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So I log on to SN after a busy weekend and find a story about the Hugo Awards, only it's a strange kind of story. It's biased, it's inflammatory, it's racist, it's sexist, and it links to the Urban Dictionary definition of the acronym "SJW". It simply isn't an appropriate piece for the front page of a respectable news aggregation site - it's biased, it mis-represents the proceedings, it's blatantly offensive towards innocent players and it's quite obviously a GamerGate propaganda piece.

The comments on the "article" were equally appalling, consisting primarily of GamerGate supporters shouting down their opponents, selectively redefining words to fit their purpose, conflating criticism with censorship and generally acting like a bunch of immature, angry, self-important morons who are incapable of holding an intelligent conversation without villifying and twisting the word of anyone who shows even the slightest disagreement with their party line.

I've been a supporter and submitter (and trainee editor) for SoylentNews since it's inception. I've submitted news stories about politics, economics, armed conflicts, espionage, upcoming technology, controversial trade agreements, video games, elections, terrorism and hackers. To be told by a senior member of Soylentnews staff that they can do without me because I don't support GamerGate...

Takyon, you should be ashamed of yourself for accepting that story in it's submitted form. Until yourself and The Mighty Buzzard have been entirely disassociated from SoylentNews, the site is dead to me.

Spotted today on YouTube a video advertising the fact that women's national teams will be implemented in FIFA 16. Video's been up less than a day. The comments on the vid include so much casual sexism dressed up as humour it's unreal. There are some interesting points about ranking male and female players by in-game attributes, development priorities and EA's support of realistic portrayals of females in video games, but they are somewhat outweighed by the immature 3-year-old mental age boys whining about gurls! urrg - oh wait, it's a console game of an immature game for immature idiots in the first place, what on earth was I expecting?

Carry on, nothing to see here...

Having finally received my new parts and built my new machine, it's now purring away on the table in front of me while I type this. My experiences so far can be summed up fairly simply.

1) mITX wasn't as fiddly a form factor to work with as I thought
2) Intel's stock HSF is a pain in the ass to fit
3) Linux is just... godlike!

Lemme expand on that last one. My motherboard has the latest and greatest Intel AC wireless/bluetooth and a pair of gigabit NICs onboard. They all worked off the live CD. (Side note: this wireless card is magick, I'm connected to the wireless access point 10 metres away through a wall and I don't even have the antennae attached!) I was expected my AMD 7850 to be a royal pain in the ass thanks to AMD's crappy Linux drivers. Okay, took me three attempts to download and install the lastest Catalyst beta, but apart from some really retarded default settings (vsync off? Whatever. 10% underscan? Wtf!) that took a tweak or two to sort out, it's been pretty flawless so far. I've had a slight issue with the canvas size under KSP, but it's smooth as butter otherwise. I realise I'm not getting full performance out of the GFX card yet, the drivers still need work, but Trine, KSP and Torchlight 2 have all been perfect.

Oh yeah, one other thing:

4) Firefox under Linux supports 60fps YouTube videos without installing Flash.

We have a winner! I will be testing out SteamOS at some point, just to see what it's like, but I'll probably be heading almost directly back to Mint Cinnamon. Got lots more testing to do, but right now it's late and the GF is in bed waiting for me ;)

It's been a month and a day since I ordered the parts I needed to build a new computer. Being on something of a budget right now, and with my motherboard selections curtailed by my choice of the mini-ITX form factor, I plumped for a Pentium G3258, 4GB of RAM, a Z87 motherboard, a recycled AMD 7850 graphics card and a 500GB/8GB SSHD storage unit. Nothing special. I totally agree with most folks in the know around the net that an AMD quad core (either an Athlon 780K or an FX 4300) would have been an overall better choice, but there simply wasn't an AMD mITX motherboard that would fit in my budget. Factor in that my games of choice right now are Kerbal Space Program and Minecraft, both heavily single-thread bottlenecked games, the G3258 is no hardship and I should hit 4GHz with the stock HSF if I'm careful and don't push the voltage too ambitiously during overclocking.

