Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Coming In 2012

And for today’s news out of the left field, Valve is working on a new Counter-Strike game. Yep, the venerable shooter might soon get an update. Details aren’t exactly flowing at the moment, but it seems and feels as if this incarnation is going to be a niche game, aimed at the competitive gaming community. Still, it’s a new Counter-Strike game! Get excited!
Counter-Strike was released as a Half-Life mod 12 long years ago. It has since went onto be its own game and the most played title on Valve’s Steam gaming distribution service. It is and always has been, in a word, popular. A whole generation of gamers grew up on CS. Before Internet gaming blew up, Counter-Strike was the LAN party game. (and Starcraft) I had to retake a MSCE course because my time was spent tearing up Dust2 rather than studying. This was the FPS that defined team-based shooters. It was the Modern Warfare before Modern Warfare. The game never exactly disappeared. It took Valve making Team Fortress 2 free-to-play for the game to lose its top spot. But it’s time for a refresh.
Pro-gamers are the ones that spun-up the rumor mill after tweeting that they actually played the game at Valve’s HQ. The game is reportedly due out in Q1 of 2012 and like mentioned before, it’s not exactly clear if CS: Global Offensive is an update of CS: Source or if it’s a totally new game. It’s said to be built around a new Source engine, meaning the graphics should be from 2012 (or at least 2011). Dedicated servers, classic maps, and classic weapons are all said to be included within the new release. There will also be new weapons, gernades and modes. The matches are apparently 5v5 and designed for the eSport scene.

Windows 8 Has Completely Redesigned File Copy/Move Dialogs

We all love Windows 7, but who doesn’t want to find out more information about the upcoming version of Windows? Today Microsoft released some information about the new copy/move/delete dialogs. The primary changes are that all the copy/move actions are in a single dialog window, where you can pause or resume copy jobs if you want, or even check out some really detailed information. The rename dialogs have been changed to be much more useful…

How Secure are Your Saved Chrome Browser Passwords?

A common question about the Google Chrome Browser is “why isn’t there a master password?” Google has (unofficially) taken the position that a master password provides a false sense of security and the most viable form of protection for this sensitive data is through overall system security.
So exactly how secure is your saved password data inside of Google Chrome?

Viewing Saved Passwords

Chrome, includes its own password manager which is accessible via Options > Personal Stuff > Manage saved passwords. This is nothing new and if you allow Chrome to store you passwords, you are probably already aware of this feature.
A nice touch of minor security is that you must first click the show button next to each password you want to view.

 

 

While there is no restriction to access this screen (i.e. if you have access to the desktop where Chrome is installed, you can get to the passwords), there is at least user intervention required to view each password with no way to export them in bulk to a plain text file.

Where is the Password Data Stored?

The saved password data is stored in an SQLite database located here:

%UserProfile%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Login Data

You can open this file (the file name is just “Login Data”) using SQLite Database Browser and view the “logins” table which contains the saved passwords. You will notice the “password_value” field is unreadable because the value is encrypted.

 

How Secure is the Encrypted Data?

To perform the encryption (on Windows), Chrome uses a Windows provided API function which makes the encrypted data only decipherable by the Windows user account used to encrypt the password. So essentially, your master password is your Windows account password. As a result, once you are logged into Windows using your account this data is decipherable by Chrome.
However, because your Windows account password is a constant, access to the “master password” is not exclusive to Chrome as external utilities can get to this data – and decrypt it – as well. Using the freely available utility ChromePass by NirSoft, you can see all your saved password data and easily export it to a plain text file.

 

So it makes sense that if the ChromePass utility can access this data, malware running as the respective user could access it as well. When the ChromePass.exe is uploaded to VirusTotal, just over half of the anti-virus engines flag it as dangerous. While in this case the utility is safe, it is a bit reassuring to see that this behavior is at the very least flagged by many of AV packages (although Microsoft Security Essentials is not one of the AV engines which reported it as dangerous).

Can the Protection Be Circumvented?

Suppose your computer is stolen and the thief resets your Windows password in order to natively login to your installation. If they were to subsequently try to view the passwords in Chrome or use the ChromePass utility, the password data would not be available. The reason is simple as the “master password” (which was your Windows account password prior to them forcefully resetting it outside of Windows) does not match so the decryption fails. Additionally, if someone were to simply copy the Chrome password SQLite database file and try to access it on another computer, ChromePass would display empty passwords for the same reason explained above.

Cell phone use can lead to low sperm count says study

Any male cell phone users trying to conceive a child with your Significant Other? You might have better luck if you stay away from your cell phone during the period when you are trying to conceive, considering that a report in the Journal of Andrology says that using a cell phone can decrease the quality and quantity of a man's sperm.

The report, titled "Cellular phone and male infertility" discussed how an experiment used rats in special plexiglass cases with cell phones placed just .2 inches below the bottom of the cage. After the rats were exposed to the emissions of a cell phone 6 hours a day for more than 4 months, the rats sperm count dropped by 25%. At the same time, the sperm tended to stick together, reducing the possibility of  fertilizing an egg.

