esme

I'm not understanding why this isn't all over the news, I'm not understanding why Google are waiting until June 1st 2016 before they are going to lift a finger to protect their users. Apparently there's a major, official, trusted, certificate authority that's been caught issuing fake certificates. which can be used to allow man in the middle attacks on HTTPS connections. OK it's only Google certificates that have been spotted, but how many sites check that the certificate they have on the site is the same as the one that is issued to computers that access it? Site owners check the site can be accessed because that's important to them, no point having a site that sells things if no one can see it. But who bothers to verify the client sees the same certificate as is actually on the site ? It's a pretty fundamental mechanic, talking to the site at all means you have a secure connection and as we can trust the CA's it means we're talking to the site we think we are and a man in the middle attack is not possible. Symantec have completely destroyed that mechanic. So that's any eCommerce site, bank, medical system, even wikipedia we can't trust that we are in direct communication with any of them, that little padlock symbol is meaningless thanks to Symantec.

I used to play Descent at work during the lunch hour, we'd organise a deathmatch, networks are fun

Spotted an article on boingboing some of you may be interested in Chrome won't trust Symantec-backed SSL as of Jun 1 unless they account for bogus certs Apparently Symantec, a major issuer of site security certificates which are used on sites using https to ensure encryption of all data traffic between the site & your browser and allow you to trust the site you are visiting, has been issuing bogus certificates. I'll just repeat that for emphasis. SYMANTEC HAS BEEN ISSUING BOGUS SSL CERTIFICATES This was initially found by Google and it allows man in the middle attacks on google.com users, however So we can't trust any site that has a certificate issued by Symantec, so that's banks, shops, anywhere really. We need Mozilla & Microsoft and all the others to also reject Symantec certificates, so please raise awareness of this, if we can't trust that we are actually securely connected to the site we think we are looking at then eCommerce is dead in the water & several countries economies will stumble & fail. This could be accidental, but personally I think it was a deliberate effort to bypass https & allow data interception by various security services, (yes NSA I'm looking at you). This is fuckwittery of the highest order. Why Chrome are waiting until June 1st I have no fucking idea, this should be shouted from the fucking rooftops, and we should stop trusting Symantec approved sites immediately in my book

Too little too, too late I'm already looking at alternatives, why should I waste my time while M$ sorts itself out with no guarantee they will or that they won't fuck us about again in future. Showstoppers for me are Encrypted data being shipped off my site. Auditing my machine every 90 days. The presence of a killswitch. Advertising appearing on the taskbar, yes I know it can be disabled for now. Forced windows updates rather than allowing me to schedule them. This whole debacle of an 'accidental' ticked check box on the Win10 update, yeah right it was 'accidental'. Whole bundles of software that I'm never going to use being rolled out with the OS & being incredibly difficult to get rid of. The paradigm shift of my general purpose computing device being turned into a smartphone lookalike.i.e. Pretty much everything M$ consider a selling point I've been a M$ fangirl since DOS 2.0, but they have destroyed my trust with this crap Do they honestly think the likes of coca cola, smithkline beecham, glaxo, haliburton and so on are really going to sit idly by and allow any one of those showstoppers to happen on equipment they own ? Course they fucking don't, they're corporate multinationals M$ won't mess with them instead they are messing with us, so fuck 'em.

From another site I use Zorin is getting good reviews, anyone got any experience of it ?

Personally I want an OS that does what I tell it to and not what some random in a foreign country says, that's what I paid for. And just because they are giving it away free does not justify using extremely dodgy and aggressive tricks to replace the product I've paid for, if I don't want their advert ridden freebie then I shouldn't have to have it and further I shouldn't have to watch the updates like a fucking hawk to see if they are trying to sneak it on to my machine. Microsoft have forgotten what the purpose of an operating system is or at the very least think everyone else has. This has completely destroyed my trust in Microsoft and I will not be buying any of their crap again, hopefully the backlash will kill off this forced update & advertising nonsense, but as a lot of users aren't that computer literate and just see a PC as an extension of their smartphone that lets them see what's on at the pictures or for sale at amazon while playing a game now and then, I'm not going to hold my breath. So as it's been a while since I did anything Unix suggestions for a secure Unix OS would be gratefully received

I really must complete the combat section of the training one day

They are 'unifying' Win10 across all their platforms, which means everything matches the least capable device and the more capable general purpose computers are dumbed down to behave like mobile phones. Cory Doctorow has a good take on this dumbing down, he says it's an attack on general purpose computing, basically even though you bought and paid for it, it's not yours and you have little or no control over how to use it https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

I mean I'll take an image backup before running windows update. I take the point about updating hardware rendering backups that predate it a bit problematic, had that problem on my partners old XP laptop when the GPU failed & was replaced with a different type, the restoration failed to a vga mode, worked fine after installing the new driver though.

