Friday, February 20, 2004

Pondering the Imponderable -- 10:51 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I finally tried UT2K4 in multiplayer today. I fired up a listen server with some bots and loyal Haus reader Quakerboy (aka Floatball, Patron Saint of the Ill-Shaven) joined in. Everything seemed to work pretty well. I just had to punch a hole in my firewall and in my router to allow it to happen. Blowing things up while occupying the same vehicle as a friend is almost too fun.

HardOCP v. Infinium Labs -- 11:33 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

NewsForge has a tongue-in-cheek take on Infinium Labs legal threats against HardOCP for an article critical of the company and its CEO. You may remember that Infinium is behind the as-yet-vaporware (and thus very appropriately named) Phantom gaming console. The only thing the company seems to have produced is press releases and now legal threats. Can you say "BitBoys"? I knew you could. Apparently the company thinks it's illegal to call a snake oil salesman, well, a snake oil salesman. I'm sure this little ploy will give them plenty of high-quality press. Thanks Slashdot.

Bleh -- 8:49 am CST, Update by The Master

Finally got a chance to fire up the UT2K4 demo last night. It is amazingly pretty. I thought UT2K3 was nice, but this one is so much more vibrant, and the effects are sweet. I blasted a 'bot coming down a ramp and they burst into flaming gibs. That was worth an animalistic roar of pleasure last night :-) I still get called a flack monkey regularly, so my universe is still in alignment. The only complaint I had was that it seems like the weapons are a little slow to fire now, but that might just be something in the demo, and not worthy of concern.

Thursday, February 19, 2004

Linux UT2K4 Demo Update -- 12:24 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

icculus posted a link to a patch for the Linux Unreal Tournament 2004 demo in his .plan. The patch fixes a ping problem in server browser and allows for external text-to-speech synthesis. I'm must confess that I'm not sure why people would want every inane thing that somebody types in a game to be turned into speech.

The Master comments: Considering some of the "witty repartee" I've seen on most of the public servers, I'm quite certain I'd rather ram a railroad spike through my ears first.

Linux Kernel Exploit -- 9:32 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Somebody needs to shoot whoever wrote the mremap() system call in the Linux kernel. A new exploit was found in it which could give root permissions to a local user or DOS the memory system. Affected kernel versions are <= 2.2.25, <= 2.4.24 and <= 2.6.2. Linux himself confirms that 2.4.25 and 2.6.3 fix the problem. Here is the security notice for your perusal. Check with your vender for a new kernel or snag the code at kernel.org.

Having said all of this, as annoying as this bug is, you need local shell access to exploit it. If people you don't know or trust can get that at your box, you probably have greater problems. Obviously, ISPs and the like will need this update. I'm compiling as I type this.

UPDATE! Great! KDE 3.2's arts doesn't get along with the version of ALSA in the 2.6.3 kernel. Sigh.

Past Two Days' News

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