via: Elinor Mills @ http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10027609-83.html

The in-game economies of virtual worlds are being hijacked by criminals who attempt to hide their profits through the exchange of virtual currencies, Dr. Igor Muttik, a senior architect at McAfee’s Avert Labs says in a white paper entitled “Securing Virtual Worlds Against Real Attacks–The Challenges of Online Game Development.”

McAfee reveals specific threats within virtual worlds, costs of vulnerabilities on the black market, and details how game developers can keep games safe for their users:

• Money laundering: The in-game economies of virtual worlds have been hijacked in many cases by cybercriminals attempting to hide their profits through the exchange of virtual currencies

• Economic value: As virtual items become rarer or more difficult to achieve, their inherent time value creates a fiscal worth in the game’s currency and real life

• User created content: A user-created code in Second Life caused a virtual terrorist attack

• Unforeseen consequences of in-game events: A virtual illness created for World of Warcraft wiped out entire servers of users when a flaw in its design allowed the disease to spread throughout low-level players

• Scripting holes: Sloppy scripting allows viruses to achieve persistency, auto-execution, and propagation

• Messaging spam: The internal messaging services of most online games have often been leveraged for spam by malicious users

• Phishing: One example is a spam campaign related to W32/Nuwar (also known as Stormworm) The bad guys created a web page offering “free” games. Links to it were widely spammed, but clicking anywhere on this web page led visitors to malware. Perhaps worst spamming runs were related to W32/Nuwar (also known as Stormworm), used a gaming theme.

• Data-Stealing Trojans: In a typical attack, data-stealing programs record user IDs and passwords along with the IP addresses or the names of the servers they use. This is done with a keylogger, which records all keystrokes. In more sophisticated attacks, the web forms are captured, as are mouse movements and even screenshots. The attacker can log into the compromised account and retrieve anything of value. Typically, when a gaming account is compromised, attackers will convert the objects they steal from online gamers into virtual currency—and then convert the virtual currency into real money.

The September campaign is a birthday initiative started by charity: water, a non-profit bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations. We’re asking everyone born in September to give up presents and ask for donations to build wells instead. We’re hoping to raise $1.5 million in one month and give 150 thousand people in Ethiopia access to clean drinking water. To learn more or sign up, go to borninseptember.org.

New works by WK INTERACT and ANTHONY LISTER @ Elms Lester Painting Rooms in London

ANTHONY LISTER, DARK FACE (left and right) 2008, mixed media on canvas, 28 x 35.5 cm each

WK-INTERACT, CRIME SCENE 2008, collage and painting on wood 275 x 183 cm

21st August - 20th September 2008
Opening hours: Tuesday - Saturday 12 - 6pm, Thursdays ’til 8pm

An exhibition of new work by French born, Brooklyn based WK INTERACT, who has recreated the urban landscape of New York for over fifteen years, with his frenetic paste up figures

and free spirited Antipodean ANTHONY LISTER, whose extraordinarily beautiful diptychs have a haunting undertone.

BOOK SIGINING

Accompanying this exhibition will be a beautiful 64 page, fully illustrated, limited edition book.

You are invited to an exclusive signing event: Saturday 23rd August 2008, between 12 - 2pm, when both artists will be in the gallery signing copies of the book.

@ Elms Lester Painting Rooms
1-3-5 Flitcroft St. London WC2H 8DH
t+44 [0] 20 7836 6747

Candle for Tibet

August 7th 2008 is the day before the opening ceremony of The Olympic Games in Beijing. On this day we aim to create the world’s greatest LIGHT PROTEST, when at least 100 million people from all over the world will light a candle and say YES to freedom in Tibet!

All you are asked to do is to light a simple candle
on August 7th at 9 pm in your own time zone.

Light the Candle at your home, workplace or in a public place. Put the candle in your Window, or on your desk, or anywhere else where other people will see it and hopefully do the same.

