If you’re a valve customer who’s paid for a game using their Steam content delivery system, be aware: once again Valve has been hacked, and this time it appears customer credit card information has been stolen. I’m pretty pissed off about this. I’m a valve customer myself, and you would have thought that they would have learned a lesson about the importance of strong network security after a hacker broke in a couple of years ago using trivial means and stole their source-code and released it online. But no, apparently they still have a cavalier attitude towards security despite having millions of customer credit cards. Making matters worse, their response to the issue has been abysmal – basically the community is outing them, otherwise they would not have said a word about it to date.

Anyway be aware. I’ll follow up as more details emerge, but it’s possible if you bought from them that your credit card is on the p2p networks or sold off to some russian crime syndicate or whatever.

[via joystiq] (and Tony who mentioned it to me yesterday)

Today’s the day – The Children of Hurin, a ‘lost’ work of JRR Tolkien, is available. Apparently this was a major unfinished work that JRR Tolkien spent a good piece of his life working on, and now one of his descendants has spent a good piece of their own life completing it. The pre-release buzz has been really good. You can get your own copy for around $15 using the link above. I’ll post a review after I finish it – of course I’ve had it on pre-order for months, given how influential Tolkien was in my early development.

I’ve touched on peak oil a number of times over the years. I managed to depress myself recently by reading through James Howard Kunstler’s recent speech to the commonwealth club of California over on alternet. It’s scary ‘end of the world as we know it’ stuff. I desperately wish I could see through the fog to know just how accurate these kinds of predictions are. Peak oil is pretty much universally accepted at this point – all that’s left is the bickering over when exactly the world will reach it, and how precipitous the drop off the cliff on the other side of it is. I’ve spent the last several weeks reading up on this and it’s pretty depressing. Almost all of the proposed solutions to allow for a soft landing on the other side of peak oil range from unlikely to utter bilge. Biodiesel seems to be a pipe dream (with the lovely side effect of causing global starvation – we’re already seeing food riots in mexico over US corn crops going to produce ethanol rather than corn for tortillas, a wonderful harbinger of what’s to come), wind power won’t scale, solar costs more energy to produce the generation systems (silicon solar cells) than the generation systems produce over their lifetimes, and the whole hydrogen economy thing seems to be snake oil. My favorite quote about the hydrogen economy issue came from a CA university system physicist, the gist of which was to the effect of ‘even if you assume we can solve the generation issue to produce hydrogen on the scale we consume energy now, it would take us 30-50 years to get our distribution, production, transportation and other systems up to speed, and meanwhile peak oil leaves us between 10 and 20 years to get there.’

Fuckin yikes!

It’s not entirely doom and gloom. Despite the problems, solar and nuclear seem the most promising possibilities. With solar we need to attain significant advances in generation and storage. With Nuclear, it’s a little reported fact that there is an unknown total global supply of uranium, no one has been prospecting for it in decades, and we currently have no decent breeder reactor system to produce our own fuels. Plus there’s the whole ‘what to do with the waste’ issue. Also even with these possibilities, there seems to be a general consensus that achieving the same level of easy access to energy resources that we enjoy now doesn’t seem at all likely.

I encourage everyone to read (or listen, there is an mp3 link) to Kunstler’s speech. Even if he’s on the far end of the spectrum in terms of outcomes, it’s informative, sobering, and important for all of us to understand.