Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:13:54 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/ Glide Underground Backend en-us http://glideunderground.com/images/logo.gif http://glideunderground.com/ http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3520 I didn't really enjoy the first one - hopefully they've cleaned up their act a bit, and gotten some story into the game. Anyways, Valhalla Knights 2 (for PSP) is hitting stores shortly. Marvelous Entertainment USA and XSEED Games announced today that Valhalla Knights 2 for the PlayStation® Portable (PSP) has officially gone gold and will ship to retail outlets nationwide starting on October 1, 2008. Developed by Marvelous Entertainment Inc., Valhalla Knights 2 is the sequel to the hit 2007 PSP title. The game is the first co-published title under the previously announced partnership between Marvelous Entertainment USA and XSEED Games. Valhalla Knights 2 offers more features, content and freedom of customization, allowing players to create the ultimate six-member battle party and embark on an incredible adventure penned by the scenario writer of Final Fantasy XII. The player must fulfill a 1,000 year old prophecy and destroy an ancient evil hiding in the center of the world. In addition to the intense single player experience, Valhalla Knights 2 also features two-player Co-op adventures and wireless Vs. battles. Explore over 100,000 skill, race, appearance and equipment combinations. Experience more job classes, weapons, monsters and magic than ever before! Valhalla Knights 2 carries a suggested retail price of $29.99 and is rated “E10+” for “Everyone 10 and Older”. For more information on Valhalla Knights 2, please visit the newly launched website at http://www.valhallaknights2.com Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:13:54 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3519 MS have decided to drop the price of the Xbox360. And HARD. No word on other consoles - expect Sony to follow suit if they want to stay (or even hope to become, depending on your market area) competitive. Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:13:18 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3518 PYN is doing a DRM-laden "trial run" with putting Ghostbusters on a USB key: We don’t know what file format and compression settings are used on the film yet, but a spokesperson for PNY explained to Custom PC that it does come with a form of DRM that prevents you from copying the movie. ‘They have DRM protection,’ explained the spokesperson, ‘so customers can download the movie onto their laptop or PC if they wish, but they have to have the USB drive plugged in to watch the movie, as the DRM is locked in the USB drive.’Prediction: the DRM will get cracked by some nerd with something to prove. Anyone else who wants the movie will simply get it the old-fashioned way... or buy the DVD if they don't already have it. Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:00:00 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3517 Bill Melendez - the only man ever authorized to animate Charlie Brown - has passed away. Melendez founded his own production company in 1964 and with his partner Lee Mendelson went on to produce, direct or animate some 70 "Peanuts" TV specials, four movies and hundreds of commercials. The first special was 1965's "A Charlie Brown Christmas." The show reportedly worried CBS because it broke so much new ground for a cartoon: It lacked a laugh track, used real children as voice actors, had a jazz score and included a scene in which Linus recited lines from the New Testament. However, the show was a ratings success and has gone on to become a Christmastime perennial. Melendez created Emmy-winning specials based on the cartoon characters Cathy and Garfield, and was involved in animated versions of the Babar the elephant books and the C.S. Lewis book, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."If you've never seen his work... go out and pick some of it up. The man was brilliant. Thu, 04 Sep 2008 09:46:26 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3516 There are some ridiculous terms-of-service agreements out there, and valleywag hits the five worst: Did you know that when you download Google's new Chrome browser, you agree that any "content" you "submit, post or display" using the service — whether you own its copyright or not — gives Google a "perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute" it? Google's ambitions for Chrome are even larger than we thought; by the letter of this license, Google will own all information that flows through its browser. But Chrome's terms of service are just the latest in a long line of ludicrous legalese.Of course, most of the people who use these services will never read the terms of service - and when the TOS is 20+ pages long, they can hide all sorts of nonsense in there that most people will just "agree" to without thinking. Thu, 04 Sep 2008 09:00:00 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3515 Star Trek: The Experience is closed down. The culprit? Greed. Their Vegas landlord is killing their lease. It's a sad day. Mon, 01 Sep 2008 09:53:31 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3514 Comcrap have announced their latest plan to screw the consumer: re-implementing the same nonsense that made millions of people leave CompuServ back in the day. "As part of our pre-existing policy, we will continue to contact the top users of our high-speed Internet service and ask them to curb their usage," Comcast said Thursday. "If a customer uses more than 250 GB and is one of the top users of our service, he or she may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use," according to the AUP. "At that time, we'll tell them exactly how much data per month they had used. We know from experience the vast majority of customers we ask to curb usage do so voluntarily."Of course, if you do certain things (play World of Warcraft, have instant messaging) that's a lot easier limit to hit than they let on. But never let the truth get in the way of Comcrap's trying to weasel out of actually providing the service they advertise! And of course, Comcrap gets away with this because it's an illegal monopoly in most of its "service" areas. When your "choice" is Comcrap, abysmally slow dialup, or ridiculous-latency satellite, there's not much choice at all. Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:44:10 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3513 The New York Times covers the big flaw in the recent Wind Power hype - wind power is completely inconsistent in its generating capacity. Apparently it's so bad that wind farms are having to turn off, cutting their output, just so they don't overload people's homes. The basic problem is that many transmission lines, and the connections between them, are simply too small for the amount of power companies would like to squeeze through them. The difficulty is most acute for long-distance transmission, but shows up at times even over distances of a few hundred miles. Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:37:56 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3512 An interesting piece in IEEE Spectrum pops up on an experimental technique for getting more RAM. Basically, it's performing data compression before things are stored in RAM. Reminds me a lot of the "Ram Doubler" type programs on the old Mac OS... but hey, if they can actually make RAM more efficient through software with a relatively small performance hit, it could do wonders on devices like the memory-stripped PSP. If software designers yield to temptation and ask for more memory than they could possibly need, they risk wasting a lot of money—even pennies matter when you're producing millions of units. Or the product could end up being too power hungry. Yet if they skimp on RAM, they may prevent the unit from running some new killer app that would allow the gadget to beat the competition. Such mistakes sometimes force companies to redesign their hardware, a process that is enormously costly and time-consuming. We have spent the better part of three years trying to give designers of embedded systems a third option: to increase effective memory by compressing the data stored in RAM using just software. Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:00:00 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3511 California's highway toll tag system has been compromised according to an article over at Tech Review: In the past, authorities have insisted that the FasTrak system uses encryption to secure data and that no personal details are stored on the device--just two unique, randomly assigned ID numbers. One of these is used to register the device when a customer purchases it, while the other acts as a unique identifier to let radio receivers at tolls detect cars as they pass by. But when Lawson opened up a transponder, he found that there was no security protecting these IDs. The device uses two antennas, one to detect a request signal from the toll reader and another to transmit its ID so that it can be read, he says. And here we go again - the same fault in these is probably all over the place. Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:18:59 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3510 A judge in New Zealand has banned publication of two mens' names in connection to a murder case, apparently for fear that the accusation could remain in search engines even if they are found innocent: He said he was "concerned about someone Googling someone's name and being able to access it later". He was also "concerned about the viral effect of digital publication". Judge Harvey ruled in Manukau District Court that it was OK to report the names and publish the images in print tomorrow or on tonight's 6pm television news but not on news websites. Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:00:00 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3509 Those little "nintendo in a controller" sets you see at flea markets? Yeah, they're illegal - and a Florida man just got a pretty stiff fine for selling them. Kifah Maswadi, age 24, of Oakland, Florida, was sentenced Friday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. He pleaded guilty on June 3 to one count of criminal copyright infringement after he was indicted Jan. 24, the DOJ said. Maswadi sold Power Player handheld game consoles that contained pirated copies of at least 76 video games, most of them games by Nintendo and its licensees, the agency said. Mon, 25 Aug 2008 10:00:00 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3508 California's just classified gallium arsenide a carcinogen: ironically, it's one of the components that makes things like LEDs work, and California is trying to standardize on LED lights to replace old incandescent bulbs. The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) of the California Environmental Protection Agency is adding gallium arsenide to the list of chemicals known to the state to cause cancer and hexafluoroacetone, nitrous oxide and vinyl cyclohexene dioxide to the list of chemicals known to the state to cause reproductive toxicity for the purposes of Proposition 65. The listing of gallium arsenide, hexafluoroacetone, nitrous oxide and vinyl cyclohexene dioxide is effective August 1, 2008. Expect a mishmash of "disposal regulations" and red tape to follow. Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:00:00 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3507 PC World asks: does this finally cross the Uncanny Valley? So what do you think? Has Emily "overleapt a long-standing barrier known as 'uncanny valley'"? The perception that computer-generated faces look less real as they approach human likeness?I'm not 100% sure - though part of it is knowing before the test. I may be picking up on "clues" that I'm looking for, like the weird twist of her mouth at one point. Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:33:17 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3506 IT World's got a great bit on the insecurity of password reset questions: When you have forgotten your password, some sites send you an email with a link for you to click. Phishers who have stolen access to your email account can do that, too. Other sites will ask you for your mother’s maiden name, the name of your best friend, what city you grew up in, or what brand your first car was. Did you know that phishers can answer those questions, too? Like the city you grew up in, your mother’s maiden name can be derived from public records – from birth certificates and marriage certificates to be specific. (Download PDF for details.) Facebook might unwittingly tell the name of your best friend. And,until quite recently, Ford with its 25% market share had a pretty good chance of being the brand of your first car!An unintended consequence of "secure" password procedures - people forget their password far too often. Unfortunately, the next step might make it impossible to get a reset done! Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:32:26 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3505 If you've never been to Arches National Park, you've missed out. Another one of the arches fell today. No culprit, just time, gravity, and erosion. Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:36:53 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3504 This will mess up the hardware market something fierce - VIA is quitting the chipset business. Speaking to Custom PC, VIA’s vice president of corporate marketing in Taiwan, Richard Brown, explained that: ‘One of the main reasons we originally moved into the x86 processor business was because we believed that ultimately the third party chipset market would disappear, and we would need to have the capability to provide a complete platform.’ ‘That has indeed come to pass,’ said Brown. He also added that ‘Intel provides the vast majority of chipsets for its processors and, following its purchase of ATI, AMD is also moving very quickly in the same direction.’ I've had a lot of VIA-powered motherboards over the years, though my most recent have been NForce. It's sad to see the industry lose some competition, though. Expect prices to jump. Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:00:00 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3503 Apple's apparently preparing the iPhone to kill certain custom apps. According to iPhone Atlas and iPhone hacker-extraordinaire Jonathan Zdziarski, Apple has readied a blacklisting system which allows the company to remotely disable applications on your device. Apparently, the new 2.x firmware contains a URL which points to a page containing a list of "unauthorized" apps -- a move which suggests that the device makes occasional contact with Apple's servers to see if anything is amiss on your phone.And this, along with the ridiculous price, is why I'm not on an iPhone right now. Mon, 11 Aug 2008 08:07:52 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3502 The EFF's offering a new tool to help you test your ISP. Details below: San Francisco - Hours before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is expected to take action against Comcast for violating the FCC's net neutrality principles, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is releasing "Switzerland," a software tool for customers to test the integrity of their Internet communications. The FCC action, expected later today, is a response to formal complaints regarding efforts by Comcast to interfere with its subscribers' use of BitTorrent to share files over the Internet. These interference efforts were first documented and disclosed in October 2007 by EFF, the Associated Press, and a concerned Internet user, Robb Topolski. EFF subsequently urged the FCC to declare Comcast's efforts inconsistent with the Commission's 2005 "Internet Policy Statement," which sets a benchmark for neutral treatment of Internet traffic. "The sad truth is that the FCC is ill-equipped to detect ISPs interfering with your Internet connection," said Fred von Lohmann, EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney. "It's up to concerned Internet users to investigate possible network neutrality violations, and EFF's Switzerland software is designed to help with that effort. Comcast isn't the first, and certainly won't be the last, ISP to meddle surreptitiously with its subscribers' Internet communications for its own benefit." "Until now, there hasn't been a reliable way to tell if somebody -- a hacker, an ISP, corporate firewall, or the Great Firewall of China -- is modifying your Internet traffic en route," said Peter Eckersley, EFF Staff Technologist and designer of Switzerland. "The few tests available have been for narrow and specific kinds of interference, or have required tremendous amounts of advanced forensic labor. Switzerland is designed to make general-purpose ISP testing faster and easier." Part of EFF's "Test your ISP" project, Switzerland is an open source, command-line