Wine based Crossover 9.2 now brings Civilization 5 support to the Mac and Linux. Crossover runs flawlessly with Civilization under Snow Leopard and with some minor flaws under Leopard.
Prices
Crossover Standard (incl. updates for 6mths): 37€
Crossover Professional (incl. updates for 12 mths and incl. Crossover Games) : 64€
Aspyr will release a native Mac version of Civilization 5 before Chrismas. We would not wonder if the Crossover emulated Windows version is more performant than the native Mac version, but let’s see ;-)
German Heise.de and american Precentral.net report today, that HP finished upgrading their smartphone flagship Palm Pre. Interestingly the Palm Pre 2 will be first released to the french market on october 22 on SFR‘s network. Sadly there is no reliable information about when it will hit other markets like the US, Germany or Canada.
The Palm Pre 2 will feature:
1 GHz CPU
5 megapixel camera
3.1″ screen size with 320×480 HVGA display
Glass screen
16 GB memory
Touchstone backcover included
HP webOS 2.0
It is rumored the price will be about 100€ on contract and about 450€ sans contract. HP rebranded Palm’s webOS to HP webOS. The Pre 2 will be shipped with webOS 2.0 preloaded.
Adobe Flash in webOS 2 (video is courtesy of Precentral.net)
Boot time and multitasking in webOS 2 (video is courtesy of Precentral.net)
webOS 2 vs. webOS 1.45 – incl. overclocked (video is courtesy of Precentral.net)
Newspapers are full of speculations and details about this unique piece of software code, that obviously is a work by a government.Stuxnet used 4-zero-day exploits to infect computer networks running with Microsoft Windows. It was compatible to Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.
(..) the Stuxnet worm was programmed to probe the hosts it infected for extremely specific settings. Unless it identified the hardware fingerprint it was looking for in industrial software systems made by Siemens, it remained largely dormant.
Experts say the quality of code is very sophisticated, there are nearly no side effects. It is estimated that the costs of the development of a virus of that quality goes into the millions of dollars. It also shows a very detailed knowledge of the attacked facilities.
The downside is we suspect this is the beginning of large scale cyber attacks. I don’t think that western Nulear Facilities are safe from such attacks. Let’s all hope the best. This virus is simply a nightmare.
A short overview on the articles published show, that almost all of them cite german security specialists Frank Rieger (member of Chaos Computer Club) or Ralph Langner (Founder of Langner.com).
Sony tries to rearm their game console flagship. Most of you using your Playstations will likely have found out: since the end of last week Sony broadcasts a new firmware 3.42. They say it fixes security issues, which not quite wrong. But do we wanna have this issue fixed?
At the moment for online players there doesn’t seem to exist any other possibility but updating, so be aware you’re gonna lose root access to your fav console and it will possibly not come back anytime soon.
For all the others playing once in a while and mostly offline: just don’t update. We really suppose something is being worked on in the background to allow updating and not losing root access, but let’s see. Sony’s fighting with two armies: the army of technicians, and the army of darkness: they got aweful lawyers also out there ;-)
Windows can eventually be used from the iPad. Users of Parallels Desktop 6 can seamlessly logon their Windows virtual appliance from the iPad. The required iPad app “Parallels Mobile” can be downloaded for free from the iTunes App Store (get it here). In the meantime check their vid:
Are you one of those lonesome people who tried to access the contents of a DMG image under Windows? Yes, there are several ways like converting to ISO with programs like Magic-Iso or mounting with Mac-Drive. All these solutions are nice, handy and well… expensive…
Simply using 7-zip is in my opinion the easiest way, as all of us should have 7-Zip installed anyway ;-)
right click the .dmg file
choose: 7-Zip
a submenu opens, in that submenu choose: unpack to <nameofmydmg\>
wait a couple of secs while unpacking and open the subfolder <nameofmydmg\>
you should find a bunch of files: 0.MBR
1.Primary GPT Header
2.Primary GPT Table
3.free
4.hfs
5.free
6.Backup GPT Table
7.Backup GPT Header
The file for further examination is “4.hfs”. It mostly is a lot bigger than all the rest of the files.
now do a right click on "4.hfs" again and
choose 7-Zip
a submenu opens again, now in that submenu choose: unpack to <4\>
et voilà…
you’re done with unpacking… now fire IDA and find the jump ;-)
A coder going under the nick “black_zero” ported the PS3 jailbreak to the Palm Pre. Find his instructions for “PS3 Freedom for Palm Pre” on the PSX-Scene.com.
[Update] In contrast to “PS3 Groove” this version also seems to enable the possibility of backups – means circumventing of copy protections. It is legally not allowed to apply this in most european countries and the U.S.
Our Comment
Sony’s protection has been compromised, no matter what they’re gonna do in the future. It is likely that there will be an update soon to stop the stack overflows in the USB code. But it won’t help them anymore.
The reason is simple: Sony will not be able to make that insecure system secure again. Because of the jailbreak the PS3 now allows accessing all features. That means that any update to come will be decrypted first, analyzed, modified to re-enable debug backdoors and then installed with all the debug features enabled again. Custom modified firmwares are the next logical step.
So although this seems to be good news for the homebrew scene, since there is hope now for a universal media center based on the PS3, the downside is still that some versions of the jailbreak also enable to play illegal backups.And since Sony’s biz model is selling licenses and games they will fight the jailbreak by trying to detect it and to block jailbroken devices from accessing the Playstation Network. And this means: permanent updates. For people playing a lot this will not be an option as they will have to wait again and again for custom firmwares that are likely to not work very long.
According to AllThingsDigital Facebook blocked Apple from using the Facebook API to access user data. Using Facebook’s API is normally free, but not for large scale access and not if it’s getting used a lot. iTunes got a user base of 160million, so that would be quiet a lot.
Kara Swisher writes:
Sources said Apple went ahead with a plan to access the Facebook APIs freely, but Facebook blocked it since it violated its terms of service.
Wired.com published an article about the business strategies of Las Vegas based law firm Righthaven LLC. Righthaven’s strategy to “save” the media world is simple:
buy copyrights of newspaper articles
instead of sending takedown notices under the DMCA,
they rather sue blogs and website, who repost articles without consent of the owner
Righthaven’s first client is the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Between March and July 2010 Righthaven has filed at least 80 lawsuits against bloggers and website owners.
And this is just the beginning, according to Wired.com:
[Steve] Gibson says, he’s just getting started, Righthaven has other media clients that he won’t name undtil the lawsuits start rolling out (..).
