Adobe will be top target for hackers in 2010

From NetworkWorld:

Adobe Systems' Flash and Acrobat Reader products will become the preferred targets for criminal hackers in 2010, surpassing Microsoft Office applications, a security vendor predicted this week.

"Cybercriminals have long picked on Microsoft products due to their popularity. In 2010, we anticipate Adobe software, especially Acrobat Reader and Flash, will take the top spot," security vendor McAfee said in its "2010 Threat Predictions" report (PDF).

Hackers usually target the most widely used products in order to achieve the maximum impact. For a long time that has made Microsoft their primary target. But the software giant has tightened security in its recent OS releases, leading hackers to look for additional targets.

McAfee also predicts more sophisticated attacks on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, Mozilla's Firefox browser, Apple's Quicktime media player, and Google's Chrome OS, with HTML 5 serving as a new vehicle for infiltration.

Monday Music XIII.5: the Midnight Riders

This Christmas song is so good, even the baby Jesus loves it!

UNAUTHORIZED EDIT: The hell he does!

Modern Warfare 2 the most pirated game of 2009

From TorrentFreak:

'In just five days of sell through[,] Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has become the largest entertainment launch in history and a pop culture phenomenon,' Activision CEO Bobby Kotick said commenting on the game’s success. This is, of course, reflected in the number of pirated copies being traded on BitTorrent.

With 4.1 million unauthorized downloads of the PC version alone, the game more than doubles the achievement of last year’s 'winner' Spore. Modern Warfare 2 leads both the PC and Xbox 360 lists, by a landslide.

The overall trend across all platforms is that, unlike last year, all of the games are 2009 releases. What makes Modern Warfare 2’s chart-topping even more impressive is that this has been achieved after just two months of availability. We further see that the figures for the most downloaded titles have more than doubled compared to last year, equaling the growth in uTorrent users.

That's IWNET: fail at everything, and fail hard.

Monday Music XIII

Only links today.  Two of the three videos had "embedding disabled by request" - which is a completely asinine thing to do - so you'll have to just click on the text.

KT Tunstall - I Want You Back

Living Colour - Solace of You

The Smiths - What Difference Does It Make?

Left 4 Speed 2

L4D2 mapping & add-on tools released

Additional details are available on this L4D blog post.  Here's the short version:

To play custom maps, you'll need to download the Left 4 Dead 2 Add-on Support application from your Steam client's "tools" tab.

To make custom maps, download the Left 4 Dead 2 Authoring Tools from the same location.

EDIT: Hammer still takes a long, long time to load.  So be ready for that.

Speak with your team

For the time being, IT( )E has migrated over to Teamspeak 3 (beta). Our Ventrilo server is still there, but we want to test TS3 for a bit to see which platform is better. So far, the sound quality in TS3 seems superior, but it also uses more system resources (~26,000K vs. ~9,000K).  Here's our connection info:

Server - ts35.gameservers.com
Port - 9107
Password - donkey

Yeah, we made Rogue Warrior...

...but don't hold that against us.

From Now Gamer:

When it was pointed out to [Rebellion's lead designer] Alex Moore that both Shellshock 2: Blood Trails and recent flop Rogue Warrior might influence gamers' feelings towards the upcoming Aliens vs Predator, the developer insisted that they were worlds apart.

'I thought this question would come up and I suppose it’s something you’ve got to ask,' Moore said in an interview with X360 magazine. 'I would hope that people can see that Rebellion’s roots are in AvP. We’ve put an awful lot of time and effort and investment into AvP. Just the devotion to it and the fact that… I’ve got to be so careful what I say.'

AvP had damned well better be "worlds apart" from Rogue Warrior. It's nice to see the tacit admission that the latter was crap, but the question remains: if you value your reputation - if you take any pride in your work at all - why would you even think about releasing a game like RW?

The games of 2009: a list of lists

A. Wired's top 5 multi-platform games

 1. Left 4 Dead 2
 2. Assassin's Creed 2
 3. Batman: Arkham Asylum
 4. The Beatles: Rockband
 5. Borderlands

Read More

BC2 - new game mode video

This developer walkthrough showcases an original gametype for Bad Company 2: "Squad Deathmath." The mode pits up to four teams against each other, providing fortifications for defense-minded teams to occupy, and a single armored assault vehicle at the center of the map to focus combat.

The featured map is Laugna Presa: a jungle environment with lots of elevation changes.

Watch