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Games

The Future of Independent Game Development 35

Posted by Soulskill from the braid-2-the-revenge dept.
The Guardian's Games Blog has an article discussing where indie game development will go in the next few years after its recent resurgence. The story follows the success of one small game studio, and suggests that the games industry will move to further embrace low-cost development. Quoting: "The likes of XBLA, ... PSN and WiiWare represent a reasonable revenue stream for publishers and developers, especially with a recession looming. However, in-house staff may not have the skills required to punch out cool, hugely intuitive budget games, with little or no management. If you look at something like Geometry Wars from Bizarre Creations, the project was started in the free time of experienced coder Stephen Cakebread, and may never have happened had he been shunted on to different, larger projects. Instead, big industry players are reaching out to the indie scene to source talent."
Security

Submission + - SPAM: NSA Patents a Way To Spot Network Snoops

Submitted by
narramissic
narramissic writes: "The National Security Agency has patented a technique for figuring out whether someone is messing with your network by measuring the amount of time it takes to send different types of data and sounding an alert if something takes too long. 'The neat thing about this particular patent is that they look at the differences between the network layers,' said Tadayoshi Kohno, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Washington. But IOActive security researcher Dan Kaminsky wasn't so impressed: 'Think of it as — if your network gets a little slower, maybe a bad guy has physically inserted a device that is intercepting and retransmitting packets. Sure, that's possible. Or perhaps you're routing through a slower path for one of a billion reasons.'"
Link to Original Source
Security

Submission + - Security flaws in Aussie net filter exposed (banthisurl.com) 2

Submitted by
Faldo
Faldo writes: "There's a three part interview with a computer security expert on BanThisURL that goes into the flaws in the Aussie net filtering scheme.

In addition to SSH tunnels and proxies, more worrying problems like trojaning the boxes to set up man in the middle attacks (which the interviewee has done in his lab), cross site scripting and the Australian blacklist leaking are all discussed.

Worrying and relevant, especially since Thailand's blacklist has just been leaked."
Software

Submission + - Book review: "Ubuntu Kung Fu" (justgoodbusiness.biz)

Submitted by
Lorin Ricker
Lorin Ricker writes: "Back in the dark ages of windows-based GUIs, corresponding to my own wandering VMS evangelical days, I became enamored of a series of books jauntily entitled Xxx Annoyances (from O'Reilly & Assocs.), where "Xxx" could be anything from "Windows 95", "Word", "Excel" or nearly piece of software which Microsoft produced. These were, if not the first, certainly among the most successful of the "tips & tricks" books that have become popular and useful to scads of hobbyists, ordinary users, hackers and, yes, even professionals in various IT pursuits. I was attracted, even a bit addicted, to these if only because they offered to try to make some useful sense out of the bewildering design choices, deficiencies and bugs that I'd find rampant in Windows and its application repertory.

The Annoyances series, of course, encouraged a host of competing series for deploying similar "how to..." wisdom, some attempting to be encyclopedic (Mother of All Windows 98 Book, Windows 98 Secrets — pax, Woody, Brian, Ed, et al), others wise-cracky humorous (the everlasting and recursively-annoying ...For Dummies series). I've always found it somewhat amusing — and simultaneously astonishing — that such a prolific cottage industry of "explainers" should be necessary, required even, in order for ordinary folks to be able to use software that's always been touted as "intuitive and easy to use...". And yet, spontaneously and in great profusion, there it is.

In spite it all, the good intentions and notions bound into the Annoyances series has best morphed into O'Reilly's Xxx Hacks series, where "Xxx" now can stand for nearly any software or hardware component, language, subsystem or resource you can imagine — there are Hacks books available on everything from Access & Ajax & Amazon, through Blackberry, Palm & Treo, Google (including Maps), Linux, Firefox, eBay & Flickr, to XP & XML. This series seems to me to be the granddaddy of 'em all, promising you tips and techniques "to get the most out of...", well, whatever you've got in your hands or on your screen. Heck, the series even includes Baseball Hacks and Statistics Hacks, two separate books, but perhaps not completely unrelated?

Clearly, we now have access to products, tools and resources which are sufficiently complex such that anything beyond basic, as-obviously-intended use or interaction requires augmented and extracurricular explanation. And most remarkably, the best, wittiest, most insightful and helpful how-to volumes tend to come not from the original software authors or development teams, but from individuals who experiment extensively with their favorite technologies — dedicated folks who develop an uncanny knack for prying the gems and innermost secrets out of their beast. And if a guy or gal can collect more than a few dozen of these nuggets that other folks might wish to know, too?... Well, from this another "tips" book can be born.

Into this fray jumps Keir Thomas, who has been writing about Linux for more than a decade, with a necessary new "tips" book entitled, intriguingly, Ubuntu Kung Fu — Tips & Tools for Exploring Using, and Tuning Linux, and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf, a division of The Pragmatic Programmers, LLC. Having only recently wandered into the light of Linux, open source software, and Ubuntu in particular, this book comes as a welcome infusion to my addiction. (Full disclosure: I qualified for a complimentary copy of the book, courtesy of the publisher. I hereby attest that this review is my honest, unbiased opinion and assessment.)

