Be sure to "middle click" on the post links to open them in a new tab. Kids get your mom or dad to approve all the news feeds, some may be PG-13 or higher.
Here’s some troubling news for my fellow World of Warcraft players. It seems that hackers, account thieves, and other miscreants have now embraced man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks to further their evil ways. Blizzard says it’s not a widespread issue, and it’s rather difficult to pull off, but it’s something y’all should be aware of.
The deal is that WoW hackers are able to infect your PC—this is a PC-only problem, mind you, so Mac players can more or less ignore all of this—with a bit of malware that’s then able to initiate the MITM attack. The purpose of this is to intercept your login name, password, and authenticator number so that they can log into your account. Once online, they can do whatever it is you’d be able to do inside the game world: sell items, mail gold to other players, etc. They cannot, it should be noted, delete your actual account or anything like that. Still, it’s potentially devastating, selling all your epics for fast gold, then turning around and selling that gold for real money to someone else.
MITM attacks aren’t new or anything. There’s plenty of programs out there can initiate them rather easily, letting people intercept passwords, instant messages, you name it. They work in that they sit in between your PC and the server you’re trying to connect to. So, if you’re playing WoW, instead of your username and password and authenticator number going directly to Blizzard’s servers, they first go to the hacker’s rogue server, which then passes the info onto your intended server, capturing the information in the process. It’s essentially invisible to you, the end-user, which is why the attacks are so dangerous.
Blizzard has already identified the piece of malware that initiates the MITM attack, so be on the lookout for emcor.dll. Be sure to keep your anti-virus software up to date.
One final bit: the odds of you being a victim of such an attack are quite low, if only because it requires so much work for the hacker to pull off; you’d have to be hacked a the very moment he wants to break into your account, and that’s something that simply doesn’t happen. Rather, your account will be compromised on, say, Monday, but it won’t be until the following Saturday that the hacker actually access your account. And again, the worst thing that could happen with this kind of attack would be for someone to sell off your character’s items and gold, then, for good measure, delete your character—your actual account cannot be tampered with. That may be a distinction without meaning, yes.
So yeah, just be sure to keep your anti-virus software up to date, and keep your wits about you. Stay away from the shady parts of the Internet!
Short version: The Aurora ALX is quite possibly the fastest computer I’ve ever used. It is in a word, amazing. The water cooling, thermally reactive venting system, and lighting combine to make a system that runs great, looks amazing, and has some innovative features that make you go “duh. why didn’t I think of that?” Of course performance has its price, and you will have to pay a premium price for this system.
Features:
Factory water cooling
Monolithic black case
Functional and useful interior lighting system
Active venting system
MSRP $4249.00 as reviewed
Pros:
Unbelievably fast
Gamer’s dream
water cooling is quiet and efficient
Cons:
System weighs about 80 pounds
Cooling system has a tendency to suck in dust and fibers
Costs more then my car
Full review: The Aurora ALX is unabashedly a gamer’s PC. It’s main focus in life is to run the latest software, and run it as fast as possible. The case makes no apologies about this, it doesn’t try to disguise itself as a business product, you can tell by looking at the case that it’s designed to go fast. The front of the case is smooth, with the alienhead logo prominently displayed at the top. When you push on the head, the front panel drops exposing the Blu-ray drive, gently lit by white LEDs. The bottom of the front gapes open, allowing air to flow through as quickly as possible. The top of the case is covered by a row of thermostatically controlled louvers, which open to allow more air flow as needed. It’s actually hard to get the louvers to open, since the factory installed liquid cooling system is so efficient. The side of the case are actually restrained. There’s a small window, lit from behind via multicolor LEDs (which you can control from in Windows). The whole design of the case is remarkably restrained, considering Alienware’s reputation for, shall we say, extreme design. One interesting feature is the addition of a small, pressure sensitive button on the back of the computer near the card slots. If you push this button (regardless of if the computer is on or not), several small LEDs light up and show you the area where you plug in the video, sound, and network connections. This is frankly brilliant, I don’t know how many times I’ve been crawling under a desk wishing for a flashlight while plugging everything in to get the thing up and running. These little LEDs are in other places as well. Taking the side of the case off reveals not just the extremely well routed wires and hoses, but also another one of these small buttons. Pushing on that button lights up the entire inside of the case, making it incredibly easy to see what you are doing while hooking up and routing said wires, connectors, and hoses. Again, a brilliant inclusion in design, that I wish more PC makers would use. After mentioning how much I liked these lights to my contact at Alienware, I was told that both sets of lights run off of a rechargeable battery.
