Many of you may know that aside from Hak.5 I’ve been involved in another podcasting venture over at mmoradio.com with Jenn Cutter of OpenAlpha.tv. The show, The War Room, was all about Blizzard’s World of Warcraft. I’m both happy and sad to say that the show has officially come to an end. I’ve canceled my WoW account, which means I’ll have much more time for Hak.5 now. I will however miss doing the live radio show with Jenn, and questing with the most awesome fans on the Stormrage realm.

Unfortunately as soon as the show ended last Sunday MMORadio.com pulled the plug on The War Room website, forums, and feed. It’s been a fun four months but for those who weren’t lucky enough to catch the live show there won’t be a series finale sync’d to their ipods this week. So thanks to our talented producer I’ve gathered all 13 episodes of The War Room and uploaded them here for your enjoyment.

It’s been a blast working with co-host Jenn Cutter and producer Stephen Saylor and I’m positive as this chapter ends new colaborative projects will emerge. But we’ll have to wait a bit longer for any announcements about that.

So as we end The War Room I propose a toast to all WoW players and invite you to enjoy the series finale available here.

On another note, if you’re ready for some twitch action shooting with Wess and I, the Hak.5 LAN party will be going on this Saturday with Counter-Strike: Source. Details in the post below.

—Darren

Just a reminder that this Saturday we will be holding our second Hak.5 LAN party. This will be the last LAN party with Counter-Strike: Source until the next rotation. So this is your chance to equip a Desert Eagle & M4A1 and take on Wess and Darren in Dust, Office, Assault, and all the other fun maps.

Game: Counter-Strike: Source
Date: Saturday, May 27th
Time: 9:00 PM EST (-5 GMT)
Server: game.hak5.org (password: hak5)

Hak.5 LAN parties powered by

We hope to see you in game Saturday!

—Darren

Last night the Computer America interview went well. We chatted for the first hour about Hak.5 in general as well as some things to look forward to in season two. The bit I said about Alli and Evil Server were just to throw you off track so don’t start speculating . I hung around for the second hour when Alex Albrecht from Revision3 joined in and we had a blast talking all things podcasting, MMO, and E3.

The audio is available without commercials in both MP3 and OGG here:

Hour 1 MP3
Hour 2 MP3
Hour 1 OGG
Hour 2 OGG

Thanks go to Carey Holtzman and Computer America for having us on, the fans for calling in, and Alex Albrecht for being cool (especially with the diggnation and the broken parodies).

—Darren

Hak.5 will be on the Computer America radio show with Craig Crossman and Carey Holzman this Friday night (May 19th) at 10pm EST (-5 GMT)/ 7pm PST. Computer America is “America’s longest-running nationally syndicated radio talk show about computers”. You can tune into the radio broadcast if it’s carried in your area or listen to the Internet stream.

I’ll make the MP3 available here on Saturday. This is a live call in show so feel free to join in!

–Darren

The Counter-Strike: Source LAN party scheduled for this Saturday, May 20th has been pushed back to Saturday May 27th due to a scheduling conflict with Wess. Last week he was unable to join the fragfest and it won’t be the same this weekend without him. Hopefully this will give everyone more time to blockout that date and hone their deagle skills.

Game: Counter-Strike: Source
Date: Saturday, May 27th
Time: 9:00 PM EST (-5 GMT)
Server: game.hak5.org (password: hak5)

Hak.5 LAN parties powered by

We hope to see you in game next week!

–Darren

Good news: The forums are back! Bad news: Disabling the forums didn’t lower CPU usage.

I know it’s PHP that’s using to many cycles and I’ve ruled out wordpress and phpbb so the only thing left is *gasp* blogtorrent. I’m tweaking it now but if I don’t see improvement by tomorrow I’ll be forced to disable the BitTorrent tracker. I don’t mind moving the tracker offsite or outsourcing it if that’s what its going to take to keep things running smoothly. Suggestions very much appreciated.

The forums have been disabled for 24 hours as I try to isolate a CPU usage problem. Until then feel free top drop by #hak5 on irc.hak5.org.

