Hawkawkari of Khaz Modan sent us this one -- apparently somebody on the Best Buy Canada site is a little miffed about some expansion news, and it's showing up in their description text for the game. There's some QQ in there about siege vehicles ("1% chance to drop, bind on pickup"), a "hairstyling" profession for Blood Elves and Night Elves, and a special "Unbalance Game" power for Death Knights "on a one-patch time limit cooldown." Pretty funny.

I thought this was just a case of Best Buy cutting and pasting from another more informal site, but Google doesn't find the same text anywhere else, so this might actually be a disgruntled WoW player in their system writing out a fairly biased description. The text still says a release date hasn't been announced (and of course it has) so look for the text to change soon (just in case it does, the full text is after the jump). But wherever you are, disgruntled WoW player, thanks for the laugh.

As much as some Blizzard reps might have wanted to play coy on the official forums, the official World of Warcraft site leaked a link to Pre-order Wrath of the Lich King which will -- according to the page -- indeed come out on November 13, 2008. So while there has mysteriously been no big announcement on the Blizzard websites, this Pre-order page pretty much confirms what Wowhead and Thottbot unveiled earlier today.

Participating retailers include Amazon, Best Buy, Circuit City, and GameStop. Interestingly enough, all the official links except for Best Buy peg the official release at November 3, a date leaked out in earlier reports. GameStop words it as "ships in 11/03/08" which could mean that the games will reach retailers over a week before the official release date. [EDIT: Or yeah, it could be that they haven't updated their sites yet. Good morning!] The details include both normal and Collector's Edition versions of the game. The official Blizzard site has, as of this writing, now been updated to reflect the official release date with a splash page.

[UPDATE: GameStop has revised their release date to match the announced date of 11/13/08]

Alright, this is a question that's probably more important for those offshore than the people in the United States. When World of Warcraft and The Burning Crusade were released, I had to call people in the U.S. to pick up our copies and send us our registration keys. I missed out on the Collector's Edition of the original one because of geographical limitations, but I'm fairly certain I would've camped out at Target or Best Buy the night before release in The Phantom Menace/ iPhone style just to get one.

I was in San Francisco a week or so before The Burning Crusade made its way to the shelves (blast you and your moving ship dates, Blizzard!), but fortunately made arrangements to get a Collector's Edition before I had to head back home. I'm more prepared now, banking on a few channels to get a couple of Collector's Editions of Wrath of the Lich King when it comes out later this year. With the game right now shaping up to be one of Blizzard's best ever, I'm curious as to where people plan to get their copy. Have you pre-ordered? Is there a store chain near you? Maybe you, like me, are geographically challenged and will have to (ab)use contacts abroad? What's your Wrath of the Lich King release date battle plan?

Hackers seem to be trying more and more ways to get legitimate accounts out of players hands and working to steal and farm more gold, but if you think they've had some sneaky schemes in the past, you ain't seen nothing yet. Our colleagues at Massively have a story that's both amazing and disturbing at the same time.

A lot of geeks found a digital photo frame under the tree this year. Seems like a good idea, I'm sure a lot of us have a pretty large collection of digital photographs stored on memory cards and flash drives that we just haven't quite gotten around to printing for display.

Unfortunately, certain frames sold at Best Buy, Target, Costco and Sam's Club come with an extra undocumented feature, in that they have a nasty little bug that's being dubbed Mocmex. The bug can burrow its way into your computer, latch itself in, and sniff out account information. It doesn't seem to affect Linux or Macs, at least not in its current form, but right now there doesn't seem to be a single manufacturer or frame type that's infected, so the origin of the bug hasn't been nailed down.

If you think you've got one of the infected picture frames, Massively recommends contacting the SANS institute and calling the store where the frame was purchased. You can check their story for the contact information.

The upside of this, I suppose, is that if the farmers are starting to branch into using peripherals to steal our accounts, they may be getting pretty desperate. The downside is, when we have people who practice safe web browsing and keep a clean computer getting bitten, like our Amanda Dean for example, we could be in some trouble. With any luck, all the major virus programs will have a cure for Mocmex and programs like it soon. In the meantime, it looks like we'll have to be extra careful about what we install on our computers, and make sure our anti-virus programs and firewalls are up to date.