Up until just recently, the bane of the PC market was coming in the form of Games for Windows Live, a service similar to Xbox Live, where players had to pay a monthly fee of 6.99 in order to play their pc games on the internet. As most pc gamers understand, the only way we’ll pay additional cash in order to play our games online is when they are MMORPG’s or if the game is free to start.
So Microsoft came to their senses and made Games for Windows Live free, and now they’re in the process of refunding the fees paid to their service over the time they spent screwing pc gamers out of their cash just to unlock a feature that should’ve been in the game in the first place for free.
Our next hope is that they will make Xbox Live free.
China, when you think about it, you think of beautiful landscapes, beautiful women, ahead-of-our-time electronics, and a place where the dollar goes so much further.
So why not have the olympics there?
Oh and why you shouldn’t go to the Olympics if you are black.
Apparently the 2 billion dollars in lost revenue from the Writers Guild Strike wasn’t enough, as now the Screen Actors Guild has rejected over 250 million in compensation from Hollywood, which is hinting that the imminent strike may be closer than we think.
What’s next? Personally, I think viewers should go on strike, instead of having to deal with all the bullshit that Hollywood pumps out on a yearly basis. We should all be on strike until Uwe Boll stops making films, Eddie Murphy stops appearing in films, Jack Black stops singing, a sequel to Titanic starring zombie Jack, and we can get some goddamn popcorn that isn’t stale!
But either way, when there’s a social dilemma, you can bet that What I Call The News will be there to suck at the social teat.
Welcome to yet another category on WICTN’s growing list of complete garbage. Because WICTN has only been up since last August, and I’ve been blogging for almost 7 years now, I tend to reference things I’ve said or done years ago, without anything to actually reference to as a source. So, I’ve set up “Before the Calling”, to show off some news I’ve covered and how relevant it is over a year later.
Last April the news was abuzz when a hacker managed to gain access to the information on Steam Cafe owners, and was threatening to release them on the internet. The hacker, MaddoxX, was well known for publicizing his hacking into Steam’s servers, as well as being on some kind of moral crusade to “help” Valve by emailing them constantly telling them that he knew how to get into their servers.
Well, over a year later, and MaddoxX has been arrested by Dutch Police. Oddly enough, he was not captured on Valve’s bidding, but on Activision for his theft last year of the source code for the (at the time) unreleased Quake Wars: Enemy Territory. It is believed that MaddoxX has been making millions by stealing source code for unreleased games, and then reselling it.
“I did try [to] contact them several months ago. At the time, I didn’t do anything harmful — just got [a few free copies of games] but never heard anything from them,” he says. “Later,” the steamed hacker adds, “I tried to warn them to fix bugs…but as usual, they don’t listen.” He recounts that he allegedly tried e-mailing Valve employees on several occasions without a reply. When a friend of his called attention to the potential security breaches on Valve forums, every trace of each thread got shut down. “They don’t even warn or reply to their Café customers that private information is leaked,” he says.
A bit egotistical, yes. MaddoxX headed No-Steam.org (Don’t bother, the website is no longer running), an anti-Valve website (Huge social lives here), and was found to have stolen over 50,000 credit card numbers from an unnamed ticker website.
So I’ll leave you with MaddoxX’s last word on the Steampowered forums last year. Kinda ironic when you think about it.
“Happy Easter hahahahah,” MaddoxX taunted after posting the information. “I’m waiting for you VALVe.”
The best Chinese propaganda I’ve ever seen on Digg. Notice how it’s not their fault, it’s our fault for bringing it up that Beijing is a hole of waste and pollution.
