Battle.net Hacked

Battle.net Hacked

Blizzard’s multi-platform, multi-game network known as Battle.net was hacked this week. They make the same “we’ve found no evidence that financial information such as credit cards, billing addresses, or real names were compromised” that normally follows a security breach at a high profile company, but we have no reason to believe otherwise. Encrypted passwords and such were, however, taken and they recommend you change your password for other services (email, etc) if it’s the same:

“We also know that cryptographically scrambled versions of Battle.net passwords (not actual passwords) for players on North American servers were taken. We use Secure Remote Password protocol (SRP) to protect these passwords, which is designed to make it extremely difficult to extract the actual password, and also means that each password would have to be deciphered individually. As a precaution, however, we recommend that players on North American servers change their password. Please click this link to change your password. Moreover, if you have used the same or similar passwords for other purposes, you may want to consider changing those passwords as well. “

 

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Steam to Sell Non-Game Software

Steam to Sell Non Game Software

Last month Joystiq showed a leak in the Android Steam app that listed various categories such as Education, Audio Production, Design & Illustration and more. Valve already sells a few non-game related items in the Steam Store such as Indie Game: The Movie, but nothing like Excel or Photoshop.

“The 40 million gamers frequenting Steam are interested in more than playing games,” said Mark Richardson at Valve. “They have told us they would like to have more of their software on Steam, so this expansion is in response to those customer requests.”

That’s exactly what they plan on doing with rolling out the latest expansion to Steam by allowing software titles to be submitted to Steam Greenlight and if approved, will be able to be purchased through the Steam Store and can take advantage of many Steamworks features, such as easy installation, automatic updating, and the ability to save your work to your personal Steam Cloud space. This doesn’t come as a total surprise with comments like Gabe telling Adobe they should run their next version of Photoshop like a F2P game and them telling him “We have absolutely no idea what you are talking about, but it sounds really bad.

I’ve got mixed reactions because I don’t always care to have all my eggs in one basket and I already use Ninite to install most of my “necessary” software like Foxit, Firefox, Adobe Flash, etc. I also hope this means that more software I need will be compatible with Linux due to all the steps Valve has taken recently to expand into the free OS, although this is just speculation for the time being.

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Bukkit for 1.3.1

Bukkit 1.3.1

The latest Craftbukkit recommended build is out for 1.3.1, so if you’re running a Minecraft server and have been anxiously awaiting Bukkit to release, you can now update your server. Several plugins will more than likely need to be updated but most of the main plugins are already updated and ready to go. We’ll be updating our server tonight with Craftbukkit and will try to work on getting the server public (not whitelisted). Grab the latest version here and check out bukkit.org for the latest plugins.

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