"young Hoffman" is worried now...
on
Antitrust
·
· Score: 2
NURV's evil tentacles engulf young Hoffman, reaching into every corner of his life, into government, politics, and, of course, most of all into the mass media.
Eeek! But I don't even pirate Microsoft software anymore! I work on Linux! Help!
It's weird when people in movies have the same name as you.:-)
Don't panic. Don't spread FUD. This has been worked around in the latest prereleases from Alan Cox. A hard limit on the length of filenames has been set as a temporary fix.
Many people on the linux kernel mailing list could never reproduce it anyway.
At any rate, the issue is being studied and a better fix is "coming soon". You can be sure that by the time there's a real 2.4.1 that the problem will have been solved.
Hmmm. Interesting, but I believe it is you who have made the logic error...
If this is the type of compensation that is "because you have done wrong upon me under the law", as you put it, then shouldn't they have to prove that I did do wrong upon them under the law? Just as OJ was found guilty in the civil case, and had to pay compensation, shouldn't they have to find me guilty before I pay?
But with this kind of compensation, they don't have to prove that. If they could, they would just charge me with copyright violation. Instead, they charge everyone.
Therefore I restate my belief that this "compensation" should be regarded the payment kind of compensation that gives me the right to copy their material.
What I always wonder about this is - If I buy some blank CD's, and pay an extra fee which goes to the distribution companies and (maybe) artists that I am possibly copying, then shouldn't it be legal for me to actually copy their stuff?
If I get taken to court, couldn't I just say, "Your Honor, I paid a fee as part of the purchase price of the blank media to compensate them for copying their content. If that doesn't make it legal for me to copy their content, then it should be illegal for them to charge me extra for the blank media, right?"
The only way Internet Explorer can "win", whatever that means, is if they release a Linux version.
And that isn't going to happen. I agree that IE has won on Windows. So what? What about the embedded market? What about Linux users? You think that Linux users are going to be happy using Netscape 3 forever?
And you are wrong that Mozilla will not be used. Even if the browser never becomes popular, the Gecko rendering engine will be. A lightweight, fast browser that uses that engine would be much faster and easier to write than a new browser from scratch.
Many embedded devices like the TiVo run Linux. Many of them will eventually have web browsers on them. Many of those will be based on Mozilla, for some of the same reasons they are based on Linux.
In recent weeks, Microsoft officials have christened Whistler the most significant Windows release since the company issued Windows 95
Um, isn't that EXACTLY what the marketing material for Windows 2000 said? Hmmmm?
As far as the copy protection... Well, I'm pleased to think that the copy of Windows 2000 I legally paid for will be the last Microsoft software I ever buy. By the time Whistler comes out, (you know it will be late, right?) Linux (with KDE2, Gnome.latest, Mozilla, XFree86 4.0.2, etc.) will be good enough on the desktop that I might even be able to stop dual-booting.
For sure I will not need to upgrade from Windows 2000, which is actually pretty decent for Office apps and games.
Does Microsoft think that Whistler's features are so much better than Windows 2000 that people will pay to upgrade and put up with all the hassle of their new licensing schemes? Get real!
You can reinstall those games without problems. You don't have to be connected to the internet to do so.
The only thing that the Half Life and Q3A keys prevent is playing on-line with a pirated key, as you have to authenticate with the master server to join an on-line game.
Single player is no problem. Hardware upgrades is no problem, installing the software on multiple computers is no problem... but only one can play on-line at a time.
I agree that turning it into some sort of big commercial contest with teams and sponsors and advertising and logos on the 4-x-4's and stuff would not be as nice as the community effort approach.
But, I didn't mean "big cash prizes", more like "T-shirt" prizes. Yes, it's more of an adventure than anything, but it's still fun to have a little recognition to shoot for. Just like Linux is a community effort but has some commercial supporters...
Going to an arbitrary point on the world just because it has nice round numbers in a totally artificial coordinate system is such a geeky thing to do - I love it.
I think it would be neat if some company (probably Garmin or some other GPS company) was to sponsor some mostly small prizes for people who manage to get to and document a lot of confluences. Perhaps a T-shirt for anyone who documents three previously unreached confluences, and maybe some GPS accessories or software for people who get five or six of them.
