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WoW, Habbo Leaders to Keynote GDC Austin 32

Posted by Zonk on Thursday May 31, 2007 @07:27PM from the very-different-games dept.

Gamasutra reports that this year's GDC Austin (formerly the Austin Games Conference) will feature a pair of distinguished and very different speakers. "World of Warcraft father Michael Morhaime and creative leader behind Habbo Hotel Sulka Haro will each present a keynote lecture for the Online Games Track at the 2007 Austin Game Developers Conference. The two online entertainment innovators will draw on their experiences revolutionizing the way people interact in virtual worlds to motivate the online game development community to break boundaries and strive to create better games." The online-focused event is slated for early September this year, and the inclusion of a gent from Habbo indicates that titles other than just the AAAs are likely to be under scrutiny.

Feed Nobel Laureate James Watson Receives Personal Genome (sciencedaily.com)

From feed by sdfeed on Thursday May 31, 2007 @07:12PM

Nobel laureate James Watson -- co-discoverer of the DNA double helix and father of the Human Genome Project -- became the first human to receive the data that encompass his personal genome sequence.

Submission + - Google is on a buying spree (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

jbrodkin

on Thursday May 31, 2007 @06:58PM

jbrodkin writes: "Google bought two companies this week, may soon buy a third, and that's not even including the pending DoubleClick acquisition. It's a continuation of a busy 12 months in which Google has agreed to 11 acquisitions of companies and technologies, several of which have bolstered the search engine leader in its competition with Microsoft. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/053107-googl e.html"

Submission + - The Ignorance of Crowds (strategy-business.com)

Submitted by sounil on Thursday May 31, 2007 @06:55PM

sounil writes: From the abstract: "The open source model, which relies on contributions from many individuals, can be an important factor in innovation, but it comes with limitations. Although this approach can be effective at refining programs or ideas that already exist, it is less successful when used to generate new ideas or to complete a project." The article provides some very interesting insights into why certain open source projects succeed and why others falter and how one can take advantage of these insights for future projects.

Submission + - 10 Anti-Phishing Firefox Extensions

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31, 2007 @06:49PM

An anonymous reader writes: 10 anti-phishing Firefox extensions list was published at Security-Hacks: "For most Internet users, defending against phishing attacks is a top priority. One popular way to combat phishing attacks is to maintain a list of known phishing sites and to check web sites against the list. This hack highlights 10 anti-phishing Firefox extensions that can be used to mitigate the risk of being a victim of a phishing attack."

Submission + - Dotster Hijacks Their Customers' Subdomains

Submitted by mo on Thursday May 31, 2007 @06:34PM

mo writes: Recently, Dotster's DNS service has made a massive, potentially illegal change that has gone largely unnoticed. They now redirect DNS queries for any of their customer's unused subdomains to a spam page that serves up ads. For example, www.asterisk.org is a popular open source PBX project who gets it's DNS from Dotster, but bogus.asterisk.org redirects to Dotster's page of ads. This policy has been imposed on all of their customers without informing them. Any domain who has ns1.nameresolve.com as their primary nameserver is being subjected to it.

The IT Department as Corporate Snoop? 116

Posted by Zonk on Thursday May 31, 2007 @06:01PM from the like-penny-in-inspector-gadget dept.

coondoggie writes with a link to a NetworkWorld article about the dangers of IT department snoops. A study released today is likely to exacerbate the trend of failing trust in employees; it shows that one in three IT employees poke through systems and prod at confidential information while on the job. The survey was done by a firm specializing in password security, so some salt might be required for this particular article. "The survey found that more than one-third of IT professionals admit they could still access their company's network once they'd left their current job, with no one to stop them. More than 200 IT professionals participated in the survey with many revealing that although it wasn't corporate policy to allow IT workers to access systems after termination, still almost 25% of respondents knew of another IT staff member who still had access to sensitive networks even though they'd left the company long ago."

