Slashdot Mirror

GamePolitics reports that Germany's new coalition government wants to limit the development and production of violent games. From the article: "... Andreas Scheuer, a parliamentarian serving under the banner of the conservative Christian Social Union, told Der Spiegel that violent games 'have no place in Germany's bedrooms.' Scheuer added that parents must be responsible for what their children play, but that the German government could help less media-savvy parents by introducing a 'complete ban' on violent games. Along with movies, games are already subject to a rating process."

Slashback tonight brings a few corrections, clarifications and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including several updates to the Sony DRM rootkit fiasco, another school system's take on intelligent design, some of the first pictures of the much talked about avian flu virus, a sentencing that gives us the first torrent user to get jail time, Bernard Golden weighs in on the continuing Massachussetts OpenDocument debate, and one users commentary on recent announcements to start pay-per-download services for TV shows. Read on for the details.

Sony still not "getting it". c writes "Mark Russinovich continues his investigation of Sony's DRM as he tries out the official uninstaller. His verdict? 'I've analyzed virulent forms of spyware/adware that provide more straightforward means of uninstall.'" Relatedly Cronos1388 writes "According to the Inquirer an Italian group is also suing Sony over the rootkit." Also, an unexpected side effect of this technology is that script kiddies have been able to leverage Sony's tool to hide unauthorized cheat programs from the watchful eye of MMO creators.

Intelligent design supporters ousted. PMuse writes "The Register and others are reporting that all eight of the members of the Dover, PA school board that had required Intelligent Design to be taught alongside Evolution have been canned by voters in yesterday's election."

What does avian flu look like? DevL writes "Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson has managed to capture images of a H5N1 (bird flu) virus entering and taking control of a cell. While the text is in Swedish, the images speak for themselves."

Torrent user goes up the river. stinerman writes to tell us that the Hong Kong man who was recently arrested for making several movies available via BitTorrent has had his sentence handed down. Chan aka "Big Crook" uploaded Daredevil, Red Planet, and Miss Congeniality which landed him 3 months in jail.

Golden weighs in on OpenDocument debate. OSS_ilation writes "With so much FUD and anti-FUD flying in the face of Massachusetts' decision to go with OpenDocument, it's no surprise that open source advocate Bernard Golden weighs in with his take on current events."

User says new downloadable television just plain "sucks." Thomas Hawk writes "In the past few weeks the three major studios have all announced deals to begin offering downloadable television for consumers -- Apple/ABC, DirecTV/NBC, and Comcast/CBS. The problem with each of these respective offerings is that they largely suck. Apple sells expensive low res limited television from ABC. NBC's new service will only work on DirecTV DVRs (uh hello McFly, why pay money for this service when I can just record it for free). And CBS' downloadable programming could contain commercials."

Game Politics reports that Jack Thompson has removed himself from the Alabama court case against members of the games industry. From the post: "Thompson's flamboyant profile, take-no-prisoners style of communication, and frequent press releases and media appearances were the subject of a defense motion on behalf of video game industry clients to revoke his Pro Hac Vice (visiting) admission to the Alabama bar. The motion to remove Thompson from the case occupied much of last Thursday's hearing before Judge Moore in Fayette County. By day's end the judge asked both sides to submit opinions on the Pro Hac Vice revocation motion as well as another defense motion to dismiss the case on a summary judgment for lack of merit." Gamespot has commentary as well.

Well known designer Warren Spector let his opinions fly in a keynote at the Montreal Game Summit, reports Edge Online. From the article: "While admitting that the largest part of the criticism stemmed from general ignorance and misunderstanding of videogaming by the 'cultural gate-keepers,' he noted that simply staying the course and waiting for mainstream acceptance to catch up could lead not only to political intervention, but a 'coarsening of our culture,' and 'eventual cultural irrelevance.' Instead, he joined a growing chorus in the development community by strongly advocating the diversification of games to be more inclusive of women, older gamers, and traditionally excluded ethnicities." Next Generation is covering a similar statement by ESA President Doug Lowenstein about his views on the gaming industry's image. Unfortunately, societal parasite Jack Thompson took Spector's remarks to be validation of his viewpoint. GamePolitics has that story.