Oh yeah, and the episodes and sketches pages have been updated. I think they look much cleaner.

–Darren

The much needed website upgrades are currently taking place. The normal drill applies, if you notice a broken link I would love to hear about it. I’m currently working on making the episodes page and sketches page much cleaner. Feedback on the new template is welcome. It’s a challenge putting this all together as there are 15 unique elements of the website that need to fit somewhere. Some have pointed out that elements such as the links or donations get lost in the mix and that’s something I’m trying to figure out how to deal with.

I hope your week is filled with technolust,
–Darren

Our first Hak.5 LAN Party was a grand success. The three hour Counter-Strike: Source marathon was a blast and I’ve got to give mad props to Rob Fuller for the impromptu live in-game commentary shoutcast stream. Now if you weren’t able to make our pilot fragfest don’t worry, we’ll be doing it again next week. Details:

Game: Counter-Strike: Source
Date: May 20, 2006
Time: 9:00 PM EST (-5:00 GMT)
Server: game.hak5.org
Password: hak5

The Hak.5 LAN Party is powered by

In this experimental season finale episode of Hak.5 Darren & Wess wrap up ton of viewer questions covering gmail to SMS, recovering dead hard drives, email from the command prompt, and streaming video in flash. A special guest drops by to cover cracking windows passwords & securing windows. Plus Rob Fuller of mubix.com joins us to talk a bit about Tor and Anonym.OS and an Interview with Travis from RainbowCrack-Online.com.
 
 
Read more

There are a lot of great happenings here at Hak.5 so I’m going to take a few moments to run through the highlights.

T-Shirts by Jinx

This is something that we’ve been very excited about for a long time and the day has finally come. Our new T-shirts are now available at www.jinx.com/hak5/ and they look great! With a big bold Hak.5 logo on the front and “Trust Your Technolust” across the back they really make a statement. The quality is leaps and bounds above those old white tees and they’re less expensive too! We can’t wait to get our first email with a picture of you wearing one. Score one for Hak.5 fans & thanks to Jason over at Jinx for making that happen.

DivX Movies

We’re also happy to announce that we’re now featured on the DivX.com site in their new Video Blogs section. Best part is you can now watch all our episodes either on the page streaming, or download them to disk. This is great news considering that prior to this announcement direct downloads of the xvid version of our back catalog (episodes 1-5) have been offline. So if you’ve missed some of the older episodes and want to catch up you can now grab a copy over at divx.com! Thank go to Ben at DivX.

Bit-Tech and Wired

We’re excited to be recognized in such awesome ‘zines both online and in print. The Wired article is now available online (We’re on page 2). You can also check out the write-up on Bit-Tech.net’s May 2nd article, IPTV Decoded (Page 3). According to Wired we’re “ubergeeks” and Bit-Tech claims we’re “hacking gurus”. As long as we’re not labeled “nerds” we’re A-OK ! Thanks guys!

G4 TechTV: Call for Help

We just recently got back from a trip up to Toronto where we shot three segments on Call for Help. Keep an eye out for Wess & Darren on episodes 370 and 374 this month!

Episode 10
It’s mad crunch time. We lost a week to my vacation at the beginning of the month, a weekend to weather, and a weekend to our trip to Toronto. We’re behind schedule and the editing box is on its last leg. It’ll be getting a reformat as soon as this episode is out the door. That said we’re burning the midnight oil to get this puppy online. Officially ep10 is our season finale which implies that we’ll be taking a break. If we even do take a break and how long said break will be is still up in the air. But some things are for sure. Once ep10 releases our focus will be on a website redesign & DVD release. Stay tuned for announcements on those in the coming month.

And most importantly, thank you everyone who has been so supportive of our dream. In our first year we’ve made some big steps and we’ve very proud to have such an amazing fan base. Whether you’ve been with us since episode 1 or just discovered us I’d like to say thank you for your support. Everything from seeding the torrents to donating to watching the show really means a lot to us.

–Darren