News

Blizzard is in the news, again, and for some of the same reasons that they have been in the news since the launch of the third installment in the Diablo franchise. When it was launched Blizzard made the decision to require a constant internet connection to play the game. This includes the single player game and is a decision that is not coming back to haunt the company. In South Korea Blizzard has been fined (a paltry $7,000) for failing to refund customers over the infamous Error 37. This error popped up when Blizzard’s servers were overloaded. Unfortunately, because of the requirement for a connection to play the single player game people were unable to play the game at all.

About a month ago the CEO of Foxconn made a statement that Apple and Foxconn were signing an agreement that would lock out all competitors of the iPhone. It was an interesting because the comments came at a time when Apple was not even acknowledging that they were even working on a new phone (although everyone knew they were). Still CEO Terry Gou claimed that Apple was making a deal with Sharp for new panel technology and with Corning which would prevent Apple’s competition from even being able to get glass for their phones.

It seems that Gabe Newell formerly from Microsoft and also of Valve fame is not a fan of the direction that Microsoft is taking. In a recent interview he was quoted as saying; “I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space.” This is something that we have been saying for a while now and for apparently some of the same reasons that Newell has; Microsoft’s recent moves to the cloud (forcing the use of Microsoft services) and also with locking out and competing with OEMs and partners. These decisions on the part of Steve Ballmer are the way to ruin the open platform that the PC was for gamers.

About two weeks ago we saw a random tweet that seemed to indicate that Microsoft had added in technology that would allow for easier spying on Skype conversations. Right after this a tweet on the YourAnonNews feed seemed to indicate that the “bug” that was accidentally sending some conversations to random members of your contact list was related to the new “feature”. There was a much more ominous tweet about an hour later that claimed Skype had been hacked and the source code downloaded. Although we never were able to confirm the relationship to the bug and the reworking of supernodes to switch to Microsoft run servers, we did find out that the released code was not the official source code, but a posting of a decompiled version of the Skype application; still useful if you wanted to look for an exploit, but not the original source code to be sure.