user_granstro writes "Madison, Wisconsin is the next city to face the shambling undead hordes. At 2pm on Saturday, October 22, zombie fans will assemble in full costume to kick off Zombie Lurch 2005. Organizer Maddie Greene, a self-styled zombie expert, says of the event, "I think that any bystander could jump right in and become a zombie with the proper groaning and limping and attitude.""

djflipstarx writes "Jack Thompson, famous anti-videogame lawyer, has found himself in the position of being investigated by the Florida Bar Association after trying to get Penny-Arcade writers Gabe and Tycho arrested. A bunch of people from the Penny-Arcade forums then went and sent letters to the FBA asking for them to check up on Thompson's current actions and review his license to practice law. The fact that even the National Institute on Media and the Family distance themselves from Thompson doesn't help his case either." The lesson here? There are many nerds in the world. Some of them have a posse. Be careful who you pick on.

Anon1001 sent us the latest developments in the ongoing saga between Miami Attorney Jack Thompson and Penny-Arcade. So far the story goes that Jack has filed a wrongful death suit against Rock Star, claiming that GTA is a cop killing training simulator responsible for the murder of a pair of cops. He also offered $10k to charity if anyone who would develop some ridiculous murder spree game. When someone did it, and he changed his mind and Penny-Arcade donated the cash instead. All of this is being documented on the Penny Arcade website, in phone calls, rants and comics, as well as an 'I Hate Jack Thompson' T-Shirt. (Note, Slashdot's parent company owns ThinkGeek). He has now called the cops claiming harassment. Update: 10/18 17:40 GMT by Z : It seems like this confrontation has been brewing all summer. The most recent altercation is just another link in the chain made by Thompson's reaction to Hot Coffee and his crusade against the Sims 2. Further, PA has put up the scan of the letter to the cops, and a photo of the check.

Goalmaster3000 writes to tell us Joystiq.com is reporting that Jack Thompson has rescinded his offer of a $10,000 donation to charity if a video game were made to fit his model. Recently a group of GTA modders cooked up a scenario to fit the bill but apparently Thompson is claiming that his piece 'A Modest Video Game Proposal' was intended as satire that the video game community was not bright enough to grasp. Perhaps Thompson was just afraid he was going to have to sue himself? Update: 10/17 20:02 GMT by SM: It appears that the Penny Arcade crew has taken the next step by donating the promised $10,000... in Jack Thompson's name.

Astervitude writes "Collisions of the cosmic kind could be the source of one of nature's most lethal explosions. Astronomers have traced the origin of short-duration gamma-ray bursts, or GRBs, to the merger of neutron stars or other dense bodies. Space.com has a report on the scientific detective work that led to the solution of what has been described as a 35-year-old mystery. "Our observations do not prove the coalescence model, but we surely have found a lady with a smoking gun next to a dead body," said Shri Kulkarni, one of over two dozen astronomers who discovered and investigated two short-duration bursts that took place last May and July. Unlike short-duration GRBs, long-duration GRBs are believed to be produced when extremely massive stars collapse and explode as supernovas."

Astervitude writes "A Frankenstein's microsatellite made out of parts "donated" by university students across Europe will be launched on September 30 atop a Russian booster. Space.com reports that more than 400 students "spread across 23 universities and 12 countries" spent 18 months designing and building the SSETI Express. While its acronym sounds suspiciously similar to that of a project that seeks to uncover signs of intelligent life beyond Earth, the SSETI or Student Space Exploration Technology Initiative mission is actually part of an effort by the European Space Agency "to boost student interest in space technology and offer some hands-on experience." The satellite itself weighs a mere 136 pounds and is the "size of a small washing machine", as shown in this ESA photo. Visitors to the mission site may want to check out the contest page for ham radio operators to help collect data from the satellite."

Sam Lowry writes "In a recent post at his livejournal, Ulrich Drepper criticizes the LSB standard and urges the distributions to drop it." It's an interesting piece; Ulrich raises some good points.

