They're still not even sure if the backdoor still works - the code gets edited often, and the subtle tricks that backdoors rely on can break quite easily that way.
And it's not like closed-source would be any better - then, the FBI can just pay the company to slip one in. I'm not worried about my OpenBSD box - it's already far more secure than my Windows rigs are. Hell, I haven't even bothered updating it in years - it's still running 3.6.
That sounds like a very interesting idea. I might try something like that, but only with a very simple hash. Such as appending a 2-letter abbreviation of the site to the password, eg. "swordfish" becomes "swordfishsd", "swordfishfb", "swordfishgm" for/., Facebook and GMail, respectively.
I use a system I call "tiered passwords". Since there's no way I can remember 20+ unique passwords for all the things that require them, I split them into tiers. Bottom tier is stuff I really don't care if you steal - I use it for Imageshack, Gawker,/., etc. Middle tier is the more important ones - I don't like you using it, but it won't ruin my life if you get access. That's a slightly more complex password (9 characters instead of 6), and I use it for my user-level computer accounts, GMail, etc. Finally, my top-tier accounts are for things that would really be terrible if someone were to get access: my root account and my bank account. That's a 20-character password, pretty much uncrackable unless the NSA gets involved.
This way, I have damage control. If something gets compromised, it's not going to affect as much. Gawker gets hacked, I change my password for a dozen websites, but don't have to worry about my email being stolen or my bank account being drained. Likewise, if someone does manage to hijack my email account, I can tell people over Facebook that it happened, and not to trust that email address anymore. Yes, it's still not as secure as unique passwords for every site, but it's significantly easier on the memory.
Uh, gamers don't use Macs. At all. Not because of the hardware (although even the most pimped out Mac pales before a fully-loaded custom rig), but because of the software. The drivers on OS X are terrible - significantly slower, and with many missing features. It's not a good gaming system - for people that will meticulously adjust timings on RAM to improve performance, a 20% performance cut to switch to Mac is just not logical.
And, unlike you, I will back this up with citations. The current survey (of gaming rigs running Steam) is:
45.50% Windows 7
26.29% Windows XP
23.05% Windows Vista
4.71% Mac OS X
0.31% Windows 2003
0.11% other, including everyone using Wine
That's a terrible percentage. Every version of Mac OS is being beaten by Vista alone in a landslide. There's honestly no need for them to release a Mac version. And, actually, Sony at least does allow keyboards/mice to be used in games. However, very few games are programmed to actually use them.
By the Nine Divines, we've got an imbecile on the loose. If you paid attention to the series lore, criminal scum, you would knot that Skyrim is the northernmost province of Tamriel, north of Cyrodiil, east of High Rock and west of Morrowind. The main inhabitants are the Nords, but ruins from when the land was in the hands of the Aldmer remain. Major cities include Winterhold, a major center of learning, and Solitude, famous for it's role as the fortress of the Wolf Queen, Potema.
Also, this is the same game series that thought "Elsweyr" was a good name for a province. You get used to it.
Real-world currency is actually kinda complicated once you get into it. The value of the dollar is pretty much undefined - it's worth whatever someone will take for it. Same for the Euro, the Yen, and the Ruble. It gets more complicated when you realize some currencies are "pegged" to others - the Riyal is defined as.26667 American Dollars, the Krone is defined as 7.46 Euros. To make things worse, the Chinese Renminbi is defined relative to a weighted average of ten other currencies, and I'm not entirely certain there isn't a loop in the dependencies somewhere. So, just figuring out "how much can I buy with this" can require more complex math than you would expect.
I would call this sort of thing a "political statement". Since actually communicating with your representatives doesn't work unless you're "donating" a couple grand to their re-election campaign, the only way to get anything said is to get the people with money to say what you want. If 4chan can actually do economic damage to Amazon, that will get a message sent to the man in Washington. Whether that message is "stop attacking Wikileaks, it's hurting 'America'" or "crack down on 'hackers'" is unpredictable.
Coincidentally, they don't even have to shut Amazon down in order to do economic damage. All they need is news coverage. If people hear "Amazon is being attacked", they might decide to shop elsewhere in order to not have to deal with it. If the investors hear "Amazon is being attacked", that could easily drop the stock price. Actually, the stock seems to have fallen about $4 over the past two days - at the number of shares Amazon has, that could (inaccurately) be described as 1.8 billion dollars in damages.
I for one donated something more valuable than money: time. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at a problem - if there's no one to actually get off their ass and do something, the problem doesn't get solved.
