ePwnage

Direct Download Link For Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3

This Saturday was exciting. I woke up at 8:00am to get a good two hours of World of Warcraft in before the start of the day. I attempted to login and kept getting a password error. “Hmm” I thought. I went to my email and noticed the following.

12:55am PST

1) This is an automated notification regarding the recent change(s) made to your World of Warcraft account <account name here>.

Your password has recently been modified through the Account Management website.

1:53am PST
2) Your Paid Character Transfer for the character <character name here> on the ARCHIMONDE realm has finished processing and is now ready to be finalized. This is for your World of Warcraft account <account name here>.

3) The character transfers listed below have been completed as of 4/26/2008. The character[s] listed will now appear in the new location and/or account selected and are immediately available for play!

- <character name here> - Level 70 Night Elf Hunter - now on realm: Ravencrest.

When I did get control back of my account I noticed that the guild bank was looted, characters striped, and my main switched on another server. The interesting oddity I noticed was the character that was switched to another server was logged out in an instance. This leads me to believe that Blizzard can’t track transaction in instances? Why would an account stealer (refuse to call them Hackers) login to an instance?

The scary part of the account hack was the fact that I still have no idea how they got my account information. I did have UI manager at one point but I did several checks on my system for Keylogger and haven’t had it.

Good Times…

I was somewhat disappointed to read this article posted on CNN. I understand how people and users get used to one program, but i think people need to give up a good thing for the benefit of new tech. Take for example, the coming analog signal conversion happening in the US for TV. The government, while late, is taking measures to free up more spectrum for other technologies. The same goes here. If everyone is going to rely on XP for the rest of time, then how can Microsoft and other vendors continue to grow and expand their own horizons. From the start, Vista has gotten a bad wrap, and rightly so. Do you honestly thing XP was solid pre-sp1? No WAY was it remotely close to stable, that’s why so many companies were still reliant on Win 2000.

I think people will eventually adopt Vista. In my opinion, Microsoft needs to market Vista better to regain user perception on how this operating system runs. What do you think? I also believe the marketing department at Microsoft needs to come up with fresh ideas fast!

I understand more than most about the crisis in China. Human rights are an extremely popular topic today along with Autism, but that’s besides the point. In London, France, and recently San Francisco protesters came out in full force to express their opinions on the matter. I want to play devils advocate for a second and say, are the Olympics really a place to express political views? Should we be focusing on the athletics?

I’ve already started hearing conspiracy theories about why airline companies are canceling flights. The best yet, was that it is an indirect protest to high fuel costs. The idea behind this theory? Canceling flights is actually more cost effective than flying planes.

Obviously the above theory is ridiculous but it’s fun to think about it from a business perspective. I would much rather they ground ALL flights and create the perception that these companies are looking out for our (consumers) best interest; safety.

Some Articles on the Airline topic:

• Summer Travels - CNN
• Flights canceled - LATIMES

Prior to 9/11 mostly only techy’s knew about text messaging while cell networks were down. This was due to messages being sent over emergency bands. Later, cell carriers added multimedia and other data to be passed over those same lines thus that old trick is dead.

Now the FCC will be approving an emergency text messaging system that would be used in the case of emergency by the government. Customers and carriers will be able to opt into the new system. Interesting it took them this long to introduce a good measure.

Link To CNN Article

CNN Article on the US recession

Above is a link to a decent article about the US recession. While it hasn’t been officially stated, many economists are calling for the government to declare it so we can move forward. Stocks have been declining, the US auto market has been hurting due to frankly, crappy cars, and more recent is the 80,000 jobs cut across our nation in the month of March. Up until now there haven’t been layoffs, now that there have been it’s time to call it what it is. A US Recession.

If anyone has stats on the average price of an American cars versus European and Japanese cars please comment.