Granted, it was a two year old article, but one of the companies around where I live would remove platters and attempt recovery for less than $2000 at that time.
That's no money at all to a company, and managable for a private citizen if the content was really important to them.
No, it really really isn't. Not every pimple faced teen's "challenge" published on the Internet will be taken even remotely seriously. As this one is not. If it were a serious publication doing research in a professional manner, it would be different. Even _if_ this site was one that could be taken seriously, the challenge itself has too many holes in it (others have pointed out details on that).
The ability to recover data that has been overwritten with 0s would be very much a service in demand today.
Perhaps. Although I would imagine someone that employs methods of safely erasing has a tendency to make sure before they hit the button.
And you completely missed the point about reputation. A company that proved it could do this would be a company that people would go to.
No, I didn't. A company that quoted that site as a source would have its reputation damaged, not improved.
They would gain MUCH more than just prize money; they would gain lots of business.
That's assuming there are lots of people out there safely erasing something they shouldn't have. I don't work in the business so I don't have any figures, but I would be very surprised if that would be even a measurable amount of their business. Also, it could very well be that it just can't be done, of course. In that case they have even less incentive - if that is possible - to waste time on that challenge.
Ok, yes, I agree it says something. Namely, that companies in this field have no interest in a no-name site's seriously flawed challenge.
Remember, they are in the business of recovering data erased or damaged by accident. They have plenty of high profile references showing they are capable of that. You might have a point if this challenge was directed at the creators of disk erasing software, but come on... This challenge is about as serious and professional as me posting "send money pls" in a blog. That is very much relevant to whether a company would take it seriously or not.
I am a bit surprised nobody's come up with a link to a privacy organization's article about something like this though. I have a hard time imagining no organization or newspaper has ever done something similar, then sent the disk in for recovery and reporting the result. For an actually corporation, the money we're talking about isn't worth mentioning.
Yes.. ENORMOUS. It's the famous 16 Systems after all. The are world renowned for their services. Such as amazing software that is capable of scanning your local files looking for sequences that might be SSNs, and two more "give me Python and five minutes" type applications.
They are clearly very security minded. Half the links on their webpage produce
Secure Connection Failed
16systems.com uses an invalid security certificate.
I can't even imagine the new business I would see if I participated in their challenge. And the recognition!
[/sarcasm] These are either idiots, well meaning kids, or scammers. Either way, only the./ editors are ever going to take that "challenge" seriously.
$30,000 and damaged platters/heads might be replaced, and attempts at hardware recovery done.
Right. The recovery firm in my area does that for less than $2000. That is, removing platters from a damaged drive and attempting recovery.
$300,000, and the electron microscopes might see use.
I haven't been able to find a quote on this one, but you were off by a factor of more than ten on your last guess. I wouldn't be surprised if that were true here as well.
I tried using Chrome on my work PC. It was utterly useless. Not because of Chrome, but because of the lack of a flash/adblocker.
Any page I went to typically had at least a handful of flash ads. It sucked up every last bit of CPU that poor machine has. The only way to be able to comfortably scroll a page in Chrome was to pop up the task manager and kill the flash plugin. Unfortunately, it loads it again when clicking a link.
Even if flash performance had been liveable, I've been using adblocker for so long it was really difficult to get any reading done with all those distractions.
I don't mind ads in general. I don't filter text ads. But good grief, those freaking animated flash ads have just got to go.
I'm so much against the notion that I should need to break a protection scheme on something I bought (it's legal where I live), that I refuse to buy it to begin with. They know what they need to do to get my money. Their move.
Unfortunately, he has to pirate it to ensure he can play it.
I just hope Fallout 3 won't follow this sad trend. If all games start going the "online activation, max 3 installs" route, I might have to find a new hobby. I sure as hell won't buy games in this state.
He's got redudant points (not having to connect is a given if assuming you're not being treated like a criminal), and the list does not cover having to be online every time you wish to install a game.
One would think that would be covered by the "not treated like criminal" point, but apparently it's not, since StarDock forces you online to install unless you bought a physical copy of the game.