Re:Paving the way for HDCP 2.0
on
Goodbye, VGA
·
· Score: 1
I'd say that you're highly pessimistic of the average "consumer". Given the choice between a) spend significant amounts of money upgrading everything, b) piracy, or c) just not watching the movie, most would pick B or C. You'll note that most people still use DVDs and lack an HDCP 1.0-compliant set up. Hell, there's still people using VHS, because there's really not much incentive to spend non-trivial amounts of money on upgrading, just to watch recent Hollywood movies.
They actually make games like that? I've never seen a game that uses even all the alpha keys. It's a rare game that uses a key to the right of the 'H', even. I'd say 50% of games just use WSADEFRQ, Ctrl, Shift, Space, and maybe TG.
Remember, most games are designed for the XBox or PS3, which are limited in buttons much more than the PC. Since controls like R+Z+DUp (actually used that) are needlessly difficult, they just limit features to "what can be done on a controller", often by making some commands context-sensitive - the "open door" button can also serve as the "talk to NPC" button without confusion, for example.
The "Win" key is actually pretty heavily used. Win+L to lock the screen, Win+D to minimize all windows, Win+R to open the "Run" prompt, Win+E to open Explorer, etc. I even set up my Linux and BSD boxen to use the same keys, plus more - Win+S to shade a window, Win+X to close a window, etc. If you can get used to key shortcuts, you can get pretty fast with it.
If I was removing keys, I would get rid of the whole PrtScrn/SysReq, Scroll Lock and Pause/Break keys. Maybe ditch the menu key. Num Lock might be another candidate for removal - on keyboards with both number keys and arrow keys, it's a bit redundant.
The Peace Prize has ALWAYS been political. Five years after it was first awarded (1906), Teddy Roosevelt got one for essentially bullying Japan into accepting worse terms than they should have after winning the Russo-Japanese War. 1973, Henry Kissinger got a Peace Prize essentially for just quitting a war. There's probably more, but that's all I can point out off the top of my head.
The Peace Prize has ALWAYS been political. Five years after it was first awarded (1906), Teddy Roosevelt got one for essentially bullying Japan into accepting worse terms than they should have after winning the Russo-Japanese War. 1973, Henry Kissinger got a Peace Prize essentially for just quitting a war. There's probably more, but that's
Really? The NYT article described it as "too graphic and violent to print in a newspaper", which hardly sounds like "carefully worded". Besides, "taking a picture of someone's home and sending them a message saying 'I'M WATCHING YOU'" is not only a verbal threat, but one involving an action. Frankly, I'm surprised it took two years to arrest this guy - if he tried it on me, I would have filed a police report within minutes.
And that still does nothing for the identity theft charges or the fraud. Hell, maybe we can get him on ACTA or something for selling counterfeits.
There's actually a perfectly good reason. 10, by convention, is the most amplification possible on a device without causing distortion. 11 is louder, but the sound will be at least somewhat distorted. While some musicians (metal, for instance) actually prefer the distortion of the sound, many musicians do not. Hence, 10 is a logical extreme for the device, but inclusion of 11 (or higher) is an option appreciated by some.
Let the record show that the first eight comments were entirely devoted to pointing out a common typo in the headline, and that every response to those comments so far has been directly related to said typo. Let it not be said that Slashdot cares not for the Queen's English.
What'll they realize next? That DRM pisses off the customers more than it prevents piracy? That using the courts to extract profit is going to backfire eventually? That water is wet?
I think that happens less often with games than it does with music/movies. Cracking a DVD is simple - cracking a game is not. I'm just going off personal experience, though; feel free to correct me with statistics.
In any case, the publishers won't think "obviously DRM is useless if they can crack it in the few days before release", they'll think "obviously we should have spent more on the DRM".
Because, from the publisher's perspective, that's giving away money. While they will put up with piracy losses after a month or so, they still want to earn money from later sales. Several games continue to be good sellers well after launch - DooM is still making id some money, 20 years later, Psychonauts didn't break even until years after release, and Call of Duty 4 continues to be a high-seller. Remember, these companies don't see the public domain as "something to contribute to" - if anything, they see it as "something to steal from".
The point of DRM, from the publisher's perspective, isn't to prevent piracy - it's to delay it. Most of the sales will happen within the first week, due to the advertising focus - look at all the huge launches like Halo or Call of Duty, that sell millions in a day. If a game can stay uncracked for a month, the DRM is considered to have done its job exceptionally. If you can make DRM that takes a full day to test, and which would take several attempts to circumvent fully, you can easily delay the piracy of the game long enough that potential pirates instead go out and buy the game.
The precise limit, IIRC, is that a.50 Browning Machine Gun bullet may not fall through the barrel. Since the bullet itself has a diameter of.510 inches, most.50 firearms pass.
While it would have been easier to say ".50" instead of "12.7mm", I'm trying to form the habit of thinking in metric.
