Wow the weekends packed with news!
Doom The Movie!
Well its official. IMDB has an entry for Doom the movie.
Following in the foot steps of works such as Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy, it is now confirmed that Doom will be next video game to be turned into a theatrical event. According to Universal Pictures, "Doom" will premiere on August 5, 2005 in US movie theaters with international releases planned for the same month.
A brief description of the plot indicates that the movie will maintain the "hyper-kinetic, kamikaze style" and take the viewer to the far corners of the galaxy with "a fully-realized vision of a dark and disturbing future". The set and story will be based on the latest version of the game, Doom 3.
Written by Dave Callahan the movie is produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura and John Wells ("The West Wing", "ER"). Actors are not named yet, but are rumored to include The Rock ("The Scorpion King") and Karl Urban ("Chronicles of Riddick").
OS X Virus (:SHOCK:)
I've been working with OS X the past couple of months for our Uni project with Monash University (basically redoing this existing site written with Apple WebObjects to a rearchitectured one in PHP which is under wraps). Naturally our client uses OS X and he's proud of it (we tease each other whenever possible about the superiority of each others OS) but one thing he always tells me is that mac is virus free... well heres a dent in the plastic....
It doesn't seem to be too destructive although it does delete some UNIX commands and modifies prefs for a couple of others. It will gather all password info on your machine. For now, lets call it "Opener." My system was a responding a bit slowly and a check of my /var/log files showed that they were _all_ empty and had the same mod date. The Activity Monitor showed a process called "john" eating almost an entire processor.
Some further looking showed an unknown startupitem in /Library/StartupItems/ called "opener". The executable file is a well-commented bash program. It scans for passwords for every user, processes the hashed info using your own Mac, turns on file sharing, and puts all this stuff into an invisible folder called .info on each users Public folder. It does much, much more but it's important that a warning get out quickly.
Dave Taylor: You might notify people that the fastest way for them to see if they've had this little bugger show up is to run:
$ sudo ls -l /Users/*/Public/.info
A good result is:
ls: /Users/*/Public/.info: No such file or directory
If you get anything else, it's time to pop into /Library/StartupItems and see what's in there.
Please make sure you try out the commands to ensure you are not affected by this.
CherryOS Update
My earlier blog entry about CherryOS got some interesting comments about CherryOS being a rip of the opensource PearPC project. Well now according to the CherryOS developers we will be able to purchase CherryOS on the 25th of November and actually be able to download a trial around the same time. Read the full statement on their site.
Windows XP Release 2 sometime Next Year!
Some called it “XP Reloaded” others called it “Release 2” and I even heard some say XP Service Pack 2 was the second release (eh?) but Microsoft will indeed deploy another release of Windows XP (hands up those who remember Windows 98-> Windows 98SE edition?) sometime next year. Unlike the 98 double release this will include some enhancements in security and maybe (just maybe) some parts of Longhorn (which is still atleast 2 years away) for early use. Steve Balmer mentioned the release at the Gartner Symposium but didnt (unfortunetly) give out release dates or mroe details of whats to be expected... In either case.... i'm excited (like Big Kev!)