.| UrbanNerd |.

Source: MTV
MTV chatted with Guillermo del Toro about Hellboy 2: The Golden Army:

“We are literally in the early stages of preproduction,” del Toro said of his sequel to the 2004 flick starring the monstrous Ron Perlman. “We’ve been designing the thing, and we are going to be shooting in April or May of next year. It’s a bigger story than the first one, and it is actually a larger scope. It’s similar to [del Toro's upcoming flick] ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ in the fact that the everyday world is grinding fantasy into the ground. Everyday life is creating a mundane reality and destroying fantasy. All of the main characters are coming back.” Del Toro expects the sequel to hit theaters in 2008.

This is a very important article published by Arstechnica. As a technologist I have always found the issue of electronic voting interesting, but I have also found that the way the US is rolling out electronic voting is alarming in it’s inconsistency and loack of technical oversight. Unfortunately there have been one too many political opinions clouding the real information that exists out there on the subject of evoting. This article really cuts through all of that:

What if I told you that it would take only one person—one highly motivated, but only moderately skilled bad apple, with either authorized or unauthorized access to the right company’s internal computer network—to steal a statewide election? You might think I was crazy, or alarmist, or just talking about something that’s only a remote, highly theoretical possibility. You also probably would think I was being really over-the-top if I told you that, without sweeping and very costly changes to the American electoral process, this scenario is almost certain to play out at some point in the future in some county or state in America, and that after it happens not only will we not have a clue as to what has taken place, but if we do get suspicious there will be no way to prove anything. You certainly wouldn’t want to believe me, and I don’t blame you.

So what if I told you that one highly motivated and moderately skilled bad apple could cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to America’s private sector by unleashing a Windows virus from the safety of his parents’ basement, and that many of the victims in the attack would never know that they’d been compromised? Before the rise of the Internet, this scenario also might’ve been considered alarmist folly by most, but now we know that it’s all too real.

Thanks to the recent and rapid adoption of direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines in states and counties across America, the two scenarios that I just outlined have now become siblings (perhaps even fraternal twins) in the same large, unhappy family of information security (infosec) challenges. Our national election infrastructure is now largely an information technology infrastructure, so the problem of keeping our elections free of vote fraud is now an information security problem. If you’ve been keeping track of the news in the past few years, with its weekly litany of high-profile breeches in public- and private-sector networks, then you know how well we’re (not) doing on the infosec front.

Over the course of almost eight years of reporting for Ars Technica, I’ve followed the merging of the areas of election security and information security, a merging that was accelerated much too rapidly in the wake of the 2000 presidential election. In all this time, I’ve yet to find a good way to convey to the non-technical public how well and truly screwed up we presently are, six years after the Florida recount. So now it’s time to hit the panic button: In this article, I’m going to show you how to steal an election.

Now, I won’t be giving you the kind of “push this, pull here” instructions for cracking specific machines that you can find scattered all over the Internet, in alarmingly lengthy PDF reports that detail vulnerability after vulnerability and exploit after exploit. (See the bibliography at the end of this article for that kind of information.) And I certainly won’t be linking to any of the leaked Diebold source code, which is available in various corners of the online world. What I’ll show you instead is a road map to the brave new world of electronic election manipulation, with just enough nuts-and-bolts detail to help you understand why things work the way they do.

Along the way, I’ll also show you just how many different hands touch these electronic voting machines before and after a vote is cast, and I’ll lay out just how vulnerable a DRE-based elections system is to what e-voting researchers have dubbed “wholesale fraud,” i.e., the ability of an individual or a very small group to steal an entire election by making subtle changes in the right places.

So let’s get right down to business and meet the tools that we’re going to use to flip a race in favor of our preferred candidate.

Read the full article here

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Video game publisher Bethesda Softworks is bringing Simon & Schuster’s best-selling book franchise “Rogue Warrior” to Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC gamers in fall 2007.

In development at Zombie Studios, the story-driven shooter will put players in the boots of a Navy SEAL who leads a team behind enemy lines in North Korea on a covert mission to assess the threat posed by the country’s nuclear arsenal.

According to Mark Long, lead producer at Zombie Studios, “Rogue” is based on an original story that Richard Marcinko, author of the book series, wrote in collaboration with the game makers.

“Dick’s team gets trapped in North Korea, and World War III breaks out between North and South Korea,” Long said. “With only limited weapons and gear, the team must escape and evade the enemy while attempting to make it back to the DMZ.”

Bethesda Softworks president Vlatko Andonov said “Rogue” marks the publisher’s return to the popular shooter genre, which it most recently explored with its “Terminator” game franchise on PC.

Central to the game’s single and multiplayer experience is the idea of a freeform battlefield, where players are given the freedom to choose how to complete a given objective, allowing for creativity and surprises rather than heavily scripted events and tightly contained spaces traditionally used in the genre.

You’ve got a wireless keyboard, wireless mouse and wireless speakers, so why are you still connecting to your monitor with a cable? What are you, some kind of luddite? You need a wireless monitor connector, like the new WID101 from Teq Gear. This device connects the DVI port on your PC to the one on your monitor over an encrypted 802.11 a. g or b network, squishing the video data down to fit. It’ll run at resolutions up to WXGA (1366 by 768 pixels; good enough for a 17-inch LCD screen) and will set you back $995.

