Looks like Disney has put the whole 360 modding/hacking scene into a little bit of a frenzy.

Disney’s newest game is the first game that has the Wave 4 formatting.  This includes the newest NXE and its dash updates.

Here is what Kushan has to say about Wave 4 games…

2009/10/16

Looks like we were wrong in assuming that iXtreme v1.51 was fully compatible with 4th Wave PFI/Video. Turns out that only Hitachi iXtreme v1.51 will boot 4th Wave backups, and BenQ/LiteOn/Samsung iXtreme v1.51 will NOT boot 4th Wave. It would have been fully compatible if only the Video data had changed but not with the change in PFI (capacity). So currently the only safe option for booting 4th Wave backups on a BenQ/LiteOn/Samsung drive is to use iXtreme v1.6 and the one shot boot disc.

2009/10/15 (Updated 2009/10/16):

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Wave 4 and YOU v1.2 by Kushan
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A n00b’s guide to everything Wave4

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What IS “Wave 4″?
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A regular, retail Xbox 360 disk is split into several sections or “partitions”. One of these partitions is known as the “video partition”. Before March 2009, this partition simply contained a video that would play if you inserted the disk into a regular DVD player, the video would basically tell you that you were an idiot and need to put it into an Xbox 360 to play it.

One of the ways Microsoft can detect you being a dirty, filthy pirate is to scan this video to make sure it matches with what is supposed to be on the disk, so to protect you, the firmware itself does a quick checksum of it and if it doesn’t match with known video data, it wont boot. Every now and then, this video changed, with each change being called a “wave”.

Normally, system updates (dashboard updates) are stored on a different part of the disk, taking up about 8Mb of space, however in November 2008 Microsoft launched the “NXE”, a completely new Dashboard for the system. Along with the new dash came Avatars, making the whole update substantially larger (somewhere in the region of 130MB). This meant the update wouldn’t fit on the disk in the same partition that previous updates were located and so instead the update was placed within the video partition. This was known as “wave 3″ and hit around March 2009.

As Microsoft now distributes new Dashboard updates in the same partition, each time the 360 gets a software update, we will see a new “wave” a few months later. There was a Dashboard update in August 2009 and that is now being distributed with the latest games. This is known as Wave4. Its identical to Wave3, except the video partition now contains the August 09 Dash update. The first known game to have this was Cars Race-o-rama.

Now, its important to remember that iXtreme was designed to PROTECT you and part of that protection is the “video partition” check. When this video partition changes, the firmware doesn’t know if its just a new “wave” or if its a bad rip and thus opts to not boot it.

When wave 3 hit, iXtreme 1.51 was quickly released to tackle the problem. This was a temporary fix only, the firmware simply does not do the video partition check and thus boots was supposed to boot ANY wave, up to wave 4 and beyond.

However, this in itself is “unsafe”. If the disk is fine, then you’ll be fine, but if the video partition is in any way corrupt, iXtreme 1.51 will still boot it and thus you could be detected by Microsoft and banned. This also is not helped by the fact that some impatient, idiotic people decided to “patch” Wave3 games with Wave2 data in order to get iXtreme 1.5 or below to boot it. This is a great way to get yourself banned and thus iXtreme 1.6 was created.

ix1.6 will only boot games that have the CORRECT video partition, up to and including wave 3. This means that if you have a Wave 3 game that was patched with a Wave 2 video partition (aka a great big bullseye for Microsoft to target), iXtreme 1.6 will not boot it but ix1.51 will.

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Will I need a new firmware to play Wave 4 games?
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IF you are on iXtreme 1.5 or below, Wave3 games will not boot for you and thus Wave4 games will not either. In this case, YES you need to update your firmware!

IF you are on iXtreme 1.51 (Hitachi), then ANY wave will boot fine, including Wave4 however you must be EXTRA careful as you are not protected against corrupt or incorrect video partitions. This is one of the many reasons to always use abgx360. If a game is fully verified, playing it on iXtreme 1.51 is just as safe as playing it on iXtreme 1.6 – this includes Wave4 games.

