The rest of the world is here
A few years ago, I warned everyone that “the rest of the world is coming.” Well, they’re here now. Check out these stats.
I suggest you go to the SlideShare site and view it full-screen, it’s text-heavy.
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3d in Flash is getting better
Remember how I said that 3d in Flash was catching up? I got a lot of flak for it in some quarters.
Check out this demo. OK, it’s not 3d, it’s actually parallax. Still. 🙂 It’s apparently from this new platform called Alternativa, which looks quite promising and which does have quite a lot of 3d. Check out this interior or this exterior.
The way things are looking right now, 3d on the web is in a position where there’s multiple solutions coming down the pike, though none are fully baked yet. There’s Flash itself, which is the dominant platform. There’s Shockwave as well. Microsoft sees a strategic imperative and is doing Silverlight. And the open-sourceniks are not going to let something so critical be all proprietary, so there’s the <canvas> tag with OpenGL.
This is basically console wars for the Web. The Alternativas/Away3ds/Papervisions of the world are middleware developers for the Flash “console.” Heck, the latest Away3d demo even somewhat reminds me of the first time I saw Magic Carpet on the PC.
Is it “here” yet? No. But you can see it from here.
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How to hack an MMO
Given the recent hack to the blog, and also given the recent news of the decompiled Eve Online client, it seemed like a good time to go over some of the ways in which a virtual world gets hacked.
The interesting thing, of course, is that all the hacks I am going to talk about are actually not hacking the virtual world at all; they instead attack the client, which is your window into the world, and also your waldo, your means of exercising control over what happens in that world. And that’s because…
The client is in the hands of the enemy.
You’ve probably heard that before — I wasn’t the first one to say it, but it constantly gets misattributed to me. That particular phrasing may have originated with Kelton Flinn, but I am sure many of us came up with it independently.
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Derivative games in 2008
2008 is the year of gaming | Tech news blog – CNET News.com
Over the course of the next few months, we’ll be inundated with titles that will let us explore totally new worlds and enjoy totally new ways of playing video games. Unlike many other years where most of the titles were derivative, this year we may have something to propel creativity in the industry.
Emphasis is mine. Their list?
- Grand Theft Auto IV – sequel
- Ninja Gaiden 2 – sequel
- Ghostbusters: The Video Game – semi-sequel, plus the movie is how old?
- Devil May Cry 4 – sequel
- Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots – sequel
- Killzone 2 – sequel
- Far Cry 2 – sequel
- Rainbow Six Vegas 2 – sequel
- Super Smash Bros. Brawl – sequel
- Mario Kart Wii – sequel
- Fallout 3 – sequel
- Lost Odyssey – a spiritual sequel and pretty derivative
- Fable 2 – sequel
- Starcraft 2 – sequel
- Gran Turismo 5 – sequel
- Little Big Planet
- Spore
So, by my count, two. Thank goodness for the smaller titles.
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What WordPress needs
A plugin that
- Greps every file in your public web directory, recursively, looking for “base64” and tells you about them. The default WP install has none of these.
- Warns you on modification date of any file in the install, plus in any themes.
- Checks header and footer for unusual size changes.
- Warns you on any files added to install directories that are not something in the vanilla install — e.g., any new php files in wp-admin that aren’t part of the install.
- Warns you on any .htaccess redirects.
- Pulls out the list of administrators by querying in wp_usermeta for wp_metavalue containing %administrator% — not whatever the dashboard uses, which appears to correlate to other tables and therefore misses hacked accounts.
- Generates a table of everything in wp_options that is not a part of the vanilla WP install, so you can check it. Sure, a whole bunch of plugins will show up, but maybe you can check that manually.
Doing all this by hand is getting old. 🙂 The saga continues at the other post, which continues to get updates.