Thanks Teq Gear

GameTap, an Internet gaming network owned by Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., said on Tuesday they are partnering with AOL Games to make nine Midway arcade titles available to AOL users. In addition to the games, AOL users will have access to original video from GameTap at the web address www.aol.com/gametap.

Source: NetScape

Advanced Micro devices Inc. is set out to make chips integrating its x86 processor with a graphics chip on one piece of silicon by the early 2009.

The announcement today as AMD finished their $5.4 billion merger with with graphics chip manufacturer ATI Technologies Inc.

Code named fusion will lead to chips for a broad spectrum of applications right from laptops to servers, said AMD.

PC manufacturers can already put a graphics processor next to the main processor on a PC’s motherboard rather than adding a dedicated graphics card in a PCI slot. That allows them to reduce the cost — and size — of their computers.

Packaging for the main processor and graphics processor on one chip will take that further and lead to a rise in power efficiency, AMD said. The Fusion chips could even show up in consumer electronics gadgets and products for emerging markets, where low cost and low power consumption is often important.

AMD won’t block out developers of coprocessors such as physics accelerators or high-end graphics chips for gamers: The Fusion chips will continue to support such external devices over the PCI Express bus, the company said.

Although AMD said it will take until late 2008 or early 2009 to build the Fusion chips, other fruits of its merger with ATI will show up sooner.

After 2007, AMD plans to deliver versions of its Turion 64 mobile processor that are more closely integrated with an external graphics processor, resulting in extended battery life for notebook computers, the company said.

Artist Freddie E. Williams II, a relative newcomer to the field known for his work on ROBIN and SEVEN SOLDIERS: MISTER MIRACLE, has signed an exclusive contract with DC Comics.

Williams first broke onto the scene with his work on superstar Grant Morrison’s MISTER MIRACLE miniseries, part of his epic SEVEN SOLDIERS event. Currently, Williams II is teaming with writer Adam Beechen on the adventures of the Boy Wonder in the pages of ROBIN.

“I’m very happy that Freddie has decided to sign an exclusive with us,” said Senior Editor Peter Tomasi. “He’s a talented artist, a complete professional and incredibly enthusiastic — a true pleasure to work with. His art on ROBIN has been great and I’m glad to have him on my Bat-crew.”

“I have loved and dreamed of drawing comics for as long as I can remember,” Williams said. “So being a total fanboy this is a lifelong dream come true! When I got the call about the exclusive, I flipped out and even asked if it was a prank. I’m thrilled to have this opportunity and very flattered; I can’t wait to get crazy with it! I have to thank Richard Bruning, Peter Tomasi and Michael Siglain — I owe each of you a life-debt.”

Work by Williams may be found in these titles:

SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY VOL. 3 TP (FEB060291), including SEVEN SOLDIERS: MISTER MIRACLE #2, is available for reorder.

SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY VOL. 4 TP (NOV060237), including SEVEN SOLDIERS: MISTER MIRACLE #3-4, is solicited in the November Previews (Volume XVI #11) and scheduled to arrive in stores on January 3.
Upcoming issues of ROBIN featuring art by Williams are available as follows:

ROBIN #156 (SEP060199) is solicited in the September Previews (Volume XVI #9) and is scheduled to arrive in stores on November 15.

ROBIN #157 (OCT060160) is solicited in the October Previews (Volume XVI #10) and is scheduled to arrive in stores on December 13.

This may be painfully obvious once you think about it, but for those who haven’t, here’s a way to get around the Xbox 360 country lock for downloadable content. Microsoft’s chosen to disable certain game demos and game videos for people of certain regions, but we want all our media to be free, don’t we?

Go online to xbox.com and register a new gamertag with an email address not associated with any previous account. Then make sure you set your country to either Japan or America—perhaps making one tag for each. Then when that’s done, go on your Xbox 360 and choose “recover gamertag” to grab the info from this tag onto your 360. Now you can see all the Japanese games you’ve been missing out on.

Online auction house eBay has made a policy clarification regarding the PS3 and Wii pre-orders, so as not to have the same problems that occurred with the Xbox 360 launch (it almost did). Only experienced eBay sellers (with at least 50 feedback and 98% positive rating) can place a PS3 or Wii console for auction before launch, only one console per account, the picture must be of your pre-order receipt, and you can not set a “Buy it Now” option.

Reasons why we love this:

It discourages fake listings and encourages fulfilled orders.
Desperate gamers who are willing to spend thousands of dollars for an early PS3 can still do so.
Kudos to eBay for setting up guidelines to handle the impending console launch fiasco.

Source: Variety

MTV VJ and “Entertainment Tonight” correspondent Vanessa Minnillo has booked a role in 20th Century Fox’s Fantastic Four: Rise of The Silver Surfer. She’ll play the love interest of Chris Evans’ character, the Human Torch.

Michael Chiklis, Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Julian McMahon, Beau Garrett and Andre Braugher also star in the Tim Story-directed sequel. The movie hits theaters on June 15, 2007.