Ultima creator Richard "Lord British" Garriott recently suffered the second break-in in two years to his Austin-area property maintained for special events. Last month, some nine or more trespassers entered Garriott's property, consumed or stole $5,000 worth of alcohol, took pictures of their misdoings--and forgot to take their camera when they left.

Speaking to Shacknews, experts on idiotic crime have projected that, had the camera not been left on the scene of the crime, the photographs in question would have been posted to a blog, a MySpace account or, depending on the age of the perpetrators, a Facebook profile.

Travis County police have released the photographs found on the camera in the hopes that the public can help identify the miscreants.

"We were debating whether we would even report this to police until we discovered the digital camera sitting on the porch of one of the cabins broken into," said Garriott. "We were joking to ourselves about tomorrow morning, when they wake up with a hangover, they're going to wonder where that camera is. This is one of those Darwin-style kind of awards, where people leave the self-incriminating evidence behind at the scene."

Garriott appeared to be less troubled by the February event than he was by his untimely 1997 assassination in the fantasy realm of Britannia.

Individuals with information on the identity of any of those pictured in the released photographs are encouraged to call (512) 472-TIPS. Police are offering rewards of up to $1,000.

The Associated Press brings us an interesting report on a huge security risk most (myself included) take for granted: photocopiers. Turns out, many of the copiers manufactured within the last five years store information on unsecured and unencrypted hard disc drives, making identify theft a breeze considering telephone survery revealed "55 percent of Americans plan to make photocopies and printouts of their tax returns and related documents."

Some copier makers are now adding security features, but many of the digital machines already found in public venues or business offices are likely still open targets, said Ed McLaughlin, president of Sharp Document Solutions Company of America.

"You actually have a better chance at winning 10 straight rolls of roulette than getting those hard drives on copiers rewritten," he said.

Then again, the article also declares "industry and security experts were unable to point to any known incidents of identity thieves using copiers to steal information," so that's cool. Except for the part where all those junior identity thieves out there just had a really good idea.

So the big fuss lately in the music world is the slight hope that music companies may finally give up on the idea of DRM when it comes to music purchased on the internet. According to this open letter by Steve Jobs published today Apple is all for ditching DRM making music purchased on iTunes or anywhere else playable on all digital music players. A couple of very interesting stats are provided:

Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. [...] In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

In theory the idea of DRM has always made business sense and made an easy sell to companies with products that could be sold and transmitted over the internet. In practice its almost always a different case. Remember the good ol days?

Scientific journal Nature released details this week of an experiment in which a video game was controlled by a paraplegic subject using nothing but the power of his mind. The research is working towards enabling people afflicted by paralyzing conditions to exhibit independent control of actions such as operating a wheelchair and eating. This week's results were achieved not with scalp-mounted electrodes, as has traditionally been the case for such experiments, but through an actual chip implanted into 25-year-old Matthew Nagle's brain.

Other researchers have achieved similar results using devices that capture brain waves through electrodes on the scalp. But some scientists think implanted devices hold the greatest promise because they pick up signals directly from the region of the brain responsible for movement.
..
A wire the thickness of a strand of vermicelli carried the impulses from the brain to a half-inch-tall pedestal attached to the skull. From there, an external cable transmitted the signals to a computer.

Nagle played games such as Pong and Tetris, and while his reflexes were not quite on the same level as a gamer using traditional controls, he was able to defeat various lab technicians in Tetris, and achieved a mastery of the mental method after four days of practice. (Thanks romulan!)

Well, it doesn't look like there's going to be tons of real gaming news at CES, but the heated battle between Sony-backed Blu-ray and Microsoft-backed HD-DVD--which to some is a battle related to next-gen consoles or desktop PCs--is in full swing. Today, Sony and various film studios announced a slew of Blu-ray movies to be released in upcoming months, while the HD-DVD group announced a pricing range for its first HD-DVD players.

Sony announced that BD-compatible players will start hitting shelves this Spring, though there was surprisingly little mention of PlayStation 3 as being part of that first push. Previously, Sony had been positioning PS3 as the main initial spearhead of the Blu-ray effort, aiming to get Blu-ray into the homes of people who already planned to buy a PS3. With Sony's announcement this week that the company will not be showing PS3 at CES or making significant announcements about the machine, as well as recent scattered rumors that PS3 might be taking longer for Sony to hammer down than the company planned for, it may be looking like the oft-repeated Spring 2006 launch date isn't such a sure thing anymore.

In terms of Blu-ray itself, Sony Pictures of course had the biggest lineup of movies, with 20 movies for the Spring lineup including titles such as Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Robocop, Sense and Sensibility, XXX, Desperado, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Kung Fu Hustle. Interesting, Sony also plans to add Java-based games to certain discs by summer. Lionsgate and Fox also announced exclusivity to the Blu-ray format. Paramount and Warner Bros. plan to support both Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Universal supports HD-DVD exclusively.

