Leaked: full Crysis 2 game, with multiplayer and master key

According to a thread on the Facepunch forums, titled "Crysis 2, leaked 49 days early," Crysis 2 has been leaked. The download contains the full game (the campaign is reportedly playable from start to finish) and multiplayer support (the master key for online authentication is supposedly included).

The game will still see a multi-platform release on March 22, 2011 in the United States and March 25, 2011 in Europe. Given how close we are to the game's release, the leaked build could be almost finished. Crytek has said that the game has the best graphics you've ever seen but that it will be graphically superior on the PC. The company will be undoubtedly less inclined to support the PC platform after a fiasco like this one. The game's developers are trying to save face by saying the leak is a still a development build.

"Crytek has been alerted that an early incomplete, unfinished build of Crysis 2 has appeared on Torrent sites," an EA spokesperson said in a statement. "Crytek and EA are deeply disappointed by the news. We encourage fans to support the game and the development team by waiting and purchasing the final, polished game on March 22. Crysis 2 is still in development and promises to be the ultimate action blockbuster as the series' signature Nanosuit lets you be the weapon as you defend NYC from an alien invasion. Piracy continues to damage the PC packaged goods market and the PC development community."

Crysis 2 was announced for the PC, Xbox 360, and the PS3 way back in June 2009. Since then, we've seen screenshots, teaser trailers, gameplay footage, and even delays. This, however, takes the cake. The news that there will be a Crysis 2 demo for PC is almost redundant now.

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In U.S. Signals to Egypt, Obama Straddled a Rift

WASHINGTON ? Last Saturday afternoon, President Obama got a jarring update from his national security team: With restive crowds of young Egyptians demanding President Hosni Mubarak?s immediate resignation, Frank G. Wisner, Mr. Obama?s envoy to Cairo, had just told a Munich conference that Mr. Mubarak was indispensable to Egypt?s democratic transition.

Mr. Obama was furious, and it did not help that his secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Wisner?s key backer, was publicly warning that any credible transition would take time ? even as Mr. Obama was demanding that change in Egypt begin right away.

Seething about coverage that made it look as if the administration were protecting a dictator and ignoring the pleas of the youths of Cairo, the president ?made it clear that this was not the message we should be delivering,? said one official who was present. He told Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to take a hard line with his Egyptian counterpart, and he pushed Senator John Kerry to counter the message from Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Wisner when he appeared on a Sunday talk show the next day.

The trouble in sending a clear message was another example of how divided Mr. Obama?s foreign policy team remains. A president who himself is often torn between idealism and pragmatism was navigating the counsel of a traditional foreign policy establishment led by Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Biden and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, against that of a next-generation White House staff who worried that the American preoccupation with stability could put a historic president on the wrong side of history.

In interviews, participants described those tensions, as well as offering the first descriptions of Mr. Obama?s two difficult phone calls imploring Mr. Mubarak to take the protesters? demands seriously. In those conversations, as Mr. Obama pressed Mr. Mubarak without demanding that he resign, the embattled Egyptian leader pushed back hard, arguing that the protests were the work of the Muslim Brotherhood and agents of Iran, a contention the Americans dismissed.

The officials said the hardest of those conversations came on Tuesday, Feb. 1, barely an hour after Mr. Mubarak announced he would not run for president again. In Mr. Obama?s view, Mr. Mubarak still had not gone far enough. Describing the conversation, one senior official quoted Mr. Obama as telling the Egyptian president, ?It is time to present to the people of Egypt its next government.? He added, ?The future of your country is at stake.?

Mr. Mubarak replied, ?Let?s talk in the next three or four days.? He added, ?And when we talk, you will find that I was right.? The two men never talked again.

However direct the conversations between the presidents, the public stance taken by the United States fed the perception that there was confusion on the Potomac. Time and again, the administration appeared to tack back and forth, alternately describing Mr. Mubarak as a stalwart ally and then a foe of meaningful political change. Twelve days ago, Mr. Obama was announcing that Mr. Mubarak had to begin the transition ?now?; last weekend his chief diplomat was telling reporters that removing Mr. Mubarak too hastily could undermine Egypt?s transition to democracy.

