Village Gamer

Reminder: Confoo 2011 is March 9th – 11th in Montreal.

Digital Extremes, developers of the PC version for the upcoming HomeFront game is participating in a session on Video Games and the Next Generation of Literacy in partnership with the Child & Youth Network, London Public Library and the United Way of London and Middlesex. The session will take place at the Museum London, 421 Ridout Street North in London, Ontario on Thursday, February 10th from 4:30pm until 8:00pm.

There will be a Keynote presentation by Dr. James Paul Gee, Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University and author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. The event will also feature a panel discussion, networking and refreshments. Donations to support literacy initiatives are welcome.

Digital Extremes has also launched a new iOS title. Available now for 99 cents US, Retro Pinball includes three handpicked tables (Crash and Burn, Super Android, Pangea) from original creator James Schmalz, all with updated graphics and sound to enhance your gaming experience on your favorite Apple iOS device.

Eidos Montreal has released a new trailer for Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Take an up-close and personal look at player character and game hero Adam Jensen.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is rated M for Mature by the ESRB and according to GameStop Canada, will be in-store on April 1st.

Puzzle Pond from Little Guy Games is a featured FreeAppADay game today, so hurry over to the iTunes App Store and grab this cute match-up game. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, you play Puzzle Pond by matching two creatures with a swipe of your finger to make them kiss and explode with joy. There are three game modes, Speed, Puzzle and Zen, with the ability to conduct combos and streaks for huge points and power-ups. There are currently sixty brain teasing puzzles in this Game Centre and OpenFeint-enabled game has twenty different achievements and a leaderboard.

Mike Farah, President of Production at comedy website Funny Or Die, and key members of his creative team will deliver a Feature Panel on the future of online comedy at BANFF 2011. Farah and his team will offer an in-depth look at the production strategy behind the phenomenal success of the site, which averages 8 million unique users and over 30 million video views per month.

“In only three years, Funny Or Die has become the destination for comedy fans online, with some of the best content out there,” said Ferne Cohen, Executive Director of the Festival. “We are all looking forward to what I’m sure will be a compelling and entertaining panel.”

As President of Production, Mike Farah oversees the creative day-to-day operations of the premier comedy site, along with Funny or Die’s television and feature projects. With Funny Or Die for over two years, Farah has produced the award-winning video “Prop 8: The Musical,” the Ron Howard-directed “Presidential Reunion,” and Marion Cotillard’s “Forehead Tittaes,” among many others. Under Farah’s leadership, Funny Or Die’s creative team produces over 25 original videos each month. In November 2010, The Hollywood Reporter named Farah one of the top 35 Hollywood executives under 35.

Montreal’s gogo6 inc., a leading provider of IPv6 products, community and services has released gogoCPE version 1.0 – a small v6 adaptor for the home that can be installed and providing IPv6 within a minute. Designed to work with, rather than replace home networking equipment, the gogoCPE can be used to deploy IPv6 using IPv4 or to deploy IPv4 using IPv6 – both resulting in a dual-stack home network. Early customers of the gogoCPE include SingTel, Comcast and Globe Telecom.

The gogoCPE is plug ‘n’ play simple and designed to be installed by the end user without any support. The gogoCPE uses the same code as the gogoCLIENT which has reliably provided IPv6 to over 150,000 users of the Freenet6 service.

The gogoCPE supports the most popular transition technologies including TSP, DS-Lite, 6RD, DSTM and L2TP. It is compatible with the gogoSERVER and other manufacturer systems. Its wide technology support allows it to work in any IPv4/v6 network scenario, including:

* Providing IPv6 to existing and new customers with IPv4 home routers in an IPv4 network.
* Providing IPv4 to new customers with IPv4 home routers in an IPv6 network.
* Providing IPv6 to new customers without IPv4 home routers in an IPv4 network.