That is the only issue I have with both Steam and SDC/Impulse. I can create local backups easily, but I cannot restore them unless I've installed SDC/Impulse/Steam and been online with it.
I can't say for sure that won't work, but I doubt it. I would assume any file Steam has created upon first login will be linked to that system. Precisely to prevent someone from just packaging it all up and distributing it. If it was really that simple, HL2 would've been all over the place hours after unlock. As far as I can remember, it took a good while, which would imply it's not trivial.
Either way, Valve does not want this to be done and the backup tool itself does not support it. Which means that, without jumping through hoops, your backup is worthless once Steam is gone. And that's my one beef with Valve/Steam. If they allowed me to backup and restore on any computer, Steam would be perfect.
I can carry around the GCF files, like for playing on school computers.
But you still have to install Steam and log on before you those files are any good, yes? That's my only beef with Steam. I wish they'd watermark the files or something instead and let me be completely untethered if I needed to be.
Do you mean the "masses" that pirate the dog shit out of the stuff?
Considering they don't have to contend with DRM at all, obviously I did not. The geeks knew what they were getting into if they bought DRMed music. The average joe, did not. But now, after the closing of several DRM music stores, they can no longer claim they don't know what they're getting into if they buy other DRMed media.
True, DVDs are technically DRMed. However, once you have a DVD player and a disc, that player will not ever stop playing that disc unless either the player or the disc breaks (for the sake of the point, I did not buy a great deal of DVDs until the DRM was so broken it wasn't an issue anymore). Blu-ray can happily decide to refuse to play your movie for any number of reasons.
Eventually virtually every Blu-ray player out there will be region free and we'll all have Blu-ray burners and empty media costing a few cents. I'll re-evaluate my decision at that time.
I think you missed part of his point. Component is not encrypted and, even though it may not be enabled on most current movies, Blu-ray is designed to reduce image quality unless the entire media path is "secure". It starts to get really depressing when you realize how hard it is to figure out whether every component in your setups actually supports whatever HDMI version is required.
Here's what I don't get. They don't refuse it to play, they "only" reduce quality to about DVD. Yet they are up in arms about people using camcorders in theaters. If they actually believe people are content watching CAMs, why would they for a second believe anybody would be bothered by DVD quality?
Assuming you count people interpreting them to fit past events as coming true. I can't remember a single instance of someone interpreting Nostradamus as predicting something *before* it actually happens, and in fact having just that happen.
The day they remove the DRM is the day I buy Blu-ray. It's just not worth my money paying for something that's designed to make it as difficult as possible to view what I buy in the quality I paid for.
For the general population, I believe the reason many embraced DVD was the navigation. Instant chapter jumps, no rewinding. Yes, it had superior quality over VHS, but for anybody but the specially interested I don't think that was the killer feature.
Blu-ray? Its *only* offer over DVD is resolution/quality on HD TV sets. And to get that you have to accept DRM that effectively means you're allowed to watch your movies for as long as "they" decide you can.
Unfortunately, the masses didn't seem to learn much from the music DRM fiasko. But luckily Blu-ray lacks any kind of killer feature so it's not being accepted as quickly as it otherwise might have been.
I'll stick to my HD media jukebox and MKVs for now, thank you very much. I would have bought a Blu-ray player for that money if it weren't for the DRM.
So, in other words, you just assumed. Even Bioshock does not have any kind of time-out, and that has the most annoying DRM of anything on Steam.
Considering all the yelling the proposed "go online every 10 days to stay activated" scheme for Mass Effect and Spore got, I can't imagine anything on Steam having such a system and it not being everywhere in the internetian news. Bluntly, I say you're bullshitting.
Now, for the other point you make, it is true offline mode will not work if you go offline mid-update. Or rather, any game currently having updates pending will not work. What does that have to do with DRM though? Heck, it even warns you about it every time you go offline, so you know not to switch back to online unless you are in a position to actually let it complete its updates.
