David Wong of Pointlesswasteoftime.com looks at the impending arrival of the next line of games consoles – the PS3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Revolution – and asks, “what do gamers want from this seventh generation of consoles,” as he presents “A Gamers’ Manifesto“.
Twenty very amusing points that really need to be addressed.

“The Sony Playstation 3 is going to cost $465.00.

In the desolate economic climate of post-apocalyptic 2006, I’m thinking that’s going to be a lot of money. Now, it’s true that at E3 Sony was boasting the Playstation 3 could crank out 1.8 TFLOPS, or 1.8 trillion FLOPS. If that many FLOPS were piled together they would fill the Grand Canyon, assuming each FLOP were the size of a muskrat. So what do gamers want from all that money and FLOP? Just ask them.”

Dan Huard and Kevin Rose, the dynamic duo behind the superb three-part videozine dubbed “TheBroken“, have started up a new videozine project called Systm. The first episode was released Monday, and is all about building a “warspying” box, a mobile scanner designed to search for signals from wireless cameras.

With the WMV version clocking in at around 150mb, the video has been released in several versions, for which there are a multitude of torrents.

Large Format

• Xvid
• Windows Media
• Theora
• h.264 quicktime 7 (Mac Only)

Small Format

• Xvid
• Windows Media
• Theora
• PSP
• h.264 quicktime 7 (Mac Only)

If you enjoyed any of the releases from TheBroken, you’ll love this. Rose and Huard are now apparently working full time on it, so stay tuned for more videos soon.

If you’ve recently upgraded to the latest version of MSN Messenger, version 7, you may have noticed the huge amount of new bullshit features that have been packed into this most recent release.

Even Patchou, developer of Messenger Plus!, has wussed out and removed the most basic of annoyance-removal features from his product – the tweak that removes the MSN ad banner at the bottom of the main MSNM window. The ad banner wasn’t enough, however, and Microsoft have seen fit to add even more bloat that few will use, including even more tabs in the main window; emoticon “packs” (for when your poorly enunciated SMS-speak just isn’t enough); and “winks” and “nudges” – at your disposal to “enhance your conversation”. Thank you, MS, for not trusting me to be able to convey my meaning on my own, and providing me with these ridiculously childish features to annoy the fuck out of my contacts. Contact not responding? Have they dared to look at another window for a few seconds? No matter, in MSNM 7, you can spam them with sound and light until they are forced to open your window again.

Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of MSNMSGR Ghost, a most excellent little program which modifies the MSN Messenger executable, and allows you remove as much annoying garbage as you wish.

Tick the boxes as you desire, then click the Go button; select the directory in which your MSNM program resides (usually \Program Files\MSN Messenger) and voila. The bullshit is conveniently swept under the rug. Until the next Messenger update of course. Sigh.

I was introduced to this little program not long ago – PeerGuardian. In short, it’s a little program that sits in your system tray, and prevents communication with any hosts that happen to be on certain blocklists.

You define which blocklists are used – you can select from blocklist.org’s plethora, including lists of known “bad” IPs from P2P networks, government IP space, music industry IP space and so on. You can also create your own lists.

The idea behind the program is to offer a little more protection to net users, more specifically P2P network users, from evilly-inclined P2P users, spyware servers, the RIAA, The Man, etc. No substitute for a proper firewall/AV setup, but a helpful tool nonetheless.

I’ve been using it for a few days, using only the “Spyware”, “P2P” and “Government” blocklists, and it seems to perform pretty well. On Limewire I got a bunch of hits listed as “Fake file sharer,” a file from which did indeed turn out to be several minutes of silence, and it does pick up the odd BitTorrent hit even when my client isn’t running.

For the truly paranoid, an extended blocklist has been compiled which purports to block “74% of the Internet” – I tried it out, and while it did leave me with a lovely fuzzy feeling of being cut off, I found that MSN wouldn’t connect, and so on, so I stopped using it.

Overall it’s a pleasing application. Auto-updates, unobtrusive operation, pretty icons. And geek power.

The Register runs an article today on potential insecurities of The Freenet Project.

Freenet is designed to be a fairly anonymous P2P network, where each node can relay data for others as well as receiving for itself. Data is cached locally in an encrypted file, and, supposedly, it is not possible to tell the difference between data that has been relayed to other nodes, and data that has been requested by the local client. This is supposed to offer deniability to users found to have naughty files in their caches.

However, The Register found that using a combination of publicly available node uptime data and file requests, it was possible to determine whether a file had been downloaded by a node, or just partially relayed. Bye-bye deniability.

True, in order to be effective, the person doing the detective work has to have physical access to your machine, but in Patriot Act-crazy America, that’s not such a remote possibility from a law enforcement point of view.

The issue is set to be remedied in the next release of Freenet, scheduled for later this year. The Freenet News page also mentions The Register’s piece.