10065516
submission
RogueyWon writes:
Kotaku is reporting that Infinity Ward, developer of Modern Warfare 2, has been at the centre of strange events, and that Jason West and Vince Zampella, two lead developers, have been fired by parent company Activision for "breaches of contract and insubordination". Speculation is rife as to the reasons behind this; following Modern Warfare 2's spectacular sales figures, it seems unlikely that the studio's performance could be to blame.
10055932
story
eldavojohn writes
"Do you have branch offices in China? iSec has published a new report (PDF) outlining the severity of the attacks on Google.cn, allegedly by the Chinese government, dubbed 'Aurora' attacks. Up to 100 companies were victims, and some are speculating that resistance to such attacks is futile. The report lays out the shape of the attacks — which were customized per-company based on installed vulnerable software and antivirus protection: '1. The attacker socially engineers a victim, often in an overseas office, to visit a malicious website. 2. This website uses a browser vulnerability to load custom malware on the initial victim's machine. 3. The malware calls out to a control server, likely identified by a dynamic DNS address. 4. The attacker escalates his privilege on the corporate Windows network, using cached or local administrator credentials. 5. The attacker attempts to access an Active Directory server to obtain the password database, which can be cracked onsite or offsite. 6. The attacker uses cracked credentials to obtain VPN access, or creates a fake user in the VPN access server. 7. At this point, the attack varies based upon the victim. The attacker may steal administrator credentials to access production systems, obtain source code from a source repository, access data hosted at the victim, or explore Intranet sites for valuable intellectual property.' The report also has pages of recommendations as well as lessons learned, which any systems administrator — even those inside the US — should read and take note of."
7847530
submission
Vigile writes:
And here Intel was about to get out of 2009 with only a modestly embarrassing year. While Intel and AMD settled their own antitrust and patent lawsuits in November, the FTC didn't think that was good enough and has decided to sue Intel for anti-competitive practices. While the suits in Europe and in the US civil courts have hurt Intel's pocketbook and its reputation, the FTC lawsuit could very likely be the most damaging towards the company's ability to practice business as they see fit. The official hearing is set for September of 2010 but we will likely here news filtering out about the evidence and charges well before that. One interest charge that has already arisen: that Intel systematically changed its widely used compiler to stunt the performance of competing processors!
7477476
submission
Vigile writes:
Intel unveiled a completely new processor design today the company is dubbing the "Single-chip Cloud Computer" (but was previously codenamed Bangalore). Justin Rattner, the company's CTO, discussed the new product at a press event in Santa Clara and revealed some interesting information about the goals and design of the new CPU. While terascale processing has been discussed for some time, this new CPU is the first to integrate full IA x86 cores rather than simple floating point units. The 48 cores are set 2 to a "tile" and each tile communicates with others via a 2D mesh networking capable of 256 GB/s rather than a large cache structure. There are more details on the design and its massive die size in this summary at PC Perspective.
7175350
submission
Vigile writes:
The new Colossus SSD comes in capacities starting at 256GB and going all the way up to 1TB in a standard 3.5-in hard drive form factor. This larger size was required because the drive actually integrates not one but FOUR Indilinx SSD controllers and THREE total RAID controllers in a nested RAID-0 array. All of this goodness combines to create an incredibly fast drive that beats most other options in terms of write speeds and is competitive in read tests as well. Using some custom "garbage collection" firmware, the drive works around the fact that TRIM commands aren't supported in RAID configurations to maintain high speeds through the life of the SSD.
7164392
submission
Mr2001 writes:
Consumerist reports that Apple is refusing to work on computers that have been used in smoking households. "The Apple store called and informed me that due to the computer having been used in a house where there was smoking, that has voided the warranty and they refuse to work on the machine, due to 'health risks of second hand smoke'," wrote one customer. Another said, "When I asked for an explanation, she said [the owner of the iMac is] a smoker and it's contaminated with cigarette smoke which they consider a bio-hazard! I checked my Applecare warranty and it says nothing about not honoring warranties if the owner is a smoker."
Apple claims that honoring the warranty would be an OSHA violation. (Remember when they claimed enabling 802.11n for free would be a Sarbanes-Oxley violation?)
5622657
submission
Vigile writes:
Performance analysis on solid state drives is still coming into clarity as more manufacturers enter the fold and more of the drives find their way into users hands. While Intel's dominance in the SSD market was once undoubted, newer garbage collection methods from Indilinx and Samsung are now balancing performance across the the major players. What hasn't been discussed in great detail yet is the effect that drive capacity can have on overall performance. Some smaller drives (64GB versus 128GB) will actually use fewer data channels from the controller chip and thus will have lower transfer speeds. In this article drives using controllers from Indilinx, Samsung and Intel are compared.
5619997
submission
Earthquake Retrofit writes:
Ars has a story about Eve Online dropping 9000 accounts for real-world trading of in-game money for profit. From the article:
"Those who buy and sell ISK, the game's currency, are not only exploiting the game, but unbalancing play. That's why the company decided to go drastic: a program they called "Unholy Rage,"
For weeks they studied the behavior and effects these real-money traders had on the game, and then they struck. During scheduled maintenance, over 6,000 accounts were banned. Hreiðarsson assures us that the methods were sound, and the bannings went off with surgical precision.
While the number of accounts banned in the opening phase of the operation constituted around 2 percent of the total active registered accounts, the CPU per user usage was cut by a good 30 percent."
Looks like they got the right 6000.
5295321
submission
Vigile writes:
When Intel's consumer line of solid state drives were first introduced late in 2008, they impressed reviewers with their performance and reliability. Intel gained a lot of community respect by addressing some performance degradation issues found at PC Perspective by quickly releasing an updated firmware that solved those problems and then some. Now Intel has its second generation of X25-M drives available, designated by a "G2" in the model name. The SSDs are technically very similar though they use 34nm flash rather than the 50nm flash used in the originals and reduced latency times. What is really going to set these new drives apart though, both from the previous Intel offerings and their competition, are the much lower prices allowed by the increased memory density. PC Perspective has posted a full review and breakdown of the new product line that should be available next week.