Our light protest will be seen by billions on TV screens all over the world on the day the Beijing Olympics open. We are not against the Olymipcs or anything else for that matter, we stand for Freedom. Period.

On the following day we will issue letters to every head of state in the world to tell him exactly how many people from his country wish Tibet to be free. We will also demand that each one of them will act for the freedom of Tibet.

We will also issue letters to the general secretary of UN, the government in Beijing and to other global organizations with data on global participation.

http://www.candle4tibet.org/en/pr3

David Horvitz asked artists with varying interests to create a thread of linking Wikipedia articles starting with something they found interest in, and continuing to other topics from links within the page. The results are a group of similar or dissimilar topics that are all linked together linearly and presented in book form as A Wikipedia Reader.

There are two initial purposes in the project. The first is to create a small game that explores surfing through information using keywords.

I wanted to explore how within a digital system categories of knowledge have become almost irrelevant in accessing the information they once contained. The Siege of Paris is no longer confined under World History, France, Franco-German or Franco-Prussian War 1870-1871 (DC281-326.5), as it is in the Library of Congress. It is just as much a part of French History as it is in the story of the elephants Castor and Pollux, the Paris Commune, things that happened September 19, 1870, and balloon mail lore. And it is just as immediately accessible from any of these places, as well as the possibility of ending up in a multitude of other diverse places. Instead of topics organized and accessed by a tree model going from larger branches to smaller ones (World History, French History, etc…), I picture a new model where there are no branches, but a pile of scattered leaves where one leaf overlaps many other leaves. Everything is interrelated. It always has been.

The second purpose is to present a list of ideas that reflect the interests of each artist. Ideally, one could be able to use these articles as supplementary to understanding the artist’s practice and work. The exception is with those who chose to use this opportunity to perform a conceptual game about the task itself (like with Brendan Fowler’s contribution).

Because of the nature of Wikipedia, many of these articles have been updated since the artists did their initial search. Some of these may even no longer be linked together. And, some may contain errors (grammatical, factual, etc…).

MYPOCKET discloses artist Burak Arikan’s personal financial records to the world by exploring and revealing essential patterns in the daily transactions of his bank account. These are the records that we usually keep secret, whereas financial institutions intensively analyze them to score our credibility. Archived on the site, the artist’s two years of spending history is analyzed by the custom software to predict future spending; these predictions sometimes determine his future choices, creating a system in which both the software and the artist adapt to one another. Influenced by today’s techno-cultural milieu, MYPOCKET presents a hybrid interface to a living physical/digital process.

The work is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site and was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.

McCain thinks offshore drilling will be the issue that wins him the White House. He has ads up now blaming Barack Obama for high gas prices, and touting drililng as a miracle cure for our energy woes. He is preying on people’s anxieties about energy prices — and it is working. If we don’t fight back now, and make sure people know offshore drilling is a gimmick that won’t work, we could end up losing the election AND the fight for clean energy.

Support our new ad “Gimmick” — it tells the truth about offshore drilling, and is a powerful counter to McCain’s attacks.

via: https://pol.moveon.org/donate/gimmickad1.html

A Critical Mass bicyclist is attacked by police in Time’s Square on July 25th 2008

The police officer in the video is 22-year-old Patrick Pogan and has been stripped of his badge and gun and the NYPD has “placed the officer on desk duty pending the outcome of a department investigation.”

The cyclist who was videotaped being body slammed off his bike in an apparently unprovoked attack by an NYPD officer during Friday night’s Critical Mass ride has been identified as Christopher Long, a 29-year-old resident of Bloomfield, New Jersey who works at the Union Square Greenmarket. His boss tells the Daily News that Long is an Army veteran and “mild-mannered environmental activist.” Craig Radhuber, 54, was riding behind Long Friday night and describes incident: “All of a sudden the cop picked this kid out and bodychecked him. I couldn’t believe what was going on. [The officer] body-slammed this kid off the bicycle so hard that he went from the lane to the curb.”

via: http://gothamist.com/2008/07/29/cyclist_thrown_from_bike_by_cop_is.php

‘O2′ 2007. Videotape loop, electric fan, Dimensions variable.