Whether that's a side-, by-, or main effect I don't give a rat's behind. A game I bought and paid for stops working because the parent company goes under, I'm pissed. You are aware that you could not play Master of Orion 2 anymore if it had that kind of protection, yes?
I was talking about Steam, specifically. There's quite a lot that separates what Steam does from what authentication based DRM does.
Steam and Stardock are services I appreciate and use. They are so damn convenient and time saving for me that I accept the fact that I will no longer be able to download those games from them once they go out of business. This is not because they are evil and require authentication and limits amounts of installs or anything of the sort. It's simply because they do not exist anymore.
There's a world of difference between that, and Spore's DRM. Steam offers me something of value, and its downside is not an artificial limitation. Securom offers me absolutely nothing of value, while depriving me of something I do value, for no good reason whatsoever. I will not buy it, nor any other product with that kind of DRM. I do not buy DRMed music. I do not buy Blu-ray movies.
And that changes what? That it will be working as long as there is Steam? Where's the difference, if I may ask?
The difference, for me, is that Steam is a distribution platform. If they go out of business I'll lose the ability to install my Steam games on any new machines, but that's a side effect, not its purpose. As long as they stay in business, I'll have access to my games, no restrictions (with exception of Bioshock, and they added a warning label to that).
DRM of the type that's becoming popular lately, purely exists to ensure you don't own what you bought. It adds nothing of value, while taking quite a bit away from you.
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, it was a two year old article, but one of the companies around where I live would remove platters and attempt recovery for less than $2000 at that time.
That's no money at all to a company, and managable for a private citizen if the content was really important to them.
Once again, the site is irrelevant.
No, it really really isn't. Not every pimple faced teen's "challenge" published on the Internet will be taken even remotely seriously. As this one is not. If it were a serious publication doing research in a professional manner, it would be different. Even _if_ this site was one that could be taken seriously, the challenge itself has too many holes in it (others have pointed out details on that).
The ability to recover data that has been overwritten with 0s would be very much a service in demand today.
Perhaps. Although I would imagine someone that employs methods of safely erasing has a tendency to make sure before they hit the button.
And you completely missed the point about reputation. A company that proved it could do this would be a company that people would go to.
No, I didn't. A company that quoted that site as a source would have its reputation damaged, not improved.
They would gain MUCH more than just prize money; they would gain lots of business.
That's assuming there are lots of people out there safely erasing something they shouldn't have. I don't work in the business so I don't have any figures, but I would be very surprised if that would be even a measurable amount of their business. Also, it could very well be that it just can't be done, of course. In that case they have even less incentive - if that is possible - to waste time on that challenge.
Ok, yes, I agree it says something. Namely, that companies in this field have no interest in a no-name site's seriously flawed challenge.
Remember, they are in the business of recovering data erased or damaged by accident. They have plenty of high profile references showing they are capable of that. You might have a point if this challenge was directed at the creators of disk erasing software, but come on... This challenge is about as serious and professional as me posting "send money pls" in a blog. That is very much relevant to whether a company would take it seriously or not.
I am a bit surprised nobody's come up with a link to a privacy organization's article about something like this though. I have a hard time imagining no organization or newspaper has ever done something similar, then sent the disk in for recovery and reporting the result. For an actually corporation, the money we're talking about isn't worth mentioning.
Yes.. ENORMOUS. It's the famous 16 Systems after all. The are world renowned for their services. Such as amazing software that is capable of scanning your local files looking for sequences that might be SSNs, and two more "give me Python and five minutes" type applications.
They are clearly very security minded. Half the links on their webpage produce
Secure Connection Failed
16systems.com uses an invalid security certificate.
I can't even imagine the new business I would see if I participated in their challenge. And the recognition!
[/sarcasm] ./ editors are ever going to take that "challenge" seriously.
These are either idiots, well meaning kids, or scammers. Either way, only the
$30,000 and damaged platters/heads might be replaced, and attempts at hardware recovery done.
Right. The recovery firm in my area does that for less than $2000. That is, removing platters from a damaged drive and attempting recovery.
