Adobe just launched Photoshop Express, an online version of its image editing software.
I have played with it a bit, and it does have some value. Obviously do not expect to have an alternative to the real Photoshop suite online, but for minor editing tasks it gets the job done. You can crop, rotate, add some visual effects, change colors and the like.
It is good to see that even mainstream companies are starting to explore online solutions.
Mozilla bug spreading
Mozilla has escalated the threat ranking for the vulnerability reported last week in the traversal of the directory structure for add-ons. The bug would allow for stealing of session information.
The bug affects more than 600 of the add-ons for the Firefox browser and remedies against the bug are to use the NoScript extension to prevent running of any exploit or using extensions that are packaged in .jar files.
A fix for the bug was set to be released on Feb 5th.
IM based attacks up 78% YoY
Instant messenger based attacks have seen a phenomenal rise this past year. The attack methodology has also seen several new-comers – multi-staged and multi-vector attacks that use e-mail in conjunction with IMs. They are also targeting P2P networks on a large scale.
An excerpt from the article on TechWorld:
IM attacks are a relatively recent phenomenon, but have grown drastically in number in recent months. In July Akonix said the number of threats over the past 12 months was up 78 percent on the previous year.
New IM worms identified in January include MSNChristmas, MSNVB, Perin and Raiodin, Akonix said.
Keeping online messengers fully updated and keeping a keen eye on the messages and the links received could go a long way in preventing infection from such attacks.
Man in the middle attacks possible on Gmail and other Google hosted services
Rob Graham, a security researcher brought to light a vulnerability in the SSL implementation on Google hosted services that could allow a hacker to make the services not encrypt the session ids that are used to authenticate users online. The implementation allows for man in the middle attacks.
The attack is a threat at WiFi hot spots or when connecting over other unsecured access points.
The gaming niche is characterized by its haves and have-nots. You’ve seen Kotaku, IGN, GameSpot, Joystiq, 1UP and the others, but what about the great, lesser-known gaming sites?
This post introduces 18 great gaming sites you might not have seen before. Whether you’re looking for freebies, music, laughs or oddities, there’s something here for occasional and hardcore gamers alike.
1. Overclocked Remix is a community hub of users who painstakingly remix and arrange video game music. There are thousands of tracks available for download. If you like the soundtrack to your favorite game, you can bet it has been remixed and reworked here.
2. The Freeware Indie Games Database offers just under 1,000 play-tested freeware titles from independent game developers. The games here are innovative and unique. Some of them are bound to be re-developed as Wii titles.
3. POKE is a light-weight utility that allows you to cheat in almost any single player game, whether it’s already published or to be published in the future.
4. The Daedalus Project gets into the minds of MMORPG players. The website’s author has surveyed over 35,000 gamers and provides a detailed break-down of his findings in areas such as the player life-cycle, making friends and status reversal. It’s fascinating stuff.
5. Gaming Magazines of the Pre-Internet Era is a treasure trove for retro gamers. It links out to .PDF databases of old and out of print gaming magazines.
6. The Grand List of Role Playing Game Clichés is a list of 100+ painful clichés any RPG fan would have encountered before. My favorite? The No! My beloved peasant village cliché: “The hero’s home town, city, slum, or planet will usually be annihilated in a spectacular fashion before the end of the game, and often before the end of the opening scene.”
7. GameCakes is the website for people who love cake and video games. These game-themed cakes run the gamut, from the bizarre to the majestic. The scrumptious photos will have you baking your own cupcakes in no time.
8. CrazyPC is the hardcore gamer’s place for computer accessories. All the neon, case mods, plexiglass, tubes and coolant fluid you can poke a memory stick at.
9. VGMusic is host to 24,000+ midi versions of video game tracks from all your retro favorites: Megaman, Mario, Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog, et al.
10. Build Your Own Gaming Computers is a website dedicated to helping you… well, you can probably guess. Gaming rigs sell for thousands of dollars and learning to build your own can save you lots of cash. This website provides advice on the entire process, from choosing parts to installation.
