Dave " Money Train" Watts reviews the new Star Trek Game...and if it lives up to the reboot
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Anonymous has smacked the media whore Westboro Baptist Church after plans to picket the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting memorials in and around the city of Newport. They hacked their site and posted member's numbers and addresses. Although we're not quite sure about such an attack or the freedom of speech issues, we are definitely in with those who hold Westboro's constant disrespect of the dead, dying and suffering in contempt. The vid is below with their full statement following. Hello, Westboro Baptist Church. Allow us to introduce ourselves. We are Anonymous. As you may not have acknowledged our existence, we, on the otherhand, have recognized yours. We have seen your depraved methods of disseminating your message of hate throughout The United States of America. We have witnessed you defaming the memories of those who sacrificed themselves for the security of our nation, disrupting the peace of the educational environment within high schools and universities, breeding hatred within the fragile minds of your own next of kin, desecrating the name of God by protesting in the proximity of churches and synagogues, and mangling the biblical text to conform in accordance with your malevolent cause. Your pseudo-faith is abhorrent, and your leaders, repugnant. Your impact and cause is hazardous to the lives of millions and you fail to see the wrong in promoting the deaths of innocent people. You are self-appointed servants of God who rewrite the words of His sacred scripture to adhere to your prejudice. Your hatred supersedes your faith, and you use faith to promote your hatred. Since your one-dimensional thought protocol will conform not to any modern logic, we will not debate, argue, or attempt to reason with you. Instead, we have unanimously deemed your organization to be harmful to the population of The United States of America, and have therefore decided to execute an agenda of action which will progressively dismantle your institution of deceitful pretext and extreme bias, and cease when your zealotry runs dry. We recognize you as serious opponents, and do not expect our campaign to terminate in a short period of time. Attrition is our weapon, and we will waste no time, money, effort, and enjoyment, in tearing your resolve into pieces, as with exposing the incongruity of your distorted faith. Anonymous possesses a plethora of information within our network about the many divisions of Christianity and numerous other religious doctrines. Many of us are versed in the biblical text, and we can identify each and every of your violations of scripture. You abuse the Holy Bible which you do not fully comprehend and know not of the thousands of authors to impose upon other people when you can simply coalesce with your loved ones and live in the manner you deem plausible. You engage in reciprocal fornication with another man and preach adultery as a sin. You, Shirley Lynn Phelps-Roper violated Deuteronomy 5:18. As a result, your son Sam is the living, breathing proof of your act of simple loneliness. Simply put, it takes not a genius to realize an arrogant woman's loose moral string, and its predilection to progressively wither and fray. From the time you have received this message, our attack protocol has past been executed and your downfall is underway. Do not attempt to delude yourselves into thinking you can escape our reach, for we are everywhere, and all-seeing, in the same sense as God. We are a body of individuals who fight for a purpose higher than self, and seek to bring the malevolent intent of the malefactors to light. We will not allow you to corrupt the minds of America with your seeds of hatred. We will not allow you to inspire aggression to the social factions which you deem inferior. We will render you obsolete. We will destroy you. We are coming. Everyone is equal. We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not Forgive. We do not Forget. Expect us. The question isn't really 'why' hackers did this. Or even 'how'. The question is WHAT DA HELL IS THE FBI DOING WITH TWELVE MILLION DEVICE ID'S?!?!?!? I've always been curious about the Guy Fawkes meme. I mean I understand what the vibe in the movie Vendetta was about. The creation of an anti-hero fighting futuristic twists of government control. Especially when, in that film, the real Fawkes' action were mimicked so closely. No, what's a trip is that Fawkes was a zealot. A man who pushed for Catholic (possibly one of the most totalitarian mechanisms ever created) control of England. He was against the rise of Protestant ideals and conspired to set his country back 2 hundred years. In that respect he's more like Rick Santorum...but smarter. Fawkes was caught. Tortured. Gave everybody else up and then, before he could be put on display for further torture, jumped to break his own neck. Today the British celebrate, not his anti-Protestant message, but his capture and death. Sort of a macabre "and one" in the finishing off of Catholic rule in England. This is a pic of Guy Fawkes being burned in effigy on Guy Fawkes Day. So, although not as unsettling as