GameStop Opening Deus Ex Boxes Aftermath

You may have heard the news a couple of days back about how GameStop had begun opening boxes of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and removing OnLive game codes for buyers of the title to be able to access the game any time. A Memo was issued by the Field Operations Manager, Josh Ivanoff to remove these codes. This would be due to GameStops future plans to get into digital distribution themselves, and don't want costumers flocking to competitors before they can even begin themselves.

Here's a copy of the memo for anyone interested.

Well, GameStop has begun issuing an apology to buyers of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and some other stuff to attempt to salvage whatever face it has left. An Email was sent to costumers reading:

For your inconvenience, we would like to offer you a free $50 GameStop gift card and a Buy 2 Get 1 Free pre-owned purchase. We want to earn back your trust and confidence in the GameStop experience. Please bring in this email and your store receipt or order confirmation from GameStop.com and present it to a Game Advisor.

It's something, but not really much of an apology for OPENING UP THE BOXES of games before people even bought them to TAKE STUFF OUT.

Fucking Gamestop.

FBI vs. Anonymous: Captures and Evasions

Anonymous is known for its zany activities on the internet, including the 2008 event when Bill O'Rielly's website was hacked, and a database of users was put to use swiftly. Many a dragon dildos and penile enlargement programs were purchased. $10,000 were claimed in losses by the end of the day.

This was on a much smaller scale in terms of the overblown publicty "Hacktivism" (What a stupid ass word) gets these days, especially if it has the name "Lulz Sec" or "Anonymous" associated with it.

How simple is it for the FBI to catch one of these "intruders" (as we will call them to make an attempt to remain neutral)?

Finding them is hard. In the instance of one of Bill O'Rielly's site hacks, it was very simple. Billoreilly.com's administrative interface was protected by a servlet that locked down access to all back-end material, but the site administrator made one small mistake: he once created a "New premium member report" showing a list of the most recent subscribers, and he created it in such a way that it bypassed the servlet. As later FBI interview notes show, this was "just an error"—but it made the new member report available outside the secure admin structure to someone who knew the location.

The feds surmise that attackers found the URL for this new members page by running a dictionary attack on the admin subsection of the site, looking for insecure addresses. "Logs show various IPs exploring the path of the administrative section looking for pages not under the servlet's control,” say FBI notes. Attackers hit a jackpot when they found the unprotected URL and suddenly had access to the most recent five days of new member info, which gave them 205 addresses and e-mails.

DDoS attacks on the site gave IP addresses of all information coming into the site.
The FBI took the top 3 addresses. Two were outside of the US, and forced them to drop them. The third was a Web Hosting company in the US that knew nothing of the event upon investigation.

IP addresses of users who accessed the new members page belonged to a proxy. The FBI traced the IP addresses to a second proxy, Vtunnel, where the trail went cold, as it did not provide the IP address logs for the date and time of the incident.

While that instance was an example of getting away with insurgency, there are many others who are not knowledgeable enough to mask themselves properly. An example was when a 23-year old was arrested in 2010 for intrusions on O'Rielly's site in 2006 and 2007. The FBI raided his dorm room, finding a disk containing credit card numbers and other information in a ceiling tile.

The FBI has recently issued over 40 warrants around the US alone to search for individuals involving in the DDoSing of Visa, Master card, and Pay-pal.

What this suggests is that the higher skilled individuals tend to be those shepherding the knowledgeable hacker-wanna-be's to perform the low level attacks. These n00bs don't know how to cover their tracks, and are the ones caught in these events without a care from the higher-ups. This is most common in LOIC related events.

The FBI has not disclosed whether or not that are in the works to perform more raids and searches on suspected members.

Why Lude Photos of Jail-bait Won't be Leaving Facebook.

Lude photos of teenage girls on Facebook are a common site. After all, Facebook is operated on the narcissism of our society. Girls want the attention, and set out to take raunchy “pics” of themselves with duck-faces.

