Wishing you all a very Happy and Safe Christmas.

We wish that all your dreams come true over the holiday season. We wish you more presents than bugs in your favourite software. We also wish you a Happy New Year.

{mosimage}This morning I was woken up around 6am not by my boss, but GoDaddy. It seems that one of my domains, PBDB.net - Australia's Premier Paintball Database site, was being used in a phishing scam.



After rubbing the crust from my eyes and looking at the email GoDaddy had sent me, I determined that the phishers / hackers / script kiddies had used an exploit in Joomla, the content management system I'm using for PBDB. I was a version behind, because when I last tried to update it, Joomla suffered from the same problems as other CMS's suffer - poor upgradeability and hence was in version-limbo.



Anyway, back to this morning. Whilst GoDaddy were in my ear about shutting my site down permanently, I told them I had deleted the offending directory, which pleased them and GoDaddy then wished me to have a nice day. As if.



There are lessons to be learnt here. 1) Keep your software up to date OR 2) Get better software, which means I should spend more time working on Depot.

{mosimage}Updates to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare have been released. This patch addresses the issue reported by community member Uzi Kidding which now catches some files bypassing the pure client test.



In addition this update will set properties so that Anti-lag is always enabled upon map loads, an optimization for Sniper Rifle accuracy at certain distances (as well as ACOG scopes), as well a fix so text chat between rounds of multiplayer will no longer cut out at the end.


The 1.3 patch will also include all previous fixes from previous patches to v1.2.



You can download the patch here (AusGamers).

Here's a very clever music parody video using Billy Joel's "We didn't start the fire".