Astervitude writes "A new study by US and Japanese scientists has put a serious dent into one version of the popular panspermia theory that credits comets for bringing the seeds of life to Earth. Surveys conducted by the University of Arizona, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and others now show that objects from the main asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars were largely responsible for the period of Late Heavy Bombardment that ended 3.9 billion years ago. UA Professor Emeritus Robert Strom believes that no more than 10 percent of the Earth's water comes from comets and any oceans then extant would have been 'vaporized by the asteroid impacts during the cataclysm.'" Interesting, because this directly contradicts the Nova mini-series Origins that just finished running on PBS. Science never stops moving.

stinerman writes "Three students at UC-Berkley used a 10 minute recording of a keyboard to recover 96% of the characters typed during the session. The article details that their methods did not require a 'training text' in order to calibrate the conversion algorithm as has been used previously. The research paper [PDF] notes that '90% of 5-character random passwords using only letters can be generated in fewer than 20 attempts by an adversary; 80% of 10-character passwords can be generated in fewer than 75 attempts.'"

hsuwh writes "Google has hired Internet pioneer Vint Cerf away from MCI as its "Chief Internet Evangelist". "He is one of the most important people alive today," said [Google CEO Eric] Schmidt, who has been friends with Cerf for more than 20 years. "Vint has put his heart and soul into making the Internet happen. I know he is going to jump right in here and start shoveling out new ideas for Google.""

naught writes "Fuddruckers, a hamburger chain, hotlinked to a flash game developer's Burgertime clone on their 'Fuddrockers' page. When the developer noticed an abnormal amount of traffic coming from their website, he decided to let the company know how he felt -- and maybe teach them about hotlinking.." From the post: "So, I redirected everything coming from Fuddruckers.com. (learned all about .htaccess files also... neat!) Wrote a nice little message pointing out how incredibly stupid their web developer is. And then redirected the main page to a pleasant little website showing photographs of slaughterhouses. And also opened up some more popups, for those that don't have popup blockers."

ComputerSherpa writes "Cyan Worlds closed its doors today. Cyan was the creator of Myst, the game that was partially responsible for popularizing the CD-ROM format. Until it was recently overtaken by The Sims, the Myst series was the most popular computer game series of all time. The last game in the Myst series, End of Ages, is scheduled to be released September 20th by UbiSoft."

Aleks Clark writes "The Interdictor, a DirectNIC crisis manager, is currently braving the madness of post-Katrina New Orleans. Server rescues, OC4 repairs and live video and audio feeds abound as he and his crew battle the odds with what seems like the entire internet at his back. 1700+ People are tracking his blog, and IRC channels are full to capacity."

rm writes "This LiveJournal entry by Nugget quite well sums up the disappointment in Google Talk among many Jabber users, caused by the service's complete lack of XMPP server-to-server communication support: '...Google has uncharacteristically missed the real strength of the Jabber design. Despite all their self-congratulation about open communications they've only embraced the smaller, less important aspect of the Jabber openness.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Davyd Madeley has completed his Prerelease Tour of GNOME 2.12. Scheduled for release on September 7th, 2005, GNOME 2.12 has picked up a new theme, some features popularised by Apple's System 7, some new multimedia tools and plenty of bug-fixes."

2600fan writes "Fred Quimby, a game developer for the Stella Atari 2600 emulator, has released a new BASIC compiler that can be used to create games to run on Stella and potentially on the 2600 itself. The compiler generates efficient assembly-language code in DASM syntax, then uses DASM to make a binary. A bitmapped playfield and easy-to-use scrolling routines are included, and programmers can also add inline assembly language and directly access TIA registers if they please."

geekdreams writes "Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder of LiveJournal, has launched OpenID, an 'actually distributed identity system' for websites that accept user comments. The system utilizes decentralized servers to authenticate users, and aims to replace centralized ID systems such as Microsoft's Passport and SixApart's TypeKey. The first implementation of OpenID can be seen on LiveJournal comments pages." Previously mentioned on Slashdot, now out of development.

hisham writes "Every now and then we see articles pointing out "what's wrong with Linux on the desktop." This one gives a nice overview not only of the problems we all know, but also where to look for solutions (app dirs, smarter filesystems) and what's out there (projects trying to change the face of Linux, like Klik, Zero Install and GoboLinux). Still, it usually boils down to things that Mac OS X already has or that are/were touted for inclusion on MS Longhorn. Fortunately, the major desktops stopped playing catch and are focusing on forward-looking Linux projects, like KDE Plasma and Gnome Beagle. Interesting times ahead."