In a recent court case, a 16 and 15 year old pair of girls bought dong-shaped lollipops, and would spend the night taking photographs of each-other orally enjoying said lollipops. The photos leaked online, and their school got a hold of them, suspending both from extracurricular activities for a part of the school year.

When asked why, the girls simply said what I imagine to be something along the lines of “for teh lulz XD”.

Anyways, the issue here was the school taking action when the photos had nothing to do with school. What ended up happening in the court case was they school was made to remove any punishments it had served on the pair, as the photos were deemed to be constitutionally protected. IT IS A GIRL’S RIGHT TO SUCK ON A LOLIPOP AND POST PICS.

Law is an “L” away from being exactly what it is: Hilarious.

Microsoft and Linux - 20th

Today at LinuxCon, an animation made by Microsoft commemorating Linux was shown during the keynote presentation. Many topics were covered, including mixed-platform deployments, and more.

FUN FACT: Microsoft is one of the biggest contributors to version 3.0 of the Linux kernel.

Here's the video:

Firefox 6 - Problems and Fixes

Firefox 6 has shipped, and with it of course come the notorious compatibility issues.

Why?

When developing a Firefox Addon, developers require to indicate a version series they want their addon to work with, such as 3.5-4.0. This gives the developer a window of opportunity to update their addon in the event an update in Firefox occurs that breaks it, so they can avoid being email bombed saying their addon doesn't work.

Luckily, these can easily be editable, and here's how:

Download the .xpi file of the addon.This can be done by finding the "+Add to Firefox" button, right clicking, and copying the short-cut into the address bar. After this, remove everything after *.xpi in the address. This is the direct link to the addon. A problem occurs when you try to go there directly, as FireFox instantly asks if you want to install it or not. To avoid this, you will need to use some sort of download manager, such as DownThemAll (easiest, just copy/paste the url into the downloader and it will pull up the file), or download the file using a different browser.

Once you download the *.xpi file, locate it on your hard drive. *.xpi files are really just re-named archives such as .rar and .zip. Right click the file, and open it with your favourite archiving software (7zip is free to download).

Inside, locate the file named install.rdf. This is a plane-text file, and can be open with Word, Notepad, or any text editor/word processor.

Find the following section near the top of the file(Make sure it says !--Firefox):

   <!-- Target Application this extension can install into,
        with minimum and maximum supported versions. -->
    <em:targetApplication>
     <!-- Firefox -->
     <Description>
       <em:id>{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}</em:id>
       <em:minVersion>3.6</em:minVersion>
       <em:maxVersion>5.*</em:maxVersion>


Change the maxVersion number from 5.* as in the example above, to 9999. This will forever allow FireFox to use the addon, no matter what version it is, so long as no changes within FireFox disrupt the functions/requirements of the addon itself.

Save the file, and exit.

Exit the archive of the *.xpi file.

Open a new tab in Firefox, and drag the *.xpi file into the new tab window.

Firefox will then prompt you to install the addon.


This is a slightly tedious process, but it gives you an always-available file for the addon that will never be outdated.

Any questions or comments are welcome in the comment section. If you believe pictures are necessary, please indicate in your comment, and they will be added later.

Massive Numbers from Twitter - Yet Another Infographic

Some pretty damn cool stats reported from twitter today. Just imagining this large number of traffic to one site gives my a headache, and a slight hard-on.

Here's the infographic in question:

If you aren't following this blog on twitter already, I suggest you do! (It's not like I post anything BORING here...right?)

Another Google Doodle

Pierre de Fermat is being celebrated by Google today.

He is known for Fermat's Last Theorem, which consists of a deceptively simple-looking formula famously scrawled in a book's margin, where he claimed the proof was too large to fit.

So who cares?

Well, for FOUR centuries, people have attempted to solve and prove the formula, until finally the publication of a successful proof came out in 1995 by a "Sir Andrew Wiles", a Royal Society Research Professor at Oxford.

Talk about a long lasting troll.

For anyone interested, Fermat's Last Theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any integer value of n greater than two.