Hardware configuration:
Intel Core i7 975 Extreme (3.33GHz, 8MB Cache)
Dual ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB video cards
6GB of RAM
2x 1TB Hard drives, running in a RAID0 configuration
Cosmic Black ALX case, with 875 watt power supply
You can see why this system is so fast after looking at the specs. To give you some hard numbers, running at 1680×1050 @ 120Hz, AAx8, and Ultra High on all options, the average FPS in the Far Cry 2 “Ranch Long” benchmark was 63 FPS. It peaked out at 139 FPS, and dipped down to 25 FPS at the slowest point. Crysis averaged 35 FPS during the “Island Time-demo”. Very respectable. From a purely organic viewpoint, I’m happy to report that any game I threw at the ALX ran perfectly, and incredibly smoothly.
The Good: the Aurora ALX is a great machine. It’s a gamers dream, and it’ll run anything you throw at it with no problem. The water cooling keeps the temps down while running quiet, and the thermal venting is really cool. The LED lights are cool, but you can shut them off if you are so inclined.
The Bad: The price. Let’s be honest, not a whole lot of people have $4500 to drop on something like a PC, particularly these days. If you do though, this is the machine to get. It’s also really really heavy. Liquid cooling and an 875 watt power supply do not make for a light weight computer. I also noticed that because it is liquid cooled, it seems to pull in more dust and fibers then an air cooled system.
Bottom line: if you can afford it, buy it. The Aurora ALX is a great machine. I’ve really enjoyed my time “reviewing” it (meaing playing Far Cry 2, Crysis, and Borderlands) and will be sad to see it go back to Alienware. Particularly because my wife will expect me to help out around the house again since I’m not busy doing work.
For all of you who bought a brand new iMac only to have something sickly and yellow-tinted show up, it looks like you may finally get some answers--or at least...
After all the exceedingly positive...oh wait, it was incredibly negative...response to my podcast discussion with Aaron Patzer, head of Intuit's Quicken team...
The White Rabbit has made his way into the App Store, and not a second too late. Hoping to experience some of the hype surrounding Tim Burton's upcoming film...
If you live in Spain that is. University of Zaragoza researchers have been looking into using various forms of solid waste to generate electricity for the nation, up to as much as 7%. What is it lately with all this decaying matter being useful?
The process involves all sorts of big, scientific sounding words like incineration, degasification, and anaerobic digestion. But the general idea is that it involves burning solid waste before it gets thrown in the landfill. This not only reduces the size and inherent risks of landfills, it can generate anywhere between 8.13 and 20.95 TWh (terawatt hours). You can find a more detailed and better explained depiction at the link below.
Sharing photos with friends, posting images and video to the Web, and geotagging have never been this easy. Better yet, these features are available on some truly high-powered megazooms and point-and-shoot cameras.
All the hella-haters can spin on it. I want “hella” as an SI-recognized prefix along with “mega” and “kilo.” And that’s why I’m about to do something I rarely ever do: join a Facebook group. Point your little browser toward The Official Petition to Establish ‘Hella-’ as the SI Prefix for 10^27 if you want your storage space in 50 years to be measured in hellabytes and the universe’s weight in hellagrams.
It came about as a sort of joke project by a student at UC Davis, but with 12,000+ people and a couple academics on board, it may just have a chance. Not really, though.
Honestly, it would hardly ever refer to anything except on the most astronomical of scales. One hellameter would be something like a billion light-years, and the limit of the universe as we know it seems to be, well, a fraction of that.
A hellasecond would be about a two and a half million times the age of our galaxy. So really, there’s no danger of people who don’t like hella having to say it all the time. Come on people, let’s do this.
After a hiatus, HP is back in the camera game with its Spring line-up of five new point-and-shoot cameras and three new camcorders. The budget devices mark HP's...
As Neowin reported earlier this month, AT&T plans to invest up to $19 billion in network upgrades. The first major step appears to be opening three test labs, according to an AT&T press release. Two of the development centers will be located in the United States and the third will...
