Mersopolis

Second dream started off in a coastal town. It was just a pleasant sunny day with a nice sea breeze and then my subconcious decided it would brighten the mood by having a maniac behind a sports car plough into the side of a bus, sending them both careening off the road and towards people on the pavement. Fortunately, the people got out of the way before they both ploughed half way through the wall of someone's house. Both instantly burst into flames, the bus passengers ran out of the bus, both drivers weren't so lucky. People began pouring out of the smashed buildings in a panic while I looked on in bewilderment at the hell around me and how fast it had appeared. There was a screech of tyres. I turned to look expecting police or ambulances but, naturally, it was U.S. soldiers... In the middle of the English countryside... They formed two columns and called for people to walk down the middle so they could be searched. One by one, people were escorted away from the danger. I was called, but as I stepped forwards the soldier on the verge of searching me flipped and raised his rifle so that I was looking down the barrel, yelling at me to back up. I did as I was told, hands raised, but that didn't stop someone kicking me in the back of the legs and forcing me flat against the road. Someone else joined the fray and pressed the side of my head into the road. As you can imagine, the panic of this attack made me attempt to break free which only served as an excuse for others to join in. Now I was completely restrained when someone grabbed my lower jaw and yanked it down almost to breaking point, they hooked their other hand under my front teeth and started pulling on the upper jaw.
 
Although being aware I could try to clamp down on whoever was dumb enough to place their fingers in my mouth, I was also aware enough to realise I didn't want my jaw being snapped seconds later, so I froze. Fortunately, he then moved his hands to my chin and forehead instead, maintaining the pressure. I caught the glint of something metallic to my right, I couldn't make it out though since my eyesight was being obscured thanks to the hand pressing my eyelids upwards too. Suddenly, the metal was smashed against my teeth and began brutishly scraping. I then realised my teeth were being filed. I writhed as I attempted escape and then in agony as my teeth (and generally the inside of my mouth) were slowly destroyed. I kicked and screamed, spat blood onto the asphalt. But the onlookers didn't make a move or sound, just kept staring. The only people who kept yelling were the ones who kept my arms twisted behind my back and kept kneeing me in the ribs. A few moments later I was magically back home. In the mirror I could see the extent of the assault. My canine teeth were reduced to bloody stubs and everything else had been filed down to a bloody, uneven line. My mouth was so butchered and my tongue so swollen I was only capable of barely audible gurgles and growls. Fortunately, with the power of dream logic, the random person in my house who I've never met* was perfectly able to understand what I was saying. I can't remember what I said though. So yeah... Basically, I was tortured by being defanged. First thing I did when I bolted awake out of that dream sat upright in bed was roll my tongue around my teeth and sigh in relief. Hopefully my next dream isn't straight out of a body horror film.
 
(*I've heard the theory where anyone you see in your dreams is actually someone you've seen in reality, as the brain isn't capable of creating faces. I'm doubtful of that... If the brain can create something as vivid as I just described, why would it struggle with making up a face?)

That's actually kinda interesting; how did people get into tf2?
 
For me it was mostly portal memes; saw the orange box on sale and it had portal so I bought it, finished portal and the hl2s before even touching tf2.  Then after getting into it a bit I found this video because a friend got me listening to Pendulum
 
 
And then I got turbo hooked even though my pc couldn't really run tf2 and I mostly played it at that same friend's house

Started work as a temporary administrator around 3 1/2 weeks ago, and although I've been hearing rumblings about it for the past week or so I've had it confirmed today that they want to take me on as a permanent contract and give me a promotion into a different team that they'll be starting in the new year as a data analyst. 

Dreamt there were these water-lizards migrating out of the river onto land to mate or something. They'd do a big jump outta the water and glide onto land. Caught one outta the air. Then some weird rectangular helicopter ship flew over my house and almost crashed.

Mind you, this is the same IT department that forced a lab to install Windows 8 on one of their computers for "security reasons" even though said computer was entirely off the network, was only used to control one piece of equipment, and the software it used to control said piece of equipment was incompatible with anything post Windows XP.  (I believe that they currently use someone's personal laptop but shhhh it's a secret.)
 
They also have only one help line for the entire institution, and said help-line is always staffed by college interns.  Thus you can have a problem where you know exactly what needs to be done on IT's side, but you still have to spend half an hour talking to some kid who thinks that you are trying to set up your e-mail address.  They even paid to have some consultants do an external review on the IT department, and their number one conclusion was that it was absolute essential to give people with more difficult technical problems direct access to someone experienced in the IT department, but nothing has changed.

IT department has decided on a policy of requiring passwords to change every month and requiring that no old password can be reused ever.
 
I tried explaining to them how this actually makes things less secure because people will have trouble remembering their passwords, and thus will either simply increment numbers on their current passwords, or will write down their passwords somewhere, with either option making passwords easier to determine.  But of course, such concerns were dismissed.

There's no Scream Fortress 9 update page so I made it one.

Come on, be fair.  They barely had more than a year to test things.

Managed to use the exploit 'fore it went away,
Made a hacker ragequit, I'm proud to say!

