Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Understanding CISPA

SOPA is once again at our door under the name: Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA. Since they failed to gain momentum by saying how piracy and IP is ruining the economy; their going after our fears. Now it's about security. How much of a threat the Internet is to YOU, how an unregulated Internet will hurt YOU. Which is a crock. No more dangerous then it is now. See, what their banking on is that the fear of the masses will think of CISPA as a way to stop the Russians, Chinese, or any other origin of threat.
The truth of the matter is that this is the same song and dance. The MPAA and it's affiliates want to stop Internet piracy. However, this will change none of that. Piracy is done at an IP level. Meaning it circumvents the DNS (domain name system, generally speaking common folks internet). When we go to something like google.com the DNS changes that into the IP address of Google's servers. CISPA wants to break this link if the publisher finds its content on a server's page. This is all fine and dandy except that it doesn't effect a torrent (peer to peer file sharing, generally used to anonymously or directly pirate data). Torrents track on an IP level 99% of the time, and even more so there are so many ways to strip DNS from a tracker anyhow.
So in short all this does is make you and I, the consumer, unable to access the Internet freely. We'll be blocked from our youtubes, facebooks, or whatever else we fancy. Imagine a world where your favorite Internet personality was removed from the Internet because the publisher of the movie the person was reviewing didn't like the review. So they censored it. Sounds pretty crappy to me.

Friday, December 23, 2011

Earlier this week, Star Wars: The Old Republic hit store shelves. Picture World of Warcraft set in the Star Wars universe. Obviously, the idea has mass appeal to today’s class of social gamers and Star Wars fans alike. The games announcement videos and developer diaries released along its road to launch have undoubtedly given fans something to be excited about.

Sadly, the launch turned out to be one of the most unsuccessful in MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) history. While some users are mildly enjoying a bug ridden gameplay experience, a sizable group cannot even create their characters or access the game. The game either fails install or the game launcher reports update errors. BioWares initial response was along the lines of, “it’s your computer’s fault.” But as more and more users report these problems, they seem to be re-evaluating their stance. Still, to many customers displeasure, there has been no official word on when this issue will be resolved.

BioWare’s forums are flooded with threads created by upset costumers who are all threatening to return the game and get a refund. BioWare’s replies are generic at best and will certainly trigger a rage-filled backlash from the community. May the force be with you BioWare, you’re going to need it... 

- Corey - www.myronin.com

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

CCleaner

If you haven't done this already make sure to keep your Windows PC running fresh with http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner . Download this app and disable any startup programs such as iTunes and Quickbooks updater. These suck up your memory and have no business running when you aren't using them

Monday, October 31, 2011

Battlefield 3 Review

***This review is for the Playstation 3 version of the game***

I going on record now saying that this was my first DICE game.

I am a huge shooter fan. When Battlefield 3 was announced with a trailer showing off the new engine I was impressed, mildly. For one thing its all well and good to tout new tech. In fact I will state that the COD engine is looking mighty dated these days.

After traveling into GameStop to pick up my copy, drove home and unwrapped its soft film. Popped that sucker in. Boom! Electronic techno war music. Wheeew i'm pumped, lets go!

The single player of this game seemed mediocre at best. Definitely an almost exact clone of Black Ops in every aspect. I found myself raising an eyebrow almost every cutscene regarding why this was indeed so parallel to Treyarch's game.

DICE did take some interesting turns in B3. The short instance where you were riding saddle in an F-18 was pretty cool. I got a sense of vertigo and other stresses while playing that I have not had in a long time.  However it quickly imitated Modern Warfare within 5 minutes.. a shame.

Multiplayer was indeed a lot different than most shooters. I had a feeling of brotherhood among other players. Giving and receiving commands. Bunkering down and holding a destination from oncoming fire. While only level 5 or so I know I am missing out a lot on features such as vehicles etc.

I look forward to giving more play to the game however Uncharted 3 and COD8 are right around the corner. :(

-Jony
www.myronin.com

Thursday, October 27, 2011

dovecot ssl nightmare...

Earlier this evening I was playing around with the idea of a free SSL. Everything was working fine as I stumbled through the cert authority's site. Since it was open source it was definitely not intuitive in any aspect. Which is fine; these are the sacrifices you make when trying to go for the cheap.

After generating my cert I installed it into our server. Prior to this I had a image made just incase.

Installed.

Green! Everything checks out. FANTASTIC!

Remove my mail account and re-add it.

Mail begins to not populate from the inbox. All others are fine.

Check webmail.

Inbox is empty.

Drat.

Fair enough-- Ill restore from my backup.

Backup did not grab my inbox, because it was in use by IMAP...

TERROR.


OK, breathe deep. I can get through this.

Following this, I began a little look around. Why were these messages gone? And if so, where did they get moved to? Obviously the server would not just delete them entirely- That would be stupid.

I navigate to my box. I find it and attempt to open it. "Permission denied in use". A little sudo and I am in.
Now here's where it gets interesting.
ls -lah
.DeletedMessages
cd .DeletedMessages/
ls-lah

all of my inbox. Whew!

now for a little copy and back to the current file.

success! All messages back and all is well.

Interesting how much the finder hides from you even when viewing invisible files.

Jony


Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Why old tech makes moving forward TERRIBLE :(

I've had a recent debacle regarding trying to implement some older attachment cards into newer systems. It comes to me as quite curious that as we move forward in technology we almost entirely stop supporting the past.

While in most cases this is find and in actuality; I don't really mind. It comes as quite a frustration when not only do we have to find hardware that supports this older peripheral. But more so downgrading the system all-together to make it work.

Seems kind of counter-productive, no?