3D Realms shuts down – millions of Duke fans weep

Duke – Smug as always,
unaware of his fate.

Update 1: There’s great coverage on the history of Duke Nukem: Forever here, a fantastic read.
Update 2: An insider story about the life and death of Duke Nukem: Forever, check it out!

It felt almost unreal reading this article and realizing that Duke Nukem Forever might actually never be released. This holy grail of vaporware has been in the making for over twelve years, which in perspective is more than half my current life length! The game has gone through a number of 3D-engine changes and a cascade of other issues.

I was one of the people that always believed. I believed when the game first became notorious for its long release cycle back around the millennium shift. I even discussed DN: Forever with Per just a week ago or so, where he proclaimed that the game would never be released, following Broussard bold claims that DN:Forever would hit the shelves this very year.

Now it sadly looks like he was right.

To be perfectly honest I shouldn’t even be sad over this, I rarely play games nowadays, even though I have fond memories of the series, especially DN: Land Of The Babes which kept me company for what probably was an entire summer vacation. But this was one of those games – the ones that you just had to at least try because of the hype. If it was a great game or a disappointment came in second.

Take-Two still holds the rights to the Duke Nukem franchise, but has declined to make a comment on the situation. Who knows, maybe they’ll continue development and actually release it, although the chances are slim. But I’ll never stop believing… R.I.P for now, Duke.

The game back in 2001, when it looked almost finished, and still cool by todays standards according to me.

In other news…

Rawr!

I’ve finally started to teach myself Apache Tomcat – a fascinating (albeit sometimes confusing)  implementation of Java for the web. If you’re a Java programmer and wish to develop dynamic applications for the web, this is where to start!

Tinfoil Tom Series – Episode 1: Securing your web browser

“What’cha lookin’ at?!”
(Thanks to Sarah for this beautiful depiction of paranoia!)

Hi and welcome to the “Tinfoil Tom” series that I intend on running on this very blog. This series of post will be dedicated to end-user computer security – for the slightly paranoid. So it seemed appropriate to start with what you’re doing at this very moment – that is, surfing the web! (Whatever else you were doing is but your own business, in the spirit of tinfoil hats, paranoia and all.)

This guide is first and foremost directed at power-users, but it is written in a way so that (hopefully) anyone can follow it without problems.

The web browser
Try asking someone about their web browser preference and you’ll notice that many people would rather bite your head off than consider an alternative one. That being said, according to me – the power-user browser is Firefox. Opera is not far behind and may very well excel in some categories, but with the grand focus on security, the enormous community and the perpetually growing add-on library that all Firefox users can enjoy, it’s simply unbeatable, and so it will be a prerequisite for this tutorial.

With its out-of-the-box configuration Firefox is one of the most secure browsers, but we won’t stop there! To make your experience even safer – read on for some useful add-ons.

Added security
Here are some great add-ons that will help in tightening your browsers security.

Adblock Plus

Before and after shot. Unfortunately, some of that heavily
appealing “bling-bling” disappears together with the ads.

Whilst not technically a security add-on, Adblock plus make practically all ads on pages disappear, and in such way makes you less targetable to third-party exploits such as XSS attacks, not to mention those bastard animated smileys. *shivers*

Using Ad blocking software has come under heavy fire lately, with many ad-financed sites expressing heavy criticism towards the users, some sites have even started to reject users with ad-blocking software. Luckily, the number of these sites so far is very small, and let us hope it doesn’t spread. One could probably spend a whole series of posts just discussing the moral aspects of ad blocking (Which according to me has heavy parallels to downloading or TiVo‘ing TV shows, effectively skipping the commercials.) but I’ll leave it for another day.

Get Adblock for Firefox here.

NoScript

Evil script is evil.

Before you install this add-on, you should be aware of the fact that breaks almost all modern websites because it interferes (or rather completely shuts off) JavaScript support unless you specifically enable it on a per-site basis. But it also stops a lot of third-party homepages from running scripts and makes a lot of other security improvements under the hood. Although I don’t recommend this add-on for normal users, power users who often visit the same set of homepages may benefit greatly in terms of increased security – this add-on will truly make your browser an impenetrable fortress.

Get NoScript for Firefox here.

TorButton

Just watching that onion makes my eyes tear up… with laughter!

TorButton is actually a quick proxy gateway to Tor, an online darknet-like anonymization effort, but because the Tor software acts as a standard HTTP proxy, we can use any proxy server in its place, and because the TorButton add-on features many security tweaks, some similar to NoScript, even running it through a transparent server on your own computers adds security, and as far as I have noticed, TorButton breaks much fewer websites and barely requires any user attention. The only problem might be the cumbersome task of properly setting up a proxy server, but for Windows I can recommend CCProxy which I use myself. (Demo version with some non-timebased restrictions, although works fine for our intentions.)

Get TorButton for Firefox here.

Coming up!
In the next episode of the Tinfoil Tom series we will be discussing laptop security, secure file deletion through wiping and file recovery.

In other news…

Randomly speaking of video game soundtracks – the classical Unreal Tournament Score is really such a pearl. Fantastic and surprisingly mellow soundscapes with a hint of almost organic roughness. I’m pretty certain it isn’t being sold anymore (I think it was only included in the special editions to begin with.) but I found a mirror, let’s hope it stays up!