As it turns out I just ordered a GPS, partly because of this website and have been looking at some maps of the area (Seattle area) to see if there are some nearby confluences I could get.
Most of the easy ones are taken already, but I might try for one of the more difficult ones on the 48th parallel east of Seattle. Also, it seems like none of the confluences in British Columbia have been reached yet! I might go for some of those on a summer camping vacation. Just for fun, sure. But getting T-shirts is cool too!
There may be ways around it. So? What you have to understand is that if the ways around it are at all tricky, or require some reverse engineering, they they will be illegal under the DMCA, just like DeCSS.
(note: I am simplifying - it is not clear that DeCSS is actually "illegal". Whatever.)
Just like the MPAA have and will sue anyone who distributes software that allows you to fully control and use a DVD drive, the RIAA and MPAA would like to sue you for distributing software that allows people to fully control and use a hard drive.
So, you are correct - there will be technical ways around this - but it's a hollow victory, because they will all count as "circumvention" to the DMCA. If someone writes a hard disk driver that "emulates" CPRM to software, but disables it, and they put it on a web page, they will probably be sued.
The content industries want to have total control over everything they sell^H^H^H^H license, for all time. They never had that right before, but the combination of weak technological protection and a crappy law to back it up is close to giving it to them.
You didn't get pictures? This is the coolest thing I've heard of in a long time. It sounds almost exactly like X files - a lot like the beginning of the movie. I would like to believe you... but... it just sounds a little too perfect? And I think if there was something that secret/dangerous around, they wouldn't just weld shut a manhole. It would be too easy for seriously curious people to get through with a cutting torch.
Do you have pictures of the welded shut manhole, even? Any evidence? Even pictures of the schoolyard or new subdivision?
Can any slashdot readers in Hawaii verify that this place exists?
There should be prizes for people who can get the most points first, and earliest.
I've been looking for an excuse to get a GPS and a digital camera, I think I just found it. Now I just need to take a 1 month vacation with my Jeep and see how many points I can rack up.
Yeah, that's what I said. Linux PPC is Linux too. But MacOS 9 and earlier don't _really_ support SMP - they just allow custom-written programs to use the second CPU.
Actually, it wouldn't be that hard to do this, if you have a simple program that can send a wave file to your sound card.
Hmmm. If you have the common style of startup script directories with/etc/rc.d/init.d and/etc/rc.d/rc[0-6].d/ directories, then add a "initsound" script to/etc/rc.d/init.d that has something like:
#!/bin/sh
# "initsound"
# play a sound when entering each run level
# assume/bin/playwav is the program, and
#/etc/runlevel_sound[0-6].wav are the sound files.
/bin/playwav/etc/runlevel_sound$runlevel.wav
# end of file
Then in each/etc/rc.d/rc[0-6].d/ directory, add the appropriate symbolic link over to initsound:
S01initsound ->../init.d/initsound
Something like that should do it. I haven't tested this though. It would be amusing to put in the Windows 2000 startup and shutdown sounds.
This is not dumb. This is very important for several popular applications of Linux - Kiosk-like systems, set top boxes, and other consumer applicances. It is also important for the consumer market - people who don't want to be engineers to run their computers.
Why does everyone want linux to "gain a substantial foothold on the desktop".
Uhh, because they can make money supporting it? Because we are all sick of dealing with Microsoft? Because Linux is more stable and cheaper than Embedded NT? Because it will make the world a better place? You NEED A REASON? What kind of geek needs a reason?
I'd really pay to see some of your faces when you compile that new kernel and all you get is a stupid splash screen instead of making sure everything is working
Don't you get it? This is perfect for applications where an engineer designs a system, puts it together, and sends the whole thing to consumers who doesn't know anything about computers.
Computers as Applicances. That is what most end users want. You turn it on, it works, you get your email and check cnn.com, and you turn it off.
That is what you want if you are selling and supporting them. You do not want people to dick around and call in to tech support saying:
"I plugged in your system and now my TV has a lot of weird looking white and black text go by really fast when I turn it on. I can't read it all, and it looks confusing? Is my system broken? Should I take it back to the store?"