Further study needs to be done, says Dr. Joel Moskowitz. The Doctor is the director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley; he says that more research is necessary to see if certain phones or networks have less of an effect on the male reproductive system than others do. For example, no one knows if either GSM or CDMA models produce the most damage.

How do cell phones affect sperm? One theory is that when handsets are kept in a male's front pocket,. the phone warms up and affects the sperm's temperature in the scrotum. Sperm normally must be in a climate about 4 degrees lower than regular body temperature. Others say that the phone's RF-EMR penetrates a male's tissue and interferes with the body's own electromagnetic frequency, creating abnormal sperm, which is somewhat confirmed by the study with the rats.

Dr. Moskowitz warns that "Children, adolescents, young adults and especially pregnant women should take precaution and avoid keeping the cell phone close to their reproductive organs, in addition to their heads. These are the parts of the body that are highly sensitive to radiation. This is a wake-up call for those who tend to leave cell phones in theor front pocket."

The lobbying arm for the wireless industry responded. John Walls, the CTIA's VP for public affairs responded in an email to CNET in which he wrote that a number of agencies have looked into cell phone radiation and have found cell phones to not be a public health risk. Still, for those men whose sperm is damaged by cell phone use regardless of how it happened, and who put the "i" in iPhone, staying clear of their cell phone while trying to make a baby could raise the odds of success.

A guide to hassle free migration from Windows XP to Windows 7

Microsoft released Windows 7 in 2009 and over the two years a number of users have migrated from Windows XP to Windows 7. This year Microsoft released Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 Service Pack 1. This gives more concrete reason to migrate to newer platform from Windows XP. In this article we will discuss the benefits customers should look for while migrating to Windows 7. We will also take up the challenges faced by the IT industry and how migration to the newer platform helps solve most of the productivity and security challenges. We will further take stock of the different ways that will help organizations in deploying Windows 7 flawlessly in their enterprise environment. There are different ways to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7. You can use the following tools to successfully migrate from Windows XP to 7 Migration:

• Windows Upgrade Advisor
• Windows Easy Transfer
• USMT 4.0 & USMT 4.0 using Hard-Link Migration

These are some of the ways in which you can take the backup of the your data in Windows XP and after migrating to Windows 7, you can restore that data using any of the tools mentioned above. However, even before you plan for a migration, make sure that you have a data backup in case of an unsuccessful migration.
First and foremost thing is to validate if your machine is capable of handling Windows 7. You can visit Microsoft's website to identify the system requirements for Windows 7. The most preferred way to see the actual requirements and validate if the computer is capable of running Windows 7 is running Windows Upgrade Advisor.

Windows Upgrade Advisor
 

First download the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor. Once the tool is downloaded, run the tool and see the report that will give detailed hardware information and accordingly you can plan for Windows 7 Migration.

Windows Easy Transfer

Windows Easy Transfer is free tool that is designed to take the user data and settings as a backup and store it on external USB device. This is recommended if you are migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7 on same machine. If there is network connectivity between the old computer and the new computer then you can directly transfer the data over the network. Lastly, if you have Windows Easy Transfer cable then you can use it to transfer data from the old computer to the new computer.

Once you are done with the data backup using Windows Easy Transfer, you can install Windows 7 on the computer. After the successful installation of Windows 7, you can run the Windows Easy Transfer on Windows 7 and restore the user data and settings back to the same computer.

Things to note, Windows Easy Transfer:

• does not take the backup of Program Files
• does not transfer the data from 64-bit Windows to 32-bit Windows

PaperPhone can be rolled up, and its Android OS - navigated by bending

In what we see as one more step towards our dream bendable phone, researchers at Queens University Human Media Lab in Ontario, Canada, demonstrated a flexible display gizmo, whose software can be navigated by different bending gestures like flexing the screen's corners.

The inventors call this PaperPhone, but the concept can also be used in other portable devices, like tablet computers. "This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper. You interact with it by bending it into a cellphone, flipping the corner to turn pages or writing on it with a pen. It can be best described as a flexible iPhone", commented creator Roel Vertegaal, the director of the Human Media Lab.


From what we see in the pictures and video below, this thing is actually running some sort of Android, and the idea about flexing the screen around to invoke actions from the mobile OS can certainly come in handy - if you are wearing gloves, for instance. In the research paper PDF there appears to be a whole set of suggested bend gesture movements for various navigational functions, based on user input, so you can hit the source link for some bedtime reading on the matter.


While we are seeing some pretty rigid contraption to be attached to the PaperPhone, where presumably some of the non-elastic circuitry is, the flexible E-ink display, which transfers its shape-shifting into software commands, is a step in the right direction for our dream future of bendable smartphones. We'd still place our screen type preferences on Samsung, with its foldable AMOLED screen concept that doesn't leave a crease in the middle, but perhaps the bending gesture idea can co-exist in concepts like the Samsung Skin, coupled with those flexible transparent batteries as well.