Why on earth, after a month and a day, am I only expecting delivery tomorrow? It starts with my bank, Lloyds. While they have fantastic Internet banking services, their security systems are... somewhat lacking. Not that they get compromised or hacked or anything like that, nonono. The automated fraud prevention system they've put in place has a habit of spitting out false positives. My first attempt to place the parts order was brought to a screeching halt when my Visa card stopped working. On calling the bank, I was told it was an "automatic randomly selected security check" (I smell bollocks!) and that I was being put through to the fraud prevention department. After being asked all kinds of questions that don't provide any measure of security ("Can you name another street within a mile of the address your card is registered at?", "When were you born?", "What's your card number?" - steal my wallet, look on Google Maps, you're good) I was told I'd failed the test and I'd need to take photo ID into the bank and do another test. Took a few days to squeeze that around my working hours, but end of the week and the order was in. Yay!

It continues with compatibility issues between the CPU and motherboard. The difference between Z87 and Z97 chipsets is purely one of out-of-the-box support for all Haswell and Haswell-refresh CPUs, plus one or two other irrelevant features. While cruising for suppliers, I found a Z87 motherboard that perfectly suited my plans and was deeply discounted - enough to make up for the small fee leveed by the supplier to update the BIOS before shipping, effectively guaranteeing CPU compatibility for two-thirds the cost of even the cheapest Z97 board. And with 802.11ac wireless too! How long did it take to get around to performing this fairly trivial update task? Two weeks. Yeah, thanks.

The final delay makes all of this completely worth it. I like to make YouTube videos of gameplay highlights and generally funny moments, plus I have plans to do some streaming some time soon. I added an Avermedia LGP C875 - a USB-powered HDMI-passthrough capture box with it's own encoding processor, good for 1080p. As an extra trick, this unit includes an SDXC slot and can cap 720p60 in standalone mode - handy for just recording without a hit on game performance, capturing everything just in case something cool happens that I can't reproduce. Like yesterday when my re-entry vehicle came down and landed quite happily on top of a discarded booster stage that (somehow) survived faling to the ground from first stage separation. I wasn't recording. It'll never happen again. Never mind. So why has this added another week delay to my order? Because of supplier problems. I have no idea what's going on with this thing, but it's now back in stock with no price - just a "Call" note on my regular supplier product page. A quick browse through Amazon shows it's now selling for just over twice what I've already paid for it. Score!

So yeah, I've just had confirmation that it'll all be arriving at work tomorrow. About damn time!

NCommander decided, with almost no notice whatsoever, to stream playing Nethack over Twitch for 24 hours. I missed the first few hours, but watched pretty much the entire stream once I knew it was on. Now, I have absolutely no idea what's happening in Nethack - I can't read the interface, I've never played it before, if NC hadn't been commentating on the action the whole time, I would have been completely baffled. And yet, NC appears to be a complete natural as a Twitch streamer. His reactions to events in game, his explanations of the various mechanics he was dealing with, they were the perfect accompaniment and brought more than enough understanding of the drama unfolding in front of us.

I say us, he managed to attract 320 viewers to his channel over the 24 hour period he played for. And he didn't just play Nethack - he moved on through Minecraft, Papers Please, Super Meat Boy, back to Nethack, then even a quick round of Textris to cap things off. Along the way, we've seen some stuff you don't typically see on Twitch - the Nano text editor, web page updates and eMacs being installed through apt were all included in the footage. We got to hear the admin team chatting and shooting the sh*t amongst themselves. We've cracked endless horse puns. I even played an improvised drinking game.

Soylentnews really is a community. It's made of people with similar interests who can have a great time together, even from half the world away from each other, and as I listen to NC finally breaking out in yawns, I realise that a lot of people involved would be more than happy to do stuff like this many more times in the future. It may be time to sleep now, we're just calling the end now, but the footage will be edited and I hope I can do it justice. It's 4am here - I may not be quite as tired as our fearless leader, but I'm glad I've made it this far.

Well done NC - good night dude!

My sister came down from London from Aberdeen for the week to visit friends and family. I met up with her and my other half and we went to the pub and out for sushi. My sis is great - she cosplays and reads comics and watches more films in a week than I have time for in a year.