Slashdot Mirror
They're still not even sure if the backdoor still works - the code gets edited often, and the subtle tricks that backdoors rely on can break quite easily that way.
And it's not like closed-source would be any better - then, the FBI can just pay the company to slip one in. I'm not worried about my OpenBSD box - it's already far more secure than my Windows rigs are. Hell, I haven't even bothered updating it in years - it's still running 3.6.
That sounds like a very interesting idea. I might try something like that, but only with a very simple hash. Such as appending a 2-letter abbreviation of the site to the password, eg. "swordfish" becomes "swordfishsd", "swordfishfb", "swordfishgm" for /., Facebook and GMail, respectively.
I use a system I call "tiered passwords". Since there's no way I can remember 20+ unique passwords for all the things that require them, I split them into tiers. Bottom tier is stuff I really don't care if you steal - I use it for Imageshack, Gawker, /., etc. Middle tier is the more important ones - I don't like you using it, but it won't ruin my life if you get access. That's a slightly more complex password (9 characters instead of 6), and I use it for my user-level computer accounts, GMail, etc. Finally, my top-tier accounts are for things that would really be terrible if someone were to get access: my root account and my bank account. That's a 20-character password, pretty much uncrackable unless the NSA gets involved.
This way, I have damage control. If something gets compromised, it's not going to affect as much. Gawker gets hacked, I change my password for a dozen websites, but don't have to worry about my email being stolen or my bank account being drained. Likewise, if someone does manage to hijack my email account, I can tell people over Facebook that it happened, and not to trust that email address anymore. Yes, it's still not as secure as unique passwords for every site, but it's significantly easier on the memory.
That's the joke.
Bethesda got Sir Patrick Stewart to play the Emperor in TES4. They know the importance of having a celebrity voiceactor.
Now, the value of having more than 14 voiceactors to do all the 900+ characters in the game, that they don't seem to quite get.
And, unlike you, I will back this up with citations. The current survey (of gaming rigs running Steam) is:
That's a terrible percentage. Every version of Mac OS is being beaten by Vista alone in a landslide. There's honestly no need for them to release a Mac version. And, actually, Sony at least does allow keyboards/mice to be used in games. However, very few games are programmed to actually use them.
By the Nine Divines, we've got an imbecile on the loose. If you paid attention to the series lore, criminal scum, you would knot that Skyrim is the northernmost province of Tamriel, north of Cyrodiil, east of High Rock and west of Morrowind. The main inhabitants are the Nords, but ruins from when the land was in the hands of the Aldmer remain. Major cities include Winterhold, a major center of learning, and Solitude, famous for it's role as the fortress of the Wolf Queen, Potema.
Also, this is the same game series that thought "Elsweyr" was a good name for a province. You get used to it.
"Ant" is one of the most pun-capable words in the English language. Why can't I (or anyone else, apparently) come up with a decent pun on this story?
The average user also doesn't need to know how virtual currency works. It is (or will be) sufficient to know that it does.
Real-world currency is actually kinda complicated once you get into it. The value of the dollar is pretty much undefined - it's worth whatever someone will take for it. Same for the Euro, the Yen, and the Ruble. It gets more complicated when you realize some currencies are "pegged" to others - the Riyal is defined as .26667 American Dollars, the Krone is defined as 7.46 Euros. To make things worse, the Chinese Renminbi is defined relative to a weighted average of ten other currencies, and I'm not entirely certain there isn't a loop in the dependencies somewhere. So, just figuring out "how much can I buy with this" can require more complex math than you would expect.
I would call this sort of thing a "political statement". Since actually communicating with your representatives doesn't work unless you're "donating" a couple grand to their re-election campaign, the only way to get anything said is to get the people with money to say what you want. If 4chan can actually do economic damage to Amazon, that will get a message sent to the man in Washington. Whether that message is "stop attacking Wikileaks, it's hurting 'America'" or "crack down on 'hackers'" is unpredictable.
Coincidentally, they don't even have to shut Amazon down in order to do economic damage. All they need is news coverage. If people hear "Amazon is being attacked", they might decide to shop elsewhere in order to not have to deal with it. If the investors hear "Amazon is being attacked", that could easily drop the stock price. Actually, the stock seems to have fallen about $4 over the past two days - at the number of shares Amazon has, that could (inaccurately) be described as 1.8 billion dollars in damages.
I for one donated something more valuable than money: time. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at a problem - if there's no one to actually get off their ass and do something, the problem doesn't get solved.