Cubes can die.
 

With the unholy magic of a Friday the 13th birthday in October, Vampire Cube is reborn!

 
(spooky music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU-WZf81cg8)
 
 

At about the same time that you posted this the radio played Metallica's cover and I was thinking "man this version sucks."
 
Here's another mashup that I think is legitimately quite a lot better than any of the component songs:
 

Aabicus introduces us to this one weird civilian everyone seems to really like.
 
I also did some tidying up, fixing up the FAQ page and the ToC page (that I kinda copied off one of my other websites that I run).

This one is worse for showing you how the algorithms work but better for pretending that you are receiving coded messages from your alien overlords:
 
 

I've been pretty enamored by Titanfall 2 over the past month and it's easily the game that's taken up the most of my free time throughout September. As such, I suppose it can't come as much of a surprise that my most recent dream that I can remember was TF2 related.
 
In my dream me and Silent (who doesn't even own or play Titanfall, fuck knows why he's there) were members of an elite mercenary team known as "The Fast Guys" and we were sent on a mission by the team leader to kill a renowned titan pilot named "Lastimosa" (Who is a character from the single-player campaign of TF2). So we travel to the planet this Lastimosa is supposedly on and a whole bunch of fighting ensues, but we pretty much take out all opposition with ease. Finally we find Pilot Lastimosa and have a long 2v1 duel with him. After a hard fight we blow up him and his titan and Silent turns to me in his titan and goes "Looks like Lastimosa just had his Lastimoment"

Then I woke up.

Why is this so good

This?

Hiya folks. I didn't see a topic on this, so I thought I would start one. Many of you may already know. I'm also a little late to the party (news was broken on Monday by Cisco Talos).
 
If you downloaded version 5.33 of CCleaner recently, you also downloaded a multi-stage payload on top of it. It looks like it was a watering hole attack, so it's unlikely the payload will DO anything to you (they were supposedly targeting big tech giants, including Cisco themselves), but you still don't want a mysterious malware backdoor on your PC. Cisco recommends you not only uninstall CCleaner, but also re-image your machine (or just restore to a date prior to August 15th). If you really want to keep CCleaner, then update to 5.35 immediately.
 
Thank god I didn't install that update (still on 5.23).
 
More info:
http://blog.talosintelligence.com/2017/09/avast-distributes-malware.html
http://blog.talosintelligence.com/2017/09/ccleaner-c2-concern.html
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/ccleaner-hackers-attacked-microsoft-intel-cisco-and-other-tech-giants/
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3225407/security/ccleaner-downloads-infected-malware.html
 

The PUBG situation right now is very interesting to me and even though I don't actively play or follow the game, I have been following the most recent debacle with Epic Games and Fortnite. PUBG has been pretty solidly in the spotlight for the past half a year roughly and it has even grown to become the most popular game on Steam, beating out giants such as Dota and CSGO. That's a very good thing for the game. Unfortunately it's also been in the spotlight with some more mixed and even negative press over the months, most notably the whole situation with PlayerUnknown making a fool of himself in a public chatroom, the stream-sniping ban controversy, the implementation of loot crates with paid keys during early access development and now finally with the POTENTIAL lawsuit against Epic Games. There's a lot to discuss regarding these things if you choose to care about it and I wouldn't blame you if would rather just shrug and go about your day. As for my self I am a relentless and thirsty drama-whore, so I'll dig into it in hopes of finding the juicy bits. 
 
So far my conclusion has been that PUBG is probably a fairly solid game and easily the best of the several different battle royale games we've seen since the inception of the original mod in Arma 2. I would probably enjoy playing PUBG with friends quite honestly. Unfortunately I have also concluded that PlayerUnknown is an arrogant prick who has no reservations about shitting on his fanbase and who is willing to go back on his word for the sake of a quick cashgrab (Loot crates in early access after an explicit promise that they wouldn't make it into the game until it had been fully released). Furthermore we're now at a tipping point where PlayerUnknown and his team are considering legal action over a fucking videogame "genre" that they have questionable legal rights to anyway.
 
People are seriously talking about whether making a genre of videogames intellectual property is OK or not. Absolutely fucking ridiculous if you ask me.

There was a mandatory IT today meeting to unveil a new web app and offer training for it.  When they asked us to login, about the third of people there got a blank page.  Someone asked "are there browser compatibility issues with this?" The response: "Oh no, it works fine with everything.  It's just that some things don't display properly with Internet Explorer, and sometimes pages don't display at all if you use Firefox or its offshots.  But we've seen very few errors when you load it in Chrome."
 
(Once I finally saw it the usability and general design of the site were shit too.)

I dreamed that TF2 got an update that turned it into...well, an MMO, I guess. It added a hub world that integrated many of the maps, where you could take control of one of the nine classes and do...not much of anything. You just wander around interacting with other players, and the characters will sometimes say some line relevant to the location and other classes that are nearby.
 
It wasn't great. Most of the dialogue was generic dream gibberish, and you had to walk all the way to a particular map if you wanted to join a game on it. But hey, at least it was an update!