Content Control for Gears of War 2
Posted By: Moonlight Pictures on Aug 18, 6:14 pm

Tired of violent games? The shooter sequel is set to ship with a content-control feature!

The highly anticipated sequel to Gears of War is going to have an optional violence filter in attempt to ease concerns about the graphic content in the game. While the filter is turned on, blood will turn into sparks and the harsh language will be removed.

The game is due out on November 7th. Click here to watch video about the content filter.

Protect yourself from fraudulent emails!
Posted By: nathanpinard on Aug 13, 11:51 am

Hello Everyone,

In the past few weeks I’ve seen a huge influx of fake emails and webpages often leading to people having their information stolen. These sites are simply to harvest information and exploit it. And, possibly even sell this information to a 3rd party.

So here’s a quick how-to in detecting harmful emails. Please note this isn’t a fool proof method, but it’s often the way I’ve seen these emails come through.

Continue Story »

No More Passwords - Not Secure Enough
Posted By: Moonlight Pictures on Aug 11, 1:12 pm

How many passwords do you have? Do you have complex and hard to remember login details or do you fall into the category of easy to remember passwords?

I personally have one password for everything, however, its a password that not even my closest of friends would know. Nevertheless, according to this article I found on Digital Domain, passwords may be ancient technology already…

Password-based log-ons are susceptible to being compromised in any number of ways. Consider a single threat, that posed by phishers who trick us into clicking to a site designed to mimic a legitimate one in order to harvest our log-on information.

Once we’ve been suckered at one site and our password purloined, it can be tried at other sites. The solution urged by the experts is to abandon passwords — and to move to a fundamentally different model, one in which humans play little or no part in logging on. Instead, machines have a cryptographically encoded conversation to establish both parties’ authenticity, using digital keys that we, as users, have no need to see.

In short, we need a log-on system that relies on cryptography, not mnemonics.

Read More Here!

“Spam King” and family found dead in murder-suicide
Posted By: Rob on Jul 25, 11:17 pm

MSNBC is reporting that convicted email spammer, Edward Davidson, has been found dead in his parked SUV parked at a farmhouse driveway in Bennett, CO, 25 miles east of Denver. Along side him were the bodies of his wife, his 3-year-old daughter as well as a teenage girl who was shot in the neck and an unharmed baby in a carseat.

Edward “Eddie” Davidson (35), for those unaware, was considered the “Spam King” and worked as a “spammer for hire” of sorts, sending out spam hundreds of thousands of spam emails for his clients from 2002 to 2005. He was indicted by a federal grand jury on in June of 2007 for violating the CAN SPAM Act of 2003, plead guilty in December 2007 and sentenced to serve 21 months in federal prison as well as pay $714,139 in restitution to the IRS.  He aparently “walked out” of the prision on July 20th, 2008 and fled.

Spectrasonics joins the podcast world with Omnisphere series
Posted By: nathanpinard on Jul 24, 12:23 am

Although this isn’t total news and is quite late, Spectrasonics; one of the leading sample and virtual instrument developers has released a podcast presenting their new software synth entitled “Omnisphere” to be released later in 2008. The video series doesn’t just demonstrate the amazing abilities of this new software synth, but also goes into the how and why they decided to approach a project such as this, right down to demonstrating some of the vintage synths of our time.

Omnisphere is known since NAMM as being a next generation synthesizer module. It combines real recordings of instruments, as well as created custom instruments, and even more odd situations right down to setting a piano on fire, and playing it while recording it. In the video podcast for Omnisphere, you can see the various techniques they used, as well as the features implemented in Omnisphere.

Omnisphere is planned to be released September 15, 2008 for Windows XP/Vista and Macintosh with Audio Unit, VST, and RTAS support for compatibility with all major host software.

To watch the video series you can go here, or check out the teaser site here.

The series is also available on iTunes.

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Nathan Allen Pinard: I’m pretty exited about this library, as it helps with a lot of things for me in terms of electronic music. It should be fun coming up with the various techniques using the arpeggiator, as well as the patches themselves. Just about any musician that is a pro would want this in their library.