General Gaming Article |
- Google Wants Celebrities on Google+
- World of Borecraft: 5 Reasons Why the World of Warcraft Will Implode
- How News of the World Hacked Everybody’s Phones
- Demand Progress Co-Founder Indicted For Stealing Over 4 Million Documents From MIT
- Arrested Pirate Claims He Was Charging For The Cases, Not The Burned DVDs
- China Hits 485 Million Internet Users -- Or Does It?
- Foxconn Has Eye on ECS, Mulls Acquisition
- Fast Forward: AMD and ARM - Get a Room!
- FBI Raids Homes of Three Suspected to Have Ties with Anonymous
- Intel Sandy Bridge-E Details Trickle Out
| Google Wants Celebrities on Google+ Posted: 19 Jul 2011 02:36 PM PDT
The impetus to get celebrities on a social networking service is simple: publicity. it might not mean a lot to our esteemed readership that Lady Gaga is tweeting her heart out on Twitter, but that will inevitably drive some more mainstream users to join up. Having verified Google+ accounts will allow the popular crowd to have confidence that they have control over their social presence. Google has yet to decide how to do the verification. One possibility is that the celebrity in question will have to mail in a copy of his or her ID. But it's more likely that Google will just end up working with known talent agencies to verify accounts. Until Google gets this sorted out, some high profile users might sit this one out. For instance, William Shatner found his Google+ account deactivated recently. Apparently a Googler flagged it as a fake profile. Do you think that celebrity uptake will help Google+? |
| World of Borecraft: 5 Reasons Why the World of Warcraft Will Implode Posted: 19 Jul 2011 01:29 PM PDT Congratulations. If you're one of the 12-million people worldwide who have sunk their lives into World of Warcraft—er, 11.4 million, I should say—then you've joined a giant, contingent of digital athletes that have done a few stretches, maneuvered into position, and taken a giant flying leap over a shark. I don't have the numbers in front of me, so I can't say that the game's recent drop from 12 million paying subscribers (paying up to $15 or so a month) to a mere 11.4 million is WoW's first such major subscriber loss. But it is rather telling that we're just half a year out since the launch of the game's Earth-shaking expansion (literally) and WoW's total subscriber numbers have returned to their pre-Cataclysm levels.
Is Warcraft a dud? Hardly; Blizzard's still filling up its Scrooge McDuck-like vault down there in Irvine, California from the monthly contributions of its gigantic player base. But that doesn't mean that World of Warcraft, as a whole, isn't giving off the complete and total impression that the game has given up its lease on life. Like an old, sputtering car, WoW just keeps slowly chugging its way toward Irrelevant City. It might take a year; it might take five years. But mark my words: WoW has passed its peak. The drop in subscriber numbers you're seeing right now is the first big chink in World of Warcraft's armor, and it's pretty easy to see why people are leaving. 1. MicrotransactionsYou know the old cooking trick where one dunks a frog into a lukewarm pot of water and then gradually turns up the heat to kill the frog without startling it? Well, that's a complete and total myth. But it could be true were the situation applied to WoW players' bank accounts. I commend Blizzard for offering up a number of account-specific customizations for its players: Changing your character's factions from alliance to horde or vice versa, changing your character's appearance and, now, even allowing characters from different servers to queue up in dungeon parties together.
Unfortunately, these features come with a price: Yes, if the cellular industry has taught us anything, it's that bits and bytes carry high premiums in the modern era. Want to move your character from one faction to another in WoW? That'll be $30 (more than the cost of a boxed copy of WoW, I might add). Want to play with people on a different server? That'll be an undisclosed amount of money. There's a phrase for this in the non-Azerothian world: Nickel and diming. The more Blizzard charges premiums for features that should be part-and-parcel of the gaming experience (mobile access, anyone?), the more they start to look and feel like a reverse Robin Hood. 2. Capping OutI know, I know. You've heard this one before. Again, to Blizzard's credit, the company has done much to try and up the ante against the good ol' "tank and spank," or the default strategy groups of players use to clear boss content within the game's dungeons. We have raids! We have raids of varying sizes! We have raids and dungeons of varying difficulties! We have actual strategies one has to employ during these fights in order to not wipe the entire party!
