So, this is actually kind of crap, but reading it is an exercise in playing "Spot the Motive". The author goes on about how Blizzard's password breach is a terrible thing because SRP-enciphered passwords can still be brute-forced, so everyone should change their passwords immediately before their account explodes and sharp pieces of flaming shrapnel wind up in your eyes.

He wants Blizzard to actually retract their previous statements (which certainly seemed to be pretty accurate) and become equally shrill about THE DANGERZ!

Honestly, fuck this guy.

He concludes his blog post with a very limp-wristed full disclosure of sorts:

"The sad truth is that the state-of-the-art ‘best practices’ in the industry currently fail to adequately protect users’ passwords from being stolen. It is my personal mission, and the mission of my company TapLink, to ultimately provide the software, infrastructure, and education which will allow companies, large and small, to successfully defend from this sort of attack.

In other words, "I think everyone's passwords are unsafe and they should pay us money."

...which is a load of shit, because we're talking about static fucking passwords, which are nearly obsolete anyway.

At no point does he even briefly mention that Blizz has been subsidizing hardware tokens for their users for ages now, and anyone who cares enough will have gotten one (because they're a $10 one-time purchase for a game that costs $15/month anyway) which means those people do not have to give a single tinker's damn about rushing out to change their static password before goldfarmers can scatter their virtual loots to the four corners of the virtual-earth.

I implore anyone who is a member of Battle.net: immediately ensure your old Battle.net password is not being used on any other sites, and you should never use that same password again. You should also verify your secret question/answer that you used on Battle.net is not reused elsewhere as well."

So... we've been going on at people about password reuse for some time now. it's fairly shallow to act as if this were timely and accurate advice relevant to the current situation of passwords possibly being cracked. People should have already not been reusing their passwords or secret questions anywhere else. It's not something we should have to keep telling people every hour of the day--it's clear they're either listening or they aren't going to care until they've gotten their fingers burned, possibly more than once.

"To Mike Morhaime and the Blizzard security team, I would request immediate retraction or clarification on your statement about the difficulty of extracting passwords from the stolen database. The message to your users should be clear: you’re passwords have almost certainly been cracked, and you should take immediate action."... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

SRP won't protect stolen passwords--give me money.

So, contrary to claims that the incident from earlier in this week was a one-time thing, we have another tale of epic shipping delays and wild prevarications coming from Mr. Christoforo.

Frankly, if the reporters who've interviewed him knew about this and didn't call him on his lies, they should feel deep shame.

More on Paul 'Douchebag' Christoforo

It just keeps getting better.

Mr. Christoforo appears to have just crossed the line into extortion.

At least all those steroids will make him popular in jail.

Paul Christoforo, Amateur Extortionist, Tempts Jail

Someone's mom cancelled his WoW account and one of his siblings was nice enough to hide a video camera in his room so that we can see his reaction.

Why the ancient custom of leaving unwanted children to the elements is still possibly useful

Wow! Even more lunacy.

Today (June 4th) Jack Thompson--Asshat Lawyer Extraordinaire--actually walked out on his own disbarment hearing, after discovering that the overseer in the case was aiming for "enhanced disbarment" meaning not only were they planning on stripping him of his legal credentals, they were planning on banning him from even trying to regain them for ten years. Well, looks like at the rate he's going they're going to wind up giving him jail time as well. I recommend they use the wing reserved for compulsive anal rapists.

Thompson, much in the fashion of how we got to this point in the first place has filed what he calls "Thompson's Formal Objection to June 4 Sanctions Hearing", which is of course, filled with just loads of things that have almost nothing to do with why he's being disbarred.

It seems that not even the Florida Bar will tolerate Thompson's form of unending legal trollery.

* For those who haven't caught on yet, the trolling technique in question is rather close to Argumentum ad lapidem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_lapidem in that Thompson, rather than talk about why he shouldn't be disbarred for (just one example) filing gay porn and literally thousands of irrelevant documents in his case against Rock Star Productions, chooses instead to argue that he's being persecuted for just dozens of things completely unrelated to anything going on at the moment. The general idea being that the troll can sucker someone into arguing each and every one of these irrelevant points until they are either completely confused, get frustrated and give up, or just die from old age. Trolls using this technique generally consider Argument from silence the winning condition.

Jack Thompson Walks Out on His Own Disbarment Hearing

On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is an episodic RPG-adventure game series set in a deranged comic-book meets-pulp-horror 1920s universe. Armed with unconventional weaponry and witty repartee, you join forces with the Gabe and Tycho, the crime-solving team of the Startling Developments Detective Agency to make war on bizarre enemies and solve the mysteries hidden deep in the sinister heart of New Arcadia.
From the hilarious and twisted minds of Penny Arcade creators Mike "Gabe" Krahulik and Jerry "Tycho" Holkins, legendary game designer Ron Gilbert and veteran producers at Hothead Games comes a 100% authentic and hilarious Penny Arcade experience.

