Portal Re-Created In Minecraft
Phil Nelson Not just a Portal gun, but a whole game mode. The question now is when will someone create Minecraft inside of Dwarf Fortress, or vise-versa?
Congress To Create Internet Blacklist THIS WEEK
Just the other day, President Obama urged other countries to stop censoring the Internet. But now the United States Congress is trying to censor the Internet here at home. A new bill being debated this week would have the Attorney General create an Internet blacklist of sites that US Internet providers would be required to block.
This is the kind of heavy-handed censorship you’d expect from a dictatorship, where one man can decide what web sites you’re not allowed to visit. But the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to pass the bill this week — and Senators say they haven’t heard much in the way of objections! That’s why we need you to sign our urgent petition to Congress demanding they oppose the Internet blacklist.
Head to the site, sign the petition, spread the message. This is Very Bad.
U.S. Wants to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet
This is the worst kind of Big Brother bullshit:
Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.
Essentially they want a “backdoor” into every online service in the world. It’s not complicated, folks: If there’s a door, anyone who really wants to will get through it. Criminals and the government and wherever the twain shall meet.
How To Play Civilization 5 On Your Mac With WineBottler
Hello, gentle reader. Since the publishing of this post, Aspyr has ported Civilization 5 to Mac OS X. That means you can just Buy Sid Meier’s Civilization V for Mac OSX on Amazon
The following how to was written for Intel Macs running Mac OS 10.6. It will probably not work if either of those two prerequisites are not met. The test machine is a 2.4ghz Macbook Pro with a GeForce 8600M GT and 4gb of RAM. Your mileage, as always, may vary.
The advances in virtualization software in the past 5 years have made it possible to enjoy PC-only games on your Mac legally, even new releases, without needing to install Windows. Leading the Windows virtualization push is a project called Wine. Wine is an open source project, and as is so often the case it suffers for lack of a user interface, which can make it a non-starter for those who prefer not to use the command line. But from the wasteland there comes a developer named Mike Kronenberg, who has created a Mac OS X native application called WineBottler.
WineBottler handles the deeply unpleasant process of creating a Windows virtualization space for applications (called a Bottle. Get it?) on your Mac with minimal fuss for the user. Using WineBottler I was able to install Steam, purchase Civilization 5, install the game and play it in about the same amount of time it would’ve taken on a native Windows computer. Here’s how.
Step 1: Hit The Bottle
Installing WineBottler is as simple as installing any other Mac OS X application. Go to the WineBottler website, and download the Disk Image. Once it’s downloaded, mount the disk image and drag WineBottler to your Applications folder. Once WineBottler has been copied to your Applications folder, double-click the icon to launch it. It’ll look something like this:
Your window won’t have the extra entries in the right pane that mine does, which are Bottles I’ve made in the past. Don’t panic. To create your “Bottle” for Civilization 5, click the Create Custom Prefixes item in the sidebar on the left. This screen is a little less friendly, but don’t worry, we’ll be out of it soon. For now hide or minimize the WineBottler window, as there’s something we have to do first.
Step 2: Steam
Steam is the distribution platform that Civilization 5 uses. If you want to play Civilization 5 legally, the only way to do it is through Steam. Lucky for us, Steam is free. Go to Steam’s download page, and click the link that reads “also available for Windows” to download the installer. Once it’s downloaded, open up your WineBottler window then click and drag the SteamInstall.msi file onto text field labeled Install File. You don’t have to change anything else on this screen, so click the Install button in the bottom right.
A Save As box will drop down from the WineBottler window. Type in Steam PC for the name, for the Where field select your Applications folder then click Save. WineBottler will start installing Steam. Soon you’ll see the Steam installation window, and if you’ve ever used a PC before then you’ll know what to do. If not, it is simple: Just keep clicking Next in the bottom right of the screen, and eventually click Finish. The WineBottler window and progress bar will stay on screen while Steam installs and runs for the first time, so don’t freak out if it won’t leave.
Once Steam updates (it does so automatically on it’s first launch), go ahead and close the Steam login window. This will let WineBottler know that Steam installed correctly and we don’t need to see WineBottler’s window anymore. WineBottler will prompt you as to which Executable you’d like to run when your launch your Steam PC application. From the menu select steam.exe and click OK.
Step 3: Try The Demo and Buy Civ 5
Now that we’re all done with WineBottler, just go to your Applications folder and double-click the icon labeled Steam PC. You can log in to Steam or create a Steam account form there, and buy Civ 5 or download the Demo just like any other user. Once the game is downloaded it will take awhile to install, primarily the portion where the installer is fetching DirectX. This can take up to 10 minutes, and you might worry that your app has frozen. It hasn’t.
