Back in October 2009, Blizzard sued Alyson Reeves over the private World of Warcraft servers she offered through her company, Scapegaming. On August 10, Blizzard won a default judgement against Reeves/Scapegaming and was awarded $88.5 million.
Now World of Warcraft private servers are fairly common, and some are fairly interesting variants that do things Blizzard would never be able to do and remain commercially viable (for example, running servers that replicate what the game was like before the Burning Crusade/Wrath of the Lich King expansions). For the most part, Blizzard doesn’t appear to have gone after private servers in general, presumably because they serve an extremely small niche market.
But unlike most private servers, Reeves/Scapegaming was run as a for-profit business that made (apparently a lot of) money off of microtransactions for its private servers. That’s just asking to be sued into oblivion.
Hopefully this won’t lead to a wholesale backlash by Blizzard going after every private server out there, but given Activision’s pressure to monetize, monetize, monetize across all of their products, it seems more likely that the days of openly running WoW private servers are numbered.
Update: here is a 1.3mb PDF version of the original complaint filed by Blizzard against Reeves. In it, Blizzard alleges that Reeves/Scapegaming collected approximately $1.5 million in donations from players accessing its private servers
The Monkeysphere Project is a project to use OpenPGP to securely identify servers in web browsers and elsewhere that routes around the growing potential problems with certificate authentication. As The Monkeysphere website sums it up,
Everyone who has used a web browser has been interrupted by the “Are you sure you want to connect?” warning message, which occurs when the browser finds the site’s certificate unacceptable. But web browser vendors (e.g. Microsoft or Mozilla) should not be responsible for determining whom (or what) the user trusts to certify the authenticity of a website, or the identity of another user online. The user herself should have the final say, and designation of trust should be done on the basis of human interaction. The Monkeysphere project aims to make that possibility a reality.
. . .
When you direct the browser to an https site using the Monkeysphere plugin and validation agent, if the certificate presented by the site does not pass the default browser validation (using standard, hierarchical X.509), the certificate and site URL are passed to the validation agent. The agent then checks the public keyservers for keys with UIDs matching the site url (e.g. https://zimmermann.mayfirst.org). If there is a trust path to that key, according to your own OpenPGP trust designations, the certficate is considered valid, and a browser ‘security exception’ is put in place to allow connections to the site.
Posted in Uncategorized
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Tagged PGP, Security
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This t-shirt of the Sesame Street’s Count von Count adding up his victims was created by TeeFury.com which, sadly, only sells its shirts for a single day so it is no longer available.
Its publication date keeps getting pushed back, but when it does come out The Star Wars Craft Book looks to be awesome. Currently slated for March 2011.
Posted in Uncategorized
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Tagged Star Wars
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George Lucas has long said that Akira Kurosawa “The Hidden Fortress” was one of his influences when filming Star Wars. Pseudonymous action figure customizer Sillof reimagines what Star Wars might have looked like if Kurosawa himself had directed the film, as in this amazing looking Daku Joute / Darth Vader figure. Hit the link to see similarly reimagined Han Solo, Princess Lea and other characters.
Apparently, there is a widespread belief in South Korea that sleeping all night with a fan blowing directly on a person can be fatal. The Wikipedia entry and Snopes.com entry about fan death are fascinating looks at how easily urban legends gain traction even in contemporary, technological societies.
No other culture appears to regard its electric fans with trepidation, yet the belief that these air circulating devices are capable of killing in their sleep even adult men is rampant among Koreans. It doesn’t help that the Korean media continues to report “fan deaths,” citing this form of demise every time an otherwise healthy-appearing individual is found dead in his bed.
As to how seriously the threat of fan death is taken in South Korea, fan users there are cautioned to always leave a window open to counter the otherwise deadly effects. Korea’s largest fan manufacturing concern, Shinil Industrial Co., issues warnings with its products telling customers to keep fans pointed away from people at night. “This product may cause suffocation or hypothermia,” the warning reads. The Korea Consumer Protection Board advises that “Doors should be left open when sleeping with the electric fan or air conditioner turned on. If bodies are exposed to electric fans or air conditioners for too long, it causes bodies to lose water and hypothermia.” Many fans sold in South Korea are equipped with timers so people don’t fall asleep with the units running all night. Fan death fear is so prevalent that some Korean drivers have made it their practice to open car windows a crack before operating their vehicles’ air conditioners.
This, of course, would never gain traction in the United States where we prefer to believe myths like “water boarding is not torture” or “Lindsey Lohan’s latest escapades are news.”
For the record, I regularly sleep with a fan pointed at me in a closed room and have yet to suffer ill effects for it. On the other hand, I think my cat is trying to suffocate me.
Grapevine Fires makes these excellent Cthulhu hats. They come in several sizes and go for $30.
For people who want to take their Star Trek cosplaying to the next level, there’s Shirtless Kirk Cologne for Men. Personally I’m holding out for Eau du Tribble.
ShushThatNoise Plugin for WordPress
ShushThatNoise is a WordPress plugin that lets you hide obnoxious comments without deleting them,