I'd say that you're highly pessimistic of the average "consumer". Given the choice between a) spend significant amounts of money upgrading everything, b) piracy, or c) just not watching the movie, most would pick B or C. You'll note that most people still use DVDs and lack an HDCP 1.0-compliant set up. Hell, there's still people using VHS, because there's really not much incentive to spend non-trivial amounts of money on upgrading, just to watch recent Hollywood movies.
They actually make games like that? I've never seen a game that uses even all the alpha keys. It's a rare game that uses a key to the right of the 'H', even. I'd say 50% of games just use WSADEFRQ, Ctrl, Shift, Space, and maybe TG.
Remember, most games are designed for the XBox or PS3, which are limited in buttons much more than the PC. Since controls like R+Z+DUp (actually used that) are needlessly difficult, they just limit features to "what can be done on a controller", often by making some commands context-sensitive - the "open door" button can also serve as the "talk to NPC" button without confusion, for example.
The "Win" key is actually pretty heavily used. Win+L to lock the screen, Win+D to minimize all windows, Win+R to open the "Run" prompt, Win+E to open Explorer, etc. I even set up my Linux and BSD boxen to use the same keys, plus more - Win+S to shade a window, Win+X to close a window, etc. If you can get used to key shortcuts, you can get pretty fast with it.
If I was removing keys, I would get rid of the whole PrtScrn/SysReq, Scroll Lock and Pause/Break keys. Maybe ditch the menu key. Num Lock might be another candidate for removal - on keyboards with both number keys and arrow keys, it's a bit redundant.
Dammit, pressed submit early.
The Peace Prize has ALWAYS been political. Five years after it was first awarded (1906), Teddy Roosevelt got one for essentially bullying Japan into accepting worse terms than they should have after winning the Russo-Japanese War. 1973, Henry Kissinger got a Peace Prize essentially for just quitting a war. There's probably more, but that's all I can point out off the top of my head.
The Peace Prize has ALWAYS been political. Five years after it was first awarded (1906), Teddy Roosevelt got one for essentially bullying Japan into accepting worse terms than they should have after winning the Russo-Japanese War. 1973, Henry Kissinger got a Peace Prize essentially for just quitting a war. There's probably more, but that's
Really? The NYT article described it as "too graphic and violent to print in a newspaper", which hardly sounds like "carefully worded". Besides, "taking a picture of someone's home and sending them a message saying 'I'M WATCHING YOU'" is not only a verbal threat, but one involving an action. Frankly, I'm surprised it took two years to arrest this guy - if he tried it on me, I would have filed a police report within minutes.
And that still does nothing for the identity theft charges or the fraud. Hell, maybe we can get him on ACTA or something for selling counterfeits.
There's actually a perfectly good reason. 10, by convention, is the most amplification possible on a device without causing distortion. 11 is louder, but the sound will be at least somewhat distorted. While some musicians (metal, for instance) actually prefer the distortion of the sound, many musicians do not. Hence, 10 is a logical extreme for the device, but inclusion of 11 (or higher) is an option appreciated by some.
Let the record show that the first eight comments were entirely devoted to pointing out a common typo in the headline, and that every response to those comments so far has been directly related to said typo. Let it not be said that Slashdot cares not for the Queen's English.
What'll they realize next? That DRM pisses off the customers more than it prevents piracy? That using the courts to extract profit is going to backfire eventually? That water is wet?
I think that happens less often with games than it does with music/movies. Cracking a DVD is simple - cracking a game is not. I'm just going off personal experience, though; feel free to correct me with statistics.
In any case, the publishers won't think "obviously DRM is useless if they can crack it in the few days before release", they'll think "obviously we should have spent more on the DRM".
Because, from the publisher's perspective, that's giving away money. While they will put up with piracy losses after a month or so, they still want to earn money from later sales. Several games continue to be good sellers well after launch - DooM is still making id some money, 20 years later, Psychonauts didn't break even until years after release, and Call of Duty 4 continues to be a high-seller. Remember, these companies don't see the public domain as "something to contribute to" - if anything, they see it as "something to steal from".
The point of DRM, from the publisher's perspective, isn't to prevent piracy - it's to delay it. Most of the sales will happen within the first week, due to the advertising focus - look at all the huge launches like Halo or Call of Duty, that sell millions in a day. If a game can stay uncracked for a month, the DRM is considered to have done its job exceptionally. If you can make DRM that takes a full day to test, and which would take several attempts to circumvent fully, you can easily delay the piracy of the game long enough that potential pirates instead go out and buy the game.
The precise limit, IIRC, is that a .50 Browning Machine Gun bullet may not fall through the barrel. Since the bullet itself has a diameter of .510 inches, most .50 firearms pass.
While it would have been easier to say ".50" instead of "12.7mm", I'm trying to form the habit of thinking in metric.