11. Abandonia offers thousands of abandonware DOS downloads. Abandonware essentially means games which aren’t sold anymore, prompting their release into the public domain. They’re the games you might have owned and loved as a child or teenager. Chances are you’ll find some old favorites here.
12. Jay is Games sources out the best casual games and brings them directly to you. The blog’s authors sure know their stuff and their opinions are worth listening to. Subscribe to their feed for a daily stream of gorgeous, idle distractions.
13. Old Grandma Hardcore is the blog of a foul-mouthed, lovable gamer grandma (with the pictures to prove it!). No, we’re not talking Brain Training and The Sims — we’re talking games like Bioshock and The Darkness. This grandma really is hardcore!
14. Insert Credit is a multi-author Japanese games and culture blog specializing in breaking news from the land of the rising sun.
15. Replacementdocs is an online archive of .PDF game manuals for thousands of popular games. If you’ve experienced the frustration of losing the manual to your favorite title, replacementdocs should have a solution for you.
16. Wonderland is an odds-and-ends gaming blog mainly known for its cool gamecrafts. From Darth Vader backpacks to Quake coasters, this blog is proof that gamers are an arty bunch.
17. The Speed Demos Archive is host to hundreds of videos documenting the efforts of those dedicated individuals who’ve conquered games in the shortest time possible. Watch epic games like Half Life 2 and Icewind Dale beaten before your lunch-break is over.
18. The System Requirements Lab analyzes your computer, benchmarking it against the minimum requirements of a specific product. Ever wondered if your computer can handle that gorgeous new release? Now you’ll know.
Update: Here are some more great websites that you might not have seen before, suggested from our readers:
Download Squad is reporting on a recent NPD study that shows 74% of Americans haven’t heard of Google Docs or any other online office suite. Out of 600 PC users, NPD found that around 94% had never tried any web-based office suite, although around 20% have at least heard of them. You can catch the full breakdown of results on the chart below.
Chart from Microsoft Watch
Download Squad sourced Microsoft Watch for this story, who read a bit more into these results and proclaimed that the end was near for the Web 2.0 office suite. But is that really the case?
I don’t think we should be surprised that most U.S. PC users haven’t heard of these web applications. After all, there is practically no publicity for this stuff outside of technology websites and magazines. And while they’re occasionally mentioned in the tech sections of mainstream media outlets, I would wager that those sections still don’t get much attention from non-techy readers.
My point is this: Technology enthusiasts, just like any niche, converse on a completely different level from general users. We should expect that topics we live with every day are completely alien to normal PC users. In these cases we need to put ourselves in the shoes of these users to understand the best way to communicate newfound concepts to them.
Microsoft Watch is completely insensitive of these considerations, which explains why they believe online productivity suites are already dead when they have barely had a chance to prove themselves. These online suites may not become household names tomorrow but it will happen eventually, as proven by their examples of other successful online applications like tax preparation software.
The biggest barrier to their success is of course Microsoft, whose Office suite is practically synonymous with productivity software on PCs. Microsoft has also trained the majority of PC users to buy their software in stores, so someone is going to have to change their mindset. My money would be on Google. At some point they’ll have to drop that “Beta” tag on Google Docs and start a real ad campaign.
They can’t just make the public aware of these online office suites, however. They also have to prove that their data will be safe, and that their online software contains all of the features they normally use in Microsoft Office. It won’t be easy, but Google is one of the few companies with enough brand clout and money to make it happen.
Until then, these suites, just like pretty much every new Web 2.0 trend, will remain in the domain of technology enthusiasts.
Text-to-Speech synthesis has a variety of uses. Writers might use it to correct mistakes in their articles, foreigners might want to know the pronunciation of a specific word, and other people will use it just for fun.