Submission + - AMD Releases Detailed Phenom Die Photo (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid on Thursday May 31, 2007 @05:56PM

MojoKid writes: A few weeks ago, AMD released information on new branding for their desktop derivatives of the Barcelona core, now dubbed the Phenom FX, X4 and X2. If you're unfamiliar with Phenom, the processors will be based on AMD's K10 architecture and will feature a faster on-die memory controller, support 64-bit and 128-bit SSE operations, and they'll be outfitted with 2MB of on-chip L2 cache (512KB dedicated per core) in addition to 2MB of shared L3 cache. Today,instead of revealing some more of the juicy details regarding those enhancements, AMD just sent over a tasty photo of a Phenom die. Click the image for a high-res version.

Feed Nokia N75 and N76 now available -- from Nokia USA (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed on Thursday May 31, 2007 @05:52PM

Filed under: Cellphones

For a company that tends to concentrate on candybars and the occasional slider for its smartphone stable, a double shot of S60 flips in the American market is pretty much a bumper crop -- and that's exactly what Nokia's delivering, officially announcing its own availability of the N75 and the N76 today. Notice we say "its own" availability; the N75 has been livin' it up in AT&T's lineup for a few weeks now but it's been nigh impossible to get one contract-free from the carrier, so Nokia's direct sale is a welcome one for folks that just want to buy one outright. Side by side, the N76 solidly whips its stablemate in the looks department, but bear in mind one critical fact: 3G data lurks underneath the N75's hood. Pick up the N75 for $429.99 and the N76 for $499.99 starting today from Nokia (including the flagship stores in New York and Chicago) and its distributors.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Submission + - Microwulf: A Personal, Portable Beowulf Cluster (calvin.edu)

Submitted by

Joel Adams

on Thursday May 31, 2007 @05:46PM

Joel Adams writes: "Tim Brom and I recently completed Microwulf — a personal, portable Beowulf cluster measuring just 11" (W) x 12" (D) x 17" (H), making it small enough to sit on one's desk and be easily transported. The total cost of the system (using January 2007 prices) was $2470. The design consists of a "double-decker sandwich" of four MicroATX motherboards and AMD64 X2 CPUs, providing a total of 8 processing cores that communicate via Gigabit Ethernet. Software includes Ubuntu Linux, OpenMPI, MPICH, and assorted free high performance apps that run on top of MPI. The system is air-cooled and draws just 450 watts of power under load, so it can be plugged into a wall outlet.

Microwulf produces 26.25 Gflops of measured, double-precision performance on the standard supercomputing benchmark HP Linpack (using Goto BLAS). That gives Microwulf a price/performance ratio of $94.10/Gflop, or less than $0.10/Mflop. These ratios reflect measured performance for double-precision floating point operations, not (sales hype) peak performance or (rarely used in high performance computing) single-precision floating point operations. Microwulf's power/performance ratio is a fairly efficient 17.14 watts/Gflop under load.

At this size and price, a person can afford to have a personal Beowulf cluster on his or her desk. For those who want to build one, the design details and pictures are available at the project website. The design is easily tweaked to incorporate quad-core and many-core CPUs, as they become available and affordable. It will be fun in the coming years to see how low people can drive the price/performance and power/performance ratios by building similar systems using these new CPUs. Microwulf costs under $0.10/Mflop; who will be the first to build a general purpose cluster for under $0.01/Mflop?"

Submission + - Mindark to Create Largest (Entropia) Universe ever

Submitted by WhitePaper on Thursday May 31, 2007 @05:35PM

WhitePaper writes: Get past the hype here http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?relea se_id=259436 and it seems that Mindark has broken through the Government Controlled Firewall at the Chinese border and signed one massive deal!

