ScummVM was born on September 17, 2001, at 5:57pm GMT+1. The program was meant as an interpreter that could play classic LucasArts point-and-click adventure games such as Monkey Island, Sam & Max Hit the Road, and Day of the Tentacle in a virtual machine VM.As for the name, “SCUMM” was the “Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion,” itself a reference to the first LucasArts game that relied on the companys proprietary game design tool. Expanded and revised through the years, SCUMM helped LucasArts build a huge line of popular adventure games in the 1980s and 1990s, but the DOS-based games became increasingly difficult to play on modern systems.ScummVM addressed this problem. Little did its earliest developers know, however, that it would grow far beyond its origins, taking on a life of its own as more than 100 people contributed a million lines of code over the next decade. Today, ScummVM has become almost a general-purpose adventure game interpreter that can run on nearly any architecture. How did an ever-changing group of volunteers manage to do it—and avoid being sued out of existence?

via Ars Technica.

Ross Douthat, the conservative New York Times columnist, and Dan Savage, the liberal sex columnist, recently had a Bloggingheads conversation about sex, lies, and videotape. It’s a fascinating…

Source: What the Right Really Thinks About Sex

by Lester Macgurdy The Portland Occupation stumbled upon a tactical innovation regarding occupying public spaces. This evolution in tactics was spontaneous, and went unreported in the media. On…

Source: Occupy Portland Outsmarts Police, Creating Blueprint for Other Occupations

Reblogged from Naked Security:

Symantec, the makers of Norton AntiVirus, has confirmed that a hacking group has gained access to some of the security product’s source code. An Indian hacking group, calling itself the Lords of Dharmaraja, has threatened to publicly disclose the source code on the internet. So far, there have been two claims related to Symantec’s source code. First, a document claiming to be confidential information related to Norton AntiVirus’s source code was posted on Pastebin. Symantec says it has investigated the …

If your security product’s effectiveness is undermined by the exposure of its source code, you’re relying security through obscurity, which is no security at all.

Reblogged from Corey Robin:

Ron Paul has two problems.  One is his and the larger conservative movement of which he is a part.  The other is ours—by which I mean a left that is committed to both economic democracy and anti-imperialism. Ron Paul’s problem is not merely the racist newsletters, the close ties with Lew Rockwell, his views on abortion, or even his stance on the 1964 Civil Rights Act—though these automatically disqualify him from my support.  His real problem is his fundamentalist commitment to federalism, which …

Excellent as usual.

Reblogged from Naked Security:

This Christmas, banks were visited by the ghost of malware past: an ever nastier version of SpyEye that manages to hide fraudulent transactions from unsuspecting victims. Security vendor Trusteer last year found SpyEye targeting transactions at major UK banks. SpyEye is a tweak of the Zeus crimeware kit that grabs web form data within browsers. This year, right before the recent holiday season, Trusteer found a hopped-up version of SpyEye attacking banks in the U.S. and U.K. The new Trojan, instead of …

Pretty scary. But also probably a bit alarmist.