Regardless of what you are trying to accomplish, however, you won’t need to install a software on your computer. There are several web tools that will do this for you, and the most straight forward one is vozMe.
You just need to paste or type the text in the form and click “Create MP3.” The tool will convert it into speech, and you will be able to hear online and to save the MP3 file. The quality is obvioiusly not that great, but it gets the job done.
You can also check more Text-to-Speech alternatives on the article “6 Online Tools for Text to Speech.”
People stabbing each other (in real life) for magic swords (inside an online game); men kidnapping a top player to steal his game password; a girl that dies after playing her favorite multiplayer game for several days in a row….
It is a crazy (virtual) world, what can I say! Below you will find the 6 most bizarre online gaming incidents in history:
1. Lengend of Mir 3 player stabs fellow gamer to death
Back in 2005 Qiu Chengwei, a 41 years-old Shanghai resident, stabbed fellow gamer Zhu Caoyuan repeatedly in the chest, causing his death. The reason? Zhu sold the “dragon sabre,” a weapon that they won jointly in the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game).
According to the China Daily, Qiu Chengwei went to the police first, but after being told that virtual items were not protected by law, he decided to make “justice” with his own hands.
Qiu Chengwei received a life sentence.
2. Brazilian gang kidnap top GunBound player
Earlier this year four Brazilian men, with ages between 19 and 28, developed a plan to steal the game password of a GunBound (an online multiplayer game) top player. The objective was to sell the game account on the Internet for $8,000.
The first step was to get the girlfriend of Igor, head of the gang, in contact with the GunBound player. They accomplished that via Google’s social networking site Orkut, which is extremely popular in Brazil. After exchanging messages for a couple of days, the girl asked the boy to meet her at a shopping center.
He went, but instead of the girl he found Igor waiting for him, armed with a gun. They took the GunBound player away, and here comes the bizarre part. After five hours of interrogation at gun point, the boy was still determined to not reveal his password, so the four men released him.
The boy went to the police, who arrested all the gang members.
3. Girl dies playing World of Warcraft
Back in 2005 a Chinese girl nicknamed “Snowly” died of exhaustion after playing the MMORPG World of Warcraft for three days in a row. She was preparing to kill the Black Dragon Prince, other players explained, hence why she had no time to rest between the game sessions.
Interestingly enough, her fellow game players held a virtual funeral inside the game, as reported by Yahoo News China.
4. Teenager arrested for stealing virtual furniture
A couple of weeks ago a seventeen year-old boy stole almost $6000 worth of virtual furniture in the online game Habbo Hotel. Habbo is a virtual world where people can create houses and other scenarios, but the items need to be purchased with real money.
The company alleged that the boy, with the help of some friends, created a website to lure other players into revealing their passwords. After that it was just a matter of logging into the game and transferring the furniture into his own room.
It would be a perfect crime, except that the police (the real one) was called and the boy was arrested.
5. Belgian Police decides to patrol Second Life after virtual rape case
The details about the case were not revealed, but two Belgian newspapers reported early this year that the Belgian Police would setup an in-game patrol unit to investigate virtual rape incidents.
Absurd as it sounds, the event spurred a myriad of discussions around the web, from sexologists arguing that even virtual rape can be a traumatic experience to online gamers that wondered the technical details that enabled a virtual rape to occur in the first place (in fact it is hard to conceive how someone would not be able to simply turn the computer off…).
6. A plague ravages World of Warcraft
In the middle of 2005 Blizzard introduced a new area to its popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft. The boss of the area was able to cast a spell called Corrupted Blood, which was supposed to infect and cause damage to all the players nearby.
Contrary to what Blizzard planned, however, the players remained infected even when they returned to their towns, contaminating pretty much everyone around them. The plague spread through the game servers and thousands of players died.
Blizzard manage to create quarantine zones within the game, and shortly afterwards it introduced a “cure” for the infection. Despite the remedies the event created a lot of buzz in online forums and community websites.
In one word: bizarre!
