According to a story on CNN, White Wolf Publishing, creator of a number of MMO games including Vampire: The Requiem and Mage: The Awakening, was recently hacked. The hackers threatened to release customer data on the Web unless the company pays an undisclosed sum of money. Rather than pay up, White Wolf have decided to go public and released a statement on their website.

Like many other well-known companies of the last few years, White Wolf was the target of an attack by international hackers on Sunday December 11th. These hackers are attempting to extort money from us with the threat of posting user data to the internet. We have no intention of paying this money, and are in contact with the FBI in an attempt to bring these criminals to justice.

We are choosing to make this public so that our users and fans can take any precautions needed to protect themselves. We are recommending that if you have used your White Wolf user password as the password for any other services you use on the internet, that you change them immediately.

In response the hackers emailed individual subscribers, offering to sell them the information for US$10. Head over to White Wolf’s website for more information.

Technorati Tags: Identity, Identity Theft, Online Game

This has been mentioned elsewhere already, but I’ve been fiddling with it and I rather like it. Performancing have released a Firefox extension that allows you to post entries to your blog from within Firefox itself. Which - as is the case with this post - means I’m looking at the Performancing website whilst posting.

There are some issues with the editor, but it supports multiple blogs, automatically reads your categories, and can even keep a track of your posting history. Very useful.

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Blog, Blogging, Extensions

There’s been a lot of talk about Gmail on mobile recently, with some people in favour, and others not so convinced. Whilst I do have a Gmail account, I never use it. I do use webmail, but it seems I am rapidly becoming a rare breed - someone who runs their own email server.

For me all my mobile email needs are provided by the webmail client I have running on my server, and IMAP4 access on my mobile phone. I don’t have any of the overhead of accessing a webmail client through a very expensive pay-per-byte mobile connection (I only download email headers rather than full text), and I ensure that communications (both to and from me) are ‘branded’ with my company domain name rather than some other company’s generic address type.

Technorati Tags: Google, Gmail, Email, Mobile

Serenity, the feature film based on the short-lived but much loved Firefly TV series is listed for release in the US on December 20. As a fan of the TV series, (and of the movie, which I saw at the cinema) I pre-ordered the US release from Play USA a month ago, when I first found out I could.

Given that the supposed release date is still a few days away, I’m rather happy that it arrived in today’s post :)

You can read a little more about Serenity (and what the success of the movie could mean to Farscape fans) over on News0r.

Technorati Tags: Serenity, Joss Whedon, Firefly, Farscape

Like a number of other people I attended last Saturday night’s London Geek Dinner with Robert Scoble. Unlike a lot of other people, I haven’t had a chance to actually write about the night. So here I go..

The night was all in all thoroughly enjoyable. When I arrived I was greeted by Hugh (the organiser), who was the first person I met, albeit briefly. Of the almost 100 other people in the room, I knew no-one. So, being the shy person I am, I went and introduced myself to the first random person I came across. (I am going to apologise right away and say I remember no-one’s names, something I repeatedly apologised for during the night).

Here’s a quick run down of who I met:
Two people from Toronto working on image recognition software. One of them was the first person I spoke to (and thanks for being so welcoming of a random stranger saying hello)
Two people from Oslo working on reporting services for MS Sharepoint. And dressed to kill, putting almost eveyrone else to shame.
A guy originally from Germany working on .NET technologies. But we talked about language instead :)
A guy from Australia working as a strategic analyst.
Kevin (whose name I do remember as he was introducd to everyone), China’s most famous blogger (I’ll have to look him up on the CBL)
And of course Robert Scoble and Hugh Macleod. (Well, I couldn’t avoid Hugh - when I appeared at the top of the stairs he rushed over and said ‘welcome’ in a distracted tone that told me he’d been awake far too long and met far too many people already.

Even though I legged it just after the speech, it was a very enjoyable evening in London. And yes, I did enjoy the (insert obligatory link) Stormhoek wine I tried.

