Posted by 010081
Tech
Friday, March 12th, 2010
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Need some 3G? Buy some 3G! Macrumors has some shots of the interface that will appear when you need to add data to your iPad data plan. You can either add 250MB for $14.99 or change to an unlimited plan for $26.99 a month. You can also cancel your plan right from the iPad, an fascinating concept. From Apple’s website: So if you have a business trip or vacation approaching, just sign up for the month you’ll be traveling and cancel when you get back. You don’t need to visit a store to get 3G service. You can sign up, check your data usage, manage your account, or cancel your service — all from your iPad. Man. I don’t know if I want to get the 3G one now. Feh.
Posted by 010081
Tech
Thursday, March 11th, 2010
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Credit to Ring of Honor, the professional wrestling promotion, for embracing the Internet era. The promotion has launched a new download store that makes its extensive video library only a $10 download away. A legal download, mind you. It’s all a fan could ever ask for. The process is pretty easy. You visit the Web site, add the video of your choice—I selected Joe vs. Punk II , from October, 2004 (which received a 5-star rating from The Wrestling Observer newsletter)—then buy via PayPal. A link then appears in the Account area of the Web site. In there is a link to a plain ol’ ISO that you then download at your leisure. The servers don’t seem to be too beefy since the download is running only at around 300 KB/s right now (6:30pm). Still, it’s quite a bit faster than waiting for a plastic disc to arrive in the mail. It should also be noted that Ring of Honor regularly hosts Internet pay-per-view events, including one on April 3 . So, “figures out the Internet” may be a bit harsh. Companies like Ring of Honor have been fighting piracy for quite some time. There’s a couple fairly high profile BitTorrent sites that specialize in professional wrestling, and their DVDs are often ripped and posted and as soon as they’re released. It’s one thing to download a WWE DVD rip, where the company makes millions of dollars every year, but smaller guys like Ring of Honor truly do get hurt every time you fire up uTorrent. (Not to justify downloading WWE DVDs, of course.) But giving people an easy-to-use, inexpensive, and legal method to access their video library is to be commend, and it probably should have happened sooner. I’d much rather be given the option of paying $10 for an ISO than having to sift my way through this or that torrent site, worrying about whether or not there’s a seeder in the swarm.
Posted by Kevin Huffman
Tech
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
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From now on, any story about “hackers” or “hacking” will be accompanied by a link to the song “ Halcyon And On And On ,” as made famous by the movie Hackers . With that in mind: who made more money last year, Wall Street fat-cats or hackers? The U.S. FDIC says that online scams cost businesses $25 million last year . These scams include phishing and other associated nonsense, which you really ought to be smart to nowadays. The most common way for people to be bilked out of their money is that they’re tricked into giving away the bank account info. You get an e-mail from “Citybank” that says something is wrong with your account, or that it needs to be “verified” or whatever. So you put your info in, and now some punk kid in St. Peterberg or Kazan has your bank info. Have fun dealing with that! I’ve said it at least 80 million times in the past year: do not go around giving your info to anybody. Nobody!
Posted by Kevin Huffman
Tech
Sunday, February 28th, 2010
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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! via wow.com
Posted by Kevin Huffman
Tech
Friday, February 26th, 2010
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Hey, times are tough and if United Airlines has to advertise sex pills on Twitter to keep costs down, I’m all for it. Maybe the company needed the extra revenue and used Twitter instead of installing quarter meters on its plane’s bathrooms. Or the account was hacked. Either way, it makes for a fun, Friday morning post. [ NYC Aviation via Consumerist ]