Hasta La Gadget!

Earlier today we reported that according to the rumor mill, word has it that Nintendo has prepped a Wii Mini for a release on the 7^th of December. If you were trying to decide if this was merely a hoax or perhaps there might be some truth to it, well it seems that Best Buy has corroborated that rumor by listing the Wii Mini on its website (screenshot pictured above). Clicking the link itself does not direct us to the Wii Mini page, but rather a list of Wii Mini games which means several things. For starters it could mean that Best Buy could simply be buying into the rumors themselves, or they probably know something we don’t and if that is the case, based on the image, we might have a glimpse of how the alleged console might look like.

This is rather odd because like we stated in our previous report, Nintendo has recently mentioned that development on Wii games has stopped and that they would be focusing their efforts on the Wii U (unsurprisingly), so if that is the case, why would anyone be interested in buying a redesigned console from the previous gen? One possible reason comes to mind which is if the Wii Mini priced extremely competitively which will attract gamers who don’t mind playing current and older games. Either way we’ll take this with a grain of salt for now and will probably only believe it when we see it!

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: GameStop’s Black Friday deal for Xbox 360 sounds too good to be true, PlayStation 4 rumored to feature AMD’s A10 APU, dev kit shipping to developers,

Best Buy’s Canadian site just got a hardware surprise from Nintendo, the Wii mini. It looks like the retailer jumped the gun but unfortunately, it doesn’t reveal much else aside from a December 7th release date. Rumors of a console refresh have circulated over the last few days and while the preorder link isn’t live just yet, but you can spot the Wii mini’s new red and black design, which looks to be only slightly taller than the original Wiimote. The Wii’s successor launched only a few weeks earlier in the US, managing to sell 400,000 units in its first week. We’ve contacted Nintendo and we’ll have more when we hear it.

Filed under: Gaming, Nintendo

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Via: Eurogamer

Source: Best Buy Canada

Over the holiday weekend Amazon was the website to grab most of the online shopping on Black Friday. While we haven’t seen official numbers, it would be a safe bet that Amazon also grabbed a significant portion of the online shopping for Cyber Monday as well. While Amazon was busy selling hordes of products over the holiday weekend, Monday it also made a rare bond offering.

Amazon’s bond offering raised $3 billion for what the company calls “general corporate purposes.” About $1.16 billion of that money is expected to be used complete the purchase of the headquarters complex for Amazon by the end of the year. The last time Amazon made a bond offering was in May of 1998. Amazon’s fortunes have significantly turned since that 1998 bond offering when the company was rated “junk.”

Amazon’s business is booming now thanks in large part to the company’s incredibly popular line of Kindle digital readers. Amazon has also turned into a heavyweight in the online retailing space selling just about anything and everything you can think of. Analysts believe that Amazon is simply taking advantage of low interest rates to build up cash reserves.

Moody’s senior credit officer Margaret Taylor doesn’t believe that the cash will be used for acquisitions. She said, “Historically, Amazon has tended to build rather than buy.”

[via WSJ]

Amazon bond offering raises $3 billion is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

When Diablo 3 was revealed, Blizzard also announced that they would be introducing a proper PvP system in which players would be able to battle each other in an arena-like setting, much like how World of Warcraft gamers can participate in arena matches for various rewards. Now given the amount of success that Starcraft and Starcraft 2 had, many are wondering if perhaps Diablo 3’s PvP scene could perhaps become an eSport. Of course Blizzard has to release the PvP feature first for that to be even considered, but it looks like even when it does, it does not seem that it will be made or pushed towards being an eSport.

This was confirmed by Blizzard’s Mike Morhaime  during a press conference last week at the Battle.net World Championship finals in Shanghai as transcribed by TeamLiquid. While this isn’t to say that PvP in Diablo 3 won’t be competitive, Morhaime rightfully distinguishes that while PvP in Diablo 3 will be competitive, creating a professional tournament around it would be an entirely different story. “There are certainly competitive things that we’ll be able to do with Diablo, and I think that at future Blizzcons we might set up different ways for people to compete at the game, but that’s very different from creating a professional tournament structure around something like that.” In any case we’re still waiting on Blizzard to release the PvP portion of the game whose date still eludes us.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Dead Or Alive 5 Costume Pack Gets All Risque, Battlefield 3 Patch Corrects Input ful Lag, Balances Weapons And Squashes Bugs,

I’d wager just about everyone has stayed in a hotel that uses the key card locks where you slide a little card into the door to release the locking mechanism. One hotel called the Hyatt in the Houston Galleria district that uses these locks had a rash of break-ins in September. The most puzzling aspect of the break-ins was that the locks weren’t picked, the doors weren’t forced open, and a key wasn’t used to unlock the doors.

During the investigation, hotel staff learned that an enterprising thief was using technology to hack the key car door locks, tricking the doors into opening with ease. The hotel staff came to this conclusion when a device capable of reading the memory on the key card lock determined that none of the hotel staff keys had accessed the lock on one of the violated rooms. In fact, the device showed no key had been used during the theft.

The thief who was behind the string of hotel room break-ins in Houston was believed to be taking advantage of a previously theoretical intrusion technique that security researchers have warned about months before. Even more troubling is that hordes of hotel rooms around the world are still vulnerable to this exact same attack. The vulnerable locks come from a company called Onity and are estimated to be in use on 4 million hotel rooms around the world.

The flaw that investigators believed to have been exploited was demonstrated by a software developer for Mozilla at the Black Hat hacker conference last July named Cody Brocious. Brocious showed that he was able to trick the lock into opening using a portable programmer device designed to be used for designating master keys and opening locks when the batteries had died. The device Brocious used was small and cost less than $50 to build. Also worth noting is that lock maker Onity isn’t paying to fix the flaw in the 4 million locks estimated to be in use, and is asking hotels to pay for the fix. That could mean many locks remain vulnerable as hotels refuse to pay.

[via Forbes]

Hotel room break-ins linked to key card lock exploit is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.