A recent discussion with mouser about the need for more games that focus on hillarity over skill brought it to my attention that there has been very little mention here of one of my all time favorite games -- Kingdom of Loathing.

The Kingdom of Loathing is a web based role playing.  The gameplay is primarily single player, as your character proceeds to acquire equipment, food, booze, and meat (the game's currency) as means to progress on various quests.  In that regard, it's pretty standard as an RPG.  Where it's truly uncommon is its character -- from the character classes to the areas to the enemies, everything is an extremely absurd parody of something. It's funny, irreverent and generally fun.

There are also some multiplayer aspects to it, as you'd expect from an online game.  The economy is purely player driven, most items in the game able to be bought and sold player to player.  It features a chat where players can communicate in real time, clans for players to team together to help one another out and some simple player versus player mechanics.

Whether you just sit back, relax and play it casually or delve deeper into the economy or making faster, more effecient "ascensions", there's plenty to do.  New items are added constantly and new quests and areas are added every now and then as well.  I've been playing KoL for a little over two years now and am still amused enough by it to continue playing for years to come.  If you do sign up, look up "Terrae", that's me!

This sounds awful..  Anyone with a better background in security want to jump in and tell us how big a deal this is in practice?

Almost two years ago in 2006 Debian decided to clean up their OpenSSL implementation. They found a few lines of code that were causing Valgrind and Purify to complain about access to uninitialized memory. Without a major investigation into the purpose of the suspect lines of code they were simply removed.
...
For the purposes of all the OpenSSL algorithms there was no deficiency. Encryption and decryption and hashes would be calculated correctly. The problem was that the PRNG used for generating keys by the OpenSSL library had been crippled when those critical lines were removed back in 2006. This was not discovered until just this week when Luciano Bello discovered that without those lines the only ‘random’ data used to seed the PRNG was the PID of the OpenSSL process. On many Linux systems the PID is limited to a positive signed 16 bit value. This means there are only 32,767 possibilities. When new keys and certificates were generated by OpenSSL they relied on this number to provide all of their entropy.

http://www.avertlabs...-cleanup-gone-wrong/

Dare we say that the Coding Horror blog has been a little weak lately.. But today's blog essay was on a subject that I have been thinking about recently.  I was talking to DC member Gothi[c] about collaborating on an open source project, and i raised the possibility of using a custom license that would discourage or disallow forking.  So I thought we might use this as a jumping off point to talk about the issue of "forking":

Forking is incredibly difficult to pull off. It is a painful, but necessary part of the evolution of open source software. Just as in real evolution, I suspect that most forks die in vast, nameless numbers, before they become strong enough to engender any forked progeny of their own. Forking is the absolute bedrock of open source software -- but it is also not a path to be chosen lightly.

http://www.codinghor...archives/001117.html

Samer at Freewaregenius.com has a nice long piece up today:

The article will present an overview of 19 free turn based strategy games (empire building or war games). The games are: FreeCiv, TripleA, Stick Figure Strategy, Weewar, Eight Kingdoms, PhpDiplomacy, C-Evo, Advanced Strategic Command, Project W, Conqueror, The General, TriChromic, FreeOrion, People’s Tactics, Lgeneral, Crimson Fields, 1848, The Battle for Wesnoth, and Risk.

http://www.freewareg...ategy-and-war-games/

Today on cybernetnews is a little tutorial on how to set up the freeware program LocatePC which basically sends you an email every day with information on the computer's internet connection, to aid you in recovering it if it is stolen.

Give a hardy welcome to LocatePC. First and foremost it will keep you informed of your computer’s whereabouts by sending you an email either on a daily basis or anytime the IP address of the machine changes. In the email it will give you all kinds of details that can help you track the PC’s location, such as the ISP it’s connected to and IP address of the machine.

http://cybernetnews....computer/#more-12507

Well, Gizmo's Tech Support Alert site has revealed it's new look and structure, and it's quite dazzling.

In addition to looking great, it's been completely wikified, with the ability for users to add comments to each of the "best of" freeware categories.

I do take issue with some of the choices (best freeware screenshot program, cough cough), but it's clear that a great site has just gotten better, and gizmo's site is one of the first places you should go when looking for a freeware program to do any given task.  Well done Gizmo!

There's even a freeware forum on the site now, though it's a bit quiet since things are just getting started over there.  I'm sure it will pick up soon.

http://techsupportalert.com