The When and How may be sketchy, but the why is clear...
— to create a cash-based virtual economy for China.
— to permit up to 7 million concurrent users logged into the virtual universe with an overall aim to attract some 150 million users from all over the world.
— Entropia Universe to generate over $1 billion annually from this partnership
— The project will enable other companies within media, film, music and gaming industries, or other content providers, to acquire their own planet within Entropia Universe

David Liu (CEO of Cyber Recreation Development Corp} says, "It is estimated that the project will generate some 10,000 qualified job opportunities in China"

Jan Welter Timkrans (CEO of MindArk PE AB) boasts, "...the structure running the Entropia Universe will be one of the fastest on Earth"

With 580,000 registered accounts Entropia Universe has been on a record breaking streak via the sale of Virtual Assets.
— Virtual Treasure Island ~ US $26,500
— Asteroid-based space resort ~ US $100,000
— Five virtual banking licenses ~ US $400,000
— Content Controlled Planet ~ Watch this space!

Hackers Dodge Xbox Live Shutout 71

Posted by Zonk on Thursday May 31, 2007 @05:35PM from the over-the-wall dept.

An Ars Technica post at their games column Opposable Thumbs points out that, despite Microsoft's best efforts, hacked Xbox 360s are once again playing on Xbox Live. "Steadfast in their pursuits, the hackers of the Xbox 360 scene have managed to best Microsoft's Xbox Live Banning protocol: a system of checks in place to identify hacked Xbox 360s and deny them access to the Xbox Live Network. The current method of hacking the 360 involves exploiting the firmware of the DVD drive (the preferable method), and this latest patch does just that. In fact, the creators are so confident in their breakthrough that the info file remarks that the new firmware 'defeats all current and some future Xbox Live detection attempts.'"

Submission + - Innocent man sets up internet GPS to track himself

Submitted by gurps_npc on Thursday May 31, 2007 @05:08PM

gurps_npc writes: Hasan Elahi is an American of Bangladesh birth. He is not arabic and not a terrorist. But someone accused him (or someone with a similar name) of being one. After he escaped from the clutches of Homeland Security, he decided to make sure he had evidence to free himself if it happened again. Beyond the normal precautions (calling up the FBI and telling them he is planning on traveling before he books his ticket), he did something a bit more extreme. He hacked his cell phone and set up a web site that tracked his GPS position. It is broadcast live to his website, here: tracking website. Then he routinely takes lots of pictures with that same cellphone, sending them to the website as well. Before you start thinking he is paranoid, you might check his web logs. Computers at government agencies have looked visited his site.

More can be read at this wordpress article.

Cure spooky music. How long before they start "asking" "people of interest" to do this?

Submission + - More Details on Michigan Wireless Bust (foxnews.com)

Submitted by

Paul Wagenseil

on Thursday May 31, 2007 @05:07PM

Paul Wagenseil writes: "FOXNews.com's Sara Bonisteel talks to Sam Peterson II, the Michigan man recently busted by local police for sitting in his car using a coffee shop's password-free wireless network.

Because he never bought a cup of coffee, the D.A.'s office threatened to prosecute Peterson for fraudulent access to a computer network, which is a felony charge carrying up to 5 years in prison. After talking to lawyers, he opted to pay a $400 fine and perform 40 hours of community service.

The cop: "We came back and we looked up the laws and we figured if we found one and thought, 'Well, let's run it by the prosecutor's office and see what they want to do.'"

The D.A.'s office: "When you buy a Wi-Fi equipped device, it's your responsibility to find out what you can and can't legally do with that device."

The bustee: "They don't happen to tell you that [wireless piggybacking] is illegal. And I guess obviously you're just supposed to know that."

The coffee-shop owner: "He could have just come in the cafe — even if he didn't have any money, I would let him get on it.""

Submission + - Arizona gov admits to seeing Phoenix lights

Submitted by stratjakt on Thursday March 22, 2007 @04:06PM

stratjakt writes: The governor of Arizona now admits to having seen the Phoenix lights.

Symington says he saw a large triangular "craft of unknown origin" with lights, moving slowly. "It was dramatic. And it couldn't have been flares because it was too symmetrical", he says. "It had a geometric outline, a constant shape."

I for one welcome our crazy republican overlords.

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