Not too long ago, a major fire demonstrated this point painfully well. As I recall, the fire was set when trying to restore this balance. Preventing natural forest fires can make the inevitable fires much worse, and it's hard to undo the damage prevention causes. However, it is still beneficial to keep fires away from populated areas, which is what this would be useful for.
Who else thought of NetHack when they saw the acronym for that title?
You zap the Wand of Wishing. You may wish for an object.--More--
For what do you wish? Box of World of Warcraft
l - World of Warcraft box
a
What do you want to use or apply? l
You start playing World of Warcraft...
Oh wow! Great stuff!
(A) the site was slashdotted at the time just about everything here was posted. Most posters are going by the sample program, which someone got and posted, and the description.
(B)The fact that it compiles doesn't make it any less a joke. The fact that it compiles is, by itself, humorous. The fact that it compiles *and* reads like a parody of Shakespeare is hilarious. Awhile ago, a steganographic tool was mentioned on Slashdot which would reversibly turn text messages into what looks like spam. This is a similar thing, for C code.
Any CSS descrambling software in Shakespeare? Assuming this isn't a complete joke...
Oh, what fools these moderators be. Of COURSE this is a complete joke; notice the category it's in, and read the sample program. It's easy to recognize which phrases have been designated to have language meanings, and that the way they're combined is grammatically-correct nonsense.
Games only push speed of the processor and the video card. That's it. Most games play off the CD, so they don't push the size of the hard drive. They could care less about your printer, scanner, or anything else like that. Most big software packages require more RAM than any game. I have 512MB at work not because I run games.
For advancing hard drives, media has taken the place of games, but games certainly *do* require hard disk space; do you honestly believe the seek times and speeds of CD drives are tolerable for games? As for RAM, well, office suites may get to be more bloated, but with that sort of software swapping doesn't matter; in games, performance goes straight to unacceptable when RAM runs out. Sure, games don't care about printers/scanners, but just about every other peripheral matters. Who do you think were first to go for super-high-resolution mice, and optical mice? Who buys very-large monitors? Gamers do. The same is true of quadrophonic speakers (and associated sound cards), and low-latency Internet connections, just to name what I see looking around my desk. Fact is, games drive consumer hardware in nearly all fields.
You can even see this in game editors -- AFAIK, WorldCraft is the only editor even close to the standard OS style...
Agree with the rest of your comment, but have to disagree with you there. To name a few, StarEdit, PUDDraft, and QuArK (which IMO is a poor interface). Game editor interfaces are usually divided into two sections: a display of the content, surrounded by controls for manipulating the content, which is the same thing you see in word processors and web browsers.
But the Diablo series has had it's share of problems, the first with the hacking of the file on the local hard drive to boost your stats (which Blizzard never really fixed),...
This was a conceptual problem in the first game, not an implementation problem, which is why they weren't able to fix it. In Diablo 2 they created the Realms, which fix this problem by keeping the save files out of the players' hands.
... and the second with being published clearly when the servers weren't ready to handle the load. Most disturbing is that many of these companies promising "massively-multiplayer RPGs" create 200,000 CDs for launch and then get surprised when more than half these users end up on their servers.
Actually, Blizzard DID prepare for load. Before releasing they conducted a 100,000-user stress-test of their servers. What they then found was that after they released, players went directly to the realms instead of playing single-player first, creating load problems. They were quite responsible about dealing with these problems, though, working to get more bandwidth and tune the server software. Also, Diablo 2 is not and was never advertised as "massively multiplayer" (though it is multiplayer).
Blizzard's been very careful about their reputation, and thus about what software they'll put their name on. The last five Blizzard games (plus expansions) were all successes; those that weren't (see Warcraft Adventures) were cancelled or delayed and reconsidered. I have faith that they'll use the extra time to make a better game, and that had they not done so, we would've been disappointed. No, they're not perfect; no company is. But they do deserve respect for refusing to shove games out the door when they need more time, and for correcting the mistakes they do make as quickly as they can.
I, too, feel I've "been there", only with Half-Life (record 40 kills to one death or so; more specifically, the Jailbreak mod, which I've since taken over as coder for); however, I must say that the ideal state is, in fact, only half-way inside "the zone". You need to be able to react instantaneously, to control your motions precisely...but at the same time, you need to keep a third-person, objective viewpoint of the game.
As I see it, gaming breaks down to a small number of important, general skills. (All examples are oversimplifications.) The first is raw mental speed; by that I mean the ability to process information and react quickly. He who fires his railgun first wins. The second is parallel thinking; that is, processing more than one bit of data at once. He who fires his rocket, predicts where his opponent's rocket will land, and strafes to the other side while switching to and firing with plasma rifle wins. The third is abstract thinking. Being able to think of Quake's physics model in its own terms helps a lot when trying to dodge a rocket coming your way. The problem is, these skills are (for the most part, arguably) talents, not acquired abilities. Thus, people who possess these skills would make good gamers; people who do not would make poor gamers. The study got the cause/effect relation backwards.
I also must say that intermediate and advanced play are different worlds entirely. For an intermediate player, there really may not be any more to the game than simple practice. At the next level, however, the "practice makes perfect" mantra no longer holds true; much like a hacker's larval stage, there has to be something to trigger a transition. Personally, I believe my transition resulted from experimenting with different elements of the physics model through Oz Deathmatch, and thus beginning to understand the game at one less level of abstraction. The difference between levels of play could be compared to the difference between a casual viewer of a movie, and an analyst picking out themes and symbolisms (I am the latter; movies made for it are *much* more interesting that way). ------------------
A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
I'm coming in on this thread too late to be seen by many, but I'd like to make one objection anyways.
But when a tool only use (reasonable use) is doing something illegal, yes I think the tool can be outlawed. That covers also the DOS tools. If they are general purpose, they are OK. If they are single purpose cracking tools they can IMHO be banned.