Inside the White House, the same aides who during his campaign pushed Mr. Obama to challenge the assumptions of the foreign policy establishment were now arguing that his failure to side with the protesters could be remembered with bitterness by a rising generation.

Those onetime campaign aides included Denis McDonough, the sharp-tongued deputy national security adviser; Benjamin J. Rhodes, who wrote the president?s seminal address to the Islamic world in Cairo in June 2009; and Samantha Power, the outspoken Pulitzer Prize winner and human rights advocate who was once drummed out of the campaign for describing Mrs. Clinton as a monster.

All agreed that Egypt, facing a historic popular revolt, needed to begin a genuine transition to democracy. The debate was how to deploy American influence on a volatile and fast-changing situation.

Despite the fervor on the streets of Cairo, and Mr. Obama?s occasional tough language, the president always took a pragmatic view of how to use America?s limited influence over change in Egypt. He was not in disagreement with the positions of Mr. Wisner and Mrs. Clinton about how long transition would take. But he apparently feared that saying so openly would reveal that the United States was not in total sync with the protesters, and was indeed putting its strategic interests first. Making that too clear would not only anger the crowds, it could give Mr. Mubarak a reason to cling to power and a pretext to crush the revolution.

It was not only Mr. Wisner?s and Mrs. Clinton?s comments that threw the administration off message. Mr. Biden told an interviewer that he did not believe Mr. Mubarak was a dictator ? words he quickly regretted, officials say.

As the administration struggled to craft a message, it was playing to multiple audiences ? the crowds in Tahrir Square, neighboring allies who feared the instability would spread, and home audiences on the left and the right.

Mrs. Clinton and some of her State Department subordinates wanted to move cautiously, and reassure allies they were not being abandoned, in part influenced by daily calls from Israel, Saudi Arabia and others who feared an Egypt without Mr. Mubarak would destabilize the entire region. Some were nervous because they perceived that the United States had been a cheerleader for the Tunisia protesters.

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Do Anonymous Leaks Have a Future?

While the U.S. government tries to build a case against WikiLeaks, the secret-document publishing site run by Australian hacker-turned-celebrity Julian Assange and currently hosted in Sweden, an entire new generation of WikiLeaks-inspired services, enabling anonymous, secure submissions of leaked documents, is springing up around the world. Although the technology for these sites may be solid, potential leakers and those to whom they leak face growing threats from the law, and from outright spying.

One recently launched outlet is the Al Jazeera Transparency Unit, which encourages people to upload documents, photos, and videos "to shine light on notable and newsworthy government and corporate activities which might otherwise go unreported [...] from human rights to poverty to official corruption." New York Times executive editor Bill Keller has said his newspaper is planning "a kind of E-Z Pass lane for leakers," although the Times has so far declined to give out specifics. And a former WikiLeaks employee, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, used last month's World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, to announce the test launch of OpenLeaks, which is intended not to serve as a document repository itself but to provide enabling technology for media outlets, NGOs, and other organizations to create their own drop boxes for leakers.

Anonymous-submission technology is tricky to implement but easy to understand. First, the receiving site needs to be unable to trace the source computer from which leaked content is uploaded. WikiLeaks directs contributors to use the Tor service, which routes Internet connections through a chain of servers, each of which can identify only the previous computer in the chain. By bouncing a connection around the world a few times, Tor makes tracing the originating computer extremely difficult (watch a video that shows how Tor works.)  WikiLeaks also allegedly keeps no logs of connections from outside computers that could perhaps help trace them.

Second, the receiving site needs to be protected from snoopers monitoring its incoming and outgoing traffic, which might help identify sources. WikiLeaks is currently hosted by the Swedish ISP Bahnhof, which encrypts all traffic through its network?essentially routing its customers through a virtual private network?so that not even Bahnhof employees can see what is being sent to and from WikiLeaks.

