Elonka wrote:

Makers of "World of Warcraft" - Blizzard Entertainment, are being sued by the parents of a 13-year-old Tianjin boy, on charges that the game caused the death of their son.

The parents have filed a law-suit against Blizzard Entertainment, alleging that their son jumped to his death while re-enacting a scene from "World of Warcraft".

Anti-Internet addiction advocate, Zhang Chunliang, is backing the parents of the deceased boy. Chunliang is said to have spoken to 63 parents, whose children have suffered due to online gaming addiction. The advocate plans to file a class-action suit in the matter. There have been no comments from Blizzard Entertainment so far.

China's online gaming market, which raked in $580 million this year, is believed to be the fastest-growing market in the world.

Blizzard Entertainment's "World of Warcraft" alone is estimated to have around 1.5 million paying players, bringing-in moolah to the tune of $30 million per month in subscription fees.

Vivendi Universal Games, parent company of Blizzard Entertainment, which has pegged the "World of Warcraft" global players count at 4.5 million, is now forced to contend with the back-lash of parents concerned with their children's addictive behavior.

Oh this is just stupid now. Who in their right mind would jump off anything and assume they will be fine because they could do it in a game? I would like to know more details on this as to what the exact scene was he was re-enacting.

RE: Parents of dead teenager sue Blizzard over 'Worlds of Warcraft'

One of the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the world, Hong Kong has an overall density of nearly 6,700 people per square kilometer. The majority of its citizens live in flats in high-rise buildings. In Architecture of Density, Wolf investigates these vibrant city blocks, finding a mesmerizing abstraction in the buildings' facades.

These are amazing photographs. I wish I could go to the exhibition.

MICHAEL WOLF

Feathers fly and teddies soar as you converge on Dundas Square for a giant urban pillow fight! Swing and whack as you evade pillow-wielding assailants. Join us for this London-style silliness: bring a soft pillow to the middle of the square at 2 PM and wait for the signal. Pillow fight!

Disclaimer: As with all things, participating in a pillow fight is risky. By bringing a pillow, you accept that despite our best efforts, you may get hurt.

This is great. Makes you think..."Why don't more places do things like this?"

Giant Urban Pillow Fight

From - Sat Nov 05 02:50:29 2005
Date: Sat, 05 Nov 2005 02:50:28 -0500
From: Acidus (acidus@yak.net)
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (X11/20050317)
To: tonykel nkem (djkelvin2003@yahoo.com)
Subject: Re: sort code

tonykel nkem wrote:

: i have some valid credit card with the billing information how can i
: get or generate the cvv2 or cvc of the card plz i need reply.
: hacker kelvin

Step 1. Remove your pants
Step 2. Insert your dick into your own ass
Step 3. Go fuck yourself

Sincerely,
Acidus

Email of a 2600 Author

Acidus wrote:

AIM Robots are sponsored and operated by AOL and other vendors and appear as buddy icons in the buddy lists of AIM users who install them.

For example, users can send an instant message to the AOLYellowpages AIM Robot with the name of a local business or with simply a keyword and the robot replies with related directory listings. The Wall Street Journal robot lets users set up news alerts to be delivered via AIM, as well as request stock prices.

For those who have been under an IT rock, Time Warner is looking to sell off AOL. With Yahoo dropping out the main parties interested are Microsoft and Google.

AOL's instant messaging technologies and userbase is its crown jewel. While Google does have an IM service I couldn't figure out why Google would be interested. How wrong I was! Google doesn't care about AOL's dial-up customers or adding AIM users. Google sees AIM as a conduit to spread services.

Decius has a T-Mobile Sidekick. So does my friend Strick. Web browsing on it is about on par with a 9600 baud modem. While there are some services/proxies/gateways which will strip HTML down to something doable on a handheld, I find they leave much to be desired. This is because they are doing it in real time. At times its faster to IM Rattle to search for something than to actually search for something.

So what does this mean about IM? IM is fast. IM is faster than web browsing on most non-PC devices. AIM compatible IM clients exist in many mobile phones. AIM has a ton of existing users. Creating Google IM Robots to respond to Local searches, Direction requests, Maps, address lookups would fill a need for mobile devices. In short, AOL and AIM allows Google to expand beyond the computer.

Today when I signed onto aim after my net connection was restored I noticed I had two IM bots on my list. One for moviephone and the other for I don't know. The point is, that is very plausible and easy for them to do. AIMbots

RE: Why would Google want AOL?

Bridget Dehl shushed her 21-month-old son, Gavin, then clapped a hand over his mouth to squelch his tiny screams amid the Sunday brunch bustle. When Gavin kept yelping "yeah, yeah, yeah," Ms. Dehl whisked him from his highchair and out the door.

Right past the sign warning the cafe's customers that "children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven," and right into a nasty spat roiling the stroller set in Chicago's changing Andersonville neighborhood.

As far as I'm concerned, there's only one side to this issue. It is completely inconsiderate to take small children that can't be quiet, sit still, etc, into an adult establishment like a coffee shop where they proceed to irritate the piss out of everyone else there.

At Center of a Clash, Rowdy Children in Coffee Shops

We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on
our hidden web-sites and our show-case site GWEI.org.
With this money we automatically buy Google shares via
our Swiss e-banking account. We buy Google via their own
advertisment! Google eats itself
- but in the end we will own it!

This is a great idea. It is cracking me up.

GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself

Delcan NET, a Canadian company, developed the system which triangulates the location of each driver by monitoring the signal sent from the cell phone as it is handed off from one cell tower to the next. Each phone is uniquely identified and the information is compared with a highway map to record on what road each motorist is traveling at any given time. The system also records the speed of each vehicle, opening up another potential ticketing technology.

A pilot program in Baltimore only tracks Cingular cell phones on 1,000 miles of road. AirSage Inc. has contracted with Sprint to spy on motorists in Norfolk, Virginia and Atlanta and Macon, Georgia.

Wow thats fucked up. AirSage says identifying information is stripped from the data in their pilot in Georgia.

Missouri To Track Through Cell Phones

A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.

The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known.

"We've found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer," said EFF Staff Technologist Seth David Schoen.

According to this page, the Secret Service was the only organization that has the ability to decode the information in the dots. That means that its usage is (was?) limited to investigations on counterfeiting operations and threats against government personnel. That's the only stuff that falls under the Secret Service's jurisdiction.

I would be curious if the FBI has the ability to use this encoding system in investigations. I'd find it strange if they couldn't. Now that the information about how its encoded is public knowledge, its arguable that any government investigative agency could use it. Once the serial number of the printer is obtained, who it was sold to is just a subpoena ot two away.

EFF Breaks Secret Tracking Code in Color Printers

TinyDisk is a program from saving and retrieving files from TinyURL and TinyURL-like services such as Nanourl. It overlays a write-once-read-many anonymous, persistent and globally shared filesystem. Once something is uploaded, only the database admin can delete it. Everyone can read it. No one can know who created it. Think of it as a magical CD-R that gets burned and placed on a network.

This is a file system Acidus demoed at Phreaknic that runs on top of the link shortening service TinyURL. Its the perfect case study of how to write meaningful extensions on top of existing web applications, which was the topic of Acidus's presentation.

He's already uploaded some fun stuff into TinyURL, like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and even TinyDisk itself. Thats right, the program to read and write to TinyURL is stored inside TinyURL! It was also very cool to see other people starting to use it.

I was doing some searching around yesterday, and it appears there is some interest in this tool coming from China.

TinyDisk - An anonymous shared file system on top of TinyURL