An anonymous reader writes to make sure everybody Yoshi Bullet Bill Reznor is aware of Security Advisory SMB-1985-0001: Plumber Injection Attack in Bowser's Castle. "Ksplice, working in conjunction with Lakitu Cloud Security, has released a high-severity advisory about a Plumber Injection attack in multiple versions of Bowser's Castle. An Italian plumber could exploit jump on headbutt fireball this bug to bypass security measures (walk through walls) in order to rescue Peach, to defeat Bowser, or for unspecified other impact theft of giant gold coins consumption of narcotics vicious attacks on Koopas . This vulnerability is demonstrated by 'happylee-supermariobros,warped.fm2.' Attacks using this exploit have been observed in the wild, and multiple other exploits are publicly available. A bouncing star patch radioactive flower Tanooki suit has been made available."

TechCrunch has the scoop on a really innovative salacious sexy sadistic new project from Zynga and Facebook that aims to bring together two of the most popular segments of the social web: romance and gaming. Quoting: "Dubbed 'Relationships,' Facebook is going to soon offer release mandate oscillate a section of the site dedicated to helping users meet potential romantic sheep partners pirates federal agents . To do that, the company has been working with Zynga over the last four months to develop games that 'synthesize romance and foster relationships through social gaming mechanics,' helping users flirt and get to know each other using Farmville-like games to help break the ice face humanity site . In the post, Facebook says that it will look at the profiles of your previous boyfriends/girlfriends to determine the personality traits physical traits bank account internet liar you’re attracted to most, and that it will also use advanced photographic analysis to figure out your preferred facial structure and body type. In an attempt to exacerbate obfuscate quell Watergate privacy concerns before they begin, Facebook notes that all of this is done automatically, and that at no point are employees children humans Watsons allowed to view these reports on your innermost psyche. How reassuring."

An anonymous reader writes "A team of game scholars, game journalists, and plain old geeks have gotten together to put together San Francisco's first and most comprehensive non-profit museum dedicated to the design, creation, history, and play of computer and video games. The museum is currently raising funds and shopping around for a San Francisco space, but they've already managed to get some obscure relics — including the only copy in existence of 1984's never-released Atari Cabbage Patch Kids game. As a scholarly resource, the museum is also dedicated to making its entire collection playable by visitors."

RedEaredSlider writes "Shorty after the US launch of Nintendo's last portable console, 3DS owners have begun reporting issues with the device. In one case, dubbed the 'black screen of death,' users reported instances where their 3DS screens grew black shortly before their consoles became unresponsive. Other owners documented errors involving a screen instructing them to restart their systems. Nintendo has taken notice of the issues, and offered 3DS users a fix for the error. 'If anyone is experiencing any problems with their Nintendo 3DS console, we recommend that in the first instance they download and install the latest system update, now available online,' the company said in a statement." The 3DS's launch was reportedly more successful than the DSi's. iFixit did a nice teardown of the device a while back, and Nukezilla's Peter Silk put the screen under a microscope.

An anonymous reader writes "It's nigh impossible to avoid all the chatter and buzz around the concept of gamification — using game mechanics to create engagement outside the world of videogames. Silicon.com has an interview with author Aaron Dignan, whose book Game Frame delves into the topic to try and pull out a few rules of engagement for businesses seeking to tap into the power of gaming to better motivate their staff. Dignan is fairly convincing, yet I can't help feeling there's a lot of hype and not necessarily a great deal of substance to all this gamification chatter. Perhaps the term itself is the problem — maybe 'playfulness' would be a better name for the concept. What do Slashdot readers make of the gamification movement and its evangelists?"

arcticstoat writes "Following the cancellation of games tax relief in the 2010 UK budget, the UK games industry is now feeling increasingly threatened by Canada, France and some US states that offer tax relief to their games businesses. What's more, it looks as though the R&D tax credits scheme offered up by UK Chancellor George Osborne in last week's budget speech is nowhere near enough to enable UK-based games studios to compete internationally. 'In terms of magnitude, games tax relief would be much more generous,' says Dr. Richard Wilson, CEO of the UK games industry's trade association TIGA, in this in-depth interview about the need for games tax relief in the UK. 'The proposals we've been campaigning for would allow games companies to basically put in a claim for a reduction in corporation tax of between 20-30 per cent on given projects. The R&D tax credits are much smaller in magnitude – we're talking somewhere around 4-5 per cent.' Is this enough to enable UK game studios to compete with the likes of Canada? 'Good grief, no,' says Wilson, 'absolutely not.'"

