Month: September 2008

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SpringSource to stop providing maintenance releases for free

Is this possibly the latest Java community buzz? SpringSource Announces Enterprise Maintenance Policy.

Mats Henricson asks What is SpringSource doing with its license? and while the SpringSource Enterprise Maintenance Policy FAQ states that there is no license change, the SpringSource Enterprise Maintenance Policy sure is a change. They summarize it quite consise themselves:

After a new major version of Spring is released, community maintenance updates will be issued for three months to address initial stability issues.  Subsequent maintenance releases will be available to SpringSource Enterprise customers. Bug fixes will be folded into the open source development trunk and will be made available in the next major community release of the software.

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Download Civilization IV: Colonization torrent

This is a link to a file called Download Civilization IV: Colonization torrent that contains the full press release and this is the most relevant part:

In Colonization, players lead one of four European nations on a quest to conquer and rule the New World. Players will be challenged to guide their people from the oppressive motherland, discover the New World, and negotiate, trade and fight with both the natives and other nations as they acquire power and fight for freedom and independence.

As a complete reimagining of the 1994 classic, Colonization is a total conversion of Civilization IV that combines Civilization’s addictive "just one more turn" gameplay with all-new graphics and features that add more depth to the franchise. New features, such as a brand-new interface, improved diplomacy options and the included modding tools ensure that Colonization will be the next great title from gaming’s premier strategy game developer.

Please note that this is not a download or torrent of Civilization IV: Colonization but a test to see how many people try to avoid paying for their games and end up on this page.

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New Windows PC and monitor ordered

I usually pride myself with not falling for "special offers" but when I found this €450 computer and monitor package I could not resist.  The new hardware is an HP Compaq dx2450 Microtower PC and an HP L2208w 22-inch Widescreen LCD Monitor. It’s not high-end stuff, but I think it should work nicely for iTunes, Civilization Ⅳ and some adventure games. Maybe I should start managing my photos in Aperture and do some video editing in Premiere Elements too!

The big question is: should I run Windows XP or Windows Vista?  Or dual-boot with both? Maybe triple-boot with Ubuntu?

Update From the list of software above it might sound like I should be running a Mac instead, but the games and hardware price tag do not fit the equation… 🙁

Update 2 Well, Aperture is only for Macs, right? Maybe I should get Lightroom?

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The WordPress Pharmacy Hack

A number of WordPress blogs around the world have been hacked (or cracked, whichever word you prefer) and a "pharmacy" subdirectory have been injected below the WordPress root. I know of these victims at the moment:

azin.se
benniboedker.dk
www.blog-celeo.com
www.digitalrights.gr
www.toscaninelmondo.org
www.vdomck.org
www.yerbastory.pl

The injected web pages are advertised by fooling Yahoo! search to make a weird GET request to a totally different web site, resulting in log lines like this:

74.6.17.184 – – [29/Aug/2008:04:03:50 +0200] "GET /\"//example.com/blog/pharmacy/spam.html\" HTTP/1.0" 404 15145 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; //help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"

I really recommend every WordPress user to add at least one extra level of protection to their wp-admin subdirectory. It’s not safe.