seeing African Americans say "founding fathers", it's still a little buggy to see him as, literally, the face of cyber resistance. Of Anonymous. Especially when they do something like this: Apparently, LulzSec, a Anonymous strong hold of hackers thought to be disbanded by interpol efforts, hacked into an FBI agent's laptop and grabbed the contents of a folder which had IDs from 12 million Apple devices. They released 1,000,001 of the files Monday, September 3. Here's part of their statement: " During the second week of March 2012, a Dell Vostro notebook, used by Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl from FBI Regional Cyber Action Team and New York FBI Office Evidence Response Team was breached using the AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability on Java, during the shell session some files were downloaded from his Desktop folder one of them with the name of "NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv" turned to be a list of 12,367,232 Apple iOS devices including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user names, name of device, type of device, Apple Push Notification Service tokens, zipcodes, cellphone numbers, addresses, etc. the personal details fields referring to people appears many times empty leaving the whole list incompleted on many parts. no other file on the same folder makes mention about this list or its purpose." The full release can be found here. Now you might say that anyone capable of hacking an agent's laptop is a serious threat to democracy...ok..fair enough...but Imma put this one out there, if a G man is skipping about with 12 million ID's from folk's "private" accounts, is there really any democracy? This release seems to be about a reveal. The "Taaa-DAAA" at the end of the show. A reminder of just how locked down we are. How info from any one of our habits, concerns, ideals or dirty lil secrets can be and IS being indexed and listed. Maybe to our detriment. One can yell and scream at what the implications of a group of faceless hackers digging through government cyber closets infer. Or at the government for not having a tight enough ship to weather such attacks. However, fact is, we're being watched. All of us. Without boundaries. And the only real question left is--what do we do about it?? -brandonbowlin Here's a quick hit from our visit to the Urban Media Summit at Digital Hollywood, Los Angeles. Okay here's the scene...the first panel is over. The panelists, including RZA and Quincy Jones are being mobbed. We grab a seat NEXT to Quincy and, without getting up, turn to interview RZA essentially from our back! Which explains the "up-the-nose-angle". We asked the question: How do new artists deal with the "upload/download for free" media world and still make a buck? ....annnnnd roll tape, er, SD Card.... UPDATE: SONY SAYS 25 MILLION MORE ACCOUNTS MAY HAVE BEEN BREACHED!!! As we reported on April 28th, we thought this was bigger than anyone was letting on! If you're counting that's about 100million folks! check out the full story here UPDATE: Here we go! After 10 days some are still a little fumed about the wait. In the meantime, after claiming that the credit card accounts were encrypted, the big "S" just upped and said that 10 million may have been compromised. Yeah this is waaaaay deeper than they're letting on! Stay Tuned!
--brandon n. bowlin is editor and a contributor of and to thedarkroome THE HACK: thedarkroome asks questions about Sony's breach @ LA GAMES conference---by brandon n. bowlin So we’re at the pool lounging ‘twixt live panels/discussions at the LA GAMES CONFERENCE at the SLS Hotel off of La Cienega when it hits us…. What do you do when your system has been compromised to the tune of 70 mill profiles? Well you keep an appointment to a safe conference where there will be a bunch of VP’s speaking, debating, moderating and generally VPeeing on everything while NO ONE gets into you about…well, your bad week. Mostly gray haired cats and chicks at their board room prime concerned with monetizing, revenue streaming, platform expansion and…oh yeah, system securities. What you ain’t gonna see is a bunch of Red Bulled, sore thumbed, AXE scented, adolescent minded, porn driven all-fuckin’-weekend gaming gamers screaming bloody murder at one of the largest WTF moments since internet Security was invented and immediately hacked, re-invented, and then…hacked again. Nope when your security system is chopped into like an old school can of Pabst, you walk into a gaming conference that has more CEO’s, CFO’s, CIO’s, DIR’s, GM’s, VP’s, LLC Partners and Senior so-and-so’s than a Hooker Lounge two blocks from Wall Street. And when you speak you speak with folk who have more to do with corporate financial innovation than UI innovation. A place where, literally, you are the only game (or game counsel) in town...... Jack Buser And especially if you’re Jack Buser, Director of PlayStationHome-Sony Computer Entertainment America. What? Did you say that THE guy who prolly knows more than anyone about what was going down the next day was at a gaming conference? Yep, Buser and PlayStationNetwork Home account Manager Ray Bautista and some icy lawyer-lookin’ person named “Karen” stood around in various stages of