software tool designed to detect the modification or injection of packets of data by ISPs. Switzerland detects changes made by software tools believed to be in use by ISPs such as Sandvine and AudibleMagic, advertising systems like FairEagle, and various censorship systems. Although currently intended for use by technically sophisticated Internet users, development plans aim to make the tool increasingly easy to use. For more information and to download the Switzerland software: http://www.eff.org/testyourisp/switzerland For more about EFF's "Test Your ISP" Project: http://www.eff.org/testyourisp Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:39:03 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3501 Gamers, thy time has come. The Video Games Live concert CD has debuted and hit the Billboard Top 10: LOS ANGELES, CA - JULY 31, 2008 - EMI Classics and Video Games Live is proud to announce that the 'Video Games Live - Volume One' album was successfully launched in North America to great acclaim and rave reviews last week during the sold out performance at Comic-Con International with the San Diego Symphony. To further establish the significance of video game music and the worldwide popularity and success of Video Games Live, the album made an unprecedented debut on the U.S. Billboard charts at #10. "What a fantastic honor for us and the entire game industry", said prolific video game composer and co-creator/executive producer of Video Games Live, Tommy Tallarico. "It's one of those things you always dream about as a musician growing up." The album is currently available in North America in all retail stores that sell music, online distributors such as Amazon.com and Walmart.com and available for download on iTunes. Congratulations, guys. You've earned it. Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:38:48 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3500 In California, noncompete clauses are completely illegal: "An employer cannot by contract restrain a former employee from engaging in his or her profession, trade or business," said Justice Ming Chin in Thursday's ruling. He said the law recognizes only a few limited exceptions, for noncompete agreements that are part of the breakup of a corporation or partnership. Businesses and employment lawyers have been following the case closely, anticipating that it would resolve the disagreement between state and federal courts on the meaning of the California law. Federal courts are likely to fall in line now that California's highest court has interpreted the law.Personally, I'd like to see these made illegal all over. Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:14:06 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3499 Microsoft's much-vaunted Vista "security" has been fatally torpedoed. While this may seem like any standard security hole, other researchers say that the work is a major breakthrough and there is very little that Microsoft can do to fix the problems. These attacks work differently than other security exploits, as they aren't based on any new Windows vulnerabilities, but instead take advantage of the way Microsoft chose to guard Vista's fundamental architecture. According to Dino Dai Zovi, a popular security researcher, "the genius of this is that it's completely reusable. They have attacks that let them load chosen content to a chosen location with chosen permissions. That's completely game over."Ouch. Seriously, just... ouch. Fri, 08 Aug 2008 08:23:20 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3498 Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is a picture of the Cat's-Eye Nebula, X-ray activity, in false color. And one heck of a background image. Direct link here. Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:56:14 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3497 A story floating on the wire today from Ars: a woman who took her computer in for repair at two shops, only to find out the tech at the first shop had been spying on her with remote webcam software. Garcia then took her machine to another computer expert—a trusted friend this time—who discovered that Feigin had installed two pieces of software onto her machine: Log Me In and Web Cam Spy Hacker. Web Cam Spy Hacker may have been written by Feigin himself (the address on the site was the same as his home address), and it allowed him to upload the various photos taken on the machine to a remote server. Unfortunately for Garcia, that included 20,000 photos of her, her friends, and her boyfriend. Since the laptop mostly resided in her bedroom, some of them were taken while she was not clothed.Word to the wise: be careful when taking any PC in for repair. The Consumerist caught Geek Squad doing this some time ago. Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:21:57 -0500 http://glideunderground.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3496 The Simpsons has actually dished out a few nuggets over the years - here's an interesting set of 25 tips on eating healthy but inexpensively. 7) Portion sizes have increased tremendously in America over the last few decades, and are a giant factor in U.S. weight gain. This is especially true for restaurant food and takeout. Homer: Is this the biggest steak you got? 72 oz.? I thought this was supposed to be a steakhouse, not a little girly, underpantsy, pink doily, tea party place! Waiter: Well, we do have one steak available upon special request. We call it Sir Loin-A-Lot. It's the size of a boogieboard. Homer: Ooh, I'll have that one! And to drink ... meatballs.Well worth a read if you're trying to slim down a bit. Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:13:53 -0500