Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.

[Spectere]

Maybe there's a security hole that makes a cookie easy to obtain or something. Whatever the case, I'm not using Gmail Mobile now.

Or a security issue with the mobile phone itself.

You're basically inside of a massive NAT'd network when you're connected to data.  That's why changing the root password on jailbroken iPhones or rooted Android phones is essential if you use SSH.  There was already a worm that spread due to people keeping the root password on jailbroken iPhone as the default "alpine".  If you've ever seen the filesystem on an iPhone or iPod Touch, you have access to everything.  Every single thing that's stored on the phone can be read.  SMS messages, e-mails (for all of the security that Exchange-enabled devices typically have, I was able to read all of the cached data, practically in plaintext), my phonebook...literally, everything.

With phones nowadays being based on their own operating system, this is going to get worse before it gets betters.  The services that run on your typical Linux and BSD systems are no strangers to remote exploits, and the proprietary phone software will undoubtedly have their own share of flaws (such as the recent PDF exploit in iOS).  It's important to use the same disciplines for mobile phones that you do for desktop computers and then some, due to the ease of stealing a phone and the fact that you are far more open.

[vladgd]

losing in starcraft

makes me FURIOUS 

[Bobbias]

ahahahaha

What? I could confirm that it was mobile, and that I received a spam email, but I still don't know the details on how they could do that. My "How the hell" post was in reference to the mobile service/actual access.

The email:

http://7wevrzt33sl.nuhmytru.com

After a couple back and forth:

My account access log says:

Mobile     Saudi Arabia (79.172.178.233)     Aug 28 (18 hours ago)

Definitely not good. A quick googling pulled up nothing for that IP, aside from what look like DNS records, and IP block allocation records.

Some investigation by google searching lead me to a page that talked about Google's mobile email service being incredibly unsecure, to the point that hackers can get into certain email accounts with little effort. :S

[Kulli]

Sorry

The way Mr. Alice said it I thought he meant you knew everything about how it worked.

[Alice]

Not "Mr."

And for future reference, my Google search was something like "gmail hijacked from mobile phone saudi arabia" followed by "gmail hijacked from mobile phone -china" when the first one didn't give me any information.

[annon]

* Unfortunately, Truth In Television: suicide pacts.
** It's unfortunately only if they already bred.

Shit like this.

[Spectere]

I am going to attempt to express my feelings for Just Cause 2 in a short paragraph:

The controls are bad and, worst yet, inconsistent (the function of X changes to several contradictory things -- including some things that O is specifically designated for).  The gameplay is awful.  The story is...well, nonexistent (why doesn't the game explain anything?).  The characters are unlikeable (hey, look, there's the "protagonist" who thinks he's some sort of grade A tough guy, there's the drunken Spaniard, and there's the helpful-yet-always-late lady in a chopper).

I wish I could ask for a partial refund of my GameFly subscription because this game is That. Bad.  How does shit like this make it to the market in the first place, let alone get good reviews?  Seriously, Mercenaries 2 is a more fun and solid game with considerably more charm and that game was never even finished.

[vladgd]

spending way too much goddamn time getting this beta to work, then it does, but random textures fucking everywhere and i don't want to play it this way when i can hardly see where im going.

this picture is what i have to deal with.  look playable from that image?  yeah, but some textures block out the whole goddamn screen, or most of it, so you can see how annoying it could be.  ohh, and they are everywhere, even in cutscenes.  only place they are missing is the character creation/selection screens before you log onto the server. 



im not about to admit how much time i have invested in getting this far, and failing at fixing this graphic problem, but it's enough to piss someone off. 

back to fear effect 2 with me.  it's a nice game because i put in the disc, turn on the console, and unlike pc shit most of the goddamn time, it works. 

ib4 BUT ITS A BETA ITS SPOSED TO BE BUGGY, not aware if this is a problem on my end, or the games end, but regardless of beta or not, this is annoying and if i can't get it working before the beta ends, this could very well finalize my decision to not buy the game

[Spectere]

As posted on my tumblr:

Why in the hell do people cling to Windows XP?  Yeah, I used to like 2000 and XP back in the day, but that day was almost a bloody decade ago.  I can't even stand using it part-time in a VM nowadays because of its, uh, "intricacies" (to put it politely).

It sucks.  Upgrade to either Windows 7 or Mac OS X already!  I'm running Windows 7 perfectly fine on a five year old laptop.  If your machine can't handle it, you're due for a system upgrade.

Posted because I'm having a horrendous time with its "secure" file sharing.  I'm not putting a fucking password on my iTunes VM.  That would just be stupid.  And I don't want to couple a password with automatic logon just to satisfy some lame kludge that "enhances security" (protip from a former network admin: it fucking doesn't; all it does is annoy administrators and people who just want their fucking anonymous shares to work).