‘OOO’ 2007. 3 videotape loops, 3 electric fans, Dimensions variable.

Zilvinas Kempinas was born in Lithuania in 1969 and has been living and working in New York since completing his MFA at Hunter College in 2002. The past year has seen a phenomenal interest in the artist’s work, since his entire January 2006 show at Spencer Brownstone Gallery was purchased for the Margulies Collection, Miami. Standout shows at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and Art Basel Miami Beach have quickly followed and in March, the artist was highlighted by Art Review Magazine as one of its ‘Future Greats: 25 Artists You Need to Know’. Zilvinas is currently preparing for two major solo museum exhibitions: at the Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania in June, and Kunsthalle, Vienna in 2008, and will be Artist In Residence at the prestigious Atelier Calder, Saché, France from January-June 2008.

via:http://www.spencerbrownstonegallery.com/Artists/Zilvinas_Kempinas/Zilvinas_Kempinas.html

This tutorial is a work in progress as a detailed step by step method of creating meshes in C4D then using Bodypaint to create surface textures for use in Second Life. In the tutorial scene file below, the SL Prim Shader was provided to me by the kind people at MAXON and is a variation of the Shader created by Klaus Strifler. As a disclaimer I am not a hardcore 3D creator so if the terminology is off or if there are areas that could use further explanation please feel free to chime in to tidy this up. These are basically my personal notes I have assembled after many hours of trial and error in attempts to accomplish this.

Create a bezier spline:

• This should be close to the zero point in the scene so that when the lathe is applied it rotates around zero
• Chose Intermediate Points/Uniform under Object Properties in the Spline Object Attributes menu.

With the Spline object selected hold alt and chose Lathe NURBS

• In Lathe Object Attributes/Object
  • set Subdivision to 64
  • set Isoparm Subdivision to 4
•  In Lathe Object Attributes/Caps/Caps and Rounding
  • set Start to None
  • set End to None

With the Spline Object selected control click FFD

• Set FFD to roughly the size of your object w/ Grid Points X=6,Y=22,Z=22
• At this point you can edit the FFD to alter the shape of the object.
• Right click the Lathe Object in the layers menu and chose “Current State to Object” to transform the FFD Object into a Polygon Object.

Add the SL Prim Shader to the object 

Change worksapce to BP 3D Paint

• Click the BP 3D Setup Wizard
  • Select Materials and make sure there is a check mark next to SL Prim Shader then click next
  • I still need to gain more understand about this section, however… the only checkbox or radio button check is “Optimal Cubic Mapping” click next
  • Check Create Missing Materials, Create/Delete Channels, Color and uncheck Rescale Existing Textures & Automatic Mapsize Interpolation.
  • Texture Size = 1024 x 1024 click finish

Now you can paint on the surface texture

• In order to see what you are doing while you work double click the Shader and in the Material Editor uncheck Luminance.

When you are done its texture baking time

• Select the object and chose Render/Bake Texture from the main menu
  • In the Bake Texture Attribute/Tag window chose the name of the texture file you will be saving and set the file type to targa.
• For the sculptie texture make this 64 x 64px w/ pixel border = 0
• Go to Bake Texture Attribute/Options and check Luminance
  • Make sure to go back to the Material Editor and check Luminance
• Click the bake button and the .tga file is saved in the same directory as your sceen file.
• To to save out the surface texture follow the above steps again but check Color instead of Luminance and make the size 1024 x 1024px then bake
  • Note that there may be small white triangles in the output textures boarders. This issue will need to be investigated further
     

Both textures will need to be flipped horizontally.

• The 64 x 64px Sculptie texture will need to be rotated 90º CCW

SL_Sculptie_Mesh_SurfaceTexture.c4d.zip