(shudder). No way. A pretty little logo is the way to go.
Well, sort of... MacOS preceding OS-X only partly supported dual processors. The second processor was more like a co-processor, and could only be used by applications that were specially written for it - like Photoshop. Contrast that with Windows NT, Linux 2.x, and OS-X which can run any program, including the operating system itself on any available processor - a much more effective and useful solution.
I suspect those BC Ferries catamarans (the "Fast Cats") would be able to handle the rough seas out there. The Northern Pacific probably has some nasty storms, and the ferry service would be kind of useless if it had to shut down all the time because of bad weather.
In fact, even though the ferries just go back and forth between Vancouver and Victoria in the sheltered Juan de Fuca strait, they still shut them down every now and then during really bad weather.
(I went to the University of Victoria, and rode those ferries a lot.) Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
No! roystgnr, I do not have a fundamental misunderstanding, but I think you do. Or perhaps we are talking past each other. You say that "you don't have to trust the client", and you "have the client send you all it's character data, and if the checksum of the client data doesn't match the stored checksum, you don't allow that character to play."
Let me say this as simply as I can: If you don't trust the client, that means you never ask the client for anything... except what key strokes and mouse movements the user is making. And you don't let that go by unchecked either.
As I alluded to in my first post: The bad guys could write a proxy that stored both the "correct" data, that would generate the correct check sum, but really used different data. In your scenario, the server tells the client: "Compute the checksum on your character data and send it to me". The client does something and then says: "OK, here it is". The server checks it and it looks good. So you let the client play. And then the client can use whatever data they want.
The easy way to make a game "unhackable" is to treat the client sort of like an X terminal. Raw keyboard and mouse input goes down the wire to the server. The server sends back a stream of jpg's and they get displayed on the screen.
With that design, the only way someone can do any "hacking" is to break into the server. The problem with that design, and the reason no one does it, is that it is too slow. So compromises have to be made. The client is used to cache data and do local computation. But as soon as you make that compromise, then the client can be modified to use different data (transparent walls, turn off fog of war, whatever) and to do computation differently (make my aim perfect).
You can attempt to prevent this by checksumming and other tricks, but if the bad guys are determined enough, they can always fake out the server.
You can't store anything client side, because you cannot trust the clients. It doesn't matter how much encryption or checksums you have on the client - the bad guys have all the code on the client, and can reverse engineer it down to the metal if they have to. They can write proxies that pretend to be properly checksummed, and behind the scenes are doing whatever they want.
The real solution to problems like this is to store everything server side, have really comprehensive backups, and really good log files.
The server must only send the clients what they should be seeing, according to the game rules.
When someone breaks something, fix the bug, and then roll back the game state to where it was when the bugs were first exploited. With sufficient backups, even if the bad guys completely take over each server, recovery is possible.
Take down the servers, rebuild their software from scratch, fix the bugs, restore the data from backup, and you are back where you started before the exploit. Then use the log files to track the crackers and sue their asses.
Slashdot had a big discussion on this subject back when the GPL'ed version of Quake led to some people creating hacked clients that gave them more capabilities than they should have had (like being able to see through walls, etc.)
I was wrong. Not 2047/2047. It's really January 18, 2038. I don't know what the exact time of the rollover is that day.
I'll be... um.... 66 years old. Crap! I hope medical technology is really advanced then, or I will be too decrepit to either make big bucks helping fix the problem, or flee into the hills with a box of food and a shotgun.:-)
I agree... the problem about Y2K is that since it was fixed but people think the whole thing was a hoax, next time we will do much worse. And guess what! The next time is coming sooner than you think, in 2047.
In 2047 or so, the 32-bit time_t counters are going to roll over. For those of you who don't know, (every?) Unix, including Linux and also Windows NT, and many embedded systems keeps track of time as the number of seconds elapsed since January 1, 1970. This is stored in a 32-bit number of type "time_t".
Now, fixing that rollover will be more important than fixing Y2K was. Those 32-bit time_t's are actually used for keeping track of time on most computers, but the Y2K issue was mostly a problem for user interfaces.
