Valve released an updated version of Alien Swarm, a popular Unreal Tournament 2004 total conversion mod. The creators of the mod were hired by Valve, and they’ve helped turn it into a stand-alone game running on the Source engine. Valve is also releasing the code base for Alien Swarm and an SDK. The game is available for free on Steam.
There is probably some nice stuff to learn that can still be applicable to UDK here !
As stated in an article at gamasutra, I am not very surprised to see this statement from Sony. I firmly believe that Nintendo will basically still do the same thing as always by ignoring the competition and doing farely good by themselves. The surprise would come on the part of Microsoft. They are have been loosing on many fronts in the recent years and their brand is becoming more fragile than it used to. I still wonder what would have had happened if Epic would not had fought to have the 512 MB in that machine…it would surely had led to a big debacle. From my standpoint, with xbox live grossing big profits, it is wise to think that the next generation will be digital content based and that physical media production will start to diminish. It will not entirely stop for sure, but we will have to see what Microsoft will think about, because I cannot envision a next console from Microsoft that bundles a Blueray, what do you think ?
Want to beat the hackers at their own game?
- Learn how hackers find security vulnerabilities!
- Learn how hackers exploit web applications!
- Learn how to stop them!
This codelab by Google, shows how web application vulnerabilities can be exploited and how to defend against these attacks. The best way to learn things is by doing, so you’ll get a chance to do some real penetration testing, actually exploiting a real application. Specifically, you’ll learn the following:
- How an application can be attacked using common web security vulnerabilities, like cross-site scripting vulnerabilities (XSS) and cross-site request forgery (XSRF).
- How to find, fix, and avoid these common vulnerabilities and other bugs that have a security impact, such as denial-of-service, information disclosure, or remote code execution.
The codelab is organized by types of vulnerabilities. In each section, you’ll find a brief description of a vulnerability and a task to find an instance of that vulnerability in the lab. Your job is to play the role of a malicious hacker and find and exploit the security bugs. In this codelab, you’ll use both black-box hacking and white-box hacking. In black box hacking, you try to find security bugs by experimenting with the application and manipulating input fields and URL parameters, trying to cause application errors, and looking at the HTTP requests and responses to guess server behavior. You do not have access to the source code, although understanding how to view source and being able to view http headers (as you can in Chrome or LiveHTTPHeaders for Firefox) is valuable. Using a web proxy like Burp or WebScarab may be helpful in creating or modifying requests. In white-box hacking, you have access to the source code and can use automated or manual analysis to identify bugs. You can treat Jarlsberg as if it’s open source: you can read through the source code to try to find bugs. The lab code named Jarlsberg (nothing to do with the cheese !) is written in Python, so some familiarity with Python can be helpful. However, the security vulnerabilities covered are not Python-specific and you can do most of the lab without even looking at the code. You can run a local instance of Jarlsberg to assist in your hacking: for example, you can create an administrator account on your local instance to learn how administrative features work and then apply that knowledge to the instance you want to hack. Security researchers use both hacking techniques, often in combination, in real life.
Come on I know you are dying to look at it !
We’ve all seen the studies trumpeting massive losses to the US economy from piracy. One famous figure, used literally for decades by rightsholders and the government, said that 750,000 jobs and up to $250 billion a year could be lost in the US economy thanks to IP infringement. A couple years ago, we thoroughly debunked that figure. For years, Business Software Alliance reports on software piracy assumed that each illicit copy was a lost sale. And the MPAA’s own commissioned study on movie piracy turned out to overstate collegiate downloading by a factor of three.
Can we trust any of these claims about piracy?
Read the shocking truth at Ars technica
An MIT Linux kernel programmer explains how to turn any NULL pointer into a root exploit on Linux. But there is also a part one to this article which state : “If you’ve ever programmed in C, you’ve probably run into a NULL pointer dereference at some point. But almost certainly, all it did was crash your program with the dreaded “Segmentation Fault”. Annoying, and often painful to debug, but nothing more than a crash. So how is it that this simple programming error becomes so dangerous when it happens in the kernel? Inspired by all the fuss, this post will explore a little bit of how memory works behind the scenes on your computer. By the end of today’s installment, we’ll understand how to write a C program that reads and writes to a NULL pointer without crashing. In a future post, I’ll take it a step further and go all the way to showing how an attacker would exploit a NULL pointer dereference in the kernel to take control of a machine!”
This is very informative for people that would takle C or C++ development on the linux platform !