misty
Latest
Wanna catch 'em all? Themed transmogrification for Pet Battles
Pet Battles was released on the beta servers earlier this week, and it's ridiculously fun. Not only can you train a team from your corral of existing pets, you can also wander out in the world and capture even more pets to level up. Needless to say, I've been having an incredibly good time with the new feature, and I'm looking forward to playing it on live servers when Mists hits. Of course, the obvious statement at BlizzCon when this feature was announced was that it bears a remarkable similarity to Pokemon. The truth is, there are a ton of these critter battle-themed games out there, and this one just happens to have that Warcraft flavor we all know and love. That said, why not use transmogrification to deck your character out in Pokemon style? It's a little tricky to do, but we've got some cloth sets that may fit the bill.
3G GSM encryption cracked in less than two hours
Looks like all that GSM code-cracking is progressing faster than we thought. Soon after the discovery of the 64-bit A5/1 GSM encryption flaw last month, the geniuses at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science went ahead and cracked the KASUMI system -- a 128-bit A5/3 algorithm implemented across 3G networks -- in less than two hours. If you must know, the method applied is dubbed 'related-key sandwich attack' where multiple values of known differentials are processed through the first seven rounds of KASUMI, then using resulting quartets that are identified sharing key differences, subkey materials can be obtained in round eight to build up the 128-bit key. Sure, it's hardly snooping-on-the-go at this speed, but worryingly this was only an 'unoptimized implementation... on a single PC.' At the same time, the paper condemns the presumably red-faced GSM Association for moving from MISTY -- a more computationally-expensive but much stronger predecessor algorithm -- to KASUMI. Guess we'll just have to stick with Skype.
