Games

Chip outfit AMD sems to have dropped a bit of a clanger with its latest promotional ruse to flog some of its graphics cards.

Buyers have been wooed with the promise of the free game to play on their Radeon cards and, in many cases, the ride 'em up Dirt 3 proves a popular choice.

Traditionally AMD supplies an unlock key to give the graphics card purchaser the opportunity to play the bundled game. Unfortunately, the outfit has contrived to make some 1.7 million promotional keys for Codemasters’ DiRT 3 available by employing shonky security on its site.

Great news for folks who are keen on using the Microsoft Xbox 360 for homebrew purposes. Last week, some hackers announced that they’ve been able to bypass the Xbox 360 security system to inject and execute their own code. The hackers even released a video clip on YouTube demonstrating the hack in action. And what makes this attack different from previous ones is that it is supposedly unblockable by future software updates from Microsoft.

Despite recent talk that Diablo 3's required Internet connection was all about the player's character and Battle.net's feature set, game director Jay Wilson made it clear that the requirement is also to prevent the same amount of hacking as seen with Diablo 2. The revelation was made while explaining why it's a bad idea to have an offline mode for the upcoming action-RPG game.

The alleged LulzSec computer hacker Jake Davis may have had his ‘secret’ identity revealed by a rival on the Xbox games console.

It is unclear how Davis was identified but in a leaked online conversation yesterday LulzSec's leader, who goes by the name Sabu, suggested it was an embarrassing source for a highly tech-savvy teen.

A 10-year-old hacker who goes by the pseudonym CyFi revealed today at DefCon 19 a zero-day exploit in games on iOS and Android devices that independent researchers have confirmed as a new class of vulnerability. The girl from California first discovered the flaw around January 2011 because she "started to get bored" with the pace of farm-style games.

The North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has found a novel way of raising badly needed cash, according to the South Korean authorities: unleashing young hackers on South Korea’s immensely popular online gaming sites to find ways to rack up points convertible to cash.

Despite its decrepit economy, North Korea is believed to train an army of computer programmers and hackers. The police in Seoul said Thursday that four South Koreans and a Korean-Chinese had been arrested on charges of drawing on that army to organize a hacking squad of 30 young video gaming experts.

More than 30 North Korean hackers were hired to work in China by a South Korean crime ring to steal the personal data of South Korean gamers, and channeled $5 million to their impoverished country in compensation, South Korea's police said on Thursday.

North Korea has been blamed for spreading malicious computer software that paralyzed websites of government agencies and businesses, and for a cyber attack on a South Korean bank this year that brought down its network.

A 20-year-old gamer has died after playing a marathon session on his Xbox 360 console.

Chris Staniforth from Sheffield suffered deep vein thrombosis after sitting in the same position playing games for twelve hours. He collapsed after telling friends he had experienced a strange felling in his chest according to the Sun.

In the summer, we like to take a break from all the serious open source applications that we usually cover and take a look at some apps that are just plain fun.

This year, we've updated our list of the "funnest" open source applications with more games than ever before. In fact, the 2011 list has 74 games in all, including 46 that we've never featured before. At the end, we've also included a few apps that aren't really games, but are still pretty fun.

A PR company responsible for handling 2K Games's Duke Nukem Forever publicity in the US has been sacked following claims that it would withhold future titles from reviewers who were less than complimentary about the Duke's return.