Perhaps everyone will be using open-source software then, and all we will have to do is redefine time_t to be 64-bit, recompile, and do some testing. That would be really nice.
But I doubt it will be that simple. There will still be people using old software - Legacy code like Microsoft.NET:-) If you spent much time studying the Y2K problem, you will remember that companies would often claim their software works -but only up until 2047 or so. Microsoft is one of these.
So, imagine the situation in 2012. All of us geeks will be either retired, or at least getting a little grey-haired. Most people who use computers will know nothing at all about what's going on down in the guts of them. The companies we work at will continue to be run by pointy-haired bosses. And when we go to them and say:
"We need some budget for fixing and testing the time_t rollover. If we don't do this, all the old stuff will crash and burn."
And they will say: "Wait a minute... this sounds like that Y2K hoax 50 years ago! This must be bullsh*t too. So forget it, that code has been working fine for 45 years, we won't touch it."
Personally, I think Linux and all Open-Source/Free software should take the lead in this area by switching to 64-bit time_t's NOW.
Doom was a breakthrough and major step forward from Wolfenstein 3D because it had network play, plus it looked very much more 3D. And it had excellent weapon balance. I must have played a couple hundred hours of Doom in my third year of university...
Quake was another huge step forward because it was true 3D. Also, quake was incredibly influential because it (and the 3Dfx Voodoo) hotwired the whole 3D acceleration industry.
IIRC, all first person shooters after Quake supported 3D hardware acceleration. That's influential!
I've installed Mandrake 7.2 from both the 4-CD "commercial boxed set" with Star Office and several other non-free apps, and the 2-CD "GPL" version from Cheapbytes (same as the download.)
There are significant differences between the two editions! The 2-CD GPL version gives you more choices during the install, and seems to install more command-line tools. It seems targeted a little more at someone who has used Linux before. The 4-CD Commercial version has an even more simplified install, and seems targeted at someone coming from Windows. This is frustrating when there are certain things that the simplified install just does wrong - like networking setup, or not installing a command line FTP client!
Also, even when you tell it to install "everything", it doesn't. That's a pain - I have a fast machine and a 40GB drive, and having to go through the CD's after a fresh install adding more RPM's that the installer skipped is just a nuisance.
Still, it's my favorite, perhaps because I have learned my way around it by now. I've used each Mandrake since 6.0, and now I know how to fix things to work the way I like them.
Slashdot Mirror
It's weird when people in movies have the same name as you.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Indeed. Linux sucks... but it sucks less than any of the other options. Depending on what you're doing, of course.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Don't panic. Don't spread FUD. This has been worked around in the latest prereleases from Alan Cox. A hard limit on the length of filenames has been set as a temporary fix.
Many people on the linux kernel mailing list could never reproduce it anyway.
At any rate, the issue is being studied and a better fix is "coming soon". You can be sure that by the time there's a real 2.4.1 that the problem will have been solved.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Hmmm. Interesting, but I believe it is you who have made the logic error...
If this is the type of compensation that is "because you have done wrong upon me under the law", as you put it, then shouldn't they have to prove that I did do wrong upon them under the law? Just as OJ was found guilty in the civil case, and had to pay compensation, shouldn't they have to find me guilty before I pay?
But with this kind of compensation, they don't have to prove that. If they could, they would just charge me with copyright violation. Instead, they charge everyone.
Therefore I restate my belief that this "compensation" should be regarded the payment kind of compensation that gives me the right to copy their material.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
What I always wonder about this is - If I buy some blank CD's, and pay an extra fee which goes to the distribution companies and (maybe) artists that I am possibly copying, then shouldn't it be legal for me to actually copy their stuff?
If I get taken to court, couldn't I just say, "Your Honor, I paid a fee as part of the purchase price of the blank media to compensate them for copying their content. If that doesn't make it legal for me to copy their content, then it should be illegal for them to charge me extra for the blank media, right?"
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I know, I know, I shouldn't feed the trolls...
The only way Internet Explorer can "win", whatever that means, is if they release a Linux version.