Toshiba, the primary player in the HD-DVD standard, announced that its first HD-DVD players, which are backwards compatible with DVD, will go on sale in March at two price levels: $499 and $799. Sony has not yet announced definite prices for its standalone players, but they are likely to be in the $1,000 range. Sony noted that prices for actual BD-ROM movies will be higher than standard DVDs, but not significantly so.

Philips today announced that visitors of CES will be able to check out the "Entertaible", a tabletop gaming platform featuring a 30-inch touchscreen LCD screen. Using the Entertaible you can mix playing pieces with any kind of traditional board game programmed into the device. The initial plan is to get the device out to restaurants and casinos and such, but a consumer version might eventually follow.

"Entertaible offers the means to reinvigorate established board game classics," comments Gerard Hollemans of Philips Research in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, who leads the research team that developed Entertaible. "However, in the longer term, Entertaible could be used to invent brand new games offering unprecedented levels of user interaction -- games that would never become predictable or ever quite 'feel' the same twice, however often you played them."

In January and February, Microsoft will be hosting a series of free webcasts teaching the basics of 3D game development using C#. It's aimed at beginning programmers, so don't feel too intimidated.

If you have always wanted to develop cutting-edge video games but are just getting started, tune in to our 11 free webcasts. Learn the concepts of 3-D video game production as instructors from DigiPen Institute of Technology demonstrate the key stages of developing a game engine using Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition, a new development environment for beginner programmers. Learn how to handle backgrounds, objects, and collisions. In addition, these webcasts provide a primer for handling artificial intelligence in your game, along with multiple levels and additional character functionality.

View our library of on-demand webcasts to learn more about 2-D game development by working with the top-down shooter game Star Trooper, and also learn about community-based Project Hoshimi.

Bonus: Attend any four live MSDN webcasts and submit evaluations during the month of January and you will receive an MSDN Webcasts superhero action figure. Want to learn more? Meet the Source Fource!

Sweet, the Source Fource!

Can't find any games you want to play right now? There's a lot of good stuff out at the moment, so you're probably looking in the wrong places, but that's another discussion. If you know the sort of thing you do want to be playing, you could always try making your own game. Download Squad has the first part of a two-article series, "How To: Create Your Own Game Company." The article, or at least this part of it, is actually more focused on tools for prototyping and creating a game than it is about forming the actual company itself, but there are also links to useful documents regarding design and business aspects.

While it's a little cost prohibitive to start developing Xbox 360 or PS3 games from your bedroom, let's not forget games like Roller Coaster Tycoon and Alien Hominid went from humble beginnings to financially successful franchises. Although you'd have to spend hundreds of hours developing AAA titles, there are some ways to get slick games up and running quickly. I'm going to show you a few ways to do just that.

It covers a variety of game engines, from those requiring little to no programming experience to those suited to seasoned coders. There are also various graphical tools suggested. The author promises to cover the logistical aspects in the next installment, including payment methods and paths to online and offline distribution. The internet has of course no shortage of people looking for teams to make mods, but with the tools given in this article you might be able to actually prototype a design on your own so you have something to show for yourself. If that's the sort of thing you might enjoy, give this a read.

Well, it doesn't have the "S" part of FPS quite yet, but Benjamin Joffe has developed a browser-based JavaScript "3D walker". It requires a browser that supports the Canvas tag, such as the 1.5 RC 3 of Firefox, as well as Safari and Opera. You can run and jump around a small maze but can't yet shoot despite the presence of a gun (lifted from Far Cry); it plays quite smoothly on my machine. There's not much besides the game on the page at the moment other than a brief indication that more is on the way.

Alot of people have suggested that I make the gun shoot or other equally redundant points. I only made this a couple of days ago so all in good time.

This game is being developed but doesn't have much direction at this time, to make a suggestion email me. The gun is copyright by FarCry but is only here temporarily until I model the weapon set.

For now it's a fun little novelty--and since it's in JavaScript, yes, you can see all the workings by simply viewing the page's source code. It'll be interesting to see if the author, or anybody else for that matter, takes it much farther.

So, now that Thanksgiving has passed, it's time to to buy all sorts of gifts for the holiday season and its various upcoming gift-giving opportunities. If you're a gamer (and I think I can hazard a guess that you are), you might be looking for some nice consolidated lists of the good stuff that 2005 brought, some of which you may well have missed the first time around. If those buying gifts for you are not gamers, some of these links may have to find their way into their email inboxes, or appear in hard copy form on their desks...