Playstation 3 Recieves Price Cuts - All Territories

For anyone putting off buying current gen consoles for whatever reasons, here's incentive to buy.



Sony announced $50 price cuts. The 160GB system will now be $250 in the United States, 250 euros in the European territories, and 24,980 yen in Japan. The price drop is effective immediately in all territories except Japan, where the price drop will begin on August 18. The PlayStation 3 model with more storage is also seeing its price cut, with the 320GB system now being sold for $300 in the US, 300 euros in European territories, and 29,980 yen. "In addition, a limited edition inFAMOUS 2 bundle is now available at participating retailers across North America. The bundle retails for $299 and includes a 320 GB PlayStation 3, a copy of inFAMOUS 2 and a 30-day membership to PlayStation Plus."

BluRay, Vidya, price cuts. Heck, you can use the thing as a desktop if you attach a keyboard and mouse.

How the New York Times Reported Metered Billing...In 1886

The times wrote an article about metered billing in 1886.

"The greedy and extortionate nature of the telephone monopoly is notorious. Controlling a means of communication which has now become indispensable to the business and social life of the country, the company takes advantage of the public's need to force from it every year an extortionate tribute."

This was met by applause from the reading public at the time.



When local telephone service became available, costumers were charged a flat rate to make calls. Calling outside of a local calling zone cost a bit more. This was a formula that costumers found to be very acceptable, as costs were very predictable.

When the phone lines in the local area began to expand, costs ran up for their construction, putting the telephone companies in a jam. Money had to be found somewhere.

Edward J. Hall of the Buffalo, New York exchange had a solution to this dilemma. His plan consisted of renting the line out for a flat fee, and an additional 10 cent cost per telephone call. In addition, costumers had to make a minimum of 500 calls a year. Another plan consisted of prepaid calling cards, allowing one to make a set number of calls.

As long as each company charged its subscribers the same fee, the unanimous cry of the consumer was "keep the prices down."

When measured service came into play, it made it harder for consumers to demand lower fees.  It was at this time that an attempt was made to kill metered billing.

Several strikes later, rate caps were being discussed, and eventually put into place in some areas.


Eventually, companies realized they need to provide some sort of telephone access to everyone at what came to appear to be a decent rate.

Fast forward to today, and we are still seeing the results. Few are still campaigning against metered internet, such as OpenMedia.

Just goes to show how history repeats itself.

Raspberry Pi - Delicious Computing Technology

You probably haven't heard about it, but this baby is surely something to keep an eye out for. The Raspberry Pi is an attempt to shove the BS One Laptop Per Child has been failing to do.

Imagine, 1080p rendering on a device the size of a business card? That's pretty much what this is. You get an ethernet jack (intertubes cord), HDMI out, USB 2.0 port, RCA out (hook that bad-boy up to any ol' boob-tube television), and an SD card slot. How much? $25 USD.

Check out their current video. Projected release date (estimated as of August 1st) is November of this year(2011)!

Specifications:

• 700MHz ARM11
• 128MB or 256MB of SDRAM
• OpenGL ES 2.0
• 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
• Composite and HDMI video output
• USB 2.0
• SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot
• General-purpose I/O
• Optional integrated 2-port USB hub and 10/100 Ethernet controller
• Open software (Ubuntu, Iceweasel, KOffice, Python)
  
  
  
  Visit their website here.

Anime: The Anime

Ladies and gentlemen, the mother of all tropes. Breasts, breast grabbing, delicious eye-candy, action, maximum retarded smilan', and what looks to be a hybrid of sci-fi and fantasy. Maybe it won't totally suck. The English translation of the title is "Horizon on the Middle of Nowhere". Hey, it's as if you've got anything better to watch any way.

Direct Link (in case you can't right click):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgwFB5pgvq8

Introduction

This is where I convince you to visit and revisit this page of nonsensical ramblings of mine that occur in the early morn as I further remain sleep deprived.

If you're interested in news about technology, GNU/Linux, music, and anime, then it may be in your interest to check out this dump once in a blue moon.