Sunday, June 10, 2012
Sabayon Linux 9
Saturday, June 9, 2012
League of Legends database hacked. Riot Games “appreciate your immediate attention”
Riot Games have notified all EU West and EU Nordic & East League of Legends players warning them that their account details may have been compromised by hackers.
Some players’ email addresses, encrypted account passwords, and dates of birth have been leaked. As a precaution Riot recommend you change your account password immediately by logging in here and clicking “my account” page in the top right.
A post from the President and CMO of Riot provides more detailed infomation. According to the post, “Even though we store passwords in encrypted form only, our security investigation determined that more than half of the passwords were simple enough to be at risk of easy cracking.”
Riot have “fixed the security issue” and “hired experts” to make future breaches “less likely.”
The post also offers a sincere apology for the breach: “We’ll continue to invest in security measures, including password hashing and data encryption, state-of-the-art firewalls, SSL, security ninjas, and other security measures to make your info safer. We’ve been humbled by this experience and know that nothing guarantees the security of Internet-connected systems such as League of Legends. We can simply promise to try our very best to protect your data.”
Riot are the latest in a long list of high profile devs to fall victim to hackers. Valve, Sony, Codemasters and Bioware have all been targeted.
Starcraft 2 Heart of the Swarm’s new units
*Hah!
**Hahaha!
1
New Terran Unit: Widow Mine
The Widow Mine replaces the cut Shredder. Like that unit, it’s a small, autonomous spidery thing, designed to allow Terran players to hold down sections of the map. But unlike that unit, it doesn’t seem to have the potential to be game-breakingly unfair. Widow Mines have to burrow before use; once in the ground, they’ll hop up and attach themselves to the legs/body/horrible gelatinous eye of anything that passes over them, before kicking off a short timer. Once the timer reaches zero, they burst, doing mad amounts of damage (currently 200) to their target. I tried building an army of fifty of them and scuttling into my foe’s base. It didn’t go so well – they don’t target buildings, and he’d built a few Photon Cannons at the front to detect cloaked or burrowed units.2
New Terran Unit: Battle Hellion
How to make anything better: add the word ‘battle’ to the front. The Battle Hellion is still a Hellion, but now comes out of the factory in its bipedal battle mode. Slower, fatter, and tougher, the Battle Hellion parps out its superheated gas in a short cone rather than a straight line. I parked five of them on my opponent’s ramp, stopping his Zerglings from escaping and roasting them before they could pull back. On the defensive, a gang of them morphed into waddle-mode stopped a minimal counter-push in a way vanilla Hellions never would.3
New Terran Unit: Warhound
The Warhound’s had its application changed heavily since its Blizzcon outing. There it was replacement therapy for the Thor, shooting down clumps of Mutalisks. Now it’s turned into a dedicated siegebreaker, its rockets auto-targeting nearby mechanical units and turning them to scrap. It also does well in a robo-fist fight, hand-mounted cannons popping Zerg Roaches in moments. Coupled with the Battle Hellion, I can see a new mini-mech style of Terran vs. Terran play emerging: a roving band of commandos punching through defences and raiding bases. A sort of halfway house between long, static Siege Tank lines and the drop-heavy bio builds we see players like MMA pull off.4
New Protoss Unit: Tempest
A Tempest upgrade can increase its range to a staggering 22. That’s from one side of your Starcraft screen to the other. Think of it like a glowing blue version of the Brood Lord, designed to pick apart turtling players. I built up a fleet of seven Tempests and floated them miles off the coast of my foe’s base. Moments later, I’d won the game, his troops reformed into so much blue goo. In groups, they look to be devastatingly powerful, but they’re also prohibitively expensive and need to be supported by ground units: their sparkly weapons don’t do much damage on their own.5
New Protoss Unit: Oracle
The Oracle’s perhaps the most interesting of HotS’s new units. A floating spellcaster, each of its abilities could be devastating in the hands of a player like Genius. Most annoying for Zerg and Terrans will be the Oracle’s ‘entomb’ spell, letting it tie up mineral patches and restrict their mining for a time. It’s possible to destroy the glowing prisms the Oracle coats your precious minerals with, but any Protoss using the tactic extensively will mean you’ll need to leave a few troops at home to crack through the coating. Oracles can also cloak nearby units, albeit at a heavy energy cost. Stealth assaults will necessitate an increase in detection: fortunately, the Oracle has that covered too – it can use its ‘preordain’ ability to make any friendly building a detector, spotting hidden and burrowed units. Game Director Dustin Browder suggested that this gives Protoss more options when it comes to openings, being able to use the Oracle to detect gambits like a Dark Templar rush without being forced to invest in Robotics Bay technology.6
New Protoss Unit: Mothership Core
After a few games with it, I started to use the Protoss’ new Mothership Core like a Terran’s Orbital Command upgrade: I grabbed it early. It’s a more offensive option than that upgrade, allowing Protoss players to morph a whacking great cannon on their chosen Nexus to defend against early attacks. It also comes packaged with the Mothership’s Mass Recall ability, allowing Protoss poking in the early-mid game. Previously, any Protoss force was committed to its attack, Sentries and such too slow to retreat. Now, Browder hopes players will be willing to commit their floaty, no-mouthed spacemen to early engagements, safe in the knowledge they can be yanked out of battle. It also spurred me on to actually use the Mothership – when you’ve got a large chunk of it hovering in the centre of your view, it tends to stick in your mind.7
