being shown at Beijing's Olympic Park. Made from junked car parts and scrap metal parts it surely looks awesome.

Comment Re:Well? (Score 1) 981

You failed to see that the independent events are conditionally dependent on having a particular outcome. Since you like the dice example:

Say I have a cup with 2 fair 6 sided dice. I roll them and turn over the cup so you can't see them. I peek under the cup, look at both dice, and without changing either die I slide out one of the dice to reveal that is a 6. Do you think the odds of the other dice being a 6 is still 1/6? No, it's 1/11 and here's the breakdown:

Odds of not rolling any 6s: 25/36 (I can't reveal a 6, so these cases are impossible as I showed you at least one 6)
Odds of rolling exactly 1 6: 10/36 (I reveal the 6 and the other die is not a 6)
Odds of rolling exactly 2 6s: 1/36 (I reveal either 6 and the other die is a 6)

It's like a mini Monty Hall problem. The key is that I have advanced knowledge of the outcome all the events and selectively reveal information. The only way the die I revealed is a 6 and the in the cup is a 6 is if I rolled double 6s to begin with (odds 1/36), and by revealing one of the a dice as a 6 I eliminate 25 of the possible cases to make the remaining odds of double 6s 1/11, which is still worse than 1/6 on an independent roll.
The Military

Submission + - Obama internet 'kill switch' bill approved (brisbanetimes.com.au)

CuteSteveJobs writes: The new "Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act" has been unanimously approved by the US Homeland Security committee and will be put to a vote on the Senate floor shortly. The act grants the US government powers to seize control of and shut down the Internet under a new bill that describes the global internet as a "US National Asset".

The act stipulates internet firms and providers must immediately comply with instructions by a new section of the US Department of Homeland Security, dubbed the "National Centre for Cybersecurity and Communications". The bill was introduced by Senator Joe Lieberman who argues that US economic security, national security and public safety were under threat from cyber-terrorists. Critics have called it an "Internet Kill switch" and said it is irresponsible for any one country to wield such power. Given how heavily business relies on the net, is this reasonable? Will other countries use this as cue to develop their own internet infrastructure?

Submission + - Thunderbird - Too Little, Too Late? (linux-mag.com)

MonsterTrimble writes: "From the Article:

"A few weeks ago, the Mozilla Messaging folks released the second beta for Thunderbird 3.1. The list of features amount to some nice improvements, but nothing revolutionary. One has to wonder if Thunderbird will ever be relevant to a wide audience, or if the Mozilla Messaging team should be focusing on doing more than incremental improvements to an old-school mailer."

"

Comment Re:If you jailbreak, you are destroying the securi (Score 1) 145

Except the problem is that the exploits in iOS that jailbreaking software uses to break in to your phone in the first place are still there. Someone could easily write a piece of malware that infects your PC, waits for your iPhone to connect via USB, then silently slips in a malicious payload in the same manner. Your phone has no measure of security to stop or even alert you of anything that makes it in.

Being aware that my phone is vulnerable no matter what but having more transparency like being able to sift through my phone's filesystem gives me just a little more peace of mind.

Comment Re:Can't wait to see (Score 1) 702

Almost all my friends end up jailbreaking their iPhones after playing with mine for a few minutes and seeing what you can do when a bunch of Apple's restrictions are lifted. A few who aren't "techy" people by any stretch even became much more interested in tinkering around with their devices as a result. I don't think the problem with the public is apathy like you suggest, it's basically ignorance that there is an alternative that works with what they want.

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