It's a good thing I have XP Pro running in my VM, since XP Home is much more guarded about its group policies for some reason (which, again, makes no fucking sense!  Group policies cannot be fully utilized because you can't join domains, so the only reason you'd want them is to disable stupid fucking handholding features...thank goodness for Microsoft getting a damned clue with Vista and keeping that -- and the graphical ACL editor -- unlocked in the home editions).

it's a nice game because i put in the disc, turn on the console, and unlike pc shit most of the goddamn time, it works. 

Eh, Steam did make things a tad better.

I was particularly impressed with Mafia II for PC.  I was literally able to start the game up and click play.  In the case of both my system and my dad's system (my dad's system resembling my old one, only with a faster dual core CPU rather than a slower quad core), it automatically picked display options that provided an excellent mixture of performance and quality.  The game both looks nice and plays smoothly.  I haven't seen a game do quite as good of a job as that before; usually they wind up dramatically underestimating your computing power, even if your system is from the same era as the game.

Of course, there's no telling how it's going to handle systems that are newer than it, but from what I've seen of it, it probably has the best set of optimized settings I've seen for the computers of now.

That being said, I really hate the way developers are treating the PC, and not just in control sets.  In particular, I'm kind of angsty at the way game developers treat ATI owners.  Almost every fucking time I see a "Designed for nVidia" logo on a game, it seems to be broken on ATI cards in some way (with Mafia II being one notable exception).  Usually the excuse is that "wahhh ATI has buggy drivers lol."  Right.  In that case, explain why companies that hire competent -- sometimes world-renowned programmers -- like id Software and Epic Games, don't seem to have any issue supporting everything out of the box with their engines.  Say what you will about Unreal Tournament 3, but that game can play at an extremely playable framerate on my laptop, and the only thing that its video card can beat nowadays are Intel's chips (though it can play a mean game of Doom 3 and FEAR).

Also, I really, really doubt that "driver bugs" are really the issue here.  Batman: Arkham Asylum is a particularly notorious example, as it locks out (or used to, at any rate) anti-aliasing on ATI cards.  Needless to say, the game has a "designed for nVidia" logo, and when anti-aliasing is hacked on it works perfectly fine on ATI cards.  Even if there were driver bugs, you'd think that they would work around some of the "bugs," considering ATI has roughly 50% of the market share for discreet video chipsets.  You know, the thing that developers usually do when certain video card driver releases have bugs.

Don't even get me started on all of the PhysX bullshit.  Between them choosing to use the slowest possible x86 instructions to do math to cripple operation on CPUs, limiting support to nVidia cards, and preventing people from using a hybrid configuration (i.e. nVidia GPU for physics processing and an ATI GPU for rendering), I don't think I really need to say anything.  I could understand nVidia limiting support to, well, nVidia cards, but the other two issues are just inexcusable.

The long and short of it: nVidia makes some rockin' hardware, but the company itself is worse than Microsoft in the late 90s.  Fuck 'em.

...wow, that was quite a tangent.

[Alice]

People complaining about the operating systems that other people use sucks.  As does Mac OS X, fuck you Apple~

Also what the fuck can somebody resize vlad's gifuckingnormous image or link it instead of uuuuuuuuuuugh

[Spectere]

People complaining about the operating systems that other people use sucks.

No, I'm complaining about an operating system that I'm using because I don't have a license to use anything better in my VM.  The fact that I use it for nothing but syncing my iPhone and can still find things to bitch about should be indication enough that something is seriously wrong with the way it does things.

My rant was mainly directed toward the general populous because I have to support that shit and try to hack it into behaving rationally at least once a week.  Supporting XP is a grating experience because Vista and 7 just handle networking that much better.

Trying to get XP to network in an anonymous workgroup environment nicely sucks ass compared to literally anything else (including "classic" Windows and pre-SP2 XP).  That is a simple fact, and it's all thanks to Microsoft's placebo "security model" that they introduced in SP2.

[vladgd]

Also what the fuck can somebody resize vlad's gifuckingnormous image or link it instead of uuuuuuuuuuugh

looks like someone needs a bigger monitor

[Spectere]

looks like someone needs a bigger monitor

Lawl, my display is 1920x1200 and I still have to scroll to see it all.

At least SMF doesn't destroy the page layouts.

[vladgd]

At least SMF doesn't destroy the page layouts.

that's actually one of the things i like about php over smf.  big image?  middle click scroll, very easy.  big image on smf?  you have to scroll down and move the slider then scroll up to see the image, pretty annoying. 

[Spectere]

that's actually one of the things i like about php over smf.  big image?  middle click scroll, very easy.  big image on smf?  you have to scroll down and move the slider then scroll up to see the image, pretty annoying. 

Yeah, but phpBB breaks the entire page layout, affecting all posts on the page.

Also, at least in Chrome, you can middle-click inside of the post affected and the autoscroll will still work fine.  I do it all the time.