From what I've seen of it so far, that last bit is dead on. The video game is truly effing Penny Arcade. (Either you get that, or you don't.) I'd really like to write something eloquent and insightful about it, but basically, it is the embodiment of the web comic, which also happens to be a video game filled with win.

At ~200 megabytes or so, it is deceptively tiny. ...but since the entire thing is either (and alternatingly) cel-shaded or vector-driven, it can be expected to compress well. (It also looks seriously pimp at 1680x1050)

Download the demo. You will see. (Oh yes, did I mention it runs on everything? Windows, OSX, Linux, and XBox360. ...and the system requirements are miniscule.)

On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One

On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is an episodic RPG-adventure game series set in a deranged comic-book meets-pulp-horror 1920s universe. Armed with unconventional weaponry and witty repartee, you join forces with the Gabe and Tycho, the crime-solving team of the Startling Developments Detective Agency to make war on bizarre enemies and solve the mysteries hidden deep in the sinister heart of New Arcadia.
From the hilarious and twisted minds of Penny Arcade creators Mike "Gabe" Krahulik and Jerry "Tycho" Holkins, legendary game designer Ron Gilbert and veteran producers at Hothead Games comes a 100% authentic and hilarious Penny Arcade experience.

From what I've seen of it so far, that last bit is dead on. The video game is truly effing Penny Arcade. (Either you get that, or you don't.) I'd really like to write something eloquent and insightful about it, but basically, it is the embodiment of the web comic, which also happens to be a video game filled with win.

At ~200 megabytes or so, it is deceptively tiny. ...but since the entire thing is either (and alternatingly) cel-shaded or vector-driven, it can be expected to compress well. (It also looks seriously pimp at 1680x1050)

Download the demo. You will see. (Oh yes, did I mention it runs on everything? Windows, OSX, Linux, and XBox360. ...and the system requirements are miniscule.)

On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One

A thorough review of Thompson’s filings lead to one conclusion. He has abused the processes of the Court… Accordingly… the Clerk of this Court is hereby instructed to reject for filing any future pleadings, petitions, motions, documents, or other filings submitted by John Bruce Thompson, unless signed by a member in good standing of The Florida Bar other than himself.

The celebrations may now begin.

Florida Supreme Court Sanctions Jack Thompson!

"Disappointing" is a word I don't like to use about a video game--mainly because this means I was just "disappointed" out of fifty bucks when this happens, but nonetheless it applies to EA's new Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix game.

Not even the magic of the Wii-mote could save this one, because somehow EA's code manages to have trouble differentiating frantically waving the thing in counter-clockwise circles from frantically waving the thing in clockwise circles. This is pretty dire, considering that I've got at least three other games that handle this task just fine.

It is neat to see characters which mostly resemble the ones from the movie on your screen and presumably vulnerable to said frantically-waving wand, but no... except for a few rather baffling (because of the hideous wand-movement parsing and lack of effective tactile feedback) battle scenes, you're not allowed to zap anyone at any time. The best you're allowed is to point your wand at people and look at them menacingly to make them run away. This is important because the AI controlling the other characters makes them about as aware of their surroundings Helen Keller, so you'll be shooing students out of your way on a regular basis--including your two ever-present tag-alongs, Hermione and Ron. Rest assured, it won't take you long to decide that perhaps if one of them were to "fall" and wind up in the hospital wing, it wouldn't be such a terrible thing.

Gone is, sadly, most of the plot from the book, which might explain why it is that the thing feels like a mood-stabilized, Disney-esque version of the book. It also might explain why it is that Sirius Black is somehow now a cheerful, upbeat guy. (For those of you who have forgotten, Black has just spent the last several years being tortured around-the-clock by Dementors in Azkhaban). There's a moderate-length cutscene near the end where Dolores Umbridge gets taken away by the centaurs, which makes no real sense at all, and somehow a screwey-looking giant is involved in this, making his second blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance, which seem to be glaring evidence that at one point there was a lot more game planned here than was actually shipped. Adding insult to injury is the "Room of Rewards"* which contains the now-standard plethora of useless junk meant to represent you having seen all 9/9 of the Jade Thimbles Of Sewingness and having set new records in the nostril mining mini-game--roughly half of these "rewards" are simply trophy items which you're shown close up for almost two full seconds (not exactly long enough to admire much). The other half are basically the anemic stepchildren of DVD "extras" about the already lackluster video game where you get to see things like Emma Caufield gushingly admit that the game showed her new levels of realism in how video games can be. Clearly, Ms. Caufield has never played a video game before this one--or perhaps it's more of the w... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Game Review: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

A bit of nostalgia (or at least something so you can pretend to be nostalgic about it) for the walls of your study/gaming room.

...whopping large Asteroids (like the game Atari made).

Asteroids!