The problem here is, there are very few if any cracking tools which have only one reasonable use. I'm going to take your example, DOS tools. Joe Random Sysadmin is going to be launching a site, and expecting, say, 50k pageviews/day, and wants to test whether his webserver will be able to handle the load. So he takes 50 machines around the office, and signals each of them to load the main page 1000 times. Of course, he doesn't do this by hand, he finds a tool to do it, and controls it from his terminal. What exactly is this tool doing? That's right, it's taking a bunch of machines and signalling them to flood a server with traffic, just like a DOS tool would.
What makes the difference is a matter of intent, which is extremely difficult to prove. If the user used the tool for a legit purpose, or just checked the box on a package list when installing his distro, then the tool is legitimate. If the user intended to or did use the tool for a destructive purpose, then it is not legit. ------------------
A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
Keep in mind, the problem here is to create an encryption system which is easy to use enough to be adopted by most Average Joes, not one which is provably strong but requires an intelligent user. This means that sending keys out of band is not an option.
A better solution would be this.
Each e-mail client keeps a database of addresses it has been in contact with, and their owners' public keys, labelled as either "verified" or "unconfirmed", and a flag indicating whether the client has sent a verifiable copy of the key.
When a message is sent, the client checks its database, and encrypts with the key it knows, verified or not. If no key is found, it goes to a public key server and asks for one there and enters that as "unconfirmed" and uses it. If it doesn't find a key from a key server, it sends plain-text with a copy of its own public key, a (mailer-interpretted) request for a public key, and a PGP signature. If the mailer doesn't remember sending a verifiable key copy (see explanation later), it attaches one to the message.
When a message is received, the mailer decrypts it and checks for any attached sender's public key, and after checking signature adds that to its database as "verified". If there is already an unverified entry for that address which does not match, it prints out a nasty warning.
So, basically, public key servers are used only until a signed key is received, and any tampering would work only for first-time contacts and would be easily discovered. The problem that remains is getting people to use the system. What's necessary for this is simple, transparent support in all mailers, a user-friendly configuration tool for each, and good publicity of the importance of using encryption to businesses (if you don't use encryption then thieves could steal your intellectual property!).
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
(Posted without +1 bonus, because this is going far off-topic; moderators, ignore)
Valve's netcode is already destroyed, according to a lot of people.
By that, I meant actually removing the code. Valve is rapidly removing support for the old net code, and considering the amount of time they've invested in it, there's no way it's going to be removed. As for whether it's actually good, that depends on perspective; it initially faced a strong backlash from many people (including myself) because of curved bullets, exploitation, and the effect it's had on weapons balance. Whether that's better than control delay is arguable.
So clients can spoof responses. So what? Isn't the server supposed to parse responses such that if a spoofed response is off, the server drops the connection with something like "user sent bogus command". I've had that happen to me on quite a few occasions.
In your case, my first guess would be that a packet got mangled or corrupted, causing mis-parsing; this also may be a symptom of the bug where the reliable packet stream fragments and becomes corrupted if too much (normal) data is sent. The entire point of intercepting and modifying packets is that you send the data which would be sent if your modifications were not in place, so the server can't detect anything.
Still, you can't blame a guy for trying. It's wishful thinking, I know, but simply because fusion power is currently impossible for us to develop doesn't mean we shouldn't look down that road.
No game can ever be completely impossible to cheat in; the best that can be obtained is very, very hard to cheat in, after which point you just count on the fact that the best programmers aren't the ones who write cheats. ------------------
A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
The parent is slightly off-topic, in that the story is about distinguising multiple users on the same machine based on keyboard/mouse usage patterns. Still, I'll address it, since as a HL mod coder I can't stand hearing incorrect information regarding the game.
Next thing ya know, someone will develop a program for CounterStrike servers that can track players' movement, aiming, and keystrokes
The server threads already know everything there is to know about players' movement and aiming. Tracking keystrokes, however, can't be done without moving keyboard parsing into the server thread, which consequentially means completely destroying Valve's net code and re-writing a lot of the engine.
that can tell the server admins if they're using binds to things like:
"gl_texturemode GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR;bind r gl_texturemode GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST;"
This can't be determined from key patterns, since it's entirely pre-entered configuration data, so to do this from the server would mean creating a challenge/response for the key/aliases table (which is easily faked). Doing this from the client inside the engine would require an ugly hack which would be worked around almost immediately; and since games can't be updated too frequently, that's as good as not working at all. Doing it from any sort of TSR outside the game's thread would require cross-program memory reading, which is disgusting hackish and non-portable at best.
On the bright side, though, that would be rather neat. The server admins would once and for all know who was and who wasn't cheating on their servers, though I figure all the privacy advocates would go apeshit over it.
But, it doesn't let server admins know who's cheating. Any cheat which can be detected by the server is a cheat that doesn't work properly; there's absolutely nothing which can prevent clients from spoofing responses.
As for this technology, however, it's not like this is anything new. Didn't DoubleClick.net have something like this going that would track what sorts of banners you would click on as well as what sites you visit such that they can tailor their ads to your preferences to attempt to get you to click on them?
This is getting back on topic now. The difference with this is that it monitors keyboard/mouse usage patterns to distinguish between multiple users of the same system. ------------------
A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
With all the news and information about the X-Box, I am convinced that the X-Box is doomed to fail at market for a number of reasons.
First, consider the hardware capabilities of the X-Box. For a console, they may seem impressive, but take a look at what they really are. First, the bogo-measurements: 4.8 gigapixel/sec (antialiased), 100M/sec sustained polygons. This may seem like a lot more than current-generation consoles, but due to diminishing returns, it isn't really.