As a relatively young Linux distro, Ubuntu already sports a wealth of introductory and how-to books vying for the enthusiast's money — and I've already purchased a significant sampling of these which informs my opinion about the book here under review. And even for Ubuntu, the "tips & tricks" section of my own Linux bookshelf contains volumes which run from the encyclopedic to the practical — I'd even collected O'Reilly's Ubuntu Hacks (Oxer, Rankin & Childers) well before encountering Ubuntu Kung Fu.

How well does Keir Thomas's new book fare in this crowded field? Does he provide actual unique value to the Ubuntu community, useful knowledge which is otherwise unavailable or hard to find? In a nutshell (oops, sorry... that's a book series for another time!): Yes, he does. In fact, he hits the target pretty squarely. Here's how:

Ubuntu Kung Fu is organized as only three chapters (with no preface material at all): "1 Introduction," including obligatory "How to Read This Book," "Acknowledgments" and "Sharing" sections; "2 An Ubuntu Administration Crash Course"; and, the largest chapter by far, "3 The Tips" themselves.

Though it concentrates on rather basic material, the second chapter on Ubuntu administration is actually one of the best subject primers I've encountered so far, and is written directly and to-the-point. There's the right focus and enough detail to help those users making the initial transition from Windows to Linux/Ubuntu, including coaching on users and passwords, file system structure (see sidebar "Drive Letters and Ubuntu"), and guidance regarding "Command Line or GUI?".

For example, after weeks of my own stumbling about in the vast sea of information and opinion known as the Ubuntu Forums (http://www.ubuntuforums.org), searching in vain for a concise explanation on the distinction between a "virtual console" and a regular old "X-windows terminal" — as an old VMS hacker, I'd had experience with such things — I found exactly the explanation I needed, including Ctrl/Alt/F-key controls, in this chapter. The author manages to underline the relevance of this even to the novice Ubuntu user as it applies to "What do I do if things go wrong?", without getting mired in unneeded exotica.

This chapter continues with the necessary skills in software installation and management, including Synaptic and APT, packages and repositories, doing a good job of giving the novice his or her bearings to get started. It concludes with a decent orientation on config files and the gconf-editor, making and keeping backups, and what to do if it does all go wrong.

"The Tips," the third chapter, constitutes 315 separate items, covering over 300 pages, the big majority of the book. Each tip is clearly titled as to its purpose, and has a small check-box in the margin beside the title so that the reader has a place to mark the tip as to personal relevance and priority.

I suppose that the best way to give you a sense of the value of these tips is to provide a summary of my own "usage statistics", derived from my own check-box marks. When I first surveyed the book to get my own bearings, I used a yellow highlighter pen to color in the check-box for tips that caught my eye and that I especially wanted to get back to... Later, as I read through the entire "Tips" chapter, I made a check in the box for each tip I intended to return to for installation or implementation on my own Ubuntu box (a STUDIO system from eRacks Open Source Systems, running Ubuntu Studio 8.04, Hardy Heron), and where appropriate, when I actually did install or implement the tip, I made an installation note as to time and details. A good many of the tips are for information or how-to skill only, with nothing to install or implement other than enhancing the reader's own understanding.

Of the 315 tips, I counted 108 (34%) that I marked with yellow highlight; 16 (5%) that I checked for implementation, but have not yet done so for one reason or another; and 19 (6%) that I've implemented on my system. Considering that any "tips & tricks" book ends up becoming a grab-bag of items with a hit-or-miss appeal to any particular person, this is a very good personal return-on-investment. Yet this breakdown is rather arbitrary, as many of the tips are techniques to know and use, rather than configurations to manage or applications to install. In other words, your mileage may vary.

Mr. Thomas's grab-bag is typical in its variety and scope — there's likely something for everyone, both Ubuntu novice and expert, in this book. And, true to style for such volumes, the author notes this about his "big book of tips": "...that you can jump in anywhere." This goes to the heart of my only notable criticism of the book, one of organization. Unlike many "tips" books, where there's usually some attempt to organize the presentation of topical items into a somewhat obvious order, the editorial decision for UKF was to explicitly order the tips randomly — this was no accident, as the author makes explicit in a couple of his remarks.

Indeed, reading through the "Tips" chapter in page-order is no different than embarking on a thorough reading in random order — there simply is no rhyme-or-reason to the presentation of items. This is particularly frustrating because there are numerous instances of tips which are closely related by subject or purpose, and for which the reader would be well served by having them grouped on successive pages for ease of reference and purpose.

That this was an editorial decision is made clear by the fact that the Table of Contents is itself 10 pages long, listing every single tip in the book, and is then followed by a secondary, equally lengthy "Contents by Topic" which attempts to group the tips by general category, e.g., "Application Enhancements", "Command Line Tricks", "General Productivity Tips", etc. Furthermore, the editorial effort was made to cross-reference related tips in the text, e.g., under Tip 39, we find "...see Tip 173, on page 204, and Tip 228, on page 260," and so on. For all this cross-referencing and contents by topic effort, wouldn't it have been more effective to simply organize the tips in a semblance of relationship, commonality and order? After all, having done a "Contents by Topic", why not just go ahead and organize the book accordingly?