“Hands down the most difficult part of introducing IPv6 into a broadband network is the home. This is where a majority of the IPv6 costs lie and where service providers have the least control. In a vast majority of the cases the home networking equipment is either not upgradable or owned by the end user making IPv6 synonymous with installing new equipment,” said Bruce Sinclair, gogo6 CEO. “The recent depletion of IPv4 addresses from the IANA pool increases the pressure on service providers to find a simple yet effective solution to offer v6 and v4 by way of v6. Service providers can quickly introduce IPv6 into their networks with a single 1U gogoSERVER and one gogoCPE per home.”

The gogoCPE is available today after being tested by service providers around the world. In addition to being sold in volume individual gogoCPEs are available on the gogo6 website. These units are preconfigured to work with Freenet6 making them plug ‘n’ play ready out of the box. Individual units cost $99 plus shipping and handling. Volume pricing is lower.

If I owned a Mac, I would be downloading the trial version of Office for Mac from Microsoft Canada right now, because they are holding a contest in partnership with LiveNation. Entrants could win a chance to see any band in the Canadian city—and seats—of his or her choice. Please see the contest rules for complete prize and entry details.

Roaring Penguin Software has updated its CanIt Reputation List, which collects IP reputation data on e-mail servers from a worldwide network of sensors. Roaring Penguin currently aggregates this data into four DNS-based block lists:

Spam Source: A list of IP addresses that have sent mostly spam and very little non-spam.
Dictionary Attackers: A list of IP addresses that have sent to many nonexistent recipients and very few valid recipients.
Greylist Stumblers: A list of IP addresses that have been thwarted by greylisting. Such machines are typically compromised personal computers.
Good: A list of IP addresses that have passed greylisting, have sent to very few nonexistent recipients, and have sent mostly non-spam. These machines are very likely legitimate mail servers.

To these block lists Roaring Penguin has added a new list called “Mixed” for hosts that send a mixture of spam and non-spam. Roaring Penguin found that the old “SpamSource” list would often list outbound mail servers for large e-mail providers. These servers tend to send a lot of spam, but they also send a lot of non-spam e-mail. The change to Roaring Penguin’s Reputation Lists means that about 5600 machines formerly listed on the “SpamSource” list are now listed on “Mixed”. This still leaves almost 1.9 million machines listed on the “SpamSource” e-mail reputation list.

CanIt 8.0 is available as:

* CanIt-PRO, an anti-spam / anti-virus appliance or a soft appliance.
* CanIt-Domain-PRO, spam filtering software that allows service providers such as MSPs to host anti-spam for their customers.
* Hosted CanIt, a fully outsourced anti-spam solution.

The Founder of the Online Party of Canada, Michael Nicula, will be holding a press conference on Saturday February 5, 2011 in the Art Room of the Gladstone Hotel to discuss CRTC policies in the context of decision 2011-44 to impose User Based Billing (UBB) on the whole Canadian market. Nicula will be joined by Iain Calder of TorFree.Net as well as affected consumers and small ISP providers.

In a move aimed to calm angry consumers, already dissatisfied with the internet service market in Canada, the CRTC president as well as many senior MPs vowed to review or strike down decision 2011-44. Internet service quality in Canada is not a new issue; it just happened that the latest CRTC decision has touched a nerve, as consumers are now enjoying data-rich social networking, livestream and television programs more than ever before.

Online Party of Canada wants to take the opportunity to broaden this discussion. Why has Canada slipped in the world ranking of country infrastructures in terms of speed and service quality? Countries like Romania and Bulgaria clock more than twice the average speed, and the leaders Korea and Japan boast speeds as much as three times faster. Is government intervention into the CRTC the right thing to do?

Online Party of Canada (OPC) is an Internet-based Political Party, pending registration. OPC is a non-traditional political party; it focuses on issues instead of platforms or individuals. OPC operates exclusively online and promotes an innovative voting system inspired from today’s popular technologies such as like/dislike, share, tweet, comment.