IF you are on iXtreme 1.51 (BenQ/LiteOn/Samsung), then YES you need to update your firmware!

IF you are on iXtreme 1.6, you can ALSO play Wave 4 and above games, however you need to use a special activation disk to do so. This was added to the firmware specifically for this eventuality – the disk activates “one-shot-boot” mode, essentially it allows iX1.6 to boot any game you insert into the drive, even if its not properly stealthed. You simply insert the disk into the drive, let it spin up (it will say “play DVD”), then swap in your Wave4 game. You will need to do this each time you want to play a Wave 4 (or above) game. Don’t worry, if the game has all the necessary stealth data, then iX1.6 will still use it, so if you boot a VERIFIED Wave4 game using this method, you should be just as safe as you were booting a verified wave 3 game.

The disk is available here: http://www.sendspace.com/file/5ed5xr and needs to be burned to a DUAL LAYER disk, but entirely on the first layer (do not set a layerbreak and when imgburn prompts, tell it to burn to the first layer only).

A new iXtreme firmware will eventually be released with strict wave4 support (no activation disk needed), however some time needs to pass before this happens. Although Cars: Race-o-Rama was the first game to appear in the wild with Wave 4 video, it was not necessarily the first game to be pressed with it. Also, during a wave transition there are often a few exceptions to the process which also need to be known about. There will be no timeframe for this, so do not ask.

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What about abgx360? Will that need to be updated?
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abgx360 v1.0.1 (latest as of time of writing) does not recognise a “wave 4″ image and will report a POSSIBLE corrupt/bad PFI/Video partition, however the program is actually still completely compatible with Wave 4 games. Once a Wave4 title is verified, abgx360 will still download the .ini from the database and fully check out the image. If the image matches and the game is verified, then it has also passed the stealth checks and thus it is as safe to play as any wave3 or wave2 game.

abgx360 v1.0.2 will be released with full Wave4 recognition in a similar manner to the new iXtreme; that is once the transition date is known and any exceptions are noted.

Yes, it has finally hit the scene.

A new service has been offered to all internet users – with Bit Torrent users specifically in mind.  It’s called “ItsHidden”.

Check them out at their webpage.

The service is nearly the same as other existing VPN services that are availble for users (such as iPredator).  The way it works, is you will VPN into their server, and all information between you, and their server is encrypted.  They also promote that no logs are kept about the information you are sending or receiving through their service.

It is designed to work with all platforms:

• Windows
• Linux
• Mac
• iPhone

Right now, the service is in a beta testing mode.  See if you can sign up for it.  Additionally, they will offer a $5 account (assuming this is a monthly versus a one-time fee) which enables port forwarding, and other features.  However, the service claims that they will always offer the basic account for free.

It’s definitely worth a look.

It’s true, DRM is officially dead.

Although, many people could have made the arguement a little while ago when Apple had announced that all music on iTunes would be DRM free.  However, the RIAA, and other copyright groups were still supporting and attempting to promote DRM.  The RIAA had predicted that DRM would be making a major comeback, but really…. come on.  Users hate it.  It only hurts legitimate users.  People will be more inclined to pirate the media they want versus deal with software that can cripple the media that they “own”.

But now the RIAA has said that DRM is nearly extinct.  Jonathan Lamy, spokesman for the RIAA, has even mentioned that DRM is almost non-existant nowadays.

It looks like the music industry is finally realizing that customers just want what they rightfully own (when purchased).  Lets hope that the death of DRM is coming.

So it’s been confirmed,

The new owners of The Pirate Bay are going to be turning the website into a paying website.  In order to access the files, and everything the new Pirate Bay has to offer, users will be forced to pay a fee, although it has not been detailed if this is a one time fee, (or more likely) a monthly fee.