Now, consider what's inside an X-Box: an Intel 733MHz processor, a (slightly modified) GeForce 3 video card, an 8 gig hard disk, and 64 megs of RAM. Sound like a PC? That's because MS wants easy porting. Unfortunately for Microsoft, historically every port from console to PC or vice versa has been a complete failure without exception. This is because of the different styles of play that consoles demand. Worse, Microsoft seems to promote "lazy" porting (add a few #ifdefs and recompile); this will be a disaster for the X-Box, since PC developers design their games to install to hard disk. There's one thing console users absolutely will not tolerate, and that's having to deal with the installations and disk space issues typical of PCs.
The X-Box is traditionally compared to current-generation consoles, such as the PS2 and Dreamcast. These comparisons are invalid, for two reasons. First, considering the release date, the X-Box must be compared to the next generation (NCube etc). Second, the XBox is, from a hardware perspective, not a console. Consider: it has the form factor of a PC, it is full of PC hardware, and it runs a modified PC operating system with PC APIs. The X-Box is not competing against Sony, Sega, and Nintendo; it is competing against Dell, Gateway, and Micron. The fact that the X-Box is not stable strengthens this argument; people will accept crashing from a PC, but certainly not from a console. X-Box looks good from a cost perspective for now, but its release date is still some ways off, and people will be willing to pay more for a general-purpose device than for an equivalent single-purpose console.
Another indicator is that Microsoft doesn't seem to be very confident in the X-Box. Look at what they've been spewing out to support it: vague promises, specs years in advance, and worse of all, faked screenshots. History has shown that Microsoft never gets anything right on the first try, and the X-Box will be no exception.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
After doing a little cursory research into this (following some of the links), it seems to me that this case manages to violate fully half of all amendments in the bill of rights: I, V, VI, VIII, and IX. It seems to me that his reason for seeking asylum in Canada is to attract attention to this case in Canadian press, and to make this a matter of international concern.
This ruling violates the first amendment, obviously, in that it infringes on his right to free speech and free assembly. Scientology argues that the first amendment favors their own case; however, this means that amendment IX would be broken, since enumeration of freedom of religion would be infringing on both free speech and free assembly. Amendment V is clearly broken; it states that "... nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". The use of quotes from the defendant, of which the context was barred from presentation, would seem to be comprise a case of him being forcibly used as a witness against himself, and seeing the circumstances of his trial, he was clearly not given due process of law.
Continuing with amendment VI, the unconstitutionality is absolutely appaling. The sixth amendment states that "the accused shall enjoy the right to... be be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor". He was barred from obtaining witnesses or evidence in his favor; he was not informed of the charges against him (until they accidentally leaked out). Amendment VIII states that "excessive bail shall not be required." According to his cached web page, he was ordered to jail despite paying $10,000 bail.
This is a case that everyone should be watching very, very closely. Even more so than the DeCSS decision, the freedom of the States depends on the outcome. ------------------
A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
First, let me say that I consider using a wireframe- or transparent-mode video driver in any sort of multi-player game is absolutely cheating, and should absolutely be prevented. That said, it's worth pointing out that, while Asus has been promoting these drivers from the cheating front, there are legitimate uses for this sort of thing, mainly for developers.
For a person writing a 3D app, not having a wireframe mode could make debugging and performance testing extremely difficult. Take, for example, the case of testing vistable algorithms (probably the case where this is most important), which are the systems used by games to selectively hide objects outside of vision and speed up rendering. Trying to debug and evaluate such an algorithm without being able to see exactly what is being rendered would be near impossible. Another case where this is important to have is when designing models or worlds through any sort of abstraction. A large percentage of the work in modelling is minimizing the number of polygons, which is difficult to say the least if you can't see them. This is exactly the reason Valve added a wireframe mode to Half-Life (which, I might point out, works only in single-player in software mode, making it effectively useless, so a driver like this could be extremely useful).
My point is, while Asus is definitely promoting this for illigitimate use, there is good reason to have these sorts of things. ------------------
A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
Well, that's the funny part. Because the games use an open standard to render their scenes, they are also succeptible to all sorts of totally unpreventable "hacks."
Games use open standards because, simply, there is no presently viable closed standard; all the closed standards (Glide, Metal, etc) died because of the fact that they were closed, when developers wanted to be able to write to a single API and have their program work on any hardware.
Regardless, id software and Valve are both in the same boat: by using an open standard to render their games, they are relying on security through obscurity.
This doesn't make any sense. They're using on *open* standard; doesn't that make it less obscure? Considering that both of these companies have open-sourced large portions of their code (Quake 1 and 2 under GPL, HL's game DLLs under a freewareish license), your claim here is invalid. That said, security through obscurity tends to be the *only* way to prevent attacks like this. Because this is a case of the untrusted client revealing data it shouldn't, there are far, far too many points of weakness, and encryption of any sort is completely out of the question for performance and compatibility reasons. What developers have to count on, instead, is that most of the hackers who have the skills to modify a 3d app significantly are white-hit; unfortunately, Asus seems to have proved them wrong. ------------------
A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
If they're really concerned, they could run CRC checks on the game files, but that would take an awful lot of effort, time, and processing power, not to mention network bandwidth.
Actually, for Half-Life there's a program called PunkBuster which does just this, and a few other things. Half-Life has a mostly-unused challenge-response system for this; PunkBuster checks file sizes to detect known cheats and disconnects anyone using one. It also does some other tricks (how they work is not well publicized) to detect external cheats, probably involving some memory scanning.
A simple, non technological measure, would be to have people switch computers every few hours. (They're all the same anyway, right?) Simply don't announce it ahead of time, and if the person who gets a machine next does better than they have all day, look at the files over the network.