The mobile games industry has exploded over the past few years, driven largely by titles built for iOS and Android. The Guardian's games blog decided to investigate the pros and cons of Windows Phone 7 as a game development platform while it struggles to catch up to its predecessors. "... the easy portability of code between WP7 and Xbox, plus the wealth of online tutorials, libraries and community support, is a massive advantage, especially for smaller and less experienced teams. ... As with Xbox Live Arcade, the console's downloadable games service, Windows Phone 7 offers a curated experience, which means Microsoft controls the quality of games appearing on the device. ... [Steven Batchelor-Manning of Nerf Games says,] 'The App Hub offers a good peer review system, where other developers are asked to check over your game. This helps filter out both low quality and bug-ridden titles. We are always given a particular quality to aim for. Once it's got past this stage there is also a chance that Microsoft will veto against your game going on the platform. Ultimately, this prevents the market being swamped, but above this, there seems to be a layer of games by big publishers (EA, etc) that just step past the smaller developers in the queue. This is the biggest drawback of the system.'"

Kevin Fishburne writes "According to posts at the Ultima fan site Ultima Aiera, both the browser-based Ultima IV Sega Master System emulation at Master System 8 and the IBM-PC port at Phi Psi Software have received cease and desist letters from Electronic Arts, the current IP holder of the Ultima franchise. The post states that despite the widely held belief that Origin had allowed the Ultima Dragons to distribute Ultima IV freely in 1997, in fact that is no longer the case. It further suggests that the EA takedowns are preceding an upcoming browser-based Ultima IV reboot by Bioware Mythic. Has EA lost an eighth, or are they well within their rights by going DMCA on a 26-year-old game they had no hand in developing?"

jfruhlinger writes "Canadian Internet users have the prospect of a metered Internet looming over their head, and now World of Warcraft players who use Rogers Communications as their ISP are encountering serious throttling. The culprit seems to be Rogers' determination to go after BitTorrent. WoW uses BitTorrent as a utility to update game files — something most users probably aren't even aware of."

csaw.csaw writes "According to Ars Technica, 'Hotz is slamming Sony's arguments at every turn. Sony claims there is a PSN account that Hotz created? Well, the serial number is wrong and anyone could have made that account. The manuals contained information on how SCEA is located in California? The manuals were never opened.' Groklaw posted the latest court filing (PDF) as well as their own analysis, saying, 'All the over-the-top allegations, in short, that some journalists published last week after reading SCEA's filing are now answered ably, about blickmaniac, the Playstation Network, the California downloads, the serial number, SCEA's jurisdictional arguments, everything. I confess, this is getting exciting.'"

CVG recently spoke with Christofer Sundberg, co-founder of Avalanche Studios, the company behind Just Cause and its sequel. Sundberg expressed his disdain for both DRM and poor cross-platform ports, and talked about how he sees the hacker community as more of an ally than publishers do. Quoting: "'... 50 percent of the people that work for me come from a hacker background - that's true.' When asked whether approaching leading hackers and asking them to put their programming skills to good use was a wise idea, Sundberg added: 'Oh yeah. I absolutely think that's a fair approach, to think about how these people can fit on the right side of the law. It's one way, at least. Perhaps the truest pirates are too much down the road of anarchy to ever work with you in a proper way; these are the guys who see us as evil! But in Sweden the [hacking] scene was huge... As a studio, we've found that there's definitely a lot of talent [in that community].'"