While chatting about some sexist questions she was asked in a job interview ("Are you planning on having children any time in the next year?") the conversation came around to sexism in video games. She related to me the story of a gaming couple she knows, husband and wife. One day he logged on to the multiplayer rooms of a fairly reputable and well known first-person shooter using her gamer tag.

On his own account, this guy was a well respected and experience player. His wife's account had a tag that marked itself out as the property of a female and had showed no prior experience. The result? A tidal wave of verbal abuse through the voice chat even before the guy did anything in game or even opened his own mouth. People left matches he joined. Lobbies he entered mysteriously emptied themselves. As an experience player, he knew how his fellow male players acted and moved around, but a woman in the same situation was made as welcome as a leper.

Made me think of my own experiences in World of Warcraft. I never played PvP and many people wondered why I pretended to be a woman in my guild. I had empirically discovered what a recent study (posted somewhere on this site) found out - in co-op play, nice boys are taken advantage of and abused, while nice girls are treated respectfully and politely. My own gaming experience went from frustration of trying to find a raid group that needed healers, often turned down for free spaces in case someone better came along, to being made a guild's primary raid group main tank, leapfrogging a number of other players who were waiting for the spot.

Who knows, maybe I was just a better tank than a healer and this is all just anecdotal, but it seems there's a big difference in perception and attitude between male and female players depending on whether the situation is competitive or co-operative.

Do you remember the first time you did a sudo'd "rm -rf /*" and nuked an OS? I did it today at the age of 33 on a Mac OS X 10.4 system heading for recycling. After all, it's not the kind of thing you just do on a whim, unless you're in the employ of certain groups within Russia and China. Maybe next time I do a reinstall, I'll do some messing around first because this was fascinating.

It occurred to the fellow tech I shared this experience with that neither of us had ever actually done it before and had never seen what happens. He had been assured by one of the older guys in our company that this entire enterprise couldn't possibly work and that the operating system would stop the process before it removed anything essential. Personally, I'd heard of this accidentally being done on exactly this version of Mac OS X and that the aftermath was as reported to be as severe as it gets, so we were both interested to see what would actually happen.

While Terminal did it's thing, we settled down to watch what was happening with a Finder window and Activity Monitor. The occasional message popped up about things that couldn't be deleted - symlinks to network devices and the like - and we made comments about the rate of hard drive reads and writes, the erratically rising free hard drive space report and the fact no error messages or problems seemed to be occurring. I say "seemed", it may have been that all sorts of shit was hitting the cpu cooling fan throughout this process but the error reporting systems would have been deleted roughly the same time as the rest of the OS, so perhaps it just couldn't tell us how badly wrong everything really was.

About 20 minutes later and almost everything had been deleted while the system itself was still running. What the remains were capable of was fascinating. I tried to look at what was left over in Terminal, but the ls command had been deleted. So had shutdown. And virtually everything else actually. Activity Monitor didn't seem to give two hoots that the copy stored on the hard drive had been erased, it just kept on faithfully reporting what was going on and didn't skip a beat. The wireless network connection was maintained. Finder kept on showing us what was around.

Issuing commands to an OS that only now exists as whatever was in the RAM at the time to browse around the area of the hard drive it was duplicated from just a minutes ago gave us quite an eerie feeling. I wish we'd had more time to play around with it, but we were at a client's office and I'd unplugged the mouse to use on another system for a few minutes while this was all going on and, oddly enough, it wasn't recognized again when I plugged it back in...

UPDATE: let me know what you lost to Microsoft's stupidity - details at www.nerdcore.org.uk

Having been a little under the weather over the last few days, I've been less than diligent reading my usual news sources and rather averse to playing Minecraft with a splitting headache. Today I discovered that Microsoft have been very heavy handed in dealing with a botnet they wanted to take down and have used a US federal warrant to seize 22 domains belonging to dynamic DNS server No-IP:

Soylent News Article: http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/07/01/1353230

Microsoft Statement: http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/06/30/microsoft-takes-on-global-cybercrime-epidemic-in-tenth-malware-disruption.aspx

No-IP Reply Statement: http://www.noip.com/blog

Microsoft's intentions are laudable - many companies would have decided that a botnet was "someone else's problem", shrugged and ignored it. Going after it themselves to protect their customers is a Good Thing (TM) and shows a good awareness of their responsibilities as a good corporate citizen.