Such precautions go a long way toward protecting the source of a leaked document, but they don't protect the receiver and publisher of leaked information from legal action. Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, thinks The New York Times and Al Jazeera will need to be more cautious than Assange about what they accept and publish. "Because it is not organized under the laws of any nation, [WikiLeaks] is less vulnerable?though I would not say invulnerable?to legal pressures from various state actors," he says. "But a newspaper opening its own drop box using OpenLeaks is in a different position. This might factor into sources' decisions, and it might affect how many news organizations take up OpenLeaks on its offer to provide the technology."

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law at Harvard and cofounder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, says the situation is complicated and uncertain. "In the U.S., leakers face the Espionage Act," he says. "Leak sites could potentially be accused of 'aiding and abetting,' though the political costs of pursuing such a prosecution could be high."

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Weekend Open Forum: Are you using a dedicated sound card?

Both Sides Are Braced for Debt-Limit Debate

While Republican leaders say they hope to avoid a market-shaking crisis, many conservatives in the party are insisting on using the issue as leverage to extract big if unspecified concessions from President Obama, leaving Wall Street concerned and even some Democrats wondering if the White House is in for a more dangerous fight than it anticipates.

If Congress does not act to increase the Treasury Department?s legal borrowing limit, which could be reached as soon as the first week of April, the government would face problems refinancing its debt and raising money for its operations, and, at worst, would risk default.

Some Democrats say the White House?s hopes of getting Congress to approve a ?clean? increase in the government?s borrowing authority ? without any additional measures to cut the budget deficit ? are unrealistic with the House in Republican hands. Republican leaders? ability to rein in their members, however, is in question after the past week, which saw turmoil within the party over issues like a Tea Party-backed demand for deeper spending cuts this year.

Further complicating the outlook, a small group of senators from both parties is mobilizing to step into any impasse to try to compel two-party talks for a long-term deficit reduction plan like the one recommended in December by a bipartisan majority of Mr. Obama?s fiscal commission.

?The crux of the issue is whether there will or won?t be a clean debt-limit bill, and that?s going to be difficult,? said Roger Altman, an investment banker and former Treasury deputy in the Clinton administration.

Soon, Mr. Altman added, ?this will be the central focus in Washington, and that of course may spill over into the business community and the financial community.?

Given the fiscal, financial and political stakes in a still-weak economy, the coming confrontation is more widely anticipated than the release on Monday of Mr. Obama?s budget for the 2012 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, 2011.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has notified Congress that sometime from April 5 to May 31, the government will exceed what it can now legally borrow to cover obligations ranging from Social Security benefits and war expenses to interest payments for Chinese creditors. Treasury can extend the deadline several weeks through ?extraordinary measures,? he wrote Congressional leaders, but even a short-term default ?would have catastrophic economic consequences.?

In Washington on Wednesday, Mr. Geithner sounded optimistic, saying markets should understand that ?Congress will act as it always has to make sure we meet those obligations.?

?There?s always a little political theater around this,? he added.

The situation presents a particular challenge to Speaker John A. Boehner, who has to navigate between the insistent demands of his Tea Party-backed members and the responsibility that comes with power. Although partisan brinkmanship over the issue has occurred in the past, Congresses under the control of both parties have always agreed to debt-limit increases to avoid undercutting the creditworthiness of the United States government and thereby igniting a crisis in the global markets.

?I hope they aren?t sleeping at night, because we really are playing with fire,? said Robert D. Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute, a Washington-based research group, and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, speaking of both parties.

The administration has left it to Congress to decide how much to raise the limit. The level will determine how soon the ceiling would need to be lifted again. There is much speculation that Republicans could force a series of short-term extensions to keep pressure on the White House to give ground.

Exactly what House Republicans want is unclear. They are split over how much and specifically what to cut from so-called discretionary spending for nonsecurity programs, which make up just over one-tenth of the federal budget. (Most of the rest covers the military, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and interest on the debt.)

?We want to bank real spending cuts and spending controls going forward,? said Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee. ?Exactly how you do that ? and there?s a lot of different ways of doing that ? is going to be in the details of negotiations.?

