First words in the new Star Wars teaser: “Real sets. Practical effects.”

Implied: “A writer. A director.”

The publicity push is starting for the upcoming game No Man’s Sky (link goes to Wikipedia, because there’s even less information on the official site). Having watched the E3 videos and the first two of the IGN videos, as far as I can tell, here’s what it’s about:

Every planet in the galaxy is ruled by robots who will kill you for defending yourself from hostile aliens or attempting to exploit local resources. They permit non-invasive "exploration" of their property, even allowing you to gain credit for "discovering" and "naming" their planets and creatures, although they're sure to react negatively to names like Cocktopus and Titsworld.

The demos certainly look gorgeous, but they make it clear that any “unknown” star system you “discover” will instantly have a space station, a claims office, and a fleet of killer robots that will hunt you down for strip-mining or for shooting native life, even accidentally or in self-defense. That kind of undercuts the whole “explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations” theme, even if it does mean that you can immediately jump back into the pirate-shooting and galactic-trader parts of the game.

I don’t know if it’s going to be fun, and the graphics suggest it will require serious hardware, so my initial interest in the concept is kind of waning.

[Update: nailed it.]

Bring it on.

Just please don’t start the deluge until after Halloween; I don’t want to get stuck with fifty pounds of leftover candy again.

So I decided I’d seen enough of the kid’s face in the previous post, and trolled through my Downloads folder looking for something to replace it. After I finished admiring the many nude and lightly-clad young women, I remembered saving this:

(St Patrick Catholic Church, Miami Beach, FL)

But I didn’t remember where I’d gotten it, so I did an image search by filename, and got this:

more...

This may be the most profound statement ever made on social media.

George Takei decided to show off the Left’s core values again. Apparently it’s still true that hatred, intolerance, and bigotry are not only acceptable but praiseworthy, as long as you’re on the “right” side of every issue.

I think I speak for every network manager and privacy advocate in the world when I say, “fuck you with a rusty crowbar”.

For those who don’t know, one of the features in the Windows 10 beta (and already in the field in Windows Phone 8.1) is WiFi Sense. The short version is, if you share your wireless access with someone, you’re now potentially sharing it with everyone on their contacts list from Outlook.com, Skype, and even Facebook if they link their accounts.

And the network owner can’t stop them from sharing the password, or even find out that it’s happened. MS offers only one way to prevent this from happening, and that’s changing your network’s SSID to contain the string “_optout”. (This article notes that Google has their own magic string to prevent your wireless from being mapped by their cars, so the new hotness is “_optout_nomap”. No doubt Apple will jump on the bandwagon as well, and next year it will have to be “_optout_nomap_nocandyfromstrangers”).

They claim it will only give limited access to all these strangers, and not let them see anything else that’s on your home network, but that requires that we not only believe that there are no security holes in a Microsoft product, but that the raw password is securely stored in three different online services and every stranger’s device.

The only real defense is to use WPA2 Enterprise authentication, which requires a Radius server. Unfortunately, a lot of consumer-grade wireless-only products won’t do that at all. Last time I tried to get a Kindle to use it, it detected it but never actually sent the username/password combination.

[Update: Microsoft’s FAQ for this misfeature includes the statement:

It can take several days for your network to be added to the opted-out list for Wi-Fi Sense. If you want to stop your network from being shared sooner than that, you can change your Wi-Fi network password.

Crowbar, Rusty. Rinse and repeat.]

[Update: just tested a Kindle Paperwhite against a WPA2 Enterprise wireless running TTLS/PAP user-based authentication. It sent an empty password, so no, you can’t protect your home wireless from Wifi Sense if you plan to connect common small devices to it.]

…is the following typo in a discussion about the likely next step, legalized polygamy: “polyarmory”.

I hereby demand nationwide legal recognition for my polyarmorous relationship. In public. Open or concealed.