Hacking, pretend and real

Played the new MegaMan card game today (yesterday was official release). Guess who won? If you guessed the other player, you're right :) Of course, he'd played it many times during development, and this was my first. Decent game - I don't follow the MegaMan console games or cartoon, but the play of the game was fast-paced, and slightly less complex than ./Hack. Another quick time-killer. Interestingly, your draw deck = your hit points, so every time you take a hit, your combat possibilities diminish. Conversely, you lose a trickle of hit points every turn whether you attack or not.

The staff at LiveJournal has posted in the lj_maintenance community that the terrible recent slowdown has two causes: LJ overgrowing its network, and a Denial of Service attack. Firstly, I've never understood the psychology of trying to take down a journal site. The Pentagon, or Bank of America, maybe. But LiveJournal? You gain that much hacker cred from preventing people from commenting about their day?

Secondly, they mention that a significant chunk of the attacks come from innocent people with infected Windows machines. Aside from a wry suggestion of changing OSes, they suggest firewall, anti-spyware, and anti-virus software, or at least changing web browsers to one that doesn't have a direct pipeline into your OS. The response? "I don't have time to bother with that!" "I'm not computer-savvy enough to install a new browser!" Or, in other words, "Yes, officer, I realize that my brakes are failing and my steering doesn't work right, but it's a real inconvenience to fix it. Perhaps you could make the other drivers just stay out of my way."

Argh. People.