But, still, that all goes out the window once you've run your 30th trip through the ever-long Halls of Origination. Or even the newly refreshed Deadmines. Or even (even) Blackwing Descent. The problem that plagues WoW is the same problem it's had since its inception: The end-game might introduce new elements and landscapes but, at the end of the day, you're still playing the exact same content over, and over, and over, and over. If you aren't in an active raid group, you might as well take up a drug addiction: It'll give you something to do while you play Warcraft's "numbers game" pursuit of slightly better loot, to borrow a phrase from Ben "Yahtzee" Crenshaw. 3. Unique Faces in the CrowdOne of the things I liked most about vanilla WoW was that the game offered a few interesting ways for a character to distinguish oneself. Perhaps that came in the form of a special tabard that you sunk a ton of time into getting, or a zone-wide yell because you accomplished some crazy task (severed dragon heads included), or because you were that jackass who kept snowballs from Blizzard's winter event until summer in order to pitch up some freezing delights into the faces of your friends. Fast-forward years later: Warcraft is now a smorgasboard of uniqueness.
I can't decide if I want WoW to have more content for players to slap onto their characters or less. Here's why: Nowadays, a simple walk through town yields people wearing all sorts of indistinguishing armor, with all sorts of titles appended to their names, with all sorts of goodies that they're carrying with them, or throwing on the ground next to them, or petting as it walks alongside them. Everyone's special, which makes everyone… refreshingly dull. I want to play in a world where others can appreciate my individual accomplishments and I, theirs, but not a world in which a wide pool of accomplishments muddies everyone's ability to stand out. And perhaps this is just an unfortunate byproduct of WoW's longevity: At nearly seven years' existence, the game has given players ample time to accomplish just about… everything. Maybe it's a graphical treatment; maybe it's a mechanics overhaul. But in a digital city full of badass veterans, what's the point of tackling WoW's more esoteric content or non-combat features if you're not much different than everyone else at the end of the day? I mean, it says something when we're still playing variants of the same holiday events year, after year, after year. Which leads me to… 4. Muddy Content WatersOne way to fix Warcraft's "stale" feeling would be for Blizzard to constantly refresh the game with new quests, new items… just constantly new things to do. Even the game's daily quests can get old after a while, especially if you're on your who-knows-how-long-its-been fix for your Daily Quest Addiction—the process by which one loads into a zone, runs the same seven or eight quests over the course of an hour or so, then logs out before doing it all again the next day. Rinse, wash, repeat. Do this enough times and I don't care what the final loot reward is for your efforts: It's boring.
Let's get to the meat of the issue: Blizzard sits on a mountain of cash. A country of cash. A freakin' digital world of cash. Why they aren't spending their obscene amounts of monthly wealth on an army of producers, actors, or superfans who would be willing to produce heaps of unique and interesting content on an accelerated timeframe is a question that's beyond my predicative abilities to answer. One of the largest MMOs in existence—or, at least, one of the biggest MMOs to have transcended from geek circles to mass-modern appeal–should have brand-new things to do going up on a daily basis. There's simply no excuse for endless repetition in a game this big! 5. Palette swapYou know what else feels stale about World of Warcraft? Its fashion sense. While pretty, the actual in-game assets of Azeroth and its inhabitants are starting to show signs of age—perhaps unavoidable, given just how much the game has to scale to meet all the system configurations its users log in with. But even semi-new titles like poor Age of Conan, or really new titles like Rift, make World of Warcraft look ancient by comparison. The graphics don't need any more crazy add-ons like rain effects or glowing raid targets: WoW needs a Cataclysm-sized update for its models, skins, rendering enging, effects… you name it! And the first thing WoW's graphical designers need to do before they start makin' swords all pretty again is sign a blood oath that they will never reuse the same character models for differently named (and differently colored) enemies. Or to put it another way, no more Scorpion and Sub-Zero treatment. When you're fighting a boss that suspiciously looks either like a boss you fought one expansion ago, or a normal mob that's just been magically resized to 30 times its original dimensions, come on. Slapping a dress on a pig doesn't make a new raid boss, especially if you just killed the first pig in another dungeon a few hours ago.
