Friday, September 10, 1999

ICQ Identity Theft -- 12:49 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Redwood points to this News.Com article that a Trojan Horse under the guise of a JPEG file is being transmitted via email. This Trojan Horse steals ICQ numbers and passwords, allowing others to use them. Apparently the number of ICQ users has grown so large that people are resorting to stealing others numbers rather than put up with a mega-long ICQ ID number.

Personally, I don't see what the big deal is. It is beyond sad if a low ICQ number becomes a status symbol. If your number is in the lower (six digit or less) range, you may want to watch out for this. It would be advisable to change your ICQ password and remove your email address from your details.

I'm not sure how a Trojan Horse can be added to a JPEG file, but if this report is real (which it seems to be) there must be a way.

The Master comments: It's the same old story. DON'T TRUST EMAIL ATTACHMENTS! It's SO easy to fool email apps into opening exe's that are named with differing extensions. In email, you can mark a file as executable and give it any extension, even .txt, and Windows will open it as an .exe. I NEVER trust my email apps. Save to disk, then use a graphics editor to open the files. Same with any other kind of attachment.

UT Preview -- 10:12 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Gamespot UK has a preview of Unreal Tournament online. The author speaks of it in very glowing terms, but the penultimate (look it up!) paragraph is a little disturbing:

We're not reviewing UT this issue because the current beta still has some serious issues with graphics. Unreal was essentially developed for 3dfx Voodoo cards and despite the array of superb D3D accelerators, Epic have only recently started working on support for those. When UT ships it should support 3Dfx Glide, D3D and OpenGL drivers all in one. It will even have a video selection phase that will attempt to find the best driver for your hardware. Next issue we'll be reviewing the finished code so non-Voodoo owners would be wise to watch for that.

This has been my greatest fear about UT. Unreal is an absolute dog in D3D and OpenGL, even on a fast system. I know the review was done on beta code and a lot of things can change, but if there still are "serious issues" this late in the development cycle, it certainly doesn't bode well. I'm trying to remain as open-minded as I can be on this. I'll reserve judgment for when the demo comes out. Thanks Blue for the heads-up.

Thursday, September 9, 1999

Annihilator Preview -- 9:32 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The lads and lasses at 3D Hardware.net have posted a preview of Creative Lab's GeForce 256-based card, the Annihilator. They do a pretty good job and weighing the pros and cons of the card. It should be out at the end of this month or the beginning of next for just under US$300.

Happy Birthday Star Trek -- 7:57 pm CST, Update by The Master

Today in 1966 at 8:30 pm The USS Enterprise NCC-1701 began it's five year mission.

Battledroid Q2 Model -- 12:54 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Check out this cool Battledroid model for Quake 2! Now you can be one of the beige terrorists from The Phantom Menace! The poly count is quite high at 1,100, but it's a very cool model nonetheless. Thanks JediKnight.Net.

Hasbro buys Wizards of the Coast -- 12:22 pm CST, Update by The Master

Oh, yuck. Hasbro made an announcement regarding their purchase of WOTC. This sucks. FASA is being bought out, and now WOTC (parent company of TSR) is being bought out. Soon nobody is going to be able to get a decent RPG with all these megacompanies buying up the REALLY cool RPG games and turning them into yuckfactor general public trash.

Okay, maybe that's a bit strong. But I'm not holding my breath. When these small, creative companies are bought out by megacorps, usually the products they make suffer from the PC syndrome and general lack of creativity embodied by megacorps. Man, I'm bummed.

GreenMarine on UT -- 10:30 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart updated his .plan with news of how QuakeWorld players have been choosing UT over Q2 and Q3. I can see why QW players would prefer anything to Q2, but the issue with Q3 confuses me (IMO, Q3 plays a lot like a jazzed-up QW). Maybe once they try to run UT on their home systems instead of on top-of-the-line machines at a conference their tune will change. Or maybe I'll run the UT demo and be blown away too. We shall see!

Y2K Test -- 10:24 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Today is supposed to be the last big Y2K-related test before "the real thing" at midnight, January 1. Programmers used to use strings of 9s as a way to indicate the end of a file. Today, being 9/9/99, could cause some of those applications to puke. So far, so good methinks.

Past Two Days' News

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