mannequiniosity while thedarkroome threw out lob after lob about this huge situation. It was for not and, except for Karen’s “The Nintendo platform change is just a rumor…” vibe, they milled and cheered everything AROUND the elephant in the room. Buser gleaned like John Lennon’s real son…Ray held down the edgy, Beiber-haired skinny jeaned gamer niche while Karen looked blank-faced and scary…Moreover all three seemed enthused to go through the number convos on network set ups and speed systems and Buser’s speech. Oh yeah he spoke. We missed it. But the Topic was: Social Games is Still About Games. Of course you can’t miss the irony that even as he spoke, “The Hack”, as it will come to be known, was unraveling that theory by reportedly stealing pass words, addresses, security questions, possibly credit card numbers and other information tied to chatting, Amazon and Sony Music and was tailor made for the high school identity-theft artist in need of a couple of mill worth of easy credit (remember, the projected number of the affected is 70million!!!)---all from a gaming platform. In fact, yesterday Sony’s breach became the milestone in proving that Social Gaming is MUCH more than games…and may do so in devastating fashion. INSIDE JOKE …meanwhile…Mike Patcher of Wedbush stood by and gave a loud and folksy arm-punching diatribe to the Sony crew/petrified forest on how this was a big glitch that Sony will fix and then announce as having been fixed and then move on without much explanation. He denied an interview on camera but said plainly that gamers will hang in there and Sony won’t have to admit much past a ‘security breach’. He went on to say that his twitter account was a lot of work and then boasted about his Call of Duty username…Thunderhump…okay that wasn’t it but we swear to you that it was something like that…. You really got the feeling that no one in that whole joint had spoken to their sons or daughters in weeks… Tim Stevdier was on a panel and used to work at Activision. We think he sides with the more reasonable and, dare we say, user-side of this which is that hacking is part of pushing the technology that you use. It’s simple on the face but it means --trust it at your peril---underneath it all. Up until ten days ago, most of us were willing to, but here’s where it gets deep… …The entire internet is faith based… We all believe that the info our ISP has is safe. Or that our Paypal account is safe. Or eBay. That our Apple Store and Amazon and Facebook and darkroome and Ustream and Blogger and Blogtalk and Four Square and 155,272 apps and, yes, SonyPlaystationNetwork…is safe. But what if it isn’t. LOOK AT ALL THESE RUMORS Here was the under byte vibe just hours after the play station shutdown; A man found an exploit in the PSN, used it and then posted it online. A few weeks later Sony, with a gaggle of lawyers, came down on the man. ANONYMOUS then warned Sony to pick on somebody their own size. Sony brushed ANONYMOUS off like ant dander. ANONYMOUS smashed into Sony’s data base like Klingonese disruptor…and here we stand. Like we said no one would even address it so the rumor looks kinda nutz. The only thing crazier is acting like The Hack hasn’t happened. That’s the cynical side of Patcher’s upbeat pep talk. That the band was simply playing on. But think about it. Every one of the company chieftains’ and heads’ cash flow is dependent on cold hard credit transfers. If their systems can be yanked and pulled down for ideological reasons then where does that leave them? Because capitalism and what can be called the socialized cyber-libertarianism of ANONYMOUS are, essentially, at odds. Which one of the Huffington Posts tireless “volunteer” writers wouldn’t have appealed to said group for a shutdown of the HuffPo because of the seemingly seedy $300 mill sale to AOL, where said writers received bupkiss? Who wouldn’t like to see foreclosure lawyers hacked? Or for that matter…ANY lawyers? Moreover, how does a room full of professionals not feel the burn of their OWN personal accounts’ vulnerability? Probably because they are in plush rooms and eating dainty dishes using expense accounts. But if the rumor be true whose inter-neck would be slated to be hacked off first? The little guy or the big guy who decided not to even acknowledge the breach? SIT TIGHT The scariest part to all this is that Patcher might be correct. It could be fixed and announced quickly and pushed to the back. Of the main page that is. We here at thedarkroome feel that this is gonna change the internet despite where the story is placed and that missing the scene won’t get you points or tame this giant monstrosity call the internet. Because, just on the cusp of complete entertainment platform full integration, with only direct tv and movie downloads missing, a small Black Hole opens and swallows the arrogance of firewall and cloud and redundant safety. Something moders and hackers all know. NOTHING is safe. If even part of that ANONYMOUS rumor is true, all of the big lettered folk need to check their egos at the door ‘cause the NEXT time they’re all in the same room---it’s gonna be a long night. --brandon n. bowlin is editor and a contributor of and to thedarkroome |
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