Cody Taylor

A recent shooting in Germany has raised the ire of many politicians and officials, and they’re turning to video games as a scapegoat after it was revealed that the shooter was a fan of Counterstrike and played Far Cry 2 the night before the rampage. First, a major retailer decided to drop mature-rated games altogether, and then the Minister for Social Affairs suggested restricting “addictive games,” such as World of Warcraft, to adults only. Despite an unfavorable reaction from gamers and game developers alike, the chief of Germany’s national police union has now spoken out against violent games as well, saying, “The world would be no poorer if there were no more killergames.”

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An anonymous reader writes “A Princeton senior has found a bug in the hardware design for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In the hardware used to record and capture events in the LHC, she discovered errors that were leading to the appearances of double images because of particle streams known as jets. ‘Xiaohang Quan ’09 was working on her senior thesis when she found a miscalculation in the hardware of the world’s largest particle accelerator. Quan, a physics concentrator, traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, last week with physics professors Christopher Tully GS ’98, Jim Olsen and Daniel Marlow for the annual meeting of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). This year, however, they also came to discuss Quan’s discovery with the designers of the hardware for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, which, as part of the Large Hadron Collider, has the potential to revolutionize particle physics.'”

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suraj.sun writes “A pair of Argentinian researchers have found a way to perform unveil a BIOS level malware attack capable of surviving even a hard-disk wipe. Alfredo Ortega and Anibal Sacco from Core Security Technologies — used the stage at last week’s CanSecWest conference to demonstrate methods for infecting the BIOS with persistent code that will survive reboots and re-flashing attempts. The technique includes patching the BIOS with a small bit of code that gave them complete control of the machine. The demo ran smoothly on a Windows machine, a PC running OpenBSD and another running VMware Player.”

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On Friday evening, Battlestar Galactica ended its four-season run as one of the most popular science fiction shows in recent history. 2.4 million people tuned in for the finale, and reactions to the ending — positive, negative, and often a mix of both — are springing up all over the internet, as are tributes and retrospectives. Producers Ron Moore and David Eick held a Q&A session after the finale to discuss certain aspects of the story and spell out the final status of several plot lines. Fans of the show will have a chance to see the Cylon side of the story this fall in a two-hour TV movie titled “The Plan,” and we’ve previously discussed the spin-off prequel series, Caprica, the pilot for which will come out on April 21st. Be warned: these links and the following discussion will contain spoilers.

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he iPhone 3.0 software includes the ability to copy-and-paste, a landscape keyboard, and push notifications. However, none of these updates were as revolutionary as the new features Apple offered to iPhone application developers. The one to watch however is the ability to purchase items within an application.

Apple this year will finally introduce video recording capabilities on at least one of its upcoming iPhone models, AppleInsider has been told.

The Narrative Fallacy writes “John Markoff has a story at the NY Times speculating about what will happen on April 1 when the Conficker worm is scheduled to activate. Already on an estimated 12 million machines, conjectures about Conficker’s purpose ranges from the benign — an April Fool’s Day prank — to far darker notions. Some say the program will be used in the ‘rent-a-computer-crook’ business, something that has been tried previously by the computer underground. ‘The most intriguing clue about the purpose of Conficker lies in the intricate design of the peer-to-peer logic of the latest version of the program, which security researchers are still trying to completely decode,’ writes Markoff. According to a paper by researchers at SRI International, in the Conficker C version of the program, infected computers can act both as clients and servers and share files in both directions. With these capabilities, Conficker’s authors could be planning to create a scheme like Freenet, the peer-to-peer system that was intended to make Internet censorship of documents impossible. On a darker note, Stefan Savage, a computer scientist at the University of California at San Diego, has suggested the possibility of a ‘Dark Google.’ ‘What if Conficker is intended to give the computer underworld the ability to search for data on all the infected computers around the globe and then sell the answers,’ writes Markoff. ‘That would be a dragnet — and a genuine horror story.'”

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meatheadmike writes to tell us that a recent Canadian court case brought against the Canadian Recording Industry Association by isoHunt Web Technologies, Inc, could drastically change the web landscape in Canada. “The question before the British Columbia Supreme Court is if a site such as isoHunt allows people to find a pirated copy of movies such as Watchmen or The Dark Knight, is it breaching Canadian copyright law? ‘It’s a huge can of worms,” said David Fewer, acting director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa. ‘I am surprised that this litigation has gone under the radar as much as it has. I do think this is the most important copyright litigation going on right now.'”

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The Wayback Machine, the digital time capsule that stores 85 billion archived versions of web pages online dating back to 1996, is getting a new 2 petabyte data center.

Ropati writes “I bank with capitalone.com. Recently I went to log in to my credit card account, and my browser reported that the site certificate didn’t match the web site I was on. [Expletive.] I’m wondering if I am getting a poisoned DNS URL. I have to log in and do my banking, so I accept the mismatched certificate. The banking site is complete, my transactions are listed but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a man in the middle attack here. I am still curious how much I have exposed my banking assets.” Read on for more, and offer advice on how to interpret what sounds like a flaky response from the bank.

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