And that isn't going to happen. I agree that IE has won on Windows. So what? What about the embedded market? What about Linux users? You think that Linux users are going to be happy using Netscape 3 forever?
And you are wrong that Mozilla will not be used. Even if the browser never becomes popular, the Gecko rendering engine will be. A lightweight, fast browser that uses that engine would be much faster and easier to write than a new browser from scratch.
Many embedded devices like the TiVo run Linux. Many of them will eventually have web browsers on them. Many of those will be based on Mozilla, for some of the same reasons they are based on Linux.
Failed utterly? Get real.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
As far as the copy protection... Well, I'm pleased to think that the copy of Windows 2000 I legally paid for will be the last Microsoft software I ever buy. By the time Whistler comes out, (you know it will be late, right?) Linux (with KDE2, Gnome.latest, Mozilla, XFree86 4.0.2, etc.) will be good enough on the desktop that I might even be able to stop dual-booting.
For sure I will not need to upgrade from Windows 2000, which is actually pretty decent for Office apps and games.
Does Microsoft think that Whistler's features are so much better than Windows 2000 that people will pay to upgrade and put up with all the hassle of their new licensing schemes? Get real!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
You can reinstall those games without problems. You don't have to be connected to the internet to do so.
The only thing that the Half Life and Q3A keys prevent is playing on-line with a pirated key, as you have to authenticate with the master server to join an on-line game.
Single player is no problem. Hardware upgrades is no problem, installing the software on multiple computers is no problem... but only one can play on-line at a time.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I agree that turning it into some sort of big commercial contest with teams and sponsors and advertising and logos on the 4-x-4's and stuff would not be as nice as the community effort approach.
But, I didn't mean "big cash prizes", more like "T-shirt" prizes. Yes, it's more of an adventure than anything, but it's still fun to have a little recognition to shoot for. Just like Linux is a community effort but has some commercial supporters...
Going to an arbitrary point on the world just because it has nice round numbers in a totally artificial coordinate system is such a geeky thing to do - I love it.
I think it would be neat if some company (probably Garmin or some other GPS company) was to sponsor some mostly small prizes for people who manage to get to and document a lot of confluences. Perhaps a T-shirt for anyone who documents three previously unreached confluences, and maybe some GPS accessories or software for people who get five or six of them.
As it turns out I just ordered a GPS, partly because of this website and have been looking at some maps of the area (Seattle area) to see if there are some nearby confluences I could get.
Most of the easy ones are taken already, but I might try for one of the more difficult ones on the 48th parallel east of Seattle. Also, it seems like none of the confluences in British Columbia have been reached yet! I might go for some of those on a summer camping vacation. Just for fun, sure. But getting T-shirts is cool too!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
There may be ways around it. So? What you have to understand is that if the ways around it are at all tricky, or require some reverse engineering, they they will be illegal under the DMCA, just like DeCSS.
(note: I am simplifying - it is not clear that DeCSS is actually "illegal". Whatever.)
Just like the MPAA have and will sue anyone who distributes software that allows you to fully control and use a DVD drive, the RIAA and MPAA would like to sue you for distributing software that allows people to fully control and use a hard drive.
So, you are correct - there will be technical ways around this - but it's a hollow victory, because they will all count as "circumvention" to the DMCA. If someone writes a hard disk driver that "emulates" CPRM to software, but disables it, and they put it on a web page, they will probably be sued.
The content industries want to have total control over everything they sell^H^H^H^H license, for all time. They never had that right before, but the combination of weak technological protection and a crappy law to back it up is close to giving it to them.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
You didn't get pictures? This is the coolest thing I've heard of in a long time. It sounds almost exactly like X files - a lot like the beginning of the movie. I would like to believe you... but... it just sounds a little too perfect? And I think if there was something that secret/dangerous around, they wouldn't just weld shut a manhole. It would be too easy for seriously curious people to get through with a cutting torch.
Do you have pictures of the welded shut manhole, even? Any evidence? Even pictures of the schoolyard or new subdivision?
Can any slashdot readers in Hawaii verify that this place exists?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
There should be prizes for people who can get the most points first, and earliest.
