Following the announcement of *takes a deep breath* Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness (boy, that's a mouthful) heading to the Xbox Live Arcade, Hothead Games and Penny Arcade just launched the official website for their upcoming episodic title.

The website will give the fans of Gabe and Tycho some game-related content and news. You can even view some trailers, screenshots, and fact sheets about the game. The website will also be used to launch the individual episodes in the series once they become available for purchased download.

On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode One is scheduled to roll out later this year for the PC, Mac OS X, Linux, and Xbox 360 platforms.

Click the Read link below to check out the official Rain-Slick site!

More bug news about Apple, and this time it's about Mac OS X. It seems that a recent addition of an exploit to the infamous Metasploit hacking framework has upped the level of threat that an unpatched bug in Samba currently poses to the system it's installed on, as well as on its user. This warning came directly from Symantec Corp., the company expressing concern over what appears to be apathy on Apple's part.

Of course, the people behind Samba had already done their homework on the bug itself. In fact, the patch that resolved the vulnerability in the open-source file and print-sharing program was produced and distributed by the Samba community exactly the day it was announced. That fixes things for Samba, but not for the Mac OS X itself.

So what's the unpatched bug, really? When turning on the Mac OS X's Windows Sharing feature, it also activates Samba. Keep in mind, Samba is not just a Mac OS X exclusive file-sharing software, as it's also used by PC and Linux users. This in itself is already a very wide opening in terms of security for the Mac OS X, as users can easily take advantage of the exploit and gain root access. Of course, this "opening" is very easily closed, as users only need to disable Windows Sharing - but it's more of a temporary stopgap rather than an actual remedy.

Apple's products may have few bugs and exploits, but by no means is it an excuse to not stay on your toes when root access security is concerned. That aside, let's hope for some timely measures coming from Apple itself. Updates as we get them.

Continuing our coverage of the ongoing E3 Media and Business Summit, here's a new video of the upcoming multiplatform FPS title Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (Mac, Linux, Games for Windows, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360).

This video is essentially a demonstration of the different customization options available to the Global Defense Force and the Strogg. We also get a look at the different combat roles that players can choose to play as along with a look at Quake Wars' mission system and the different objectives that can be assigned to players throughout the course of a mission.

There's also a cool demonstration there of the different ways players can choose to tackle a given objective or target. Not only can players shoot the wheels off of vehicles rather than blow them up, they can also choose to repair them with the help of a trusty pair of pliers. Pretty cool stuff. Check out the vid below.

GreatGamesExperiment.com has just announced today that they will be holding a week-long giveaway of games on you PC or Mac, whether it be Linux or Windows-based. GGE promises that each new user registered between June 7-14 will automatically get one shiny new game free from the GarageGames.com Game Store.

 

And that's not all, users will be able to select the game they want from a selection of 40+ games offered in this promotion, which are all made available at the same online game store. Users can choose from some award winning titles offered on the site, including Marble Blast Gold, ThinkTanks (office productivity's arch-enemy, we promise), Minigolf Mania, and Jets 'n' Guns Gold among others.

All games are available for the Windows platforms, while 18 additional titles are available for Mac casual gamers and another 11 titles can be downloaded to Linux. Upon creating an account, users must check their valid emails entered as a requirement on the registration form to hop over directly to the GarageGames Game Store site.

If you're wondering what Garage Games Experiment is, it's an online community of gamers, indie developers and publishers of the arcade, mini-game and casual persuasions can connect to each other through distribution and direct feedback. Gamers will be able to directly speak with developers of their instant favorites, while developers can choose to adjust their development to cater to the fanbase's whims.

This is certainly a great example of turning lemons into lemonade. In this case, turning a broken iPod into something much better.

After noticing that his iPod screen broke, Owen McGarry decided not to get it fixed, and instead managed to modify the iPod into an iBook mini-me. This was done by cutting the body crosswise in such a way that it would fold laptop-style, with the other half holding the screen and the hard drive and motherboard kept in the lower half.

What's great about this modified iPod is that there's a Linux operating system installed, along with full user interface. Not bad for a dying iPod reborn as a nifty...iTop. But how useful is it really? Check out the screens below.

   

According to Mac News Network, Apple's recent patent application clued in a couple of images detailing the Mac OS X Dashboard and its ability to be manipulated in a 3D fashion. In addition to being able to flip the Dashboard to reveal several other faces of multiple Dashboards, each new face will sport different assortments of widgets as defined by the user of the system.