I think I'll go back to my old method of instead of just taking an image backup of the disk every few months, I'll take one before I do an upgrade.

I turn off auto updates & use windows update at a convenient time, mainly because when I want to use my PC I don't want to sit there for half an hour while updates are installed then a reboot & another half hour while it configures them and then finally the machine is ready to use, which is a bit crap if I'm sniping something on ebay. And now Microsoft have made me so paranoid that they're going to pull a fast one I'm wasting tons of time researching every fucking update before I install them which eats into my work schedule, maybe I should send them a bill for my time. And that idea can fuck right off too

I play it precisely because it's hard, because it's not running around with a BFG shooting everything that twitches, because I have to think & pay attention

Having looked at these I think I'd like to visit Prague

The Klementium, Prague

Ah never noticed that, ta

I don't think it was meant for public consumption more a quick team briefing on how they were going to or had solved the sound propogation issue so the level builders had a better idea of how to design levels and bear in mind this is really old, I believe it's a design doc from the Dark Project, possibly even Dark Camelot

Finally found what I was looking for, it's a PDF of a powerpoint presentation by Chris Carollo chris_carollo.pdf Thought I'd lost that for a bit there, hope it's useful

As I remember a roombrush is a 3D envelope around a section of the game, it's used for sound propogation, within the roombrush sound propogatesfrom it's source via the most direct path, if two roombrushes overlap sound will propogate from one to the other at the overlap so if theres a wall with an AI patrolling behind it, you can have a roombrush coverine the AI, another for the player and two small overlapping ones connecting them together at either end of the wall so as the AI goes left to right the sound from either end of the wall increases & diminishes but doesn't appear to come through the wall I've got a graphic somewhere that explains how they work I'll see if I can find it

Just had a thought about the KB971033 update. There's no real reason why you need to check if a system is properly licensed more than once but this one seems to do a software audit every 90 days. Then I remembered WIn10 has a killswitch. The killswitch is supposed to be used for software downloaded from the Microsoft store that somehow proves to be rogue, which opens up the whole discussion of why wasn't it checked when it was added to the store rather than installed on a users PC - but that's another discussion, personally I suspect that the killswitch can be applied to any software Microsoft doesn't approve of regardless of source, certainly measures can be taken to disable or delete unapproved software. So there's a possible reason for checking the licenses every 90 days, it's a small step from knowing what you're running to disabling it if it's not approved. I know, I'm paranoid.

Not architecture but could be good for lighting/sky effects http://www.spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=117450&PHPSESSID=lbr97uoco8dpnrm8oib68j3or0 http://www.spaceweathergallery.com/

I wonder how businesses are handling WIndows sending encrypted comms off site without permission or do enterprise editions not get the spyware ?

oooooooohhhhh nice

Your options are Yes (8 votes [30.77%] - View So that's 8 votes in favour of having a switch that affects oil lamps in existing gamesNo (10 votes [38.46%] - View) 10 votes againstYes or no, depending on a new gameplay setting. (1 votes [3.85%] - View) 1 vote possibly for possibly against no idea what you mean with this to be honestYes or no, depending on how mappers define them. (7 votes [26.92%] - View) 7 votes for or against, again no idea what you actually meanThese figures may change with more votes The poll is confusing, I suspect you're interpreting all the yes/no answers as support, I don't I will say this again. I have no problem with someone adding a new model which can be turned off or a script or setting so authors can allow players to turn certain types of lamp off in new missions, should the author decide to use that model, script or setting.Also if authors want to retrofit these to existing missions then that's their decision.If authors choose not to use this model or setting then I am against the idea that their choice can be overridden by the player, they chose a particular model and allowed certain actions to affect it for a reason, whether the player likes or even understands that reason is immaterial, it's not the players choice, it's the authors choice .I am also against the idea of a gameplay setting that allows the players that use it to turn off lamps that they can't currently turn off in existing or even new missions, again the author chose a particular model, they could have added scripts to let the player turn the lamp off with a frob, this has always been possible, if they didn't know how to do it they could have asked, but they chose not to.Which option says that ? And any hostility on my part stems from your sweeping generalisations that mission authors don't plan their lighting to the very last light and don't plan which specific resources including the quantity you are given to deal with any obstacles or problems.

I can't speak for TDM but in T2 absolutely everything is placed by the mission author, everything is calculated, everything is deliberate and to suggest mission authors don't place lights, objects and everything else in their missions deliberately and with care is, frankly, insulting to the effort authors put into making missions

"I'll put some lego buildings & rooms in a space then press the button that throws some lights in there, then I can get to the important stuff of placing the AI & loot" - no mission author ever