Stating in a press release, Blizzard Entertainment announced today that the closed beta test for its highly anticipated real-time strategy game, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, has begun.
“Gathering concentrated feedback from our players is an important step for us as we head into the final stretch of development...
Who doesn’t like Bigfoot. Nobody, that’s who. I got a chance to look at Mattel’s singing, dancing, and rolling Bigfoot robot. He can even throw balls at you and sleeps when he gets tired. Very, very cute.
Fisher-Price(R) Imaginext(R) BIGFOOT The Monster: A Discovery of Legendary Proportions on Display in Mattel Showroom at New York Toy Fair
EAST AURORA, N.Y., Feb 09, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — It all began a few years ago, when BIGFOOT sightings started popping up just beyond the world headquarters of Fisher-Price, Inc. (a subsidiary of Mattel, Inc. NASDAQ:MAT) in East Aurora, N.Y. Although the scientific community considers BIGFOOT to be a combination of folklore and myths, that didn’t stop toy designers from setting out to capture the legendary, elusive creature. Fisher-Price found BIGFOOT and brought him back to its world-renowned Play Laboratory where designers unfolded the complicated, misunderstood monster who, surprisingly, wooed them with his charm. After years of intense research (and a few laughs) with BIGFOOT, Fisher-Price is ready to share his engaging personality with the world by introducing Imaginext(R) BIGFOOT The Monster at New York Toy Fair, Feb. 14 – Feb. 17.
“BIGFOOT The Monster is completely on-trend for 2010. Fisher-Price has interpreted a classic play pattern for contemporary kids,” says Chris Byrne, content director for TimetoPlayMag.com, aka The Toy Guy(R). “Inspired by the legendary ‘BIGFOOT,’ Fisher-Price scores again with a toy that effectively combines the fun and engagement of R/C robotic play with technology that’s easy and engaging for preschoolers to use. BIGFOOT is feature-rich, offers long-lasting play value and reflects a preschooler’s sense of humor, all of which deliver on the value consumers are looking for this year. ”
BIGFOOT continues to roam freely and eyewitness reports persist, generating public scrutiny and misconceived perceptions of the obscure monster. With New York Toy Fair approaching, Fisher-Price is prepared to show the world the true persona behind the myth…but it doesn’t stop there.
Rumor has it that Fisher-Price will continue to work with the friendly monster throughout the year, with special character appearances and brunches at national zoo events including San Diego Zoo, Zoo Atlanta, Brookfield Zoo, Tampa’s Lowery Park Zoo, Toledo Zoo and San Francisco Zoo. To track Big Foot sightings until then, parents and children can log onto www.fisher-price.com/bigfoottoyfair for updates.
Unlike the legendary BIGFOOT, the Imaginext(R) BIGFOOT The Monster from Fisher-Price is a life-like remote controlled monster friend for kids three to eight, with lots of personality, fun facial expressions and interactive phrases like “Wanna Play?” and much more. Featuring over 80 actions and phrases, BIGFOOT comes to life with a kid-friendly foot shaped remote control that has easy-to-use, icon-driven buttons. With the simple touch of the remote, preschoolers can make BIGFOOT walk forward and backwards, elicit happy or angry emotions, fall asleep, throw a ball, exercise and even do a forward somersault and a backwards roll! BIGFOOT also features interactive touch points on his belly and mouth that will make him laugh or eat a leaf that evokes fun chomping and burping sound effects. Although the legendary BIGFOOT has mainly been spotted in the Pacific Northwest region of North America, the Imaginext(R) BIGFOOT The Monster will be available at retailers nationwide in June for approximately $99.99.
So once you become a reviewer of Tenga Jars it seems you become the go-to guy for folks trying to sell Tenga Jars. I feel like Malcom’s dad in Breaking Bad. You get into something for noble reasons and you end up killing a dude in the desert after blowing up his headquarters with fulminated mercury. Anyway, please bear with me. Someone out there may need this information.
Drumroll please: Just in time for Valentine’s Day, I present my review of the A10 Cyclone.
So what is the A10 Cyclone? Think of it as a shoe cleaner for your weenus. This onahole has a series of brushes that rotate back and forth over the item in question. The brushes are made of washable silicone. Then there’s a USB cable.
