WTF?

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Why the Megaupload shutdown won’t stop piracy  

January 21, 2012 in WTF? | 26 comments

Yesterday the FBI shut down website megaupload, a storage website which was known for facilitating copyright infringement, but which was also used by thousands of users as a legit way to store files (those files are gone, and if you didn’t have a backup, you’ll probably never see them again).

Yesterday I read the indictment (the document that states what the prosecutors believe Megaupload to be guilty off), and one thing has been bothering me since: The Entertainment industry have in their hands, for the first time, a global-scale case study showing how much people are ready to pay (either through subscription or advertising) for digital content in today’s world, but in their arrogance will probably not draw any useful conclusion out of it. Read the rest of this entry »



America’s FBI takes down hundreds of thousands of legal files  

January 20, 2012 in WTF? | 44 comments

Today the American FBI took down Megaupload and its sister sites on the ground that Megaupload was intentionally designed to promote piracy. I could have decided to not care, until I realized we (the /talk community) host hundreds of perfectly legal homebrews there, independent games and creations that are now potentially lost forever.

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PS3 scene: Kakaroto shows the true face of Mathieulh (yay, drama bits inside!)  

December 17, 2011 in PS3, security, WTF? | 31 comments

First of all, thanks to Abdullah who pointed me to Kakaroto’s recent twitter posts, as I’ve only been following the PS3 scene distantly recently.

I love drama

Let me say that I love drama in the console hacking scene. Not that I chose to love drama, but I remember that my first “excitement” in the PSP scene was to understand who the hackers were and how they figured things out and made stuff work. One thing that really shocked me (probably because I’m a developer myself and like to be recognized for my work at least at much as I like my salary) is how often “normal” people (the users) would forget about who the real hackers behind a given homebrew/hack/discovery were exactly. I’ve been internally boiling several times when I saw some people kept thanking “Dark Alex” for every possible hack on the PSP, even when he wasn’t involved at all… (another one that I really hated was the “thank you pspgen” I could see once in a while during the HBL era…not pspgen’s fault, but we have to live with the fact that users don’t really care and/or are dumb).

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Sony wins a legal battle against their users  

December 15, 2011 in PS3, WTF? | 19 comments

Some of you might remember that Sony removed a feature of the PS3 last year, the possibility to run linux (known as OtherOS)*. You might also remember that this pissed off some of Sony’s users, enough that some of them filed a class action suit against Sony (for those of you unaware of the concept, this basically means several customers gathered in order to sue Sony, and no, don’t quote me on this, I am not a lawyer and can just grasp the basic concepts of the American legal system).

The case lasted almost a year, and ended up being dismissed. Quoting the judge:

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Yinlips, the 88$ Chinese fake PS Vita clone  

December 13, 2011 in PS Vita, WTF? | 24 comments

I can hate Sony to my guts for their crappy software and their locking policy, but we have to admit their hardware usually rocks, for a reasonable price (ok, maybe not the Vaio, but again, that’s mostly because of the crapware they put in it). The same can probably not be said of this Chinese “replica” of the PS Vita, named the “Yinlips”.

Look at all you can do with the Yinlips! Amazing!!!

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Japan sells edible(?) Dragon Quest monsters  

November 29, 2011 in WTF? | 15 comments

If you’ve ever been to Japan, you know that in many aspects, it’s a crazy country. I’ve been living here for a while, but I’m always happy to see that I can still get surprised once in a while. Today a new convenience store (Family Mart) opened close to my workplace, and they were selling something…interesting.

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Meanwhile, in the real world…  

November 24, 2011 in 3DS, Gaming, release, WTF? | 14 comments

Doom3 Open Sourced

Yesterday ID Software released the source code of Doom3 under the GPL License. Those of you who feel that the Vita would love to run a port of Doom3 should start digging in the thousands of lines of code of this beast even before the vita is out. “Sadly”, it’s C++, so don’t expect to port it smoothly to the Playstation Suite :)

Samsung VS Apple – Fight!

Samsung released a commercial mocking Apple’s fans.  Read the rest of this entry »

6th sense, the movie in which Bruce Willis is actually dead from the start but you didn’t know it  

November 13, 2011 in WTF? | 22 comments

Today, I’m going to talk about some Japanese translations… that’s not entirely off topic, because this subject came to me as I was playing Uncharted 3, so there, still related to Sony and gaming news.

The Japanese are well known for their shameless use of foreign languages, especially English. Now, don’t get me wrong, what’s fun is not that the Japanese can’t speak proper English (I would be lame to criticize that given my own level in Japanese), but that many companies in Japan don’t even take the two minutes necessary to make sure that the English sentence they plan to print on hundreds of thousands of advertising posters actually makes sense…

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Is DJGodman (only) a faker?  

October 14, 2011 in CFW Pro, psp dev, security, WTF? | 203 comments

There’s one thing me and the mods at wololo.net don’t like, it’s fakers, people who pretend to be hackers, but are just tricking gullible people.

There’s one thing we hate even more, it’s GPL infringement.

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Gizmodo don’t like geeks?  

September 1, 2011 in magic, WTF? | 13 comments

I was randomly browsing the web yesterday, and found this article that was getting lots of hype on Gizmodo (I usually don’t read these generic gadget websites, but the title caught my attention)… You’ve got to read it to understand, but basically this Gizmodo editor thinks she’s too good to date John Finkel, a professional Poker and Magic:the Gathering player, because, well, he’s a nerd, and who wants to date a nerd? That article is so wrong in so many ways, that Alyssa Bereznak (the blogger who wrote this article) quickly became a meme…

Is it a joke to welcome the announcement on Magic’s latest expansion? Is it an attempt from Gizmodo to create some buzz (in which case, well done, it’s working!), or is that person dumb enough to think it’s a good idea to publicly talk about her dates on a major website, and on top of that, complain about nerds on a gadget website (where she works, what tech-oriented company hires a person who doesn’t like Magic :P )?

The author of the blog article complains she didn’t google for John Finkel and should have, in order to find out he’s a nerd before going to a date with him. She should also probably have googled a bit more to find he’s making hundreds of thousands of dollars playing Magic, before bashing him for being a nerd.

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