Back in the deep, dark depths of 1994, Microprose released Colonization for the PC, the spiritual sequel to Sid Meier’s classic Civilization.  Much like it’s more famous cousin, Colonization is a turn based strategy based on the European colonisation of the New World (America), and see’s the English, Spanish, French and Dutch battle and negotiate their way to dominance with the native tribes and the monarchies back in Europe between the years of 1492 and 1850.  The ultimate goal is declare independence from the state and repel the expeditionary forces sent to destroy you when you do this.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year or so, you’ll probably have noticed that Bill Gates will soon be leaving the company he founded, Microsoft, to work on his philanthropic projects around the world. I guess he’ll also be doing some kicking back and relaxing, as building one of the biggest companies in the world, and in turn becoming the richest man in the world, probably isn’t all that easy.

And so it is that CNN’s Fortune Magazine has this excellent slideshow with some unseen images from Gates’s past, including the excellent picture above of him dressed as a superhero for a sales meeting. It also has audio narration from the man himself. It’s a great insight into the inner workings of the early Microsoft, and of course Bill himself.

Microsoft, and Bill, FTW!

Ars Technica are reporting today that a new Mac OS X trojan, known as AppleScript.THT, has been spotted in the wild. The trojan comes in the form of an executable that needs to be manually downloaded and run by the user, and is rumoured to be distributed via Limewire and iChat.

It takes advantage of a privilege escalation vulnerability in Apple’s remote desktop software, allowing an attacker to remotely run commands as the root (admin) user. The trojan can do anything that the root user can do, including some of these scary things listed by SecureMac:

…allows a malicious user complete remote access to the system, can transmit system and user passwords, and can avoid detection by opening ports in the firewall and turning off system logging. Additionally, the AppleScript.THT Trojan horse can log keystrokes, take pictures with the built-in Apple iSight camera, take screenshots, and turn on file sharing.

As Apple slowly gains marketshare we’ll more than likely be seeing more and more of this, especially with OS X’s perceived security advantage being an enticing target for hackers and virus writers. The moral of the story? Don’t run random things you find on the internet.

To be on the safe side, the vulnerability can be disabled by either enabling Remote Desktop Access (which makes it run as the current user, not as root), or by running this terminal command to remove all permissions from the Remote Desktop Agent, effectively disabling the service altogether. It’s a horrendous bodge, but it’ll work:

sudo chmod -R 000 /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app

SecureMac advises that anyone who thinks they may be infected should run their MacScan security product. Out of interest I ran it on my machine, and I can safely say that it’s still lovely and clean after 18 months of hardcore unprotected internet usage.

*Ahem*

Hot off the back of ‘Hammerhead‘ appearing in Rock Band this week, the cheeky Californian foursome have also revealed that more Offspring tracks are scheduled to appear in the coming months.  No dates have been announced yet, but the track’s in question are:-

• Come Out & Play (from Smash)
• Self Esteem (from Smash)
• Gone Away (from Ixnay on the Hombre)
• All I Want (from Ixnay on the Hombre)
• Pretty Fly (for a White Guy) (from Americana)
• The Kids Aren’t Alright (from Americana)

Great to see some classic Offspring appearing and not just the new stuff…  Although a bit of Jennifer Lost the War and Session would have been nice…

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While I was at the 24 Hours of Le Mans this weekend I had the chance to get my hands on crazy little gadget called Kangaroo TV.  For those not in the know, Kangaroo TV is a little handheld device that allows you to pick up video feeds, leaderboards and statistics, radio feeds and various other information on the sporing event you are attending.

The unit itself offers a 3.5 inch backlit LCD screen, capable of showing MPEG4 video, uses on the UHF frequency band to receive transmissions and runs on a version of Trolltech’s Qtopia linux.  The data is transmitted from a mast that is erected at the event and only has a second or so delay behind the sites main feeds.