When it comes time to launch Civ 5, select the DirectX 9 option. When the game launches the window will be complete white for a minute or two due to some weirdness with the introduction video. This is totally normal, so don’t panic. After about one minute of the white screen you’ll see the game’s welcome screen and be well on your way to getting your ass handed to you by Montezuma.
Evercookie
evercookie is a javascript API available that produces
extremely persistent cookies in a browser. Its goal
is to identify a client even after they’ve removed standard
cookies, Flash cookies (Local Shared Objects or LSOs), and
others.evercookie accomplishes this by storing the cookie data in
several types of storage mechanisms that are available on
the local browser. Additionally, if evercookie has found the
user has removed any of the types of cookies in question, it
recreates them using each mechanism available.
Ars Technica did an an interview with the creator. All via Andy Baio.
Lukas Mathis Interviews Chris Clark
I don’t link to many interviews on ExFu but when Lukas is interested enough in someone’s work to talk to them I listen, and you should too.
Developer of Minecraft on How Piracy Works
A whole lot of truth packed into a short post:
I won’t bother analyzing why people copy games and other digital media, as that’s really a moot point. We’ve got an amazingly effective way of distributing culture that is extremely beneficial for humanity, but it clashes with our current economical models. Piracy will win in the long run. It has to. The alternative is too scary.
Acorn 2.5
Every update to Acorn, dubbed “The Image Editor for Humans” , has me spending less time in Photoshop.
Try Diaspora
If you were the kind of person who might like to see how Diaspora is coming along, and why wouldn’t you, then you can do so at my Diaspora-powered site, Radicle.me. Go nuts. Bug reports should go to Diaspora’s github account.
Why Radicle? From Wikipedia:
In botany, the radicle is the first part of a seedling (a growing plant embryo) to emerge from the seed during the process of germination.
Fighting The Wrong Fight
Excellent piece by Elia Freedman:
We have been distracted by ridiculous arguments and fabricated “wars” for too long. We have been distracted by thinking that Google is Microsoft and Apple is Apple in a doomed fight already fought 20 years ago.
But that is not the fight we should be caring about at all. The fight we should be talking about, but aren’t, is the fight between mobile device makers and the carriers. This is the only real fight that matters.
Burnbit
Creates a torrent out of any web-accessible file, posts it for the world to see. As a prerequisite for this being 2010, they have an embed code as well, which (sadly) creates it’s own HTML attributes. I think Burnbit_file is going to be a hard sell to the HTML5 Working Group, guys.
Digital Comic Museum
A growing collection of Golden Age comics who has come into the public domain. The covers alone are worth it.
via Andy Baio
U.S. Ninth-Circuit Court Rules Against Right of First Sale
If the clickwrap EULA forbids sale, then you can’t sell it, no matter how much you don’t want it anymore.
In other words, goodbye to used game sales. How long before they classify films and TV show files as Software? What do I do with the Xbox games I don’t want anymore? Throw them out? Give them away? Somehow I think they’d have a problem with that, too. Some Blu-Ray releases of films contain games. Are they covered?
The ruling makes note of a “license” .vs. a “sale”. Are we allowed to own anything anymore? The software in question, AutoCAD, costs $4000. That makes a $4000 invisible license to use software that you throw away if you don’t want it anymore. Hell of a way to make money.
Compromising Twitter’s OAuth security system
Twitter officially disabled Basic authentication this week, the final step in the company’s transition to mandatory OAuth authentication. Sadly, Twitter’s extremely poor implementation of the OAuth standard offers a textbook example of how to do it wrong. This article will explore some of the problems with Twitter’s OAuth implementation and some potential pitfalls inherent to the standard. I will also show you how I managed to compromise the secret OAuth key in Twitter’s very own official client application for Android.
via Schneier
Amateur Hour
Jesper of Waffle Software on the new, published, App Store rules:
[…] I don’t think it’s unfair for Apple to have a list of the applications produced for its platform that it believes is decent and upstanding, and which it is proud to be associated with. I just don’t think that that list should be the same as the list of all applications that can run, ever. I honestly think that even my detractors will concede this as a fair point.
I’m constantly surprised, myself, how many people still don’t see this as a problem. Is Apple totally within their rights to arbitrarily block apps? Yep. Nobody I know is arguing they shouldn’t be allowed to. However, it is troubling to me that they would want to. A dick move is a dick move is a dick move.
I Want To Be Your Horrible Boyfriend
John Campbell of the webcomic Pictures for Sad Children has a tumblr now.