I was there. Stop laughing.
Like some new-found lover, the touch screen friendly Glider Gloves promise to keep you warm without cramping your style. Will they be true to their word and become a long-term keeper, or is this just another weekend tryst roused by empty promises? Get the intimate details in our full review.
It’s not the only game in town – not by a long shot – but many had high hopes that storage locker MEGA would deliver where competitors like Dropbox and Skydrive fall short: elbow room.
Apparently, Dotcom planted all his seed money in the lawyers’ garden, and forgot to retain a few competent techs during the whole “architecture” phase of this project.
If MEGA’s HTML-5 frontend is the handsome, youthful face of the company, then the servers and security code are surely the true picture of Dorian Gray.
“It’s a nice website, but when it comes to cryptography they seem to have no experience […] Quite frankly it felt like I had coded this in 2011 while drunk.” – Nadim Kobeissi, creator of Crytocat.
Security researchers have discovered multiple, fundamental flaws with Dotcom’s distributed paradigm:
“If you were hosting one of Mega’s CDN [content delivery network] nodes (or you were a government official of the CDN hoster’s jurisdiction), you could now take over Mega and steal users’ encryption keys,” (source)
And just for the hat trick, Steve Thomas has discovered how to decipher the confirmation email sent by MEGA, allowing you to unlock any data stored by the email recipient on the servers. Email is of course comparatively easy to intercept as plain text, so this should be a very present concern for users.
All of these security holes, coupled with near-to-useless responsiveness for the entire post-launch week, and Dotcom is off to a very shaky start indeed.
Still, our hopes are high that all the concerns can be addressed quickly, and if so, MEGA may yet emerge as a real online storage contender (provided they get on the cross-platform horse in a big hurry). But let this be a lesson: If you’re going to launch a tech company, it’s probably unwise to skimp on the tech.
With its growth phase grinding to a halt, investors are ditching Apple’s former orchard for greener pastures. Unfortunately for Tim Cook, this means he is no longer perched atop the world’s most valuable company. Apple’s market cap lead over runner-up Exxon has been steadily eroding since the dizzying highs of September 2012. Now the also-ran oil megacorp is snubbing its nose at Cook &Co., taunting the familiar old schoolyard chant, “Slow and steady wins the race!“.
It would be silly to suggest Apple is in its death throws. They’re still hammering shut the crates on the company’s best quarter ever. Yet the parallels to Microsoft during its meteoric rise in the late 90’s before leveling off are all too apparent. This is what happens when bean-counters usurp the visionaries in growing companies.
Unless Apple can find a way to bring something new and exciting to market again, they’re doomed to repeat history as so many companies have before them (GM, IBM, Blackberry – we’re looking at you). Releasing catch-up products like like the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini is a consequence of the company slipping into a reactive development phase, willing to fall in line rather than stand at the head of it.
So without a new game-changer to tip the market on it’s ear, poor old Apple will have to settle for being a gigantic, successful and extremely profitable company for at least the next decade. Not bad for second place.
Part 1 of the (lengthy) rip and encode guide for optical media is now online. You’ll find it linked at the top of the page under “Guides”.
Part 1 covers decryption and ripping to a lossless MKV format. Parts 2 and 3 (still to come) will cover re-encoding and setting up a home media server. Stay tuned for more!
MEGA’s current end-user experience.
24 hours into what’s turning out to be one of the biggest startup launches in history, Kim Dotcom’s MEGA site is struggling under an unprecedented load.
Now topping 1 million registered souls, the soup-to-nuts encrypted storage cloud is still incapable of providing service to most of its users.
MEGA’s primary host, Cogent’s German operation, is scaling services to try and keep up with demand, but most visitors are stuck staring at the puffy, insubstantial cumulus loading gif.
If you’re lucky enough to make it this far, you’ll find the interface to be simple but functional, and very polished for a launch product.
Given Dotcom’s history with the film industry’s hired goons, it remains to be seen if his new service will face any real legal challenges. Billed as a direct, secure competitor to the likes of Dropbox, iCloud and SkyDrive, MEGA is lawyered-up and swears it’s walking the straight and narrow.
Will Kim Dotcom dodge the legal bullets and prove himself a true rainmaker?
Get the story: ArsTechnica (excellent coverage), ZDNet, Bloomberg
SSH windows via PuTTY running on the author’s MS Surface. A tear was shed by tech admins around the globe.
The Royal Smart People over at XDA have handed the world a little slice of freedom via their new Jailbreak for Windows RT.
Clorkr’s original exploit made waves earlier this month, but it wasn’t until XDA user netham45 packaged the whole thing up (about a week ago) into a tidy .bat file that the vulnerability truly brought power to the people. As of today, the refined version 1.1 works with the most recent updates to RT and will jailbreak almost any Windows RT device in a minute or less.
This isn’t your Mom’s (read: iPhone) jailbreak. Don’t expect to install Hackulous and grab all your favourite games for free. In fact, this jailbreak doesn’t allow copying Microsoft’s App Store programs at all – that’s not the intention, and hopefully never is.
So what does it do? Well, dear reader, it permits the desktop-mode interface to run anything compiled for Windows ARM (not x86, but read on). Some very kind gear-heads have re-compiled several applications so far that will run natively, and the list is growing daily. Among the high-profile programs ported so far:
Also, notably, the Bochs x86 emulator has been ported over, which opens the door to a whole new horizon of apps on the ARM-based RT platform. Some crafty masochists are already running Win98SE in emulated mode to enjoy the games of yesteryore.