I've been looking for an excuse to get a GPS and a digital camera, I think I just found it. Now I just need to take a 1 month vacation with my Jeep and see how many points I can rack up.
(points... get it? get it? Ha ha ha ha. sorry.)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Yeah, that's what I said. Linux PPC is Linux too. But MacOS 9 and earlier don't _really_ support SMP - they just allow custom-written programs to use the second CPU.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Actually, it wouldn't be that hard to do this, if you have a simple program that can send a wave file to your sound card.
/etc/rc.d/init.d and /etc/rc.d/rc[0-6].d/ directories, then add a "initsound" script to /etc/rc.d/init.d that has something like:
/bin/playwav is the program, and
/etc/runlevel_sound[0-6].wav are the sound files.
/etc/runlevel_sound$runlevel.wav
/etc/rc.d/rc[0-6].d/ directory, add the appropriate symbolic link over to initsound:
../init.d/initsound
Hmmm. If you have the common style of startup script directories with
#!/bin/sh
# "initsound"
# play a sound when entering each run level
# assume
#
/bin/playwav
# end of file
Then in each
S01initsound ->
Something like that should do it. I haven't tested this though. It would be amusing to put in the Windows 2000 startup and shutdown sounds.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Uhh, because they can make money supporting it? Because we are all sick of dealing with Microsoft? Because Linux is more stable and cheaper than Embedded NT? Because it will make the world a better place? You NEED A REASON? What kind of geek needs a reason?
Don't you get it? This is perfect for applications where an engineer designs a system, puts it together, and sends the whole thing to consumers who doesn't know anything about computers.
Computers as Applicances. That is what most end users want. You turn it on, it works, you get your email and check cnn.com, and you turn it off.
That is what you want if you are selling and supporting them. You do not want people to dick around and call in to tech support saying:
"I plugged in your system and now my TV has a lot of weird looking white and black text go by really fast when I turn it on. I can't read it all, and it looks confusing? Is my system broken? Should I take it back to the store?"
(shudder). No way. A pretty little logo is the way to go.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Arrgh. "would NOT be able to handle the rough seas". That will teach me to preview.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I suspect those BC Ferries catamarans (the "Fast Cats") would be able to handle the rough seas out there. The Northern Pacific probably has some nasty storms, and the ferry service would be kind of useless if it had to shut down all the time because of bad weather.
In fact, even though the ferries just go back and forth between Vancouver and Victoria in the sheltered Juan de Fuca strait, they still shut them down every now and then during really bad weather.
(I went to the University of Victoria, and rode those ferries a lot.)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Yeah, that's a good one. I mean, the list that they didn't redact is pretty comprehensive. EM radiation, line conduction, and acoustic emissions...
:-)
The only things I can thing that they might have XXXX'ed out are:
Light - perhaps the "compromising signal" is just "reading the fscking monitor screen" with a concealed camera.
Smell - a sudden smell of urine indicates the user has received a frightening or very surprising communication.
Tachyon Flux - the NSA has alien technology that can detect emissions of elementary particles that nobody else knows about.
I wonder what else that xxxxxxxxx could be?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
No! roystgnr, I do not have a fundamental misunderstanding, but I think you do. Or perhaps we are talking past each other. You say that "you don't have to trust the client", and you "have the client send you all it's character data, and if the checksum of the client data doesn't match the stored checksum, you don't allow that character to play."
Let me say this as simply as I can: If you don't trust the client, that means you never ask the client for anything... except what key strokes and mouse movements the user is making. And you don't let that go by unchecked either.
As I alluded to in my first post: The bad guys could write a proxy that stored both the "correct" data, that would generate the correct check sum, but really used different data. In your scenario, the server tells the client: "Compute the checksum on your character data and send it to me". The client does something and then says: "OK, here it is". The server checks it and it looks good. So you let the client play. And then the client can use whatever data they want.
The easy way to make a game "unhackable" is to treat the client sort of like an X terminal. Raw keyboard and mouse input goes down the wire to the server. The server sends back a stream of jpg's and they get displayed on the screen.