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It’s like Sonic Adventure, but fast-paced as a Sonic game should be. Also, the environments look huge and detailed, and the graphics don’t look half bad either (from what I can tell by looking at this grainy YouTube video). If they’ve managed to work out a camera control system that doesn’t completely suck and have Sonic running into walls every five minutes, this may just be the best Sonic game made since the early ’90s… And by far the best 3D Sonic game ever.

Consider my interest in this game piqued.

Sonic Sonic Sonic.

In honour of this weekends 24 Heures du Mans this weeks Game that Time Forgot is the classic C64 racing game, Pole Position. Released by Atari in 1983 on the C64, 1982 in the arcades and almost every other format under the sun at the time, it was one of the first racing games released for home systems, and widely regarded as popularising the genre. It is a real old school arcade racing affair here, you race to complete laps before the timer runs down and the game ends, every completed lap extends your timer until you complete the required amount of laps to finish the race.

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I’m man enough to admit that the clip above, provided courtesy of YouTube’s magical video delivery system (which must surely be powered by witchcraft), made me cry.

When I was a child, I watched the Transformers film. This was back in the day before spoilers and previews, so I really didn’t know what to expect. I remember watching on in horror and sorrow as Optimus Prime, the leader of my beloved Autobots, died. Like the light in Prime’s eyes, a little part of myself also died that day.

Optimus Prime was dead. I cried. I burst into tears, I openly wept, I wailed. To the young me, Optimus Prime was the very epitome of Hero. He was valiant, he was brave, he always had a useful moral message to give and, more importantly, he was a TRUCK that changed into a ROBOT. I recall being very sad and looking forlornly at my Optimus Prime toy, looking into the face of a dead, er… robot. The young me fared badly, but I pulled on through after a few bleak weeks.

I seriously don’t think that the makers of the Transformers movie realised what a profound effect the death of Prime had on millions of people. Did He-Man die? No. Lion-O? No. What if this had happened in a franchise of girls toys? Imagine the outrage if the lead pony (?) of My Little Pony was butchered and turned into glue. Mental scarring for life. But it didn’t happen, whereas the death of Prime did very much take place.

So when I stumbled across the clip above and watched it in it’s entirety, I did feel a twinge of sorrow. The memories came flooding back and I did, for a moment, feel quite sad. Seriously, they KILLED one of the great characters of 1980′s cartoons, and the repercussions of that are clearly still being felt by me now. However, I am glad to report that upon watching the clip, now, in 2008, my adult self didn’t cry.

Well, much. But it makes me vulnerable and sweet and lovely to admit it, right? It’s good that I’m in touch with my fragile, emotional side, right? Guys? Oh alright, let the mockery commence.

Incidentally, this is my first ‘simulcast’ on both randomlinkage.com and teamteabag.com, so hello to everyone. I hope you can join me in my time of grief, or if not I hope you can humiliate me with amusing comments.

I love me some retro gaming on XBLA, I just think that there are some absolute stunners that should be cleaned off and given a second life on XBLA/PSN, and here is my personal top 10 games I want to see resurrected.

10. Desktop Tower Defense (PC)

One of the few flash games that has ever truly grabbed me, Desktop Tower Defense is a free to play game at Kongregate.com. The aim of the game is to build up a maze of different attack towers to filter the oncoming enemies into and hope the meet their doom before the get to the exit, very simple, very fun! The control system might be hard to port to a console, but hopefully they can find a way.

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Here we have the fastest police car ever designed.  Made by British supercar loons Caparo in conjunction with the Metropolitan Police Force, the T1-RRV is based on the original Caparo T1 (which has proven somewhat unreliable in tests) and is capable of 0-100mph in less than 5 seconds, boasts 575bhp and has a top speed over 200mph!  Of course, the car cannot cope with speed bumps, so would only be deployed on the M25 to catch people trying to speed away from the cops, and it has no passenger seat, so all they can do once they catch you is hold you at the roadside until more arrive to take you away.

Sadly, it is just a concept car and not likely to reach production…  But if it did, I wonder how many people would be signing up to join the Met?

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