October
October 21st, 2010
Minecraft Multiplayer Brought Down by DDoS Attack
Minecraft multiplayer is down thanks to a DDoS attack which is apparently being carried out by a group of Minecraft fans who are dissatisfied with the way creator Markus Persson is handling the game.
Minecraft is a pretty amazing thing. You can build a full-scale replica of the NCC-1701D with it. You can make a working computer with it. You can recreate Andrew Ryan's underwater utopia with it. But what you can't do, for the moment at least, is log into your account or hook up to multiplayer servers. The reason is simple: The hub at Minecraft.net has been getting pounded by a DDoS attack since yesterday afternoon.
"I'm not sure exactly what's going on, but minecraft.net appears to be suffering some kind of attack, and is down at the moment," Persson wrote on his personal blog. "I'm working on fixing it."
October 26th, 2010
World of Warcraft Lore Nerd Wins Blizzcon
During the question and answer portion of a panel at Blizzcon, a young kid lobbed a lore question that Blizzard's lore-guru Chris Metzen couldn't handle.
There is an abundance of fans of World of Warcraft who take the lore very seriously. Not only will these fans belabor the details of the world history that Vice President of Creative Development Chris Metzen created, they can also sometimes catch him on a few points. During the Quest and Lore panel this weekend at Blizzcon, one such fan threw a question at Metzen for which he had no answer.
"Falstad Wildhammer will be on the Council of Three Hammers, but in the [Cataclysm] beta it's Kurdran Wildhammer and Falstad isn't in the game at all," the fan began. "What happened to him?"
Metzen then asked, "Isn't Falstad dead from Day of the Dragon?" referring to a novel set before WoW's timeline.
The kid replied confidently, "No, he survived, and in fact he was the leader of Aerie Peak in vanilla Wow through Wrath of the Lich King."
October 27th, 2010
Woman Blames FarmVille for Killing Her Baby
A Florida woman who pleaded guilty to shaking her baby to death in January said FarmVille made her do it.
22-year-old Alexandra V. Tobias entered a plea of guilty to to second-degree murder today in the shaking death of three-month-old Dylan Lee Edmonson. She told investigators that she became angry with the infant because he was crying while she was playing FarmVille on Facebook; she claimed she shook the baby, had a cigarette and then shook him again, adding that he may have hit his head while she was shaking him.
Tobias will be sentenced in December and although guidelines call for 25 to 50 years in prison, Judge Adrian Soud gave no indication as to the length of the sentence he'll impose.