The new owners have said that a user can contribute his computing resources (our guess is sharing the files, nothing like a distributed computing application) to reduce that users total cost all the way down to 0.

Essentially it appears that the site can be free, but we don’t know the amount of “computing contribution” is required for that amount.

If all goes well, the sale is supposed to take place by the end of July…

Let’s hope you followed our previous article about copying The Pirate Bay’s torrents to an open tracker and we can make sure we never have to use this model.

Well,

It has been confirmed that The Pirate Bay is going to be sold for 7.8 Million dollars to the Global Gaming Company, which is a Swedish software company.  So now, many of us might be thinking, what exactly is going to happen to the torrents that are hosted on The Pirate Bay?  The new owners promise that “no illegal” downloading will take place on the website.

Does this mean that the torrent community will lose quite a bit of content?

Not if we take action.

Torrentfreak provides a pretty nifty article on what can be done to help keep the trackers alive, using Open Bittorrent, which is an open tracker that anyone can use.

So how does this work?

To quote Torrentfreak, this is the general process:

First of all find a torrent on The Pirate Bay – I chose Montt Mardie’s “We Are All The Pirate Bay” for symbolic demo purposes here. Now paste the URL of the torrent into the editor on TorrentEditor.com and click ‘edit it’. TorrentEditor will return the seeds and peers – in this case 182 seeds and no peers.

For the next step, remove the Pirate Bay’s trackers from the torrent and replace them with the announce URL for OpenBitTorrent’s tracker, which is http://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80/announce and click ‘update’ at the bottom of the page. Result: 182 seeds, no peers.

This is the entire process.  Pretty simple.

By no means are we suggesting any single person go through and do this for all torrents on The Pirate Bay (but if you feel like it, go for it).  But if we can get the entire bittorrent community to add just a few torrents, we can ensure that The Pirate Bay’s files will continue to sail forward.

ugh… cheesy, I know.

But, lets all start, and add one today to help keep content available…

Wow,

In some pretty surprising news, it appears that The Pirate Bay has been sold to Global Gaming Company, a Swedish software company.

Additionally, The Pirate Bay is closing down its own tracker, and will no longer be hosting torrent files on its servers.  Instead, TPB admins said that they are going to be moving their tracker, to be hosted by another company, and all torrents that they host onto another seperate company.

The word from the admins themselves is that they are trying to make the bit torrent site as de-centralized as possible.  They also did not want the entire bit torrent community reliant on TPB servers exclusively.

However, the Global Gaming Company CEO has said, “We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.”.  This is obviously pretty disturbing, because we do not know what resctrictions/policies might now be put in place on what was previously the most popular bit torrent website in thw world.

It appears, a number of users bit torrent users have been targeted for a new virus that has been spreading.

The way it works, is a user gets an e-mail from what is supposed to be a MediaDefender e-mail address.  Inside the letter, is a message saying that you have been tracked/caught downloading copyrighted material at a list of bit torrent websites (and it will have a list).  it will then go on that you can view the log, as it is attached to the e-mail.

First off, of the bit torrent sites that are listed in the e-mail, not all of them even offer their own private tracker, therefore (if your knowledgeable about it) you would realize something’s wrong.  Additionally, opening attachments from unsolicited e-mails, probably not the smartest thing to do.

This “log” of your activities turns out to be a trojan waiting to infect your system.  It’s main purpose is to disable your firewall, steal financial information, and things of that nature.

Just watch out for what e-mails you download, and if you get any e-mail of the sort…. don’t open the log.

Left 4 Dead 2

How amazing was Left 4 Dead?  With sales of over 2.5 million PC and XBOX 360 units sold worldwide, there is a large following.  So why are fans upset over the news of a sequel?

Since the game was released on Steam, the number of sales have greatly increased.  When users shelled out their $50 to play the hot multiplayer game, they did so with certain expectations.; they expected updates and new content available periodically.  The recent update had a survival mode which allowed versus on previous story maps.  Although this is an “update” it’s more like a rehash of the content.