This is an interesting proposal, but I'll tell you this, and I'm not alone: I will not play on any computer but my own, ever, especially not at a LAN party. Moving to a new computer means moving to new input devices; I find it takes days at the very least to get used to new input devices. This would also be strongly discriminating against people with unusual control devices (joysticks, trackballs, DVORAK keyboards--yes, they are out there) and, much worse, people with unusual control configurations (I'm left-handed, and couldn't possibly play with any config vaguely resembling default. Including my scripts, my configuration is massive (I compile them with a preprocessor), and couldn't possibly be reconstructed by hand). If people were to move between computers, their configuration files, their input devices, and the drivers for those input devices would have to move with them--and since device drivers are arbitrarily powerful executables, that puts you right back at the start.
Another problem is that there actually isn't any working definition of what a cheat is. There are some things which are unambiguously considered cheats (distorting timedeltas to move at unnatural speeds, modifying video drivers to see the entire PVS), but other things aren't so easy to decide. One example is gamma-related video settings. Back in Counter-Strike 6.x, a video setting called lambert was discovered which could be used to cause other players to appear to glow. Opponents of it said that this was cheating, because it effectively gets night-vision goggles for free; I said that it was only evening an unfair advantage, because night-vision goggles didn't work on most hardware. Then, there's scripts, one of the most-misunderstood elements of the game. Nearly every advanced player plays with some sort of scripting in their controls, but some people consider scripts to be cheating, and some scripts are widely considered to be cheating. As a mod programmer, my opinion is that anything exposed by scripting functionality was deliberately enabled, and therefore is not a cheat.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
Your arguments started out very reasonably, but the last few bits seemed awfully trollish.
I can't see how people can object to actions that stop piracy - people seem to think no-one gets hurt by these things. They are wrong. The people working for record and computer companies have jobs and families too. And these are the ones that get hurt by the revenue lost.
It's never the big boss that gets hurt. Not Julia Roberts or Leonardo Di Caprio. It's the man who's packing the videos for $8/hour. It's the guy making them. He's the one losing the money.
I decided to do a little to verify this claim of yours. Impact on the employees, obviously, comes from impact on the bottom line where managers react by cutting expenses. This usually occurs in companies seeing only small profits or are in the red.
So, let's start with the 2000 annual budget report of News Corp, parent company of 20th Century Fox. This company reported an overall profit of $11.6 billion in 2000, $9.7 billion in 1999. In 1998 they reported an overall profit of $8.3 billion. Unfortunately these reports don't seem to separate revenue from expenses, but you can see the point pretty clearly anyways. Also I am making the assumption that this company is more or less representative of the industry as a whole, which might not be the case.
From this, you can clearly see that the amount of profit taken by these companies is rising. Now, has piracy notably affected the bottom line? Any effect it may have had is lost compared to the massive sales increases of the past few years. So is it hurting workers? Again, any effect it may have is insignificant. ------------------
A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
The arguments that 7days makes come up frequently, so I will address them in general.
What crap. People seem to think that once I have created something, you have the right to do what the hell you like with it.
Be able to do "what the hell you like with it" is obviously overbroad. What is in dispute, however, is:
1)the right to make copies for fair-use purposes including backup, transportation, and consumption, but not for the purposes of sale or exchange
2)the right to fair quote passages in research and criticism
3)the right to sell an originally purchased copy, provided it is sold in whole and no duplication of it has occured prior
4)the right to act as a carrier for content which you do not regulate
5)the to the use of ideas in research and science
6)the right to possess tools which facilitate the exercising of these rights, in cases where such tools could also be used to do things that are not protected by fair use.
Of these, in particular (1), (4), and (6) have come directly under attack, and as a consequence of this, technical means are being removed to exercise the others. I will adress the concerns regarding these three directly.
Now, as far as what constitutes a "right", I am going to take the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an authorative source. The most relevant passages are quoted below.
Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 27.
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
Article 28.
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
Article 27(2) is the only thing in the U.N. Declaration which grants authors control over their work. Now, right #1 stated above is protected by Article 27(1). Right 6, established in the oft-quoted Betamax case, would seem to be protected by article 28, because without it other rights could not be realized. Right 4 is similar, and falls under the same protection.
Once I've created something, surely I am the only person who gets to decide what happens to it? You wouldn't say you have the right to do what you want with cookies I had baked, so why do you think that with my *intellectual* property?
There's a crucial difference. Your *intellectual* property is things that you have made public (since we are not talking about trade secrets here), so a better analogy would be, we have the right to do what we want with cookies *you have sold*, including figuring out the recipe (reverse-engineering), and reselling. Your other examples (locks and gaurds) are similarly flawed. ------------------
A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
As the HHGTTG says, Don't Panic! They are, basically, enforcing a charge for using their bandwidth. There is nothing they can legally do to stop people from setting up free (as in money) mirrors.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
The one-click shopping which Amazon has patented clearly was, at the time it was created by Amazon, obvious. I don't say that because it was obvious in hindsight, but because it was exactly the type of thing which cookies were created for.
The purpose of cookies was to enable the caching of form input data, particularly logins, for later use. There should be no difficulty in finding a document which establishes this. As applied to logins for sites such as Slashdot, the result is that a form is not displayed, but rather the previously-entered data is used. Now, consider what the page of billing and shipping information is. It is a form. One-click shopping only a slightly different manifestation of the same technology of auto-login scripts, and is exactly the category of things which cookies were created for. ------------------
A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
However, relying on client data for this is faulty (pain in the ass, probably proprietary, probably not multiplatform, hacked clients, etc), and relying on the server is also inacurrate (people using proxies). Practically, if this was implemented on the server, who cares if they get around it using a proxy? If they're doing that, they probably don't want their money going to whatever site they're at (microsoft.com comes to mind).
Part of the idea was that the client is allowed to override the default of what it goes to, by design, so attacking clients and working around it is a non-issue. That way, people can give all the donations to the sites they feel have the highest-quality content, and it also means that the client can be considered trustable.
