Tech News

Nooooooo….! Damn j00 Valve! Just because your security is so sucky that some script kiddie managed to install a keylogger on your network…Half-Life 2 Delay.

The recent theft of source code for the highly anticipated game Half-Life 2 is adding to the considerable cloud of uncertainty around game publisher Vivendi Universal Games, one of the gaming industry’s big dogs.

Even before the code theft was reported last week, developer Valve and VU Games had announced the game had slipped from a Sept. 30 release date to the holidays. A VU official earlier this week told Reuters that the theft means the game will slip to April 30 — a huge blow in an industry that depends on blockbusters and where time is always of the essence.

FIVE WHOLE MONTHS! Well…at least ATI Radeons will be more affordable then…

VU Games executive Christoph Ramboz told a French newspaper earlier this week that the theft would result in the game’s slipping until April 30 — which remains unconfirmed by other Vivendi sources or Valve.

The delay has not been confirmed by Valve sources yet, VU is the parent company but what they say might not be the latest infomation…One can only hope… Seriously, what has a source code leak got to do with the release date? The intruder made a COPY of the source root, not DELETE the whole thing. The leak lacked graphics, sound, maps and cannot run for frick. Delaying the game now will do NOTHING!!!! Except piss off people, like me, who have been waiting since it was first announced during E3. (and subsequently downloaded every single E3 preview movie…)

In other Wired news: Man copyrights and sells his brain.

The worth of Keats’ brain already may have more value than most, since the artist has gained a measure of notoriety for earlier thought performances, which included an attempt to get the city of Berkeley, California, to pass an unbreakable law, A=A.

That law, which still is being considered, would mandate that all things in Berkeley be equal to themselves.

LOL. :P

And lastly, the latest talk of the town. Eventhing from CNN to Zeropaid has an update about it: Princeton Graduate sued for posting about how to defeat the latest music copyright protection: By pressing the Shift key.

LOS ANGELES — Three days after a Princeton graduate student posted a paper on his website detailing how to defeat the copy-protection software on a new music CD by pressing a single computer key, the maker of the software said on Thursday it would sue him.

In a statement, SunnComm Technologies said it would sue Alex Halderman over the paper, which said SunnComm’s MediaMax CD-3 software could be blocked by holding down the Shift key on a computer keyboard as a CD using the software was inserted into a disc drive.

“SunnComm believes that by making erroneous assumptions in putting together his critical review of the MediaMax CD-3 technology, Halderman came to false conclusions concerning the robustness and efficacy of SunnComm’s MediaMax technology,” it said.

And the latest update from Zeropaid.com: SunnComm won’t sue grad student. (probably because they figured that suing someone for telling others to press the Shift key is a stupid idea)

Without specifying a reason, SunnComm president William Whitmore told CNET News.com on Friday that the company had abandoned its promised litigation. Whitmore said the company was preparing a statement to be released later in the day.

SunnComm’s threats had drawn enormous attention in a short time, with some legal analysts saying a lawsuit would represent an egregious abuse of the DMCA, which broadly prohibits “circumventing” copy-protection technologies. The law does contain narrow exceptions for reverse engineering and academic research, though two proposals in Congress would make the exemptions far broader.

Ahahahaha, the whole thing is just plain stupid. Copyright protection defeated by a built-in Windows function…