With that design, the only way someone can do any "hacking" is to break into the server. The problem with that design, and the reason no one does it, is that it is too slow. So compromises have to be made. The client is used to cache data and do local computation. But as soon as you make that compromise, then the client can be modified to use different data (transparent walls, turn off fog of war, whatever) and to do computation differently (make my aim perfect).
You can attempt to prevent this by checksumming and other tricks, but if the bad guys are determined enough, they can always fake out the server.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
No. No. No.
You can't store anything client side, because you cannot trust the clients. It doesn't matter how much encryption or checksums you have on the client - the bad guys have all the code on the client, and can reverse engineer it down to the metal if they have to. They can write proxies that pretend to be properly checksummed, and behind the scenes are doing whatever they want.
The real solution to problems like this is to store everything server side, have really comprehensive backups, and really good log files.
The server must only send the clients what they should be seeing, according to the game rules.
When someone breaks something, fix the bug, and then roll back the game state to where it was when the bugs were first exploited. With sufficient backups, even if the bad guys completely take over each server, recovery is possible.
Take down the servers, rebuild their software from scratch, fix the bugs, restore the data from backup, and you are back where you started before the exploit. Then use the log files to track the crackers and sue their asses.
Slashdot had a big discussion on this subject back when the GPL'ed version of Quake led to some people creating hacked clients that gave them more capabilities than they should have had (like being able to see through walls, etc.)
You can't trust the client. End of story.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Arrgh.
:-)
I was wrong. Not 2047/2047. It's really January 18, 2038. I don't know what the exact time of the rollover is that day.
I'll be... um.... 66 years old. Crap! I hope medical technology is really advanced then, or I will be too decrepit to either make big bucks helping fix the problem, or flee into the hills with a box of food and a shotgun.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I agree... the problem about Y2K is that since it was fixed but people think the whole thing was a hoax, next time we will do much worse. And guess what! The next time is coming sooner than you think, in 2047.
.NET :-) If you spent much time studying the Y2K problem, you will remember that companies would often claim their software works -but only up until 2047 or so. Microsoft is one of these.
In 2047 or so, the 32-bit time_t counters are going to roll over. For those of you who don't know, (every?) Unix, including Linux and also Windows NT, and many embedded systems keeps track of time as the number of seconds elapsed since January 1, 1970. This is stored in a 32-bit number of type "time_t".
Now, fixing that rollover will be more important than fixing Y2K was. Those 32-bit time_t's are actually used for keeping track of time on most computers, but the Y2K issue was mostly a problem for user interfaces.
Perhaps everyone will be using open-source software then, and all we will have to do is redefine time_t to be 64-bit, recompile, and do some testing. That would be really nice.
But I doubt it will be that simple. There will still be people using old software - Legacy code like Microsoft
So, imagine the situation in 2012. All of us geeks will be either retired, or at least getting a little grey-haired. Most people who use computers will know nothing at all about what's going on down in the guts of them. The companies we work at will continue to be run by pointy-haired bosses. And when we go to them and say:
"We need some budget for fixing and testing the time_t rollover. If we don't do this, all the old stuff will crash and burn."
And they will say: "Wait a minute... this sounds like that Y2K hoax 50 years ago! This must be bullsh*t too. So forget it, that code has been working fine for 45 years, we won't touch it."
Personally, I think Linux and all Open-Source/Free software should take the lead in this area by switching to 64-bit time_t's NOW.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Doom was a breakthrough and major step forward from Wolfenstein 3D because it had network play, plus it looked very much more 3D. And it had excellent weapon balance. I must have played a couple hundred hours of Doom in my third year of university...
Quake was another huge step forward because it was true 3D. Also, quake was incredibly influential because it (and the 3Dfx Voodoo) hotwired the whole 3D acceleration industry.
IIRC, all first person shooters after Quake supported 3D hardware acceleration. That's influential!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
I've installed Mandrake 7.2 from both the 4-CD "commercial boxed set" with Star Office and several other non-free apps, and the 2-CD "GPL" version from Cheapbytes (same as the download.)
There are significant differences between the two editions! The 2-CD GPL version gives you more