New Zerg Unit: Swarm Host
Controlling a Spawn Host is horrible. Their horrible back spots burst when they’re burrowed, making them look like an infected strawberry. Nonetheless, they’re useful as siegebreakers, or as their own siege unit. Browder said he wanted Zerg players to have a chance to capitalise on successes, taking parts of the map as their own instead of being forced to expand willy-nilly. Park a few Spawn Hosts outside an enemy base and you’ll annoy the face off a Siege Tanking Terran, eventually forcing him out to deal with your disgusting friends. From there, it’s easy to send in the Zerglings and surround the cleanup troops.8
New Zerg Unit: Viper
The Viper feels like a floating Infestor in tone, but with less of a direct-damage focus. It’s been seemingly built to mess with Terran armies: the ‘blinding cloud’ ability reduces biological unit range to 1, and the ‘abduct’ spell lets it pull enemy units out of position. Both Marine/Marauder drop-heavy and Siege Tank focused Terrans find a counter in the Viper, even if its giant licky tongue can’t directly hurt anything on the battlefield.9
Altered Zerg Unit: Ultralisk
The Ultralisk remains as powerfully huge as ever, but he’s now learnt how to muscle his way past pesky Marines. Press C and aim your Ultras forward and they’ll hurtle underground like a chitinous torpedo. It renders ramp defence pointless, allowing large quantities of Starcraft 2′s biggest monsters access to the heart of your base. But, realistically, Ultras are a late game unit choice, meaning the HotS change is one to reduce Zerg annoyance – Ultras would happily clump around single units they should be able to trample over – rather than add a new unit function.Friday, June 8, 2012
Hard drive prices won’t fall until 2014
The
price of traditional hard drive storage isn’t likely to come down to
the levels seen in the first half of last year for at least 18 months.
That’s the opinion of industry analysts at IHS iSuppli, who have released a report today on the subject.It’s almost a year since the floods in Thailand which damaged many key factories owned by Western Digital and the like, which caused the cost of drives to double and even treble at retail as stocks ran short. While prices have fallen in recent months, they’re still considerably more expensive than they were this time last year, and you can expect to pay up to £100 or for a decent 1TB drive still.
Even the cheapest terabyte drives are around 25% more expensive than they were at their lowest cost.
Previously, analysts had expected prices to have returned to pre-2011 levels by now as most production facilities have been operational since December. IHS says that in the next quarter, shipments of drives will increase year on year for the first time since last July.
Unfortunately, other factors are now coming in to play. Most notable is the fact that just two companies now control the vast majority of the market, lowering competition and reducing the incentive to bring end user prices back down.
In a press statement, IHS’ Fang Zhang said:
“HDD manufacturers now have greater pricing power than they did in 2011, allowing them to keep ASPs steady. With the two mega-mergers between Seagate/Samsung and Western Digital/Hitachi GST, the two top suppliers held 85 percent of HDD market share in the first quarter 2012. This was up from 62 percent in the third quarter of 2011, before the mergers. The concentration of market share has resulted in an oligarchy where the top players can control pricing and are able to keep ASPs at a relatively high level.”
I’ve contacted hard drive manufacturers themselves for comment.
Conversely, while big hard drives are still expensive we’re seeing a race to the bottom as far as solid state storage is concerned. Thanks to demand for Ultrabooks and the like, competition in the supply chain there is looking very healthy. Indeed, it’s possible to get a 256GB drive like Crucial’s excellent M4 for less than £200 now, and many of last year’s premium drives based on the SF2281 controller are even cheaper.
Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 1
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Assassin’s Creed 3 multiplayer screenshots and information
Three new screenshots have just been released by Ubisoft, and CVG have a little inside knowledge on the multiplayer. As well as a four versus four king-of-the-hill-style Domination mode, there are environmental kills, which mean you can topple trees on your opponents to squish them. There are also three confirmed characters: The Commander, The Carpenter and The Lady Maverick. Who we’re going to assume feature in these screenshots.
The Lady Maverick
Short sleeves and split skirts can’t be all that becoming to freezing conditions, but hey, she’s The Lady Maverick and she can do as she damn well pleases. Even if it involves hypothermia. No sign of her face, but she does seem to have a rather large and crooked nose which juts out to the side of her face. Or that could just be hair.The Carpenter
We’re assuming this is The Carpenter because he has the large rugged hands that go with being a woodsmith. He also hates the cultural phenomenon of Steampunk. “History was interesting enough without you having to glue some cogs to it you idiot!” he yells as he biffs the man in his face with his mighty mallet.The Commander
Here The Commander is under attack from a flying Native American warrior. The Commander secretly wishes he could fly, hence his incredulous expression. The Carpenter doesn’t really care what happens to The Commander, as in the pub last night The Commander told him that his pincers looked a bit flat.
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