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Role Playing (Games)

Student Makes a Million Online, Gets Deported 309

Posted by Zonk from the probably-should-have-thought-this-through dept.
Via Kotaku, a story at the Mainichi daily news about an enterprising exchange student that got himself deported. Wang Yue Si, a Chinese student who went to Japan on a student visa, found himself in need of some spending money. Since he was a gamer, he decided to make some cash by selling virtual items online. He was so successful, the cops noticed. From the article: "He started selling items such as weapons and currency for online games through an Internet auction site in April this year, without obtaining the appropriate residency status. Wang, living in Kumamoto, has admitted that he sold the virtual goods for about 6 million yen ($US 1.3 Million), in violation of the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law. A bank worker became suspicious when Wang regularly sent money back home to China and alerted police in August, prompting Kumamoto police officers to investigate the student."

Did Humans Evolve? No, Say Americans 2155

Posted by Zonk from the i-do-not-think-that-word-means-what-you-think-it-means dept.
Stern Thinker writes "In a 2005 poll covering 33 countries, Americans are the least likely (except for Turkish respondents) to assert that 'humans developed ... from earlier species of animals.' Iceland, meanwhile, has an 85% acceptance rating for evolution." The blurb on the site for Science magazine is less circumspect about the findings: "The acceptance of evolution is lower in the United States than in Japan or Europe, largely because of widespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in the United States."

Studios OK Burning Movie Downloads 216

Posted by CowboyNeal from the so-long-as-it's-paid-for dept.
SirClicksalot writes "The DVD Copy Control Association has released a statement (pdf) announcing that it will make adaptations to the Content Scramble System (CSS) used to protect DVDs. The association, made up of Hollywood studios, consumer electronics and software companies, licenses CSS to the DVD industry to protect content. The changes will allow home users to legally burn purchased movie downloads to special CSS protected DVDs, compatible with existing DVD players."

Homeland Security says 'Patch Windows Now' 381

Posted by timothy from the well-that's-paraphrased dept.
gregger writes "Wow, so the Department of Homeland Security is really concerned with Microsoft patches now... enough to come out and tell us to patch our machines. This warning, chronicled in eWeek, was issued less than a day after the release of 23 patches from Redmond. So, if you don't apply the patches, then what?"

A Different Kind of WGA 'Problem' 348

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the foolproof-just-found-a-better-fool dept.
Ed Bott recently attempted to scout out the problems reported in so many horror stories floating around the net relating to Microsoft's WGA. He did experience problems, however, not the ones that you might expect. He intentionally installed a pirated copy of Windows XP to see how the process worked but was unable to get WGA to recognize his computer as pirated. From the article: "I'm reluctantly running a pirated version of Windows and can't get caught no matter how hard I try. But these same people want us to believe that the WGA software they've developed is nearly foolproof. They claim that all but "a fraction of a percent" of those 60 million people who've been denied access to Microsoft updates and downloads are guilty, guilty, guilty. Right."

Text-Mining Technique Intelligently Learns Topics 84

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the sound-of-google-knocking-on-your-door dept.
Grv writes "Researchers at University of California-Irvine have announced a new technique they call 'topic modeling' that can be used to analyze and group massive amounts of text-based information. Unlike typical text indexing, topic modeling attempts to learn what a given section of text is about without clues being fed to it by humans. The researchers used their method to analyze and group 330,000 articles from the New York Times archive. From the article, 'The UCI team managed this by programming their software to find patterns of words which occurred together in New York Times articles published between 2000 and 2002. Once these word patterns were indexed, the software then turned them into topics and was able to construct a map of such topics over time.'"

Hire a Game Coach Online 179

Posted by samzenpus from the get-some-skillz-noob dept.
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Expert videogame players, many of them teens, are forging professional careers as coaches, finding clients — many of them in their 20s or 30s — online, the Wall Street Journal reports. Some gigs pay $65 an hour. From the article: 'Gaming-lessons.com says its youngest "Halo 2" instructor is 8-year-old New Yorker Victor De Leon III — better known by his online gamer name, Lil Poison — who has given several lessons a month since late last year, fitting the classes in after he has done his homework. His father, also named Victor, says his son has used some of the money he earns from lessons (hourly rate: $25) to buy a hamster, named Cortana after a character in the game.'"