Try an experiment for me. Stop playing WoW for however long it takes you to break the urge to log online and finish your daily quests: For some, that might be days. For others, a full month. Don't cancel your account. Just stop playing. Now once you've achieved this Zen-like state of clarity, think about everything you've been doing with your digital life. Does it sound like this? You log online to your level 85 character. You're on the Horde, because "Da Horde Rulez #1." You load up in the capital city of Orgrimmar, immediately queue yourself up for your daily random instance, and start to think of things to do while you wait. You could check the auction house, but the goods you need to level your latest secondary skill are obscenely expensive. You could do some normal quests, but you're already outgeared for any of the rewards. You're not really in the mood to grind reputation since the time/payoff ratio is scant, and your guild chat is full of people looking for 5 more offline members to finish out their newbie raid. Your primary raid group is one you'll never see because, though you feel like you're at the top of your WoW game, you aren't anywhere near the item levels you need to play "real Warcraft." Your instance pops up. You run the same dungeon you've been running the last 3 months. You alt-tab out during the boring parts or you run WoW in a window so you can just kind of half-ass your way through the dungeon while concentrating on your latest Reddit posts (or Maximum PC reviews). The loot that drops throughout the dungeon is nothing you need, but the simple act of finishing it brings you 1/65 closer to a slightly better piece of gear that might, someday, help you raid with the big boys. And you, like many, ask yourself why you continue to play the "game." Blizzard's World of Warcraft is hardly a flawed creation. And there are certainly parts of the game that are novel, fun, and downright hilarious. But just as you can't beat an endgame boss without tweaked-out gear and strategy, Blizzard can't expect its followers to just play blindly, forever, without offering them the latest and greatest incentives to continue. And right now, I don't see strategy in Blizzard's methods; I see content shoveling. |
| How News of the World Hacked Everybody’s Phones Posted: 19 Jul 2011 12:38 PM PDT
For a while, leaving your cell unattended seemed like the biggest threat to phone security. But this recent business is a reminder that there are savvier ways someone can violate your phone—without even touching it. Details are still emerging as to how, exactly, News of the World reporters got into everybody's giblets. But here are the common—and shockingly simple—phone hacking techniques they likely used. Voicemail hacking, according to security experts, is not the worst of the things that could happen to you and your secret-spilling cell. These days, it is the least intrusive because voicemail as a message-delivering tool is fading out behind simple caller id, texting, and emailing. But it's still a massive invasion of privacy—even if the only one that still leaves messages is your dad. To access these messages, cell providers typically offer an external number you can call to get into your mailbox. The service recognizes the phone number calling, which is convenient for everyone—including people trying to get into your voicemail. Phone numbers—that unique identity that we assume belongs only to the object in our pocket—can be spoofed using Voice Over IP and some open source software. "The caller ID is a burst of data before the signal that tells the phone to ring," explains Chester Wisniewski, a Senior Security Advisor at Sophos. "If you're not using a commercial service provider, you can set your caller ID to anything." This means that that external number that you call to check your voicemail may interpret the falsified number as yours and act accordingly. Typically the service provider's external number still requires a password, even if you haven't set one. Bonus! But to get yourself equipped with something unique, each company has a well-known default (like the last 4 digits of your phone number, for