$300,000, and the electron microscopes might see use.
I haven't been able to find a quote on this one, but you were off by a factor of more than ten on your last guess. I wouldn't be surprised if that were true here as well.
Among me and my friends, HD capable media jukeboxes won the HD war.
I tried using Chrome on my work PC. It was utterly useless. Not because of Chrome, but because of the lack of a flash/adblocker.
Any page I went to typically had at least a handful of flash ads. It sucked up every last bit of CPU that poor machine has. The only way to be able to comfortably scroll a page in Chrome was to pop up the task manager and kill the flash plugin. Unfortunately, it loads it again when clicking a link.
Even if flash performance had been liveable, I've been using adblocker for so long it was really difficult to get any reading done with all those distractions.
I don't mind ads in general. I don't filter text ads. But good grief, those freaking animated flash ads have just got to go.
By buying it, you are endorsing the protection.
I'm so much against the notion that I should need to break a protection scheme on something I bought (it's legal where I live), that I refuse to buy it to begin with. They know what they need to do to get my money. Their move.
He should buy it if he wants to play it
Unfortunately, he has to pirate it to ensure he can play it.
I just hope Fallout 3 won't follow this sad trend. If all games start going the "online activation, max 3 installs" route, I might have to find a new hobby. I sure as hell won't buy games in this state.
I still have a couple of tribbles I bought there.
Me too. And it's one of the few noises my guinea pigs refuse to get used to.
It'll be strange going to Vegas and not vising it. It's become tradition on our US vacations.
He's got redudant points (not having to connect is a given if assuming you're not being treated like a criminal), and the list does not cover having to be online every time you wish to install a game.
One would think that would be covered by the "not treated like criminal" point, but apparently it's not, since StarDock forces you online to install unless you bought a physical copy of the game.
That is the only issue I have with both Steam and SDC/Impulse. I can create local backups easily, but I cannot restore them unless I've installed SDC/Impulse/Steam and been online with it.
Where in "for future generations" did you read "aliens"?
No, they really will. Yes, you have to install/log into Steam (whoever said that you wouldn't? It's still a Steam game...)
Now, let us quote what you are refuting.
No, they really won't. You will be unable to restore those backups until you've installed and logged into Steam
See a similarity?
The entire point was that once Steam is gone, your backup is useless. That makes it not a backup but a bandwidth saving feature.
I can't say for sure that won't work, but I doubt it. I would assume any file Steam has created upon first login will be linked to that system. Precisely to prevent someone from just packaging it all up and distributing it. If it was really that simple, HL2 would've been all over the place hours after unlock. As far as I can remember, it took a good while, which would imply it's not trivial.
Either way, Valve does not want this to be done and the backup tool itself does not support it. Which means that, without jumping through hoops, your backup is worthless once Steam is gone. And that's my one beef with Valve/Steam. If they allowed me to backup and restore on any computer, Steam would be perfect.
No, they really won't. You will be unable to restore those backups until you've installed and logged into Steam (just try it, I did).
So, yes, you save yourself the download, but if Valve is out of business you're still screwed and have to rely on cracked copies.
I can carry around the GCF files, like for playing on school computers.
But you still have to install Steam and log on before you those files are any good, yes? That's my only beef with Steam. I wish they'd watermark the files or something instead and let me be completely untethered if I needed to be.
After YouTube started mangling the audio it made it pretty useless for this sort of thing. Try Vimeo instead http://www.vimeo.com/1431471?pg=embed&sec=1431471
Do you mean the "masses" that pirate the dog shit out of the stuff?
Considering they don't have to contend with DRM at all, obviously I did not. The geeks knew what they were getting into if they bought DRMed music. The average joe, did not. But now, after the closing of several DRM music stores, they can no longer claim they don't know what they're getting into if they buy other DRMed media.
True, DVDs are technically DRMed. However, once you have a DVD player and a disc, that player will not ever stop playing that disc unless either the player or the disc breaks (for the sake of the point, I did not buy a great deal of DVDs until the DRM was so broken it wasn't an issue anymore). Blu-ray can happily decide to refuse to play your movie for any number of reasons.