CNN/Money's Chris Morris has his Video Game Buying Guide: 2005, and for good measure he's also written up the Confessions of a Black Friday Shopper. GameSpot has its 2005 Holiday Gift Guide, covering every current console and type of gamer, and IGN has a 2005 Holiday Buyer's Guide. Bytesector has its 2005 Gaming Holiday Gift Guide.

Those of you with little gaming tykes may want to check out 1UP's Best Family Friendly Games list ("We should point out that these are not 'kiddie' games, just great games that you can enjoy with your mom and your nephew," the site says reassuringly) and the GamerDad Holiday Guide, which is categorized by age group; GamerDad is quick to note that its staff plays every game recommended.

Did you manage to pick up an Xbox 360, but you've got tons of extra cash and no HDTV? Well, HD Beat's HDTV Buying Guide: Xbox 360 Edition is for you.

HardCOREware has a PC Hardware Shopping Guide up for the PC enthusiast, rounding up a list of LCD monitors, speaker sets, computer cases, and cooling solutions. If that's not enough to satisfy your case-buying hunter, ThinkComputers has a Holiday 2005 PC Case Buyers Guide; there's also a Holiday 2005 Memory Buyers Guide. XYZ Computing's Holiday Wishlist 2005 is filled with PC-related and general gadgety treats. If you simply want a no-nonsense, by the numbers method of comparing hundreds of PC video cards to try and narrow down your search for GPU goodness, try Rojak Pot's Desktop Graphics Card Comparison Guide. If you're looking to treat yourself or someone else to a reasonably-priced whole PC, try TechSpot's Mid-Level PC Buying Guide.

I'm sure there are plenty more guides out there, but these should do you pretty well for a very large start. Good luck with the shopping--or convincing someone else to shop with these lists in mind!

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you celebrating the holiday, and Ha Ha Ha to those of you who don't get to eat mind-boggling amounts of wonderful food today. Anyway, today Gamastura has a Day in the Life of Andy Thomason, a game programmer for dev tools studio SN. The article seems like it would be geared somewhat towards programmer types, but it doesn't actually get technical. Thomason basically goes through a list of his daily activities punctuated by interesting asides about his job and the industry in general.

The game industry is a fiercely competitive world. Developers who assume that faster console hardware will give them an easier life are usually very disappointed. It is very easy for another developer to sneak in and produce something a lot slicker. The faster the code goes the more art content a game can have, which means that game architectures have to be revised every year to stay in the game. Game technologists are constantly trying out new game architectures and math techniques, and these are the subject of my current book project.

For something that does get a bit more technical, feel free to peruse How Xbox 360 Works, from the generally fascinating and addictive HowStuffWorks.com. The site has featured similar articles on other consoles, but this one does a better job of explaining the fundamentals of the CPU and graphics systems. It goes into the 360's processor architecture of three double-threaded cores and a bit into the ATI GPU. Unfortunately, after that, it sort of turns into rehash of marketing lines about all the awesome stuff that's bundled with the system, but I found it a pretty good read until then.

See, this is what I love about MMOs. Remember that plague that broke out in World of Warcraft recently? The way that unexpected events such as that play out in virtual worlds is a fascinating thing to me, and apparently it is to National Public Radio as well. NPR has a feature up comparing the reactions of players in-game to the reactions of real-world disaster victims. Blizzard's lead producer on WoW also speaks. He notes that, while the plague was unintentional, Blizzard was very intruiged by the player reaction and might want to introduce a similar more controlled event.

According to the co-director of the Tufts Center for Modelling of Infectious Diseases, accurate simulations of disaster events are extremely hard to run, because people's reactions tend to be very different than they actually would in a completely unexpected situation. She would like to cooperative with Blizzard, so that if the company ever introduces an unannounced plague-like event, she can observe the results and interview players to guage reactions and understand why they acted the way they did. Blizzard representatives said they were open to the prospect of working with her.

Thanks to Arkbender for the tip.

There's an article up by the enigmatically-named Spanner entitled The Back O' The Arcade. The author takes a nostalgic and evocative look back at the arcade scene in England in the late 80s and 90s, recalling a time when dingy hole in the wall arcade establishments were populated by young school kids congregating out of a shared love for games.

There were kids in these arcades whose socks were a substantial part of their shoe leather and had their hair cut by their sister with a knife and fork, but give them the price of a single credit and they became rich men and kings alike. They were revered among their people for their prowess at making that single coin last longer than their melancholy trek home in the rain.

When I see a video game show on the TV, populated by affluent, sharply dressed 20-somethings talking their insipid talk while walking a 30 second walk on some photo-realistic 3-D football simulator, I remember those down and out 10-year-olds who stood on a milk crate to see the screen as they thwarted the final boss on R-Type with cramping knuckles and aching fingers.