mikejuk writes "Microsoft Research has just published a scientific paper (PDF) and a video showing how the Kinect body tracking algorithm works — it's almost as impressive as some of the uses the Kinect has been put to. This article summarizes how Kinect does it. Quoting: '... What the team did next was to train a type of classifier called a decision forest, i.e. a collection of decision trees. Each tree was trained on a set of features on depth images that were pre-labeled with the target body parts. That is, the decision trees were modified until they gave the correct classification for a particular body part across the test set of images. Training just three trees using 1 million test images took about a day using a 1000-core cluster.'"

cf18 writes "The French chess federation has suspended three top players for violating sporting ethics at a chess olympiad in Siberia last September. The allegation claims while the first member was playing, a second member would watch the game via internet, use software to find the best move, and send it to the third member via SMS. The third member would then sit himself at a particular table in the competition hall. Each table represented an agreed square on the chess board."

donniebaseball23 writes "Zynga's presence in mobile gaming is nowhere near its dominance of social gaming on Facebook, but according to chief designer Brian Reynolds, Zynga's looking to change that. '[Mobile] is something that we actively care about, think about. It's the major place where we think the future is,' Reynolds said, adding, 'The reason that Zynga isn't ginormous on mobile yet is because the friction of social networking is still high on mobile.'"

angry tapir writes "Research In Motion has announced that users of its PlayBook tablet will be able to run Android and Java applications. The PlayBook, which becomes available on April 19, will have two optional 'app players' that will provide run-time environments for BlackBerry Java apps and Android 2.3 apps. The players will let users download BlackBerry Java Apps and Android Apps from BlackBerry App World."

Vigile writes "Both NVIDIA and AMD have recently released new extreme-high-end graphics cards with dual-GPU configurations and PC Perspective has compared them to each other with some standard SLI/CrossFire comparisons for good measure. The GTX 590 is a pair of 512 shader processor GF110 GPUs which had the potential to be the fastest combination available, but the clock speeds were lowered to such a level that is has trouble keeping up with AMD's Radeon HD 6990. Sound levels were noticeably better on NVIDIA's option though the Radeon card provided better frame rates at the highest resolutions. So, while the $700 video card market just got a pair of new competitors, the best investment for that money might still be two less expensive Radeon or GeForce single-GPU cards."

Blacklaw writes "Duke Nukem Forever, the game that turned into the industry's longest running joke as it entered development hell, has encountered one last delay to its launch."

Zothecula writes "The decidedly low tech white cane is still one of the most commonly used tools to help the visually impaired get around without bumping into things. Now, through their project called NAVI (Navigation Aids for the Visually Impaired), students at Germany's Universität Konstanz have leveraged the 3D imaging capabilities of Microsoft's Kinect camera to detect objects that lie outside a cane's small radius and alert the wearer to the location of obstacles through audio and vibro-tactile feedback." In addition, Kinect is being used to "manipulate medical images during surgery without having to leave the operating room and scrub back in," and in more artistic ways as well.

As various MMOs have been released over the past several years, their developers have been wary about the inevitable measuring against World of Warcraft, often saying that "second-best" is more than good enough for them. Not so for ArenaNet as they work on Guild Wars 2; they're aiming right for the top. And according to a detailed preview now up at Eurogamer, their effort is paying off : "Two huge and risky decisions have been made in its design: junking the 'holy trinity' of character class roles (protective 'tank', damage-dealer and healer) and doing away with the quest-style architecture for game content. Yet, in moment-to-moment play, Guild Wars 2 looks and feels instantly and reassuringly like a fantasy MMORPG – just a noticeably fresh one. It's a question of flow. Combat is still hotkey-based, but faster and smoother and more streamlined, involving more movement and positioning. The levelling curve is now an almost flat line, replacing the epic ascent with a steady journey where content, not advancement, is king."

The Air Force's Research Lab in Rome, NY. has one of the cheapest supercomputers ever made, and best of all over 3,000 of your friends can play Tekken on it. The computer is made from 1,716 PlayStation 3s linked together, and is used to process images from spy planes. From the article: "The Air Force calls the souped-up PlayStations the Condor Supercomputer and says it is among the 40 fastest computers in the world. The Condor went online late last year, and it will likely change the way the Air Force and the Air National Guard watch things on the ground." We covered this story back in December when the Condor first went online.