For some readers, the random shuffling of tips may not matter much, as so much of the information will be newly encountered and of subjectively individual value. And value there is aplenty in this book! I'll close by noting four items which were of particular interest and value to me, things for which I'd been previously searching for without luck, or which I didn't even know existed in the open source world of resources:

First, on the ubiquitous implementation of yet another Trashcan for file deletion in a File Manager (the Gnome Nautilus app, which is prevalently used on Ubuntu): GUI designers just can't get over the fact that "mere mortals" might actually delete files and not really mean it... hence, the Trashcan mechanism to protect them from their own silly actions.

This is actually a two-edged sword, and I'd been caught in the quandary of having intended to really delete some application files, which happen to have been root-owned, only to have them get snagged in my file system's Trashcan. The real quandary commenced when, using sudo, I tried to figure out how to delete them from the command line — but where in the heck is "the Trashcan"? I could see the files in Nautilus (where I couldn't conveniently use sudo-power to delete them), but following my own hunches as to where-in-the-file-system the Trashcan was actually stored turned up empty-handed.

UKF to the rescue — see Tips 39, 228 and 309 (see, I told you it was random order...) for everything you'd need to know about handling the Trashcan from the command line.

Secondly, I'd become quite fond of enhanced cut-&-paste (multiple) clipboard capabilities under Windows. Again, UKF to the rescue: Tip 306 let me know of an open source (KDE) clipboard enhancement known as Klipper (it's in the Ubuntu Repositories), which scratches this itch most satisfactorily.

Third, although Ubuntu provides basic, rudimentary tools (Gnome and KDE) for capturing screen shots, until I got to Tip 313, I didn't know that the GIMP could be used to augment and sophisticate screen shot capturing! And, of course, you can refine, edit and save your shots in any GIMP-available format directly. A great enhancement, if only to my working GIMP knowledge!

Lastly, like most folks, I've got a dark side, secrets which must be kept — things like account numbers, passwords, and other personal arcana which cannot, or should not, be kept in unencrypted form. Again, under Windows, I'd found an encryption technology known as TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org) which I'd employed (and paid for) on that platform for a couple of years prior — and with my transition to Linux, I had mistakenly assumed that I had to abandon TrueCrypt as a Windows-only app.

Imagine my surprise and delight when I encountered Tip 145, which informed me that TrueCrypt includes an open source licensed release for Linux, including exactly where to go to install it and how best to use it! Bravo, and thank you, Mr. Thomas, for helping me resurrect an old and trusted friend!

In summary, it should be apparent that, in spite of my grumblings about the random tip presentation, I think that Keir Thomas's Ubuntu Kung Fu is a wonderful book — address the organization issues in a second edition, and I think it'd become an exemplar of its type. I recommend it highly to anyone who has become, or is becoming, an Ubuntu Linux user and enthusiast. It usefully helps bridge the gap between the Microsoft Windows experience and the not-so-different world of the Linux desktop. It provides ample practical help and knowledge to advance your productive use of Ubuntu Linux. This book takes a pride-of-place position right beside my copy of Ubuntu Hacks, where I can refer to it whenever I've a hankering to implement "that new thing" I remember having read about..."
Toys

Submission + - Interesting uses for a USB LED screen? 1

Submitted by Hogwash McFly
Hogwash McFly writes: My boss gave me one of those USB-powered red LED scrolling displays as a Christmas gift, and while cycling the usual 'I read your emails' and 'ID10T Error' messages will be entertaining for a day or two, I was wondering if it could be put to more constructive uses. The configuration file is plaintext and supports different scroll speeds, flashing, bitmaps and wav sounds. The font is defined as 5x5 pixels per character, also stored in plaintext as 5 hex values, one for each vertical line of pixels. A dynamically generated message could prove useful in my day to day work on the helpdesk, but are there any interesting uses beyond network notifications and news feeds?
Portables

Submission + - Linux Compatability With VR Goggles

Submitted by
WorldWarCheese
WorldWarCheese writes: "There are more times than not I wished I had a little more mobility or comfort with my computer. Laptops work for most things, but anyone interested can see right onto my screen and they don't quite have that "cool" factor that VR Goggles/Headsets do. The problem is whenever I start looking at my options (like: http://www.i-glassesstore.com/iglassespc-3d.html) none of them say they are compatible with Linux (Ubuntu in particular). Is there a set out there that is, or if not can I do anything to make them compatible?"

Audio CAPTCHAs Cracked; ReCAPTCHA Remains Strong 157

Posted by CmdrTaco from the captcha-captcha-chameleon dept.
Falkkin writes "Ars Technica reports that audio CAPTCHAs consisting of only distorted digits or letters can be easy to crack using machine learning techniques. This includes most of the audio CAPTCHAs currently in use on the Web. The reCAPTCHA team has discussed their new audio CAPTCHA, which is resistant to this attack."

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