Yet any compromise is likely to upset many Tea Party activists and the scores of Republican lawmakers they helped elect in November. ?We?re telling them not to raise the debt limit,? said Mark Meckler, the co-founder and national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots. ?When your credit card is maxed out, you don?t go to the credit-card company and say, ?Hey, if you would just give us more debt, it would be O.K.? ?

Further constricting House leaders? room to maneuver are calls from Republican presidential aspirants not to raise the debt limit, or to force the Treasury Department to delay until Mr. Obama concedes to Republican demands ? admonitions that harden conservative lawmakers? opposition.

Democrats say the White House believes it is well positioned for the debate, at least initially, because of the Republican fissures, polls suggesting the unpopularity of domestic cuts that would be required, and, not least, the House Republicans? shared responsibility for governing. But polls also show that Americans have a dim view of Mr. Obama?s overall handling of the deficit and the economy.

The White House will try to enlist Republican luminaries to echo its call for a clean bill given the economic dangers of political brinkmanship, officials say. Unbidden, the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, implored Congress in a recent speech not to use the debt limit as a ?bargaining chip.?

Such pleas are expected to go unheeded.

By all accounts, Mr. Boehner could not pass a clean bill if he wanted to. Yet anything he adds to secure Republican votes is expected to cost support from Democrats, already eager to vote no to force Republicans to take responsibility for passing a bill.

Whatever the House does attach to a debt limit is expected to hit a wall in the Senate, where Democrats retain a narrow majority. But Senate Democrats are also split on how to handle a debt- limit bill; their differences were aired at a party retreat this week.

Most, including the majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, favor a clean measure. But a faction of mostly moderate Democrats wants some bipartisan commitment to negotiate a multiyear deficit reduction plan, and has been meeting with a few Senate Republicans to plan their strategy.

?I don?t agree with the approach the House is taking, but I think it?s important that we show progress? against the deficit, said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia. ?Let?s take the year?s worth of work that was the president?s deficit commission. Let?s use that as a starting point.?

Besides Mr. Warner, the group includes Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, and four senators who were on the fiscal commission ? the Democrats Kent Conrad of North Dakota, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, and Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, and the Republicans Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Michael D. Crapo of Idaho.

Even if the Senate approved some step toward budget talks as a condition for increasing the debt limit, House Republicans would most likely balk, people in both parties say. All three House leaders who were on the fiscal commission, including Mr. Ryan, opposed the recommendations made in the majority report, saying they would not cut health spending enough and would force tax increases.

However the debt debate unfolds, Republicans are sure to turn Mr. Obama?s own words against him. As a senator in 2006, with Republicans controlling the White House and Congress, Mr. Obama voted against the Bush administration?s request to raise the debt limit. It passed with Republican votes only, 52 to 48.

?The fact that we are here today to debate raising America?s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure,? Mr. Obama said then. He added, ?Leadership means that the buck stops here.?

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Bit-Gamer Competition #6

Bit-Gamer Competition #6

Posted on 7th Feb 2011 at 12:01 by Joe Martin with 14 comments

Last week we asked you to let us know what you thought about Sony's newly announced NGP for a chance to win one of two bundles of PC strategy games. Now, we announce the winners and set a whole new competition!

First, we'll set the rules for the new competition. What we want you to do this week is either send us a question or let us know which game you'd like us to discuss in our next games podcast.

We have two sets of prizes to give away, one for the forums and one for Facebook.

If you want to enter via the forums then all you need to do is drop your answer in the comments to this article for a chance to win a copy of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit on the Xbox 360, plus Daniel Wilson's How to Survive a Robot Uprising book!

If you want to enter via Facebook then you should tell us on our Facebook page for a chance to win Medal of Honour on PS3, plus a copy of Chris Ryan's novelization. You can, of course, enter both as many times as you want to increase your chances of winning.

As for who won the last competition, we've selected two random winners from Facebook and Twitter and quoted them below. We'll be in contact with both of you to let you know how to get your prizes!