Now before you get all excited, this USB cable connects to the R-1 controller and not your PC. That’s right. You need an add-on for your add-on. The controller makes the brushes spin in different ways – back and forth, fast around, slow. You can really treat yourself. There’s a quick turn-off feature for when the mailman comes. You will probably also need some of JList’s special lubricants. It’s like climbing Mt. Everest. Do you go unprepared? No.
Here’s my honest opinion: I personally didn’t like the sensation. It’s kind of all-encompassing and you get quickly overwhelmed. I mean seriously, people. This is a motorized tenga jar. We’re not talking butterfly kisses. You either like it or you don’t. If you can’t handle lots of stimulation at once, maybe stay away.
The thing that I’m most confused about, however, is the Japanese fascination with these things. I mean if you’re down with putting it into a robot, do it. By all means. But seriously: these things do nothing for the self-esteem. If you can’t shave, meet a nice lady, maybe go to dinner and a movie, and maybe go back to her place and do the horizontal bop, fine. But seriously: do you need this level of simulation in your onanism? Do you? You really have to make a production out of things when you use this. It’s like cooking yourself a gourmet meal – it’s fun, but wouldn’t you rather order some wings and drink a beer? You’ll at least get more done around the house instead of chopping shallots and braising pheasant.
Anyway, this machine is $80 and the R-1 (which actually comes with a little vibrating egg and looks like an iPod Mini) is $60. For my money I’d stick with a Tenga jar (a little less overwhelming) but you do what you feel, dude.
So once you become a reviewer of Tenga Jars it seems you become the go-to guy for folks trying to sell Tenga Jars. I feel like Malcom’s dad in Breaking Bad. You get into something for noble reasons and you end up killing a dude in the desert after blowing up his headquarters with fulminated mercury. Anyway, please bear with me. Someone out there may need this information.
Drumroll please: Just in time for Valentine’s Day, I present my review of the A10 Cyclone.
So what is the A10 Cyclone? Think of it as a shoe cleaner for your weenus. This onahole has a series of brushes that rotate back and forth over the item in question. The brushes are made of washable silicone. Then there’s a USB cable.
Now before you get all excited, this USB cable connects to the R-1 controller and not your PC. That’s right. You need an add-on for your add-on. The controller makes the brushes spin in different ways – back and forth, fast around, slow. You can really treat yourself. There’s a quick turn-off feature for when the mailman comes. You will probably also need some of JList’s special lubricants. It’s like climbing Mt. Everest. Do you go unprepared? No.
Here’s my honest opinion: I personally didn’t like the sensation. It’s kind of all-encompassing and you get quickly overwhelmed. I mean seriously, people. This is a motorized tenga jar. We’re not talking butterfly kisses. You either like it or you don’t. If you can’t handle lots of stimulation at once, maybe stay away.
The thing that I’m most confused about, however, is the Japanese fascination with these things. I mean if you’re down with putting it into a robot, do it. By all means. But seriously: these things do nothing for the self-esteem. If you can’t shave, meet a nice lady, maybe go to dinner and a movie, and maybe go back to her place and do the horizontal bop, fine. But seriously: do you need this level of simulation in your onanism? Do you? You really have to make a production out of things when you use this. It’s like cooking yourself a gourmet meal – it’s fun, but wouldn’t you rather order some wings and drink a beer? You’ll at least get more done around the house instead of chopping shallots and braising pheasant.
Anyway, this machine is $80 and the R-1 (which actually comes with a little vibrating egg and looks like an iPod Mini) is $60. For my money I’d stick with a Tenga jar (a little less overwhelming) but you do what you feel, dude.
In not-too-surprising, yet good-to-know-for-sure news, it seems that Samsung is indeed working on a netbook designed around Chrome OS. Now, what exactly that comprises I can’t tell you — my guess is they’re really just getting a cheap netbook ready to go with whatever Google announces when Chrome OS hits prime time. Or maybe they’ll use one of those neat (useless) transparent ones?
The specs are nothing crazy: 3G, 2GB of RAM to start, 64GB or more of SSD storage, probably a 10.1″ screen, and a nice long battery life. The chipset and processor weren’t disclosed, but the source is suggesting a 1.5GHz Snapdragon. I wonder about that — I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some curveballs in there. Dual Snapdragons, for instance, or a dedicated GPU like the iPad. It’s actually very similar to this speculative post here, except without a price, which makes it much easier to swallow.