Zak3056 writes "Last week, Mastercard announced that up to 40,000,000 credit card numbers may have been compromised by one of their processing companies. Today, the New York Times (registration, along with first born child, required) is reporting that the company in question, CardSystems Solutions, should not have been retaining that data to begin with. John M. Perry, CEO of the processor in question, claims the data was merely being kept for 'research purposes.' The number of compromised Master Card accounts has been revised downward to about 68,000, with another 132,000 possibly compromised accounts belonging to Visa, American Express, and other companies."

jimharris writes "After reading Geoff Ryman's Mundane SF website, where he promotes a new form of science fiction based on real science, I got to wondering if traditional science fiction is just the opiate of the geek masses? Most science fiction is based on speculative fantasy rather than hard science - the common example being stories built around faster-than-light travel. Einstein rules, and FTL space travel has about zero chance of ever existing. SF writer Ian McDonald replied in his blog, Heads down, there's going to be incoming... and a rather wide-ranging discussion and elaboration of the idea is held over at mundane-sf.blogspot.com. Proponents of the Mundane Manifesto readily admit that traditional science fiction is just harmless fun, but I have to ask, how many people out there have a positive view on life because they believe in Star Trek in the same way that other faithful do."

ThePolkapunk asks: "After years of suffering through floppy demagnetizations, hard drive crashes, CDR bit rot and the click of death, I've become fed up with having to take care of my own backups. Does anyone know of a reasonably inexpensive, secure data storage facility accessible online that can store all of my important files with enough redundancy for me to feel safe?"

Jack writes "The British No2ID campaign, which opposes the creation of a National Identity Database to hold biometric data on all UK citizens, has created an online pledge as part of an effort to publicise their cause. The three-day old pledge has recently gained the attention of the blogging community, with bloggers bringing a thousand new signatories to the pledge today alone. Readers in the UK are invited to look at the No2ID FAQ on the plans for mandatory ID cards - some of it makes for scary reading." Update: 06/14 17:13 GMT by T : Side note: Tom Steinberg, director of MySociety.org (organizers of this petition) writes "The ID pledge is cool in that it is so big and successful, but it is a very small insight into what pledgebank.com can do." It's actually a much more general organizing tool.

Jack writes "The British No2ID campaign, which opposes the creation of a National Identity Database to hold biometric data on all UK citizens, has created an online pledge as part of an effort to publicise their cause. The three-day old pledge has recently gained the attention of the blogging community, with bloggers bringing a thousand new signatories to the pledge today alone. Readers in the UK are invited to look at the No2ID FAQ on the plans for mandatory ID cards - some of it makes for scary reading." Update: 06/14 17:13 GMT by T : Side note: Tom Steinberg, director of MySociety.org (organizers of this petition) writes "The ID pledge is cool in that it is so big and successful, but it is a very small insight into what pledgebank.com can do." It's actually a much more general organizing tool.

iskander writes "After a disappointing experience with sound, Jamie Zawinski has finally given up on desktop Linux and switched to Mac OS X. The future of apps like xscreensaver and Gronk is now ``highly ambiguous''. He has already ditched a free/open platform before, but he seems a lot angrier this time. Indeed, twisted by the Dark Side of the Source, young Zawinski has become."

iskander writes "After a disappointing experience with sound, Jamie Zawinski has finally given up on desktop Linux and switched to Mac OS X. The future of apps like xscreensaver and Gronk is now ``highly ambiguous''. He has already ditched a free/open platform before, but he seems a lot angrier this time. Indeed, twisted by the Dark Side of the Source, young Zawinski has become."

Tamerlan writes "Ulrich Drepper posted a blog entry titled "Dictatorship of Minorities". He argues that open source projects' attempts to support non-mainstream (read "non-Linux") operating systems slow down development and testing. While Ulrich may be biased (he is a RedHat employee) he has the point: if you ever read mailing list of any large open source project, you know that significant piece of traffic is about platform-specific bugs or a new release broken on some exotic platform."

stinerman writes "Today the house passed two bills aimed at stopping spyware / adware and unauthorized use of computers. H.R. 29 makes it 'unlawful for any person who is not the owner or authorized user of a protected computer to engage in deceptive acts or practices'. H.R. 744 (I-SPY Act) prohibits accessing a protected system via code copied on to the system to, among other things, disseminate personal information. Both bills sailed through the house and are expected to be passed by the Senate."