What is the incentive for the ISP to do this, though? If ISP X charges $8 extra per month and pays it to sites that get the most hits, and ISP Y doesn't -- which one are you (the consumer) going to choose? The ISP isn't going to want to lose its userbase just to fund content providers. Maybe the ISP would get benefits somehow in turn from the sites. I dunno.. it's your idea:)
There are a variety of ways ISPs could be coerced into doing such a thing. One would be regulation enforcing it (via international treaty, most likely). A more likely idea would be for sites to only open themselves to viewers from pages that enable this (they're the only ones the site gets money from, so I see why they'd do it). The extra pages accessible to customers (and thus wider customer base) are the benefit to the ISP. Also, in my example where I said +$8 a month, my base cost is $40 for DSL, so by comparison I wasn't talking about very much money. Also, AOL with its $20/month dialup cost has shown that Average Joe doesn't shop around for prices very much. ------------------
A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
There's an interesting possibility I've thought about, and while there're many details which would need to be worked out for a successful implementation, in theory it could work.
Each user pays an additional amount (say, 10% added to the ISP's monthly fee), and this money is distributed among web pages. The way it is distributed is controlled client-side, and can be overriden by the user, but defaults to being in proportion to the number of hours viewing (decided by the browser, based on number of hours with a web page opened and in focus). Web pages which already require paying for content are excluded, web pages on free providers are excluded, web pages from which no *ML or TXT files have been downloaded are excluded (no banner providers, web bugs, etc).
If, for example, in a month I spend 6 hours reading Slashdot, two hours reading User Friendly, and do no other web surfing, then of the $8 extra I'd be paying my ISP, $6 would go to VA Linux and $2 would go to Iliad.
There are many benefits to this sort of system. First, it provides an incentive to provide content. It allows people to control where their micropayment money is going, encouraging quality content. It provides far more funding than banner ads, so annoying banners are no longer necessary for web pages.
Obviously, a potential problem with this is abuses, such as people manually setting all this money to go to their friends (and receiving from them in return). Certain anti-abuse measures could be put in place; ie, a web page which has had less than 100 unique viewers is not included, and users don't default to giving to web pages where they have spent less than, say, half an hour. The system would have to be carefully designed to protect privacy and security. The client's decision on how to distribute payments should be visible only to the ISP, and there it should be immediately pooled with all the payments and not logged separately. The data stays encrypted (private key/public key) during all transfers, and other normal routine security precautions are taken. ------------------
A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
Sure, if the assistant principle had somehow shutdown the web site this might be justified, but he did not. He merely punished the student for violating the rules of the school, which to my mind is within his rights.
Censoring free speech and punishing it are, from a legally perspective, more or less equivalent under the first amendment (or its state constitution equivalent).
Was the web site downloadable on school PCs? If so, this is no different than a student being suspended for distributing an obscene parody pamphlet, or running down the halls yelling obscene things about the assistant principle.
Whether the site was downloadable on school PCs is irrelevant, because the speech was done publically and not through a school channel. Distributing an "obscene parody pamphlet" or "running down the halls yelling obscene things about the assistant principle" would get a student punished for violating school rules and disrupting school, but the key difference is that those are actions done while within the school building.
Freedom of speech is certainly sacrosanct, but this boy's freedom of speech was not violated - he did not have to take down his web site (though he may have of his own accord).
The boy's freedom of speech was clearly violated. As I said earlier, censoring and punishing free speech are more or less equivalent.
In the same way, you have every right to put up an independent parody web site criticizing your employer, but don't expect to keep your job when they find out.
You miss the key difference, which is that the employer is a business, while the school is a government-run institution. Businesses are not bound by the first amendment, while government is. ------------------
A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
Slashdot Mirror
Not too long ago, a major fire demonstrated this point painfully well. As I recall, the fire was set when trying to restore this balance. Preventing natural forest fires can make the inevitable fires much worse, and it's hard to undo the damage prevention causes. However, it is still beneficial to keep fires away from populated areas, which is what this would be useful for.
Who else thought of NetHack when they saw the acronym for that title?
You zap the Wand of Wishing. You may wish for an object.--More--
For what do you wish? Box of World of Warcraft
l - World of Warcraft box
a
What do you want to use or apply? l
You start playing World of Warcraft...
Oh wow! Great stuff!
(A) the site was slashdotted at the time just about everything here was posted. Most posters are going by the sample program, which someone got and posted, and the description.
(B)The fact that it compiles doesn't make it any less a joke. The fact that it compiles is, by itself, humorous. The fact that it compiles *and* reads like a parody of Shakespeare is hilarious. Awhile ago, a steganographic tool was mentioned on Slashdot which would reversibly turn text messages into what looks like spam. This is a similar thing, for C code.
Actually, Blizzard DID prepare for load. Before releasing they conducted a 100,000-user stress-test of their servers. What they then found was that after they released, players went directly to the realms instead of playing single-player first, creating load problems. They were quite responsible about dealing with these problems, though, working to get more bandwidth and tune the server software. Also, Diablo 2 is not and was never advertised as "massively multiplayer" (though it is multiplayer).
Blizzard's been very careful about their reputation, and thus about what software they'll put their name on. The last five Blizzard games (plus expansions) were all successes; those that weren't (see Warcraft Adventures) were cancelled or delayed and reconsidered. I have faith that they'll use the extra time to make a better game, and that had they not done so, we would've been disappointed. No, they're not perfect; no company is. But they do deserve respect for refusing to shove games out the door when they need more time, and for correcting the mistakes they do make as quickly as they can.