instance) that gives users first time access. And how many of us actually change that pin? Uh oh. Spoof a number, enter the last 4 digits of that number, and presto: 10 identical voice mail messages from my dad on 10 consecutive Sundays. Spoofed numbers also allow another access point. Ever called your own phone number? "It automatically dumps you into voicemail and plays your messages," says Wisniewski. By now you see where I'm going with this: Would be evesdroppers can get there, too, using your number. To get forwarded to voicemail, someone might be tasked with intentionally occupying your line, while another with the forged number—your forged number—calls you as well. Bam: Voicemail. If not given direct access right then, pushing * during the outgoing message is a reliable way to gain entry. Passwords would be helpful here, but even strong passwords guarding voicemail are not 100-percent safe from determined snoopers, who have been known to call phone companies to ask for a password reset on a target's account. Security experts expect that some amount of this type of social engineering took place in the News of the World scandal. What this boils down to is someone tricking an employee at a cell carrier into giving up access. They'd need a few key details of the person's life to go from, of course, but security experts seem to treat this as a foregone conclusion. The thing about most voicemail intrusions is that there's no real way to know they've happened. If you've already listened to a message, someone playing it for a second time is not going to set off any alarm bells. Steven Rambam, an investigator and director of Pallorium, Inc. explains that that it can go even further. "I can save them as new after I've listened to each one so nobody will know." Alarming, to say the least. More alarming is the gamut of violations Rambam says are possible. Transgressions range from wriggling into someone's web portal to accessing call history to legal cell phone tracking (not the paying-off-cops stuff that was going on in the UK) to sending an email that will embed something on your phone to grab passwords. But 90 percent of the above voicemail-specific problems can be prevented if strong passwords are put into place, according to Rambam. That means no patterns on the keyboard (ahem, 2580) or digits repeated 4 times. "There's a balance between convenience and privacy," says Rambam, "and you have to decide if it's worth it for you." In other words: Put passwords on everything. Right now. Protect YourselfIt would be nice to keep the things in your private life private. Here are a few easy things you can do to guard yourself against unwanted interlopers.
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| Demand Progress Co-Founder Indicted For Stealing Over 4 Million Documents From MIT Posted: 19 Jul 2011 11:44 AM PDT
Carmen Ortiz, the US District Attorney for Massachusetts, says that Swartz – who didn't even attend MIT – broke into an off-limits area at the school and tapped into the University's network in a wiring closet, the NY Times Bits blog reports. "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars," Ortiz said. Swartz is up for wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, recklessly damaging a protected computer, aiding and abetting, and criminal forfeiture. If convicted, he faces up to 35 years in prison and a $1 millon fine. You can check out the indictment online. And yes, the Bits article is the top story on Reddit, in case you were wondering. Update: Demand Progress, the political organization co-founded by Swartz, offers their take on the situation on their blog. You can guess their slant by the name of the post alone: "Federal Government Indicts Former Demand Progress Executive Director For Downloading Too Many Journal Articles." Apparently, JSTOR didn't even want charges brought against Swartz. Update, round two: Apparently, the New York Times (and by extension, us) got it wrong the first time around. Aaron Swartz didn't co-found Reddit; he became part of the company when Reddit merged with Swartz's company, Infogami, six months into Reddit's lifespan. You can check out the clarification in a Google+ post by Alexis Ohanian, one of the, erm, actual co-founders. We've updated the article's text accordingly. Image credit: Boston.com |