It's a good read for longtime arcade gamers (or longtime gamers of any type, really), offering a brief but fully-realized picture of a certain subset of gaming culture that for the most part has passed with the dominance of PC and home console gaming.

Ok, this isn't really news, but I found it a pretty fascinating read. Engadget has posted an article presenting a hypothetical BBS from 1985. It goes through then-current technology in cell phones, gaming, computing, and so on. Obviously the stuff comes off as pretty primitive, but one thing I found pretty striking is that for the most part the technology hasn't fundamentally changed. It's all smaller and faster (and a bit smarter) these days, but I wasn't really blown away by how much "different" the things we use now are. Agree/disagree?

Japanese upstart Nintendo's finally announced they're importing their Nintendo Family Computer (Famicom, as they call it over in Japan) to the US. They even gave their box a slick redesign! The new Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) isn't top-loading anymore, but features a totally crazy spring-loaded insertion mechanism (you'll have to try it to believe it) and even non hardwired controllers. Unfortunately they made it so you can't play those bootleg games on the NES anymore, but this hot 8-bit piece of machinery might just compete against the Amiga and Commodore... if it's lucky.

So, who else dialed into BBSes? I remember the phone numbers used to be listed in newspapers and computing magazines. I also remember running up some pretty atrocious phone bills...

Well, as many of you may or may not know, yesterday was Steve's 40th birthday. For hitting the big four-oh, I decided it was high time to embarrass him again.

Happy Birthday, Steve!

There's some interesting legal scuffles going on right now that just might one day change the way we do things around here. Check out this ABCNews article which details "deep linking" and some folks who are fighting it. It's difficult to really summarize, but lets just say that it could make directly linking to articles that are a few subpages down something we have to ask permission to do each time. Thanks Kaiser note: There was an earlier story about this on Wired Thanks indeego

And finally, it means people should take little for granted as long-established copyright law continues to collide with the Internet. When is a link a copy, and when is it just a link? "We don't know how copyright law applies to the Web," says Von Lohmann. "When you visit a Web page, you are making a copy in your browser. Nearly eight years after the Web [became commercial], we still don't have a good legal analysis of that."

This story at Reuters has confirmed what I'm sure many of us have suspected for years, anyone under 25 is a mutant. Playing videogames and using cell phones has made these youngsters freakish beyond belief.

New research carried out in nine cities around the world shows that the thumbs of people under the age of 25 have taken over as the hand's most dexterous digit, said The Observer.The change affects those who have grown up with hand-held devices where the thumbs are used for keying in text messages and emails.

Stuff like that is just cool/interesting ya know? I like to ponder how humans will evolve over the coming years/centuries. I bet we get sexier.

Ok I thought this was some kind of fake after reading the first message about it, but get a load of this latest so called legislation you can read about on USA Today , this HardForum post, this BayArea article, or this AnandTech post. It's the SSSCA and well, get this:

The SSSCA, among other things, will make the following illegal:
* Assembling a home-built PC.
* Using a non-secure computer (ie, a computer built before the would-be implementation of the SSSCA) on a network.
* Widespread development of open-sourced (non-copyrighted and “digitally unsigned? software.
* Use of open-sourced software (essentially the entire software platform for the UNIX and Linux operating systems, on which Computer Science research relies).
* University and corporate research on systems, debugging, security, and watermarking.

Sounds like a winner! Thanks James St. Don

This one will amuse you guys a bit. The folks at TRUSTe, ePrivacy Group, MSN, and DoubleClick are all putting together a "trusted senders" group of advertisers that they are hoping will not be classified as spam by ISP filters when they send advertising emails to you. The angle being that people hate spam for fear of fraud, and not because it's cluttering up their inbox, especially those poor guys who pay-per-minute on dialup and get those advertisements with attachments. Good one huh?

"Our approach is to rise above the traditional reactive e-mail filters and identify the good (e-mails) so they can be elevated," Schiavone said. "It benefits everybody along the e-mail chain. Senders agree to abide by the privacy principles independently verified by Truste. They have agreed to make themselves accountable to consumers."

Oh yeah, check this story out. 1400 pieces of spam email per person per day in 5 years. Thanks /.

The latest in wacky make money on the internet ideas, Yahoo is launching a pay per search service. Apparently the searching is not just standard internet searching though. It includes some premium document search thing. Here ya go:

According to the site, Yahoo plans to charge consumers between $1 and $4 to retrieve files from a specialized database of some 25 million research documents culled from 7,100 publications, including academic periodicals. Yahoo also expects to offer a "Premium Discount Search" option of 50 documents a month for $4.95.

Seems kinda odd, but I guess researchers will be in to this? No idea how much valuable information is in that database of documents though, or if those documents are freely available outside of the Yahoo search.