I, too, feel I've "been there", only with Half-Life (record 40 kills to one death or so; more specifically, the Jailbreak mod, which I've since taken over as coder for); however, I must say that the ideal state is, in fact, only half-way inside "the zone". You need to be able to react instantaneously, to control your motions precisely...but at the same time, you need to keep a third-person, objective viewpoint of the game. As I see it, gaming breaks down to a small number of important, general skills. (All examples are oversimplifications.) The first is raw mental speed; by that I mean the ability to process information and react quickly. He who fires his railgun first wins. The second is parallel thinking; that is, processing more than one bit of data at once. He who fires his rocket, predicts where his opponent's rocket will land, and strafes to the other side while switching to and firing with plasma rifle wins. The third is abstract thinking. Being able to think of Quake's physics model in its own terms helps a lot when trying to dodge a rocket coming your way. The problem is, these skills are (for the most part, arguably) talents, not acquired abilities. Thus, people who possess these skills would make good gamers; people who do not would make poor gamers. The study got the cause/effect relation backwards. I also must say that intermediate and advanced play are different worlds entirely. For an intermediate player, there really may not be any more to the game than simple practice. At the next level, however, the "practice makes perfect" mantra no longer holds true; much like a hacker's larval stage, there has to be something to trigger a transition. Personally, I believe my transition resulted from experimenting with different elements of the physics model through Oz Deathmatch, and thus beginning to understand the game at one less level of abstraction. The difference between levels of play could be compared to the difference between a casual viewer of a movie, and an analyst picking out themes and symbolisms (I am the latter; movies made for it are *much* more interesting that way).
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
The problem here is, there are very few if any cracking tools which have only one reasonable use. I'm going to take your example, DOS tools. Joe Random Sysadmin is going to be launching a site, and expecting, say, 50k pageviews/day, and wants to test whether his webserver will be able to handle the load. So he takes 50 machines around the office, and signals each of them to load the main page 1000 times. Of course, he doesn't do this by hand, he finds a tool to do it, and controls it from his terminal. What exactly is this tool doing? That's right, it's taking a bunch of machines and signalling them to flood a server with traffic, just like a DOS tool would.
What makes the difference is a matter of intent, which is extremely difficult to prove. If the user used the tool for a legit purpose, or just checked the box on a package list when installing his distro, then the tool is legitimate. If the user intended to or did use the tool for a destructive purpose, then it is not legit.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
Keep in mind, the problem here is to create an encryption system which is easy to use enough to be adopted by most Average Joes, not one which is provably strong but requires an intelligent user. This means that sending keys out of band is not an option.
A better solution would be this.
Each e-mail client keeps a database of addresses it has been in contact with, and their owners' public keys, labelled as either "verified" or "unconfirmed", and a flag indicating whether the client has sent a verifiable copy of the key.
When a message is sent, the client checks its database, and encrypts with the key it knows, verified or not. If no key is found, it goes to a public key server and asks for one there and enters that as "unconfirmed" and uses it. If it doesn't find a key from a key server, it sends plain-text with a copy of its own public key, a (mailer-interpretted) request for a public key, and a PGP signature. If the mailer doesn't remember sending a verifiable key copy (see explanation later), it attaches one to the message.
When a message is received, the mailer decrypts it and checks for any attached sender's public key, and after checking signature adds that to its database as "verified". If there is already an unverified entry for that address which does not match, it prints out a nasty warning.
So, basically, public key servers are used only until a signed key is received, and any tampering would work only for first-time contacts and would be easily discovered. The problem that remains is getting people to use the system. What's necessary for this is simple, transparent support in all mailers, a user-friendly configuration tool for each, and good publicity of the importance of using encryption to businesses (if you don't use encryption then thieves could steal your intellectual property!).
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
By that, I meant actually removing the code. Valve is rapidly removing support for the old net code, and considering the amount of time they've invested in it, there's no way it's going to be removed. As for whether it's actually good, that depends on perspective; it initially faced a strong backlash from many people (including myself) because of curved bullets, exploitation, and the effect it's had on weapons balance. Whether that's better than control delay is arguable.
In your case, my first guess would be that a packet got mangled or corrupted, causing mis-parsing; this also may be a symptom of the bug where the reliable packet stream fragments and becomes corrupted if too much (normal) data is sent. The entire point of intercepting and modifying packets is that you send the data which would be sent if your modifications were not in place, so the server can't detect anything. No game can ever be completely impossible to cheat in; the best that can be obtained is very, very hard to cheat in, after which point you just count on the fact that the best programmers aren't the ones who write cheats.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
This can't be determined from key patterns, since it's entirely pre-entered configuration data, so to do this from the server would mean creating a challenge/response for the key/aliases table (which is easily faked). Doing this from the client inside the engine would require an ugly hack which would be worked around almost immediately; and since games can't be updated too frequently, that's as good as not working at all. Doing it from any sort of TSR outside the game's thread would require cross-program memory reading, which is disgusting hackish and non-portable at best.
But, it doesn't let server admins know who's cheating. Any cheat which can be detected by the server is a cheat that doesn't work properly; there's absolutely nothing which can prevent clients from spoofing responses.
This is getting back on topic now. The difference with this is that it monitors keyboard/mouse usage patterns to distinguish between multiple users of the same system.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
With all the news and information about the X-Box, I am convinced that the X-Box is doomed to fail at market for a number of reasons.
First, consider the hardware capabilities of the X-Box. For a console, they may seem impressive, but take a look at what they really are. First, the bogo-measurements: 4.8 gigapixel/sec (antialiased), 100M/sec sustained polygons. This may seem like a lot more than current-generation consoles, but due to diminishing returns, it isn't really.
Now, consider what's inside an X-Box: an Intel 733MHz processor, a (slightly modified) GeForce 3 video card, an 8 gig hard disk, and 64 megs of RAM. Sound like a PC? That's because MS wants easy porting. Unfortunately for Microsoft, historically every port from console to PC or vice versa has been a complete failure without exception. This is because of the different styles of play that consoles demand. Worse, Microsoft seems to promote "lazy" porting (add a few #ifdefs and recompile); this will be a disaster for the X-Box, since PC developers design their games to install to hard disk. There's one thing console users absolutely will not tolerate, and that's having to deal with the installations and disk space issues typical of PCs.