Nurgled writes "Danga Interactive, who created LiveJournal and memcached, is working on a new decentralized single-signon system called OpenID. Similar in principle to Six Apart's TypeKey or MSN Passport, OpenID will allow you to assert a single identity to any OpenID-supporting site. The difference here is that there is no central authenticating server: anyone can run one, and Danga's reference implementations will be open-source. The site you are authenticating with never sees your username or password, just a one-time token. You can read the initial announcement on LiveJournal, though some details have changed since that post, so be sure to read the information on the official site."

fenderdb writes "Brad Fitzgerald of LiveJournal fame has written a utility and a quick article on how all hard drives from the consumer level to the highest level 'enterprise' grade SCSI and SATA drives do not obey the fsync() function. Manufacturers are blatantly sacrificing integrity in favor of scoring higher on 'pure speed' performance benchmarking."

fenderdb writes "Brad Fitzgerald of LiveJournal fame has written a utility and a quick article on how all hard drives from the consumer level to the highest level 'enterprise' grade SCSI and SATA drives do not obey the fsync() function. Manufacturers are blatantly sacrificing integrity in favor of scoring higher on 'pure speed' performance benchmarking."

A. Price writes "The Slacker Astronomy podcast reports on a recently discovered super star cluster located just 10,000 light years away. This system is expected to spawn 1500 supernovae in about 40 million years. I don't plan to be around to see the fireworks, but I wish I could. The show will be awesome. SA is a weekly look at astronomy by astronomers as told by a 20-something gal from Harvard and two of her friends. It's funny and cheesy, like the Dr. Who of podcasts."

The previously mentioned Shadowrun Fourth Edition is apparently going to be more than just a rules overhaul. Rumours circulating on the fan forum Dumpshock.com have been confirmed by a post to the livejournal of Adam Jury, the webmaster for the Shadowrun website. From the post: "No self-respecting shadowrunner will do anything illegal, so they now all ride pedal-bikes everywhere." Indeed, posts to the Dumpshock message boards now indicate that Shadowrun will be a cyberpunk flavoured messenger game, which will draw on materials such as A Coder in Courierland and other first hand accounts of bike messenger life. Players will take on the roles of "Shadow Runners", individuals who move packages, letters, and blueprints (by hook or by crook) across the post-industrial remains of the city of Seattle. Major development time has apparently been spent on the delivery mechanics, bike customization rules, and seduction tables (both for receptionists and secretaries). The new rules set is still expected out at this year's GenCon game fair. Update: 04/02 18:02 GMT by Z : April 1st hoax story.

Ovid writes "Being a bit of a hypocrite, I sometimes whine about privacy in my blog. I do, however, try to be careful about not letting anyone get information about me they shouldn't and I rarely, if ever, use a credit card online. This is why I was surprised to find out one morning that identity thieves had racked up thousands of dollars one two of my credit cards. By early afternoon, I caught them and the police arrested them."

Neil Halelamien writes "Back in 1999, satellite images were photographed of 5-mile-high whirlwinds streaking across the surface of Mars. A couple of months ago the Spirit rover got a close up view of whirlwind tracks, and this past week photographed a whirlwind in action (animation). It's thought that these dust devils may be responsible for the mystery power boost to the rovers' solar cells. Last year the rovers also spotted clouds and frost."

J writes "In contrast to current stories about publishers creating their own design courses comes news from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Their new "Video Game Design & Development" Concentration was the cover story of LaLouisiane, The University's magazine. This concentration resulted from a collaboration between the Computer Science faculty and members of the Student Video Game Alliance, a student group that had been tackling game development on their own time. The first Video Game Design and Development course began this Spring semester."

prostoalex writes "Right after Business Week named WebLogs, Inc. one of the five Net companies to watch in 2005, the Associated Press has a feature on SixApart, the company behind Movable Type, Typepad and (after acquisition) LiveJournal. The article talks about the company starting to 'think big' after being approached by venture capitalists, and has some stats on the blog industry in general."

