Appologies for not posting as of late, I've been pretty busy and have been making a habbit of going up to the mountains to snowboard every weekend. I'll be posting a review of my new Samsung SCH-i760 in the next few days, but I thought it would be an appropriate time to give away some more Xbox Live Arcade games courtesy of the folks over at the GamerScoreBlog.
The games are:
-
Sensible World of Soccer
-
Tempest
-
Omega 5
-
Tron
Also congrats to Tree for winning the Spongebob arcade game!
When logging into majornelson.com (or litheon.com) you might notice that you are redirected to the secure page. Although we generally wouldn't purchase SSL certificates for our sites, especially the wildcard certificate for majornelson.com, DigiCert made a very generous offer to quite a few Microsoft MVPs and as such Major and myself now have SSL. So thanks to them you can now rest assured that nobody will be harvesting your login credetials.
I must say DigiCert has a very user-friendly experience, even for
somebody, like myself, who has never gone through the process of
creating or requesting a certificate before. If you're ever looking for
a wildcard certificate or a certificate with a few subject alternative
names (domains it's valid for) you should definitely check them out.
They have a very friendly, responsive, and incredibly fast staff (even at 3 AM).
In case you're curious SSL works by using asymmetric cryptography to obscure data sent between both the client and server. In the process the client requesting information from the server receives a public key from the server, with which it can generate it's own private key and then encrypt it before sending it back to the server. After this both parties will be able to encrypt and decrypt data sent between them so they can be reasonably sure that no untrusted third party could be maliciously intercepting their communications. During this key exchange progress is generally where the protocol is most vulnerable because the client could potentially be given a bogus certificate by any entity performing a man-in-the-middle attack, which would allow them to retrieve encrypted data sent to them, decrypt it, and then send it off again to the server as encrypted. However, it is very easy to combat this by paying attention to any sort of certificate errors you may receive during browsing. If you ever receive a certificate error when visiting a site you trust (and have visited it securely) it's usually accurate to assume somebody is trying to intercept your communications.
In other words, if you ever receive a certificate error when visiting litheon.com, majornelson.com, or any other website for that matter don't ever input any sort of information that you would not trust in the hands of a third party. Also if you ever have any issues in regards to security with either site feel free to send me an email.
I hope you all had a good holiday despite some of the recent issues Xbox Live has been having.
I'm currently in the process of looking for a relatively large HDTV for my dorm room (when I say large somewhere between 42 and 46 inches) that I can move over to an appartment next year. Now I've never really bought a TV before so I don't exactly know what I'm looking for, but after some research it seems that I would probably want to purchase an LCD. The ideal candidate would do 1080p and have a relatively good response time so gaming on it isn't an issue. What I've had in mind is this TV on Newegg. It's a little pricey, but from what I can tell this TV is a pretty good deal and will do the job pretty well. So I'm looking for any suggestions anybody might have in regards to the purchase of a TV, anything from where to get it or where to get cables, to whether or not purchasing an extended warranty is a good idea.
Also, if anybody wants the new SpongeBob arcade game send me a message over Xbox Live or post a comment here and i'll do a drawing between the first 10 people to send me a message. Please don't enter just for the sake of getting something free though.
Thanks!