Guess we’ll find out… not soon. It’s not clear when they’ll be making the real announcement, and at any rate we’ll probably hear from Google first.
Google is set to unveil a brand new social networking application, that is all set to integrate with at least two Google products. The new social network will go head-to-head to compete with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, bringing in a whole new competitor to the market.
According to details...
The China operator of World of Warcraft will seek new government approval for the game, dragging it further into a turf war between Chinese regulatory agencies.
There are a billion ways to get the right shot. Most of them, pros will tell you, involve taking a huge amount of pictures. Macro shots of in-flight insects are no exception — I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to take a picture of a bug flying around but it’s hard. However, what if your shot was pretty much guaranteed to be perfect exposure technically? You could take shot after shot of bees zooming around and they’d all come out perfectly-focused and framed just right. All you’d have to do is pick out the best ones.
Well, Belgian photographer Fotoopa (nickname, I’m supposing) has put together a seriously cool rig that does this. It’s not easy to make, but if you’re dedicated, it looks like this might be the best way on earth to capture bugs in flight.
As far as I can tell, it has a second lens that is constantly checking the in-focus spot of the actual lens, using infrared LEDs and an IR rangefinder. Just get a bug in the general area of the sweet spot and as soon as it flies into the zone, the camera will snap a picture. Because it uses IR LEDs, it even works in total darkness. He’s put together the instructions here, including the board layout and other components.
I’m not going to lie: using this rig, you can get a better shot in 10 seconds than I did after an hour and a couple hundred exposures. Still a nice shot, but if I were a robot camera whose only purpose in life was to get bees exactly in focus mere inches from my lens, I probably would have had a higher success rate.
Will Apple's war on Flash change the Web? Are tablets about to kill e-readers? Join the editors of PCWorld for a lively roundtable discussion of this week's top tech stories.
Get ready home shoppers, Alienware is going to be paying you a visit at 1am Eastern time on the 6th. Apparently, showing up on geeky TV shows and at Blizzcon isn’t enough, so Alienware is going to be selling it old school: on QVC late nights.
Of course, you can still buy them online, they are still going to be expensive, but this might expand the brand awareness for them. If nothing else, a whole bunch of rednecks will end up with some serious computing power.
It wasn’t too long ago that our own Nicholas Deleon was detained and manhandled at a Best Buy. Today, we hear reports of someone who, for the crime of having some trouble with gift cards, was handcuffed, frisked, and put in a holding cell at the station. The bright side of this story is that the person this happened to should feel free to sue the hell out of Best Buy and the NYPD. I kind of expect this sort of behavior in a suburban mall where the rent-a-cops get bored, but on Broadway in Manhattan?
You can read the full situation over at Consumerist, but the gist is this: there were some technical difficulties with some American Express gift cards with which this person was trying to pay for a Blu-ray player. There was some confusion about the numbers on the cards, and the customer was apparently assumed to be a master thief, detained by Best Buy, and then taken to the police station, where she was held until they figured it out. Outrageous, Best Buy.
Here’s what should have happened: any trouble with the cards, even if they are supposed with good reason to be counterfeit, should be referred to a manager. This isn’t a floor staff issue. The manager can spend 15 minutes figuring it out, and if that doesn’t bear fruit, he could apologize to the customer for the inconvenience and ask them to come again tomorrow when they’ve got it all figured out. A ten-dollar gift certificate would probably make the customer forget anything bad had happened. To do anything otherwise, and assume the problem is with the customer, should not even be considered.
Best Buy, in this case, is liable, and although I would not say that litigation was wise in Nicholas’ case, in this person’s case it seems necessary. This was a serious breach of civil rights and needs to be addressed. Best Buy needs to get this problem under control.
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal via CNET.com, Google is preparing an online store in which it will sell third-party business software to Google Apps customers.
Google's store could arrive as early as March with the works of third-party developers available as enhancements to Google's office productivity software...
Short version: The Aurora ALX is quite possibly the fastest computer I’ve ever used. It is in a word, amazing. The water cooling, thermally reactive venting system, and lighting combine to make a system that runs great, looks amazing, and has some innovative features that make you go “duh. why didn’t I think of that?” Of course performance has its price, and you will have to pay a premium price for this system.
