Recently on the Women in Games (WiG) blog, Emma Westecott wrote up a post about needing a student blogger for two events, I'd say I jumped at the chance of it, although I had forgotten until last minute before the deadline to actually send my email I had composed. All because I'd been super busy with moving house the same weekend.

So I rushed to McDonalds to use their free Wi-Fi (pretty much the only place in Aldershot with free Wi-Fi), as I'm currently without the internet.

A couple of days later I heard back from Emma telling me I'd been chosen, which I'm ecstatic and completely blown away by, I never would have thought I would be picked for it, but then I don't really know how many people tried to get the little job.

Either way it now means that I get to go to Develop and DiGRA, which I am very happy about, as I originally intended on buying myself a ticket for Develop, and without much money at the moment it may have made living a problem and DiGRA I could have only afforded once I had a job.

So keep an eye on the WiG blog as hopefully there shall be some posts up by me soon.

Huge thanks though to everyone that had to do with me being picked as well.

So it’s finally come to the end of my three years at University and I happily have come out with a nice first like I posted about before. Now my life begins, I’ve moved to Aldershot, Hampshire, as opposed to going back to Chelmsford, Essex, as I felt I would be less productive if I lived at home.

So why Aldershot I hear you ask?

Well it’s not as expensive as Guildford, Surrey (a key place in the games industry, plus close to London and home) but it’s just down the road, and close to London, along with everywhere else that Guildford is close to, just add or subtract around 20-30 minutes on top of travel time when going in certain directions.

I will honestly miss Newport, but there was no real reason to stay in Wales, so I had to leave. Unpacking is almost complete give it another day maybe to get everything nice and neat and tidy. I also need to finish work on Void, send out more CVs and get my business cards designed, coloured and printed all before Develop, which should be interesting.

I've been getting a few e-mails from people asking where they can download MSE now that Microsoft have closed off the beta. The short answer is I don't know.

I can tell you the MD5 and SHA-1 hashes, so you can at least make sure you can get a copy that hasn't been tampered with if you're that keen on using it.

There's three installers:

mssefullinstall-amd64fre-en-us-vista.exe (3.72MB) which is the installer for Windows Vista and Windows 7 64-bit, its hashes are as follows:

MD5: D460B3A5116FF1DB2CFA69ACA80DF8C0
SHA-1: B5E7FC24FCD646EFCAE3457DB7D7FC48E648AE23

mssefullinstall-x86fre-en-us-vista.exe (4.72MB) is the installer for Windows Vista and Windows 7 32-bit.

MD5: 4C9AC845F5FD5547FC522035FA251F00
SHA-1: 7986596458E37EF8875A9DDAC0AE9AAC9A41E936

mssefullinstall-x86fre-en-us-xp.exe (7.51MB) is the installer for Windows XP 32-bit.

MD5: 7F9D0DE36B6673974D4D6BD6F5731D89
SHA-1: F273DA4CC2EECFBF0C97B2B0701399A20EC5B7AA

So if you are going to go to any lengths to get hold of it, at least get one which hasn't been modified to include any unwanted surprises.

This week:

Marvel vs Capcom
ZeniMax Media acquire id Software
Fallout 3 expansion
Idea of the week: Tremors game
Spore: Galactic Adventures
Moaning about Spore
Blizzard stuff

Download, 24MB, MP3.

If there's one thing I learnereded from his work, its that zombies are people too.

Took some pictures a few days ago. Here's the Photosynth.

You can press P to toggle the point cloud/images on and off. I've just got a 4GB CF card, weather permitting I'll start work on the biggest Photosynth ever. :)

As expected Symantec (the makers of Norton, the most popular anti-virus/security suite software) are a tad nervous over Microsoft Security Essentials, and with the number of technology enthusiasts they've scorned over the years they've got every reason to fear a backlash now, so they're upping the FUD campaign from level 1, they're not concerned about MSE, to level 2, stating that its rubbish and won't protect you.

From the BBC:

"Early reviews of the beta are showing that it under-performs when compared to existing freeware products, and well below paid solutions," said security firm Symantec in a statement.

I'm not sure what reviews Symantec are talking about, but I haven't read any data on MSE's performance yet, nor should we expect any for weeks, if not months as that's how long it takes to actual do proper scientific tests.  It does however use the same core engine and definitions as OneCare and Forefront, so the logical thing to do would be to use data evaluating OneCare's performance.

The latest tests by AV-Comparatives, rank OneCare second in detection of new malware, but also importantly it scores the lowest false positives by far, meaning it won't detect genuine files as being malicious.  Which is what led AV Comparatives to award it the highest ranking.  Here's the data for new malware detection rates.  Where's Symantec, oh right down the bottom with a dismal 35%.

For a good couple of years now OneCare/Forefront has been well above average on detection rates for new malware and on false positives.  MSE using the same engine will continue this trend, and if anything improve it as it will give Microsoft a larger sample size to create new definitions on.

What else do Symantec have to say?

"Referring to Microsoft's basic anti-virus and anti-spyware product as an essential security solution is misleading. Consumers need firewall protection, web protection, anti-spam and identity safeguards"

1) Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista and Windows 7 have a built in firewall which is turned on by default. :-)
2) Internet Explorer 7 and 8, and Firefox and other browsers have web protection, i.e. blacklists of known malicious or phishing/identity-stealing websites. :-)
3) Everyone's e-mail, either web-based like Hotmail or Gmail, or their e-mail clients, Windows Mail, Outlook etc all have built in spam filters nowadays. :-)

Seriously Symantec, you're not doing yourself any favours.  Microsoft Security Essentials is the most non-annoying consumer anti-virus ever, not only that it also has one of the best detection engines out there.

The beta for Microsoft Security Essentials is now available from Connect, or find your way there from the official homepage.

Highly recommended.

This week:

Letters
Games on Demand
PEGI ratings to replace BBFC
"New" Xbox 360
Sims 3
Transformers 2
PGR and Forza

Download, 26MB, MP3.

Neowin has some details on codename Morro, now called Microsoft Security Essentials - rumoured to go into a public beta form soon.

You can clearly see how this was built upon the excellent anti-spyware software Windows Defender that Microsoft included with Windows Vista (and made a free download for Windows XP), you can see it even more clearly in earlier builds.

Hopefully this will be everything the PC ecosystem needs it to be. Windows Defender + anti-virus. Windows Defender was really a breath of fresh air, it showed anti-malware manufacturers how the job should be done. It's fast, it doesn't complain about updating itself - it just does it. It doesn't blast open windows telling you its running a scan - it just does it. The only remotely annoying thing would be a tray-icon appearing after three days if the computer hadn't been on to run a scan - a tray-icon that doesn't even exist the rest of the time.

Compare that with the likes of Norton and McAfee who just put bucket loads of junk all over your system, Norton toolbar in IE, Norton this and that in the Control Panel, all over the Start Menu and in the system tray. Let's not even talk about the performance hit - which is extreme and how they're constantly bugging you.

It looks like Microsoft Security Essentials will basically disable and replace Windows Defender on a system, it will take up the job of anti-malware in general - another good thing, having two separate scanners for anti-virus and another for anti-spyware is a bad performance hit. Having one resident scanner scanning for everything is much better.

Hopefully they keep things that way and continue to follow in the steps of Windows Defender, and not fall along the path of OneCare, Norton and McAfee, of being more annoying than the malware they're supposed to protect you against.

So far so good. Now I just need the beta so I have time to complain about things before it ships to the world, and if done right, massively shakes up PC security forever.