Unfortunately, all of those sentiments and the good will they would have earned by doing this were dashed to the floor and smashed into a billion pieces when they heavy-handedly decided the best way to go after these scumbags was to close down the entire dynamic DNS service their C&C system was built on. Never mind the vast majority of legitimate users, never mind that No-IP has a long history of helping chase down and catch people doing exactly this, never mind the shaky international legal grey area they've just thrust themselves into, Microsoft themselves have just launched what could well go down in history as the biggest DoS ever deliberately launched by a corporate entity in history.

I live in England. In 2006, the Police and Justice Act was passed. Clause 40 was specifically crafted to make Denial of Service attacks illegal. Here's some of the relevant language from the passage in question:

"Clause 40: Unauthorised acts with intent to impair operation of computer, etc"

"A person is guilty of an offence if"..."he does any unauthorised act in relation to a computer"..."to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer"..."whether permanently or temporarily." (3, 3.1, 3.1.a, 3.2.b, 3.2)

"The intent need not be directed at"..."any particular computer"..."any particular program or data" (3.3, 3.3.a, 3.3.b)

"For the purposes of subsection (1)(b) above the requisite knowledge is knowledge that the act in question is unauthorised." (3.4)

"A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable"..."on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years or to a fine or to both." (3.6, 3.6.c)

From my position as not-a-lawyer, Microsoft has by definition in UK law illegally DoS'd my Minecraft server, a criminal act that could see folks go to prison.

1 - Can the Microsoft in the UK be held accountable for the actions of it's parent company in the US?
2 - Does the US Federal warrant count as authorization seeing as it's worthless in the UK?

So far, I've sent an email to the EFF asking for any advice they may be able to give on this matter, and I'd be interested to hear their take on what's going on here. I'm also preparing a letter to Microsoft UK about this, as well as currently setting up a blog (on my own server again, good work No-IP for bagging some new domains asap!) to detail everything that happens.

At some point I'll be asking for anyone else affected in to the UK to let me know who they are, what got taken down and how much of an impact it's had on their lives and businesses. Microsoft should be brought to account for the huge amount of trouble they've caused - I'd wager a lot of money that the seizures have caused far more damage than the botnet they sought to take down would ever have been capable of.

Microsoft must pay!

The PR company I'm currently contracting for hosted a conference this morning for folk in the group on the subject of content pollution. The area the presentations were made in was right next to the IT office - my boss is obviously considered far too disruptive to be allowed to be on the same floor as anyone other than the receptionist - and I caught a few of the points as I nipped in and out picking up equipment inductees.

All the presenters were PR people in good standing and the main topic revolved around dealing with the deluge of inconsumable content that swamps communication platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube every second of every day with "trod on dog turdz lolfail!" and videos of the aforementioned hound depositing the future foot warmer on the pavement while the cameraphone holding braindead idiot laughs hysterically. Then they got down to hints on how to actually do something about this. Hints like choosing a suitable medium for your particular message. Ensuring your writing style accurately conveys the motivation behind the piece. Make sure that content posted for clients will make some traction with the audience.

Effectively, a lot of people who think themselves very smart and creative have just realised the following, which when boiled down like this would have been far quicker to present, rather less self-serving and much more honest:

1) Idiots are Idiots
2) Diarrhoea is Diarrhoea
3) Writing, Photography and Film-making are professions

That's right you overpaid dickheads! People have been considering these problems online for decades; I was considering all this at university 15 years ago and it wasn't a new subject then. Considering that everyone at this conference was a PR professional working in an Internet-based arena, anyone who actually learned anything from any of the presentations should have been fired for incompetence the moment they nodded sagely as a bullet point appeared on the screen.

I did not see a thing in any of the presentations that wouldn't have been sneered at by any sixth form* teacher of the subjects under discussion. I never realised teachers got paid so much - they should do considering how much it seems you have to know to work in PR. It used to be said you had to sell your soul to work in PR, but the evidence now suggests the deal is actually for a large portion of your brain.

*high school