We're all suffering from the summer slump these weeks, so let's do something

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Mania Creative (MAC) celebrates its 10,000th registered User
WIN TRACKMANIA UNITED FOREVER

You can win 1 fresh TMU serial to upgrade your Nations account to United.

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What you need to do ? LINK BACK TO MANIA CREATIVE
Let's get Mania Creative known a bit more among computer people.
So give this forum link to all your Trackmania and Online buddies.

Step 1) Go to another big forum, where you are registered (no TM forum!). Edit your userprofile / signature there.

Step 2) Insert one of these codes into your signature on the other forum. Chose the logo you like more :-)


or


Step 3) Come back here and post a link to one of your threads/post on the other forum, so we can see the MAC logo in your signature.

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End of the Raffle : 1.10.2010
At the end of the raffle, 1 RANDOM PERSON which has posted a valid backlink, WINS !
Everyone has a chance to win !

Quote:Rules:
- The other forum must be related to "anything computer" (hardware,software,games,social, etc...) and must be a public, active forum.
- The big TM forums (TMForum,Maniaplanet,TMX,DS etc.pp) and TM clan forums are NOT valid.
- Your signature must be activated for all your posts in that forum.
- You must be an active member (not newly registered) on that forum, so chose carefully.

* The winner will name a nations account login, which will be transformed to a United account by me.
This is to prevent TMU people "storing" multiple serials for trading purposes (without using it for real accounts).

Alternative for people who are not registered on big forums:
Post the large banner (with linkback) permanently on your own homepage and post it here.
Your homepage must have its own domain (no freehost).

Forwarded by Tecfan

More great news this day: an ESL admin has asked the RPG community to build maps for upcoming ESL RPG cups.

Here is a quote from a guy called "NOW" from his RPG forum post:

Quote:Hey guys, iam an ESL Admin and we search RPG-Maps for Cups. Do you can build an RPG-Map for this? 60 Min time and after this 60 min win the 3 fastest times. The Map should be easy, but not to easy. In the Cups drive many rookies, so they must find the way. The Pros should be drive in they first try a time around 20 min. The rookies between 30-40 min. It would be great, if you can answer me

The cups will be one Wednesday per month, and the first one will be on August 18th. As of right now, the cup is only for German, Austrian and Swiss players, but they are hoping to make it international.

I look forward to these ESL RPG cups anyway, and you can be sure that the RPG blog will cover them.

And as NOW states, they need builders, so if you are interested, this is the place to go:
http://www.trackmania-rpg.com/256-esl-is...-cups.html

Source:
http://trackmaniarpg.blogspot.com/2010/0...lders.html

Nadeo has announced to open up a new big forum at 12'noon today !
It's meant to be a compact platform for TM,TM2,SM and QM!

We'll see what happens, don't forget to register soon! Click the image to get there !

More info:
E3 2010: Maniaplanet reveal

Source:
http://palgn.com.au/pc-gaming/16706/e3-2...et-reveal/

Quote:During Ubisoft's Press Conference today they made the announcement of a new gaming platform that they were creating. This platform is called Maniaplanet, which they have dubbed the world's first user-powered PC gaming zone.

Within it you will be able to play 3 genre's; First Person Shooters in Shootmania, Racing games in Trackmania and Role Playing Games in Questmania. It's a unified network that allows users to create games using the map editor provided and upload them to the Internet for other's who are a part of Maniaplanet to play. It is a new way to distribute user made content across multiple genre's, while keeping them all in one central location and all compatible with the original Maniaplanet software.

The follow beta testing periods were also given in the trailer:

* Trackmania 2: Q4 2010
* Shootmania: Q1 2011
* Questmania: Coming Soon

GO TO ORIGINAL YOUTUBE VIDEO

source: http://www.tm-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=25540



A new Manialink reserved to United player is born. It is named ManiaHome.This is the social network integrated into Trackmania. Indeed on this Manialink you can access to every pieces of information linked to your friends. It’s also possible to comment their activities. Moreover you can add other Manialinks as bookmarks and receive news from them. You will also have a shortcut on your maniahome page to access to all your bookmarks.

To access to your notifications just type ManiaHome in the Manialink explorer.

PLEASE READ CAREFULLY !
Yesterday I had the opportunity to talk to a well known TM programmer and security specialist and he was nice enough to answer me an important question:

"How do TM accounts get hacked today?"
Back in the earlier days, a TM client revealed a bit too much information connecting to online servers and besides that, TM's player database was directly attacked by hackers to reveal huge listings of player logins + passwords.
These flaws were fixed a long time ago and luckily, people aren't stupid enough anymore to freely give away their account passwords to anyone else who promises to give them any bonuses like coppers or whatever.
So how does it still happen ?

Never underestimate the power of automation !
People lightly use important pieces of data (like passwords) in places of -unknown- security, for example to protect their selfmade driving tracks from beeing analysed by others. That's a common thing among trackmakers...

Have you considered someone using the information stored in that trackfile (playerlogin + a password) to try to login into your TM account ?
Could that be successful because you used the same password for your tracks and your TM account and even lots other websites ?
Have you ever considered the power of automated scripts, reading+processing thousands of tracks and testing the login/pw combinations within literally no time ?
You should....

Do server accounts get hacked as well ?
Yes, there are numerous methods to gain access to servers and server accounts, because server admins make the same stupid mistakes (leaving default values as logins/passwords) and by not protecting important configuration files against direct access from outside (and against beeing found by search engines like google!). And never forget that servers LOVE to talk to everyone who connects to the right ports.

This was just a small small insight to how people could get a hold of your account, these and other methods have been successfully (!) executed in the past and it's time for you to gear up your security measures.

4 simple hints for you !
- Don't use default values for passwords. Never.
- Don't use the same passwords at different important locations. Never.
- Always protect important configuration files against readability and beeing indexed by search engines.
- Never give your passwords to anyone else for whatever reason. Never.