| Arrested Pirate Claims He Was Charging For The Cases, Not The Burned DVDs Posted: 19 Jul 2011 11:07 AM PDT
The business only lasted a few months before an MPAA investigator told the police about the place, Ars Technica reports, citing an Orlando Sentinel article. When the cops kicked in the door, they found two computers and over 1,200 DVDs. The door itself backed up the man's defense: the owner had tacked a huge sign on it saying the movies were gratis and for promotional use only. Any money that changed hands for the cases themselves was simply a kind-hearted donation to the store. Erm, too bad that doesn't fly. Even if the court somehow swallows the "Selling cases" BS, copying copyrighted movies isn't legal, no matter whether you sell them for profit or accept "donations" for the jewel cases you stuff them into. If convicted, then owner of the shop is facing up to five years and prison and a $5,000 fine. Rest safe, Floridians; the illegal copies of Cars 2 and Hangover 2 are now off the streets in your community. |
| China Hits 485 Million Internet Users -- Or Does It? Posted: 19 Jul 2011 10:34 AM PDT
The China Internet Network Information Center claims that 27 million Chinese natives signed up for this newfangled Internet thing since the first of the year, PC World reports. That brings the total number of Chinese Internet users to 485 million, by CINIC's count. Of those 485 million, it's claimed that 318 million access the Web with their mobile device (the US only has a total population of around 311 million). However, comScore and an IDG analyst disagree with the tally. ComScore, you see, keeps its own tabs on the net, and by their count, the total number of connected Chinese added up to just 304 million users as of May. When comScore chucked Internet cafes into the mix, that number leaped as high as 415 million. That's still a ton of people, but 70 million less than CINIC claims. PC World throws doubt on the way CINIC's total is even calculated: apparently, the group considers a Chinese person an Internet user if they are over six years old and connected to the Web just once in the previous six months. Even if CINIC's 485 million user claim turns out to be true, that still means that only about a third of all Chinese citizens connect to the Internet. CINIC says that an additional 815 million rural Chinese still don't have Internet access, and in fact, many don't even know how to operate a computer. |
| Foxconn Has Eye on ECS, Mulls Acquisition Posted: 19 Jul 2011 10:15 AM PDT
At least that's the buzz from news and rumor site DigiTimes, which readily admits that both Foxconn and ECS refute the rumor. If you roll your own systems, you might recognize ECS as a builder of budget motherboards. ECS also produces higher end mobos, as well as a whole host of other products, including OEM boards for system vendors. According to DigiTimes, the big draw for Foxconn is a buyout would give it access to ECS' China-based retail channel subsidiary Orbbit, which is headquartered in Beijing. On the flipside, ECS is one of the few subsidiaries of Tatung Group that isn't losing money, so Tatung might not be real motivated to sell. Image Credit: topnews.net.nz |
| Fast Forward: AMD and ARM - Get a Room! Posted: 19 Jul 2011 10:08 AM PDT "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." That reasoning has led to many strange alliances among nations, but it also makes for some interesting business partnerships. For example, at AMD's recent Fusion developers' conference, AMD and ARM were practically flaunting their PDAs—public displays of affection, not personal digital assistants. ARM is the world's leading supplier of 32-bit CPU cores for cell-phone processors, consumer electronics, and embedded systems. Lately, this relatively small British company has been irritating Intel, which is trying to muscle into ARM's low-power territory, so AMD and ARM share a common enemy. Their hugfest at AMD's conference has important implications.