The X-Box is traditionally compared to current-generation consoles, such as the PS2 and Dreamcast. These comparisons are invalid, for two reasons. First, considering the release date, the X-Box must be compared to the next generation (NCube etc). Second, the XBox is, from a hardware perspective, not a console. Consider: it has the form factor of a PC, it is full of PC hardware, and it runs a modified PC operating system with PC APIs. The X-Box is not competing against Sony, Sega, and Nintendo; it is competing against Dell, Gateway, and Micron. The fact that the X-Box is not stable strengthens this argument; people will accept crashing from a PC, but certainly not from a console. X-Box looks good from a cost perspective for now, but its release date is still some ways off, and people will be willing to pay more for a general-purpose device than for an equivalent single-purpose console.
Another indicator is that Microsoft doesn't seem to be very confident in the X-Box. Look at what they've been spewing out to support it: vague promises, specs years in advance, and worse of all, faked screenshots. History has shown that Microsoft never gets anything right on the first try, and the X-Box will be no exception.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
After doing a little cursory research into this (following some of the links), it seems to me that this case manages to violate fully half of all amendments in the bill of rights: I, V, VI, VIII, and IX. It seems to me that his reason for seeking asylum in Canada is to attract attention to this case in Canadian press, and to make this a matter of international concern.
... be be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor". He was barred from obtaining witnesses or evidence in his favor; he was not informed of the charges against him (until they accidentally leaked out). Amendment VIII states that "excessive bail shall not be required." According to his cached web page, he was ordered to jail despite paying $10,000 bail.
This ruling violates the first amendment, obviously, in that it infringes on his right to free speech and free assembly. Scientology argues that the first amendment favors their own case; however, this means that amendment IX would be broken, since enumeration of freedom of religion would be infringing on both free speech and free assembly. Amendment V is clearly broken; it states that "... nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". The use of quotes from the defendant, of which the context was barred from presentation, would seem to be comprise a case of him being forcibly used as a witness against himself, and seeing the circumstances of his trial, he was clearly not given due process of law.
Continuing with amendment VI, the unconstitutionality is absolutely appaling. The sixth amendment states that "the accused shall enjoy the right to
This is a case that everyone should be watching very, very closely. Even more so than the DeCSS decision, the freedom of the States depends on the outcome.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
First, let me say that I consider using a wireframe- or transparent-mode video driver in any sort of multi-player game is absolutely cheating, and should absolutely be prevented. That said, it's worth pointing out that, while Asus has been promoting these drivers from the cheating front, there are legitimate uses for this sort of thing, mainly for developers.
For a person writing a 3D app, not having a wireframe mode could make debugging and performance testing extremely difficult. Take, for example, the case of testing vistable algorithms (probably the case where this is most important), which are the systems used by games to selectively hide objects outside of vision and speed up rendering. Trying to debug and evaluate such an algorithm without being able to see exactly what is being rendered would be near impossible. Another case where this is important to have is when designing models or worlds through any sort of abstraction. A large percentage of the work in modelling is minimizing the number of polygons, which is difficult to say the least if you can't see them. This is exactly the reason Valve added a wireframe mode to Half-Life (which, I might point out, works only in single-player in software mode, making it effectively useless, so a driver like this could be extremely useful).
My point is, while Asus is definitely promoting this for illigitimate use, there is good reason to have these sorts of things.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
Games use open standards because, simply, there is no presently viable closed standard; all the closed standards (Glide, Metal, etc) died because of the fact that they were closed, when developers wanted to be able to write to a single API and have their program work on any hardware.
This doesn't make any sense. They're using on *open* standard; doesn't that make it less obscure? Considering that both of these companies have open-sourced large portions of their code (Quake 1 and 2 under GPL, HL's game DLLs under a freewareish license), your claim here is invalid. That said, security through obscurity tends to be the *only* way to prevent attacks like this. Because this is a case of the untrusted client revealing data it shouldn't, there are far, far too many points of weakness, and encryption of any sort is completely out of the question for performance and compatibility reasons. What developers have to count on, instead, is that most of the hackers who have the skills to modify a 3d app significantly are white-hit; unfortunately, Asus seems to have proved them wrong.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
This is an interesting proposal, but I'll tell you this, and I'm not alone: I will not play on any computer but my own, ever, especially not at a LAN party. Moving to a new computer means moving to new input devices; I find it takes days at the very least to get used to new input devices. This would also be strongly discriminating against people with unusual control devices (joysticks, trackballs, DVORAK keyboards--yes, they are out there) and, much worse, people with unusual control configurations (I'm left-handed, and couldn't possibly play with any config vaguely resembling default. Including my scripts, my configuration is massive (I compile them with a preprocessor), and couldn't possibly be reconstructed by hand). If people were to move between computers, their configuration files, their input devices, and the drivers for those input devices would have to move with them--and since device drivers are arbitrarily powerful executables, that puts you right back at the start.
Another problem is that there actually isn't any working definition of what a cheat is. There are some things which are unambiguously considered cheats (distorting timedeltas to move at unnatural speeds, modifying video drivers to see the entire PVS), but other things aren't so easy to decide. One example is gamma-related video settings. Back in Counter-Strike 6.x, a video setting called lambert was discovered which could be used to cause other players to appear to glow. Opponents of it said that this was cheating, because it effectively gets night-vision goggles for free; I said that it was only evening an unfair advantage, because night-vision goggles didn't work on most hardware. Then, there's scripts, one of the most-misunderstood elements of the game. Nearly every advanced player plays with some sort of scripting in their controls, but some people consider scripts to be cheating, and some scripts are widely considered to be cheating. As a mod programmer, my opinion is that anything exposed by scripting functionality was deliberately enabled, and therefore is not a cheat.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
I decided to do a little to verify this claim of yours. Impact on the employees, obviously, comes from impact on the bottom line where managers react by cutting expenses. This usually occurs in companies seeing only small profits or are in the red.