United States Cedes Control of the Internet 508

Posted by samzenpus from the learning-to-share dept.
greenechidna writes "The Register is reporting that the U.S. is relinquishing control of ICANN. The story states: 'In a meeting that will go down in internet history, the United States government last night conceded that it can no longer expect to maintain its position as the ultimate authority over the internet. Having been the internet's instigator and, since 1998, its voluntary taskmaster, the US government finally agreed to transition its control over not-for-profit internet overseeing organization ICANN, making the organization a more international body.'"

Virtual Worlds and ESP 310

Posted by timothy from the wait-I-know-what-you're-thinking dept.
Yesterday's post about an experiment using virtual worlds in an attempt to investigate the possibility of telepathic ability elicited nearly 400 comments from readers who had points to raise about experimental design, skepticism and credulity, and quantum mechanics. Read on for the Backslash summary of the discussion.

Bacterial DVD Holds 50TB 268

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the your-cdrom-wants-penicillin dept.
CAMags writes to tell us that a Harvard Professor is claiming to have developed a new variant of a protein called bacteriorhodopsin (bR) that, when layered on a DVD, can store up to 50TB of data. From the article: "The light-activated protein is found in the membrane of a salt marsh microbe Halobacterium salinarum and is also known as bacteriorhodopsin (bR). It captures and stores sunlight to convert it to chemical energy. When light shines on bR, it is converted to a series of intermediate molecules each with a unique shape and color before returning to its 'ground state.'"

Spam from Taiwan 229

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the spam-who-loved-me dept.
TristanGrimaux writes "According to a recent study done by CipherTrust, two thirds of the world's spam is sent by Taiwan servers. The US follows with 24% and in a distant third is China with only 3% of the servers who actually sends the spam." The article cites easy access to broadband and lack of crackdown on offenders as the main contributing factors.

Blue Security Gives up the Fight 672

Posted by CmdrTaco from the eggs-bacon-sausage-and-splat dept.
bblboy54 writes "According to The Washington Post, Blue Security has closed its doors, which can be confirmed by the Blue Security application failing to work today and their domain no longer resolving. Blue Security's CEO is quoted in the article: "It's clear to us that [quitting] would be the only thing to prevent a full-scale cyber-war that we just don't have the authority to start," Reshef said. "Our users never signed up for this kind of thing." You have to wonder where it goes from here. It seems an effective method has been found but more than a small private company could handle. Will someone else adapt this concept, or does the internet world give up?"
Security

Apache Now the Leader in SSL Servers? 160

Posted by Zonk from the moving-on-up dept.
miller60 writes "Apache has overtaken Microsoft as the leading developer of secure web servers, according to Netcraft's monthly SSL survey. Apache now runs on 44.0% of secure web sites, compared to 43.8% for Microsoft. Apache's recent gains are attributed to the inclusion of mod_ssl in version 2, and strong growth of SSL-enabled sites in non-US markets where Apache has stronger market share."

Comment Re:Hm... (Score 1) 172

by emiddlec (#13430260) Attached to: Interview with SETI@home Director David Anderson
The interview concentrates on the computing side of the project, the BOINC platform.

I thought so too. I was looking for more questions about SETI myself, but oh well. If anyone else is looking for an interview more about SETI and less about BOINC, here are the interview questions up front, so you can skip the 3-page interview if it doesn't appeal to you:

  • Can you tell us a little about BOINC and the history behind it?
  • Besides SETI@home and Climateprediction.net, what other projects are using BOINC?
  • What would you say are the main goals and principles behind the design of BOINC?
  • Can you tell us what the main hurdles, technical and otherwise, were in developing BOINC?
  • One would expect that dealing with so many platforms and operating systems would be challenging. How do you handle it?
  • What are the major security concerns, and how are you addressing them?
  • We're hearing a lot about various forms of distributed computing these days, such as grid, utility, on-demand, and SOA (service-oriented architecture). What's your take on these approaches, and how do they relate to volunteer computing?
  • Following on that, where's the intersection (if any) between volunteer computing and such familiar technologies as clustering and SMP (symmetric multiprocessing)?
  • What forces do you feel led to the rise of volunteer-donated distributed computing for applications such as SETI@home?
  • Where is BOINC headed over the next few years?
  • Are there any expected commercial applications?

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