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Half Life is one of those games, along with Doom and Castle Wolfenstein, which helped define an entire genre of games. It gave us a new type of hero as well, the crowbar toting MIT PHD Gordon Freeman. Since the games introduction fans have waited for each new chapter in the life of Dr. Freeman. Sadly we have never really gotten the “third” chapter in Freeman’s life, but there has always been the modding community to help keep u going. Back in 2012 a group called Black Mesa Source revamped the game from beginning to the Lambda Core level to the delight of many fans.

There is a common belief that Linux and BSD operating systems are, by their nature, much more secure than anything Microsoft has ever released. The problem with this belief is that it is simply not true. Linux, BSD and Windows can all be made more secure than they are by default, but there is work involved and there is a tradeoff of ease of use when you start locking things down. Many web hosts running Linux or BSD do not really have the time or available man power to really lock their host systems down which leaves them vulnerable to a number of attacks.

In the last couple of months we have talked a lot about AMD and the direction they are trying to move to. Most of what we have reported is not good news and centers on the fact that AMD’s R&D/production budget is dwindling to the point where they cannot push multiple projects at one time. They have had to consolidate their efforts to the point that they do not really have products to bring to market to make them more money. An example of this is the lack of a new GPU for the normal launch cycles. AMD does have some products in the pipeline, but these might not be enough to win them back any marketshare from Intel or NVIDIA.

Over the weekend there was a lot of talk about how Windows in particular is vulnerable to a flaw that is linked to SMB. This flaw could allow someone to grab user information by forcing a redirect to a malicious server using the SMB protocol. The way it works is pretty simple; if you give someone a URL that begins with the work “file” then Windows (and some other systems) will think that you want to use SMB to connect to a file share. If the server that the link (URL) points to uses even basic authentication then you can try and tempt a user to put in their own credentials and grab them during the exchange.