So, let's start with the 2000 annual budget report of News Corp, parent company of 20th Century Fox. This company reported an overall profit of $11.6 billion in 2000, $9.7 billion in 1999. In 1998 they reported an overall profit of $8.3 billion. Unfortunately these reports don't seem to separate revenue from expenses, but you can see the point pretty clearly anyways. Also I am making the assumption that this company is more or less representative of the industry as a whole, which might not be the case.
From this, you can clearly see that the amount of profit taken by these companies is rising. Now, has piracy notably affected the bottom line? Any effect it may have had is lost compared to the massive sales increases of the past few years. So is it hurting workers? Again, any effect it may have is insignificant.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
Be able to do "what the hell you like with it" is obviously overbroad. What is in dispute, however, is:
1)the right to make copies for fair-use purposes including backup, transportation, and consumption, but not for the purposes of sale or exchange
2)the right to fair quote passages in research and criticism
3)the right to sell an originally purchased copy, provided it is sold in whole and no duplication of it has occured prior
4)the right to act as a carrier for content which you do not regulate
5)the to the use of ideas in research and science
6)the right to possess tools which facilitate the exercising of these rights, in cases where such tools could also be used to do things that are not protected by fair use.
Of these, in particular (1), (4), and (6) have come directly under attack, and as a consequence of this, technical means are being removed to exercise the others. I will adress the concerns regarding these three directly.
Now, as far as what constitutes a "right", I am going to take the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an authorative source. The most relevant passages are quoted below.
Article 27(2) is the only thing in the U.N. Declaration which grants authors control over their work. Now, right #1 stated above is protected by Article 27(1). Right 6, established in the oft-quoted Betamax case, would seem to be protected by article 28, because without it other rights could not be realized. Right 4 is similar, and falls under the same protection.
There's a crucial difference. Your *intellectual* property is things that you have made public (since we are not talking about trade secrets here), so a better analogy would be, we have the right to do what we want with cookies *you have sold*, including figuring out the recipe (reverse-engineering), and reselling. Your other examples (locks and gaurds) are similarly flawed.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
As the HHGTTG says, Don't Panic! They are, basically, enforcing a charge for using their bandwidth. There is nothing they can legally do to stop people from setting up free (as in money) mirrors.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
The one-click shopping which Amazon has patented clearly was, at the time it was created by Amazon, obvious. I don't say that because it was obvious in hindsight, but because it was exactly the type of thing which cookies were created for.
The purpose of cookies was to enable the caching of form input data, particularly logins, for later use. There should be no difficulty in finding a document which establishes this. As applied to logins for sites such as Slashdot, the result is that a form is not displayed, but rather the previously-entered data is used. Now, consider what the page of billing and shipping information is. It is a form. One-click shopping only a slightly different manifestation of the same technology of auto-login scripts, and is exactly the category of things which cookies were created for.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
There are a variety of ways ISPs could be coerced into doing such a thing. One would be regulation enforcing it (via international treaty, most likely). A more likely idea would be for sites to only open themselves to viewers from pages that enable this (they're the only ones the site gets money from, so I see why they'd do it). The extra pages accessible to customers (and thus wider customer base) are the benefit to the ISP. Also, in my example where I said +$8 a month, my base cost is $40 for DSL, so by comparison I wasn't talking about very much money. Also, AOL with its $20/month dialup cost has shown that Average Joe doesn't shop around for prices very much.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
There's an interesting possibility I've thought about, and while there're many details which would need to be worked out for a successful implementation, in theory it could work.
Each user pays an additional amount (say, 10% added to the ISP's monthly fee), and this money is distributed among web pages. The way it is distributed is controlled client-side, and can be overriden by the user, but defaults to being in proportion to the number of hours viewing (decided by the browser, based on number of hours with a web page opened and in focus). Web pages which already require paying for content are excluded, web pages on free providers are excluded, web pages from which no *ML or TXT files have been downloaded are excluded (no banner providers, web bugs, etc).
If, for example, in a month I spend 6 hours reading Slashdot, two hours reading User Friendly, and do no other web surfing, then of the $8 extra I'd be paying my ISP, $6 would go to VA Linux and $2 would go to Iliad.
There are many benefits to this sort of system. First, it provides an incentive to provide content. It allows people to control where their micropayment money is going, encouraging quality content. It provides far more funding than banner ads, so annoying banners are no longer necessary for web pages.
Obviously, a potential problem with this is abuses, such as people manually setting all this money to go to their friends (and receiving from them in return). Certain anti-abuse measures could be put in place; ie, a web page which has had less than 100 unique viewers is not included, and users don't default to giving to web pages where they have spent less than, say, half an hour. The system would have to be carefully designed to protect privacy and security. The client's decision on how to distribute payments should be visible only to the ISP, and there it should be immediately pooled with all the payments and not logged separately. The data stays encrypted (private key/public key) during all transfers, and other normal routine security precautions are taken.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
Was the web site downloadable on school PCs? If so, this is no different than a student being suspended for distributing an obscene parody pamphlet, or running down the halls yelling obscene things about the assistant principle. Whether the site was downloadable on school PCs is irrelevant, because the speech was done publically and not through a school channel. Distributing an "obscene parody pamphlet" or "running down the halls yelling obscene things about the assistant principle" would get a student punished for violating school rules and disrupting school, but the key difference is that those are actions done while within the school building.
The boy's freedom of speech was clearly violated. As I said earlier, censoring and punishing free speech are more or less equivalent.
You miss the key difference, which is that the employer is a business, while the school is a government-run institution. Businesses are not bound by the first amendment, while government is.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.