AMD is panting over heterogeneous microprocessors, which integrate multiple processor cores of different architectures on the same chip. AMD's Fusion processors are heterogeneous, because they combine AMD's x86 CPU cores with an AMD Radeon GPU core. More particularly, AMD is lusting for heterogeneous processing—sharing general-purpose workloads among different cores, instead of dedicating some cores to specialized tasks. Programmers are already using GPUs for general-purpose computing on AMD's ATI Stream and Nvidia's CUDA software platforms. Before Fusion, however, the GPU was a second-class citizen, relegated to the PCI Express bus. Fusion couples the GPU directly to the CPUs, making them peer processors. Now AMD is suggesting that ARM's CPU cores could make it a threesome. ARM cores could appear in PC processors or in future AMD embedded processors. They could work alongside the x86 CPUs and GPU, offloading some chores that require better power efficiency. Programming becomes more complex, but the chip could save power and cost less. This union could also save AMD the trouble of developing very-low-power x86 cores. If the flirting between AMD and ARM turns serious, maybe Intel will be the one who's hot and bothered. Tom Halfhill was formerly a senior editor for Byte magazine and is now an analyst for Microprocessor Report. |
| FBI Raids Homes of Three Suspected to Have Ties with Anonymous Posted: 19 Jul 2011 09:07 AM PDT
According to FoxNews.com, which claims an exclusive on the story, nearly a dozen FBI agents stormed through the Baldwin, New York home of Giordani Jordan with search warrant in hand. The agents confiscated at least one laptop from their 1-hour and 40-minute long raid. Meawhile, agents also searched a home in Long Island, and another in Brooklyn, both also in New York. It's unclear if anything was confiscated from those homes, though according to FoxNews.com, Jordan's system is one that authorities believe was used in a coordinated distributed denial of service attack against several companies. Remaining the defiant bunch, a user connected with Anonymous after learning of the raids tweeted, "It doesn't matter how many people the 'FBI' arrest.. whether they are core members or not.. #anonymous have started something unstoppable." LulzSec's recent reemergence notwithstanding, we used to hear similar war cries, right up until the organization abruptly called it quits as authorities began to close in on their inner circle. |
| Intel Sandy Bridge-E Details Trickle Out Posted: 19 Jul 2011 08:43 AM PDT
First up is the Core i7 3960X. This will be a six-core chip clocked at 3.3GHz, and up to 3.9GHz via Turbo. This thing will pack a monstrous 15MB of cache, and expect an unlocked multiplier as it's an Extreme Edition part. Sitting one rung lower is the Core i7 3930, also of the Extreme Edition variety. This is another six-core processor, but clocked slightly slower at 3.2GHz (Turbo 3.8GHz) and will a little less cache at 12MB. Both this and the 3960X have TDPs rated at 130W. Finally there's the Core i7 3820, a regular quad-core processor with a locked multiplier and clocked at 3.6GHz (Turbo 3.9GHz). It will come with 10MB of cache and a 130W TDP. |
Twitter has made a lot of headway by having big-name celebrities use the service as a promotional tool. This is the verified account scheme that the social networking site rolled out last year. Although Twitter doesn't make a lot of use of it anymore, we're getting word that Google is looking to create a 
Sites like Reddit and Digg are based entirely on free-thought concepts like crowdsourcing, forums and fair use. So, what's a poor former Reddit team member supposed to do when someone doesn't want to share their ideas? Apparently, he steals them. That's what Boston police say, at least. Today, they indicted 24-year-old programmer and Demand Progress co-founder Aaron Swartz on multiple charges, claiming he pilfered over four million documents from MIT and the JSTOR academic archive.
The best laughs in the country aren't found in comedy clubs or celebrity-filled roasts; if you want to really put the "L" in ROFL, you need to turn towards the court system. In today's humor-filled disposition, a store owner accused of selling illegal copies of DVDs says no, sir, he wasn't selling copyrighted DVDs – that's illegal, after all. He was actually giving the movies away for free, you see, and his customers were forking over $5 "donations" for the DVD cases.
China talks big when it comes to the Internet. Not just big as in "
As the primary supplier of iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad touch devices, as well as making products for high-profile companies like Acer, Asus, Dell, Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, and others, life is good for Foxconn (or Hon Hai Precision, if you prefer), which collected $59.3 billion in revenue in 2010. Foxconn can afford to go on a spending spree, and in addition to buying one of Cisco's manufacturing facilities in Mexico, the electronics maker is now setting its sights on Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS).
What's ironic about the hacking group known as Anonymous is that it's virtually impossible to remain truly anonymous on the Internet. We're not saying hackers can't hide themselves really well, but throw enough time and resources into the hunt, and chances are they'll be tracked down. The FBI has done just that and raided the homes of three suspected Anonymous hackers living in New York.
We'd like to tell you we donned our ninja suits, infiltrated Intel's facilities, and made off with a bunch of secrets all without getting caught, but none of that actually happened. Lucky for us, we didn't have to take things that far, because a | You are subscribed to email updates from Maximum PC - All Articles To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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