Lastly, if you don’t want to potter over to Hugh’s page and scroll down, here are some links to other people’s impresisons of the night (photos included!)

A podcast interview of Robert Scoble and Hugh Macleod by Hugh Fraser. (Remind me not to past late at night after a long day at work - it’s Robert not Richard.)

Event photos from Simon Cast.

Yet more photos.

And the wiki, with these and more links.

Technorati Tags: Scoble, London Geek Dinner, Hugh Macleod, Gaping Void, Blog, Blogging

SAP have entered the Identity Management sphere with an announcement of a global strategic alliance to deliver a standards-based identity management solution.

The solution will be delivered through SAPs Netweaver platform, and is based on Siemens Identity Management solution called HiPath SIcurity DirX Identity. The alliance aims to allow organisations using SAP to integrate with their existing deployments and centralise the management of access to IT systems.

This is interesting, as it seems to indicate that SAP and Siemens will be immediately deploying a full RBAC implementation based on SAP’s internal job role specification:

With the integrated solution, each user is represented by a unique digital identity and assigned access privileges to applications and systems based on their job role in the organization. Employees are able to easily and transparently access all systems and applications needed to support their job roles without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure.

The user’s privileges are centrally maintained, continuously updated to reflect changes in the organization, automatically communicated across all relevant systems and withdrawn immediately if necessary.

If you’re concerned about which standards are being supported, check out this PDF about it.

Technorati Tags: Digital Identity, Identity, SAP, Netweaver, Siemens, Roles, RBAC, mySAP

After the news about the delay of next week’s EPG seminar to the new year, Toby’s dropped me a line with the new date: February 6, 2006. Remember, go bug Toby for an invite if you want to come along.

Next week’s EPG Identity Special Interest Group has attracted so much interest that it’s been delayed until January so that those who want to attend but cannot due to other commitments can also participate. Whilst I am sad that the event has been delayed, I’m also happy that so many people are interested that the organisers felt they had to reschedule.

Ah well, only down to London once this coming week…

Embarrassed update: sometimes my ability to spell fails me. It’s a seminar

Eric over at Digital ID World has posted a short comment on Sun’s announcement:

At a high level, commoditization of the “stack” will only accelerate the market and bring about the next wave of identity applications and technologies…..the disruption in will cause ripples that we’ll be watching for months.

This actually gave me pause for thought, having had a reasonably long conversation about the subject yesterday.

Remember, everything’s free now (and not free as in “test drive” as Eric says). It’s permanently free. There’s no time limits, you can download, install, configure, tweak and run your entire enterprise on free software from Sun. You can do a complete Identity Management project using Sun’s Identity and Access Management tools. And it’s free forever.

What you don’t get is support. So if you’re confident in your Solaris skills, help yourself :)

A while back Michael Arrington at Techcrunch posted about 10 companies he’d like to profile. (An interesting list by the way). Which in a roundabout way is similar to what I want, although I’m not going to list 10 pieces of software I’d like to see, I’m just going to talk about one.

“Never Install”
The piece of software I would like to see is something that gives me the option to never install a piece of software. I’ve generally been annoyed when I put a DVD movie into my laptop and rather than the movie starting a software installer pops up instead.

I put in a brand new movie I bought today and the Interactual player installation dialogue came up. The thing is, I don’t want to install the Interactual player. In fact, I never want to install the player.

So what I want is some way of ensuring that if the Interactual player ever tries to run, that my PC will detect it and stop it from running at all. I don’t want it. I’ll never want it. And I never want it to run on my PC.

Sidenote: I’d also like something that lets me select ‘never search the Internet’ when I double-click a file that Windows doesn’t recognise, and I’d like something that lets me ‘never search the Internet’ when I install new hardware. No, I don’t want you to search the Internet, not this time, not every time. I never want you to search the Internet. So stop asking.