Beautiful Cloud

With Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 out in the market, selling millions of unit worldwide, having the biggest video game launch ever beating even the largest music sales and video game sales record previously owned by Grand Theft Auto IV. I'm just wondering, how modern is Modern Warfare 2?

With the current state of information technology of most technologically advanced countries, they could do lots of things that would render physical combat to a stopping halt. Using satellites, spies and drones to steal battle plans and positions of soldiers and war machines, to track of influential soldiers or person to make assassination easier, to disrupt air traffic systems, to gather information on all possible combat locations, to tap, decrypt and falsify information like eaves dropping and sending false messages to the enemy, intercept their wireless communication system or even penetrating their cellular networks. And to a country that relies heavily on information, hacking into and taking over their network systems be it wired or wireless, disabling their life supporting utilities like electrical, water and gas plants, disrupt financial data to prevent banks from reconciling their financial transaction and stock exchange to go haywire and finally the country economic systems. Imagine all that happening to your country just before the troops and lethal forces comes in and invade.

Wouldn’t that be more terrorizing?

One might argue that it is not there yet. But information warfare is here. With people using public cloud computing to crack PGP encrypted files, what kind of computing power do you think the central governments agencies, such as NSA have for example? Secure networks? I’ve seen people sending private messages using their company systems, revealing all internal networks IP addresses, operating systems, mail client and server versions and usernames. People using wireless devices while at the same time connected to their internal networks. Third world countries that do not rely heavily on IT? Information warfare does not rely on the internet only. And now most countries have internet and unfortunately Microsoft operating systems on their desktops, go figure. And small groups of people are already hacking into cell phones and do man-in-the-middle attacks on satellite network transmissions.

So, back to the question. How modern is Modern Warfare 2?

Tim Sneath from Microsoft has published 30 tips and tricks to try on the new Windows 7 which can be read here. What interest me is that Windows 7 can be installed via USB just by copying the content of the DVD to a USB. It is also said that the performance of Windows 7 is better then Vista AND XP.

Windows 7 Beta 1 is publicly available from Microsoft Website. You can get the 32-bit ISO or the 64-bit ISO.

Log in to TechNet using a valid Windows Live ID then go to the 32-bit beta key page to get your key or the 64-bit beta key

After downloading check the integrity of the file using a hash calculator such as HashCalc.

32-bit version hashes:
MD5 - f9dce6ebd0a63930b44d8ae802b63825
SHA1 - 6071184282b2156ff61cdc5260545c078cca31ee
CRC: AABA5A48

64-bit version hashes:
MD5 - 773fc9cc60338c612af716a2a14f177d
SHA1 - E09fdbc1cb3a92cf6cc872040fdaf65553ab62a5
CRC - 8E2FAD39

If you are in need to run multiple versions of firefox in you PC, such as having both 2.0.0.14 and 3.0b5 at the same time, then this is basically how you do it.

You can get the latest beta version from here, which is 3.0 beta 5 by the time of this writing