Twitter Winner - Adam Maturo
"@Bit_Gamer I think the NGP looks awesome. But it'll probably be really expensive and the back touch panel seems like a gimmick."

Facebook Winner - Lee Thompson
"I'm very much looking forward to the Sony NGP. It's quite a powerful piece of kit, addresses the serious flaw in the PSP (the dual thumb sticks) and the games should be amazing.

"Questions remain though - battery life, price and developer support. Hopefully it won't be hacked and piracy doesn't kill it in the same way that happened to PSP. If it's put on sale in the £300-£350 mark, it might well be the first console I pick up on day 1."

Good luck everyone!

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Blog - Blast 'n' Blown

AMD to abandon its processor brand names?

According to a document spotted by X-bit labs, AMD plans to abandon its established Sempron, Athlon and Phenom processor brand names with upcoming products. The company will divide new processors into different categories of Vision platforms and stamp them with basic model classifications and numerical identifiers, but no brand name.

We've already seen this with the newly launched Fusion APUs (Accelerated Processing Units). The Ontario and Zacate chips are simply called the AMD C-30, C-50, E-240 and E-350. AMD's Llano and Zambezi desktop APUs are expected to use a similar scheme, with the former being mid-range A-series chips and the latter becoming the high-end FX-series.


AMD says its Brazos ultrathin platform (which includes the aforementioned Ontario and Zacate APUs) forgoes component branding so OEM partners can use their desired names without sub-brands getting in the way. By excluding product brands, AMD also places more emphasis on its corporate identity -- X-bit labs compares this to Mercedes cars.

"Vision is AMD's contribution, which comes with the intention of simplifying the purchasing for folks who know what they want to do with their PC and don't care to learn the intricate sub-component technical nuances to make a buying decision. Will we do the same with Llano and Zambezi? You'll have to wait and see," said AMD spokesman Damon Muzny.

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Patient-Derived Heart Cells Mimic Disease

Beating balls of heart cells created from skin biopsies of children with a rare inherited disorder called Timothy syndrome replicate the abnormal heart rhythms that characterize the disease. The cells provide a new way to search for drugs to treat the disease, which is linked to autism and serious?sometimes fatal?heart problems.

Researchers have already identified one compound that normalizes heart rhythms in cells growing in a dish. In addition to benefiting research into Timothy syndrome, the cells might be useful for detecting drug compounds that trigger or exacerbate abnormal heart rhythms, one of the most common reasons for drugs to be pulled off the market.

The findings, published Thursday in Nature, are part of a growing trend to create stem cells from patients with specific diseases, such as heart disease, neurodegenerative disorders, and developmental disorders, and use these cells to recreate the disease of interest in a dish. Although scientists have previously created cells from people with Down syndrome, ALS, diabetes, and inherited forms of heart disease related to Timothy syndrome, this study is among the first to use the cells to screen compounds intended to reverse the defects seen in the cells.

"Even though we know the gene mutation for many of these diseases, people haven't always connected the dots in terms of how the mutation leads to the arrhythmia [abnormal heart rhythm]," says Michael Laflamme, a physician-scientist in the Center for Cardiovascular Biology at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the study. "That's where these cells come in."

Ricardo Dolmetsch, a neurobiologist at Stanford, and collaborators collected skin cells from two young patients with Timothy syndrome and returned them to a stem-cell state with a technique called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell reprogramming. Like embryonic stem cells, iPS cells can be differentiated into any type of tissue, making them a potential source of tissue for drug screening and perhaps tissue-replacement therapies.

The researchers treated the stem cells with chemicals to prod them to develop into heart tissue. After growing for about a month in a dish, the cells developed into beating masses of tissue made of each of the three cell types in the heart; atrial, ventricular, and nodal cells. When the cells are made from people with normal hearts, "they beat beautifully at 60 beats per minute, just like human hearts," says Dolmetsch. However, when derived from stem cells created from patients with cardiac disease, they beat more slowly and missed certain beats, he says. "Something is clearly wrong with them."

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