With the announcement of Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) coming out in November of ‘09, only one year since the first game, there has been a growing number of people feeling deserted.  They’re concerned new updates for L4D won’t materialize since the new installment will be available.  A group on Steam called L4D2 Boycott (NO-L4D2), has been created with over 3000 people.  This group talks about everything from Valve’s lack of support for Left 4 Dead to terrible music and overly colorful visuals in the sequel.

The group’s manifesto:

• Significant content for L4D1 was promised, and never delivered
• Valve put little faith in L4D1 since they almost certainly started working on L4D2 right after release
• The fact that L4D2 is nearly identical to L4D1 will decimate the community for both games
• The announced date is not nearly enough time to polish content or make significant gameplay changes
• The new character designs seem bland and unappealing so far
• L4D2 is too colourful to fit in with L4D1’s visual aesthetic
• The fiddle-based horde music is extremely disliked, though the differently orchestrated music is otherwise welcome
• L4D2’s release will result in a drop in quality and frequency for L4D1 content, even compared to before
• The community has lost faith in Valve’s former reputation for commitment to their games post-release

It’s understandable that people are upset about spending money on a sequel, when they feel cheated on the original.  But even with the original content there are 10’s of hours of great playtime.  With the sales of the original game and the idea of battling  zombies with new weapons and areas,  chances are Left 4 Dead 2 will surpass the original game.

Bring on the sequel!

There have been many cases against people who are accused of downloading copyrighted material from the RIAA, MPAA, and many other pro-copyright organizations.  These organizations have been hiring third-party companies to catch file-sharers (like MediaSentry).  However, an Italian court has made a landmark ruling that could (hopefully) spread throughout the world, and will have a significant impact on all cases filed.

The way users are typically caught, is some organization will find an IP address that is sharing copyrighted material.  The IP address is then logged, and the corresponding ISP is contacted.  The charging organization will then get the user’s information that is associated with the logged IP address, and begin contacting the user, informing them they have been caught, and trying to promote an out-of-court settlement.  This will happen no more, atleast in Italy for now.

An Italian judge and District Attorney has ruled that an IP address alone is not enough to implicate a user for file sharing.  While it does establish that a file was downloaded from that location, it does not point to a specific individual.

This simply, is common sense.  Since most of the world is not tech-savy, you will easily find wireless networks that are not password protected, and simply, are open to the public (usually not to the knowledge of the network owner).  So, in this case, any individual could go by (or live in an apartment above), connect to the wireless network, use it to download anything the individual wishes, and not have that associated with the downloader’s own IP address.

In this example, the network owner would be charged for something a neighbor did.  Anyone with any common sense could see that an IP address could easily identify the location of the download, but not the individual responsible.

Lets hope this “common sense” does indeed become common sense throughout the rest of the world.

A punking has occurred that would rival even Ashton Kutcher on his best day (especially recently, has anyone seen a good episode of that show?).    Henrik Pontén, the prosecutor in The Pirate Bay trial, went to go get his mail one day, and received quite a shock…

The Swedish version of the IRS (the Swedish Tax Authority) sent him a letter saying that his request for a name change had been accepted.  He found this quite odd because he never made such a request.  As of May 29th, 2009, Henrik Pontén now goes by the name of….

Pirate Pontén

Needless to say, Henrik is furious about this, and is doing everything possible to reverse the change.  It appears that there simply is not any form of identity check performed by the Swedish Tax authority when requesting a name change.  So anyone with access to a keyboard or phone could easily request such a change.  And since we know that Henrik has most certainly offended many people with access to a keyboard and phone, it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.

The Pirate Party has obviously had to distance themselves from this sort of act, especially given their recent win in elections, and a seat in the European parliament.  However, we are sure that the party members certainly had a good laugh behind closed doors…

In other news… the Sweedish Tax Authority said that they would work as quickly as possible to change the name from Pirate Pontén back to his original name.