ThePolkapunk writes "Scientists have been having problems in predicting the behavior of Quantum Dots, which are considered to be the most likely material to be used to build nanocomputers. Physorg is reporting that physicists at Ohio University believe they've found the problem, and it's with a flaw in the construction of quantum dots. If their theory pans out, "It's one more step towards the holy grail of finding a better quantum bit, which hopefully will lead to a quantum computer."" We first mentioned this about six years ago.

Ludonauts.com has a short piece where several intelligent observers in the field of game writing give their picks for the best game writing of 2004. The authors offer links to several quality works, including the now infamous EA Spouse blog, and the always quality Game Over column at CNN. They also refer to the trend towards the New Games Journalism, covered previously on Slashdot.

Neil Halelamien writes "The competition for the prime contract to build the Crew Exploration Vehicle, the successor to the Space Shuttle, is ramping up. Currently, 11 different companies are creating preliminary designs for systems and vehicles which could be useful in implementing NASA's Vision for Space Exploration. By the end of the year, NASA will select two teams to independently develop and build a CEV design. The two teams will launch competing unmanned prototypes in 2008, at which point NASA will award a final winning contract. Aerospace giants Boeing and Northrop Grumman have formed one team. Another "all-star" team, announced a couple of days ago, is headed by Lockheed Martin. A third team in the running is underdog t/Space, a company with a free enterprise approach to space exploration, which includes notable figures from the commercial spaceflight arena, such as Burt Rutan and Gary Hudson. There is concern that a NASA budget boost to help pay for the exploration program could draw some opposition, as most other government programs are anticipating budget cuts."

Hakubi_Washu writes "LiveJournal has posted their official analysis of what happened last Friday. Apparently someone "accidentally" pushed the emergency power off (which should keep all power off, even UPS), reset it and ran off. They had problems to come back up fast, because of "9 machines with faulty motherboards with embedded NICs that don't do auto-negotiation properly", Machines not fully rebooting for analysis reasons and few others. "

spectre_be writes "Davyd Madeley wrote a Sneak Peek at Gnome 2.10, scheduled for release on the March 9, 2005. Looks like the new release-policy is starting to pay of, as several existing utilities get enhancements and a couple of new ones are added. Also (finally) a mozilla-stylee type-ahead find has been implemented in Gnome's Open/Save dialog. Together with OpenOffice.org 2.0's scheduled release and Novell's Mono coming up to speed, will 2005 prove to be the year of Gnome?" Update: 01/18 01:40 GMT by T : Oops - the "2-point" got chopped off in the headline; still a while until GNOME 10.

Wind writes "According to any journal hosted off of LiveJournal.com, the LiveJournal data center Internap has suffered a critical power failure, leaving all of LiveJournal and its content temporarily offline and requiring the revival of 100+ servers. Perhaps Six Apart wasn't quite prepared for the responsibilities of a website of this size? Updated information is posted here."

Wind writes "According to any journal hosted off of LiveJournal.com, the LiveJournal data center Internap has suffered a critical power failure, leaving all of LiveJournal and its content temporarily offline and requiring the revival of 100+ servers. Perhaps Six Apart wasn't quite prepared for the responsibilities of a website of this size? Updated information is posted here."

Neil Halelamien writes "Recently the Planetary Society released the winning entries of their Huygens Art Contest. The contest challenged contestants to create artwork depicting what they imagine the ESA's Huygens probe will find when it descends to Titan's surface. 435 people from 35 countries entered the contest, and several of the winning images look like they would make great desktop backgrounds. The Huygens encounter with Titan is due for January 14 (Friday), but it looks like there isn't any live coverage planned of this exciting event."

Kingfox writes "Brad Fitzpatrick, creator of LiveJournal, finally confirms the story that was posted to Slashdot yesterday. Six Apart has purchased Danga. This means that they're moving to San Francisco, LiveJournal users are finally getting the trackback feature, but the project will stay open source, and little else will change for the end user."

Kingfox writes "Brad Fitzpatrick, creator of LiveJournal, finally confirms the story that was posted to Slashdot yesterday. Six Apart has purchased Danga. This means that they're moving to San Francisco, LiveJournal users are finally getting the trackback feature, but the project will stay open source, and little else will change for the end user."