While it's a novel idea, the concept looks just as similar to Beryl, a breath-taking interface modification for users of supported flavors of Linux. In a similar fashion, Beryl allows Linux users to flip their entire desktop to reveal other different faces of the cube, and each new face also sports a different assortment of windows as set by the user.

Mere "coinkidink"? We'd like to say yes, but then the Apple patent doesn't rip off the concept of "Vista-killer" desktop interface to level against Microsoft's Aero interface. You can hop to the article in MacNN through the "Read" link below, but before you do, check out a demo of just what Beryl does and judge for yourself. Thanks to w00styl3 for the video.

As a game where only the body count matters, genocide-em-up DEFCON: Everybody Dies was ported over to the Mac, allowing Mac gamers to wreak nuclear havoc on PC DEFCON commanders on Windows and Linux. Ambrosia Software picked up Introversion's World War III title and brought the nuclear warfare fun over to Mac users everywhere.

 

The Beta version for the Mac started back in February, but now it's up to par with the PC version at v1.4 and a new demo has shipped out today. Also, Ambrosia recently announced a patch for Windows users that will allow cross-platform multiplayer ability against Mac users. The v1.4 patch is the latest patch for DEFCON: Everybody Dies for Windows and should allow PC users to challenge Mac players.

The patch also ships immersive "watch, feel and hear" AmBX support to PC gamers with AmBX gaming peripherals coming soon. It is not the same RC patch released just a week ago, so PC beta testers must download the patch immediately. Players over Steam get updated automatically, so no worries there.

In addition, a Linux patch is also underway, allowing PC and Mac gamers to play with Linux gamers. The Mac and Linux versions are being created in unison, so expect the final release of the Mac to also signify the final release of the Linux version, too.

The poor guy who blew from boredom to stardom within minutes in Digg is now being hounded by Linux and Apple command line weavers for his apparent limited knowledge. In his opinion piece at the Apple Matters blog, he questioned the intuitiveness of Apple's Mac OS X when he committed a fatal mistake of deleting a directory vital to the Unix kernel.

While Matthew Bookspan could be excused for being in a rush to delete his /usr directory, the fact that he did use third party programs (NO-IP, to be specific) to provide above average user access otherwise unavailable, turns tables against him. But even then, we can't see the relation of his mistake to the the Mac OS X intuitiveness question.

Still, it should be apparent to anyone that there are things in your computer that just shouldn't be touched. Well, okay, that's not the entire truth: you can touch those sensitive folders, but only when you do have the technical knowledge or expertise to do so. In short, if you don't know what you're doing, don't do it.

But granted Bookspan learned his lesson, new computer users should also be vigilant on what they're doing, what effects it would lead to and who the action will affect. And because the Mac is slowly squeezing into the corporate world, new Apple users should heed our advice.

It's probably not time to go running for the hills with your mp3 player, but a little information about everyone's favorite music machine is probably in order now. It seems that someone's managed to create the first virus that actually infects an iPod.

Of course, as with any proof of concept, it's not as devastating as one might think. The virus, known as "Podloso" or "Oslo.zip," infects only iPods running the iPod Linux software. When saved to the iPod's memory, the virus scans the hard disk, infecting all the .elf format files. Using the infected files comes up with the message, "You are infected with Oslo the first iPodLinux Virus".

The only bright side so far to this news is that it doesn't have a destructive payload as of yet. Furthermore, iPod Linux is only present in less than one percent of all iPods in the world, due to the specialized nature of using Linux as an OS.

This isn't the first time the device has had a problem with viruses, however. RJump, otherwise known as RavMonE.exe, was a trojan that opened up back doors in Microsoft Windows and was installed into a number of video iPods prior to their shipping.

It looks like the Apple TV is going to feature Tux on its hood beside the pervasive Apple logo. Some ingenious hackers claim that they have wrought a custom Linux kernel on Apple TV's boot loader. The info is still incomplete but as it is, the kernel and the set-top box seem to have WiFi, SpeedStep and EFI. Other kernel status statistics:

• EFI is not working fully
• USB works with the "irqpoll" kernel commadnline option
• nv Xorg driver works
• nvidia's propritiary driver also works with full 3D accel
• Speedstep seems to work. The CPU Clock gets down to 600 MHz
• Wlan is working with ndiswrapper
• Sound works fine

Just for fun, we'd like to quote to you the spoof Apple marketing campaign that appeared on the Linux users' site when Linux was hacked into a Mac Book.

The Intel chip... For months, it's been trapped inside a Mac, inside a pretty little box, dutifully performing pretty little tasks when it could have been doing so much more. Starting today, the Intel chip will be set free, and get to live life in a Mac... running Linux. Imagine the possibilities.