Eventually virtually every Blu-ray player out there will be region free and we'll all have Blu-ray burners and empty media costing a few cents. I'll re-evaluate my decision at that time.
I think you missed part of his point. Component is not encrypted and, even though it may not be enabled on most current movies, Blu-ray is designed to reduce image quality unless the entire media path is "secure". It starts to get really depressing when you realize how hard it is to figure out whether every component in your setups actually supports whatever HDMI version is required.
Here's what I don't get. They don't refuse it to play, they "only" reduce quality to about DVD. Yet they are up in arms about people using camcorders in theaters. If they actually believe people are content watching CAMs, why would they for a second believe anybody would be bothered by DVD quality?
Yeees.. His predictions always seem to come true.
Assuming you count people interpreting them to fit past events as coming true. I can't remember a single instance of someone interpreting Nostradamus as predicting something *before* it actually happens, and in fact having just that happen.
The day they remove the DRM is the day I buy Blu-ray. It's just not worth my money paying for something that's designed to make it as difficult as possible to view what I buy in the quality I paid for.
For the general population, I believe the reason many embraced DVD was the navigation. Instant chapter jumps, no rewinding. Yes, it had superior quality over VHS, but for anybody but the specially interested I don't think that was the killer feature.
Blu-ray? Its *only* offer over DVD is resolution/quality on HD TV sets. And to get that you have to accept DRM that effectively means you're allowed to watch your movies for as long as "they" decide you can.
Unfortunately, the masses didn't seem to learn much from the music DRM fiasko. But luckily Blu-ray lacks any kind of killer feature so it's not being accepted as quickly as it otherwise might have been.
I'll stick to my HD media jukebox and MKVs for now, thank you very much. I would have bought a Blu-ray player for that money if it weren't for the DRM.
Allow me to quote myself
Or rather, any game currently having updates pending will not work.
So, in other words, you just assumed. Even Bioshock does not have any kind of time-out, and that has the most annoying DRM of anything on Steam.
Considering all the yelling the proposed "go online every 10 days to stay activated" scheme for Mass Effect and Spore got, I can't imagine anything on Steam having such a system and it not being everywhere in the internetian news. Bluntly, I say you're bullshitting.
Now, for the other point you make, it is true offline mode will not work if you go offline mid-update. Or rather, any game currently having updates pending will not work. What does that have to do with DRM though? Heck, it even warns you about it every time you go offline, so you know not to switch back to online unless you are in a position to actually let it complete its updates.
Whether that's a side-, by-, or main effect I don't give a rat's behind. A game I bought and paid for stops working because the parent company goes under, I'm pissed. You are aware that you could not play Master of Orion 2 anymore if it had that kind of protection, yes?
I was talking about Steam, specifically. There's quite a lot that separates what Steam does from what authentication based DRM does.
Steam and Stardock are services I appreciate and use. They are so damn convenient and time saving for me that I accept the fact that I will no longer be able to download those games from them once they go out of business. This is not because they are evil and require authentication and limits amounts of installs or anything of the sort. It's simply because they do not exist anymore.
There's a world of difference between that, and Spore's DRM. Steam offers me something of value, and its downside is not an artificial limitation. Securom offers me absolutely nothing of value, while depriving me of something I do value, for no good reason whatsoever. I will not buy it, nor any other product with that kind of DRM. I do not buy DRMed music. I do not buy Blu-ray movies.
I do love Steam.
And that changes what? That it will be working as long as there is Steam? Where's the difference, if I may ask?
The difference, for me, is that Steam is a distribution platform. If they go out of business I'll lose the ability to install my Steam games on any new machines, but that's a side effect, not its purpose. As long as they stay in business, I'll have access to my games, no restrictions (with exception of Bioshock, and they added a warning label to that).
DRM of the type that's becoming popular lately, purely exists to ensure you don't own what you bought. It adds nothing of value, while taking quite a bit away from you.