Other notable but unfinished ports rumored to be in the works include Firefox, Thunderbird, Apache and of course the Linux kernel. Provided Microsoft doesn’t call in the Gestapo FBI to somehow take all this down, there is a very bright future for the RT homebrew community.
UPDATE: Audicity has been ported over. This could be a game changer for a few important reasons (upcoming article).
UPDATE2: VirtuaWin ported as well. Great productivity tool, especially for smaller screens.
Visit the XDA forum here to find out more and download the jailbreak script.
It would appear that the dirty job of humanity’s extinction is back in our own hands for a while longer.
The Ice Ball Cometeh.
The comet Apophis – measuring in just over .3km – was given a 1 in 50 chance of slamming into earth either in 2029 or 2036. Needless to say this impact would have been unpleasant for most of us… Ignoring the vaporization of the millions of poor sods near the impact point, the pandemic debris cloud would have cut global food production dramatically, leading to widespread starvation, riots, and general zombie apocalypse conditions.
NASA has now revised their projected probably downwards to 1 in 1,000,000, essentially ruling it out as a concern.
Ah well, back to overconsumption and general environmental obliviousness. Slow and steady wins the race!
It’s no secret the tidal wave that is Android gaming will make landfall in 2013 – for better or for worse. It seems the seal has been broken on the Android cash-keg, and developers in droves are rushing to port their AAA titles of yesteryear to the the extremely popular, young OS.
GameKlip for Galaxy S3 paired via bluetooth. Wireless is cleaner, but requires the Sixaxis controller to be charged separately via mini-USB.
Games like Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Max Payne and GTA Vice City lend serious street cred to on-phone gaming, but the platform is hobbled by a major drawback: the dreaded thumb barrier. Not only are touch screen controls clunky to begin with, but smaller phone-size screens lose as much as 30% of their visible area to our beloved opposable digit.
Android has always espoused the use of game controllers – whether USB connected or paired via bluetooth. Pretty much any HID-compliant input will work with minimal fuss, but another problem remains… if you’re holding the controller where do you put your phone?
Enter the GameKlip – brainchild of Ryan French. The GameKlip is a plastic frame that snaps onto your Sixaxis controller, and then provides a mount/cradle for your phone or small tablet. The concept of the klip is simple, and admittedly not new, but French’s implementation is sturdy, elegant and perfectly balanced.
GameKlip wired configuration (S3 model shown). The battery drain from powering the Sixaxis will cut your playtime.
For testing, I purchased the wired S3 kit that ships with a perfectly sized micro-USB to mini-USB cable, used to connect the Sony Sixaxis controller to almost any modern Android phone. Setup could not have been easier – within one minute of attaching the supplied cable, I was smiting dastardly Trow in the The Bard’s Tale. No drivers, no installation – just ready to play. The game menus even correctly displayed the familiar X/Square/Triangle/Circle icons from Sony’s venerated controller, meaning zero learning curve or button re-mapping.
In-Game help system of “The Bard’s Tale” correctly displaying the Sixaxis controller icons. No drivers or 3rd party software required for the wired version.
You also have the option of pairing the controller and the phone via bluetooth. Be warned that this requires a rooted phone, and a separate piece of commercial, 3rd-party software called, bewilderingly, “Sixaxis” ($3 on Google Play). You can thank Sony for the root and extra software requirements, due to their (surprise surprise) proprietary implementation of bluetooth on the Sixaxis/PS3.
There are pros and cons to each type of connection (USB vs Bluetooth). While USB doesn’t require root – and hence may be your only option – the cable costs a few dollars extra, and it will drain your phone battery trying to keep the Sixaxis controller fully charged. There is also the inconvenience of requiring that very special little cable, which would be easy to misplace if not plugged into the Sixaxis. Once setup, the bluetooth method is convenient, elegant, and generally easier on the battery. If you go this road, though, you’ll have to charge your Sixaxis separately, and if you use the game controller with multiple devices (like your PS3), you’ll need to re-pair it via a computer utility every time you want to use it with your phone.
The GameKlip flying solo. Though a simple plastic cradle, its elegance and balance place it miles ahead of previous offerings.
The GameKlip is fabricated using a flexible plastic so it can wrap around and snap securely onto the Sixaxis. Still, the klip is rigid enough to prevent wobbling or vibration during play. I really don’t think there is a much better compromise on the construction – the clip is light and unobtrusive, but more than sturdy enough to do the job, all while managing easy access to the buttons and connectors on both the game pad and the android device.
At $14 ($20 for the wired version), the GameKlip is more than reasonably priced. I’m sure within 6 months we’ll see $5 mass-produced knockoffs show up at Wal-Mart, but in the realm of phone accessories, $14-$20 is pretty small potatoes. I can honestly say I completely shunned phone and tablet action gaming until the day my GameKlip arrived. I’m already looking at ordering a second for my Nexus 7 – if only they could keep the darn things in stock.
(Product photos unceremoniously pilfered from manufacturer’s website at http://thegameklip.com)
I love the modern reboot of The Bard’s Tale (talking about this release). From the all-star voice acting to the hilarious writing to the engaging RPG gameplay, it’s a true gem of a production – a rare and timeless classic.
If you’re like me, though, you’re going to be left with an empty spot in your OCD mosaic as it is impossible to max every stat and attain every talent given the level cap of 21.
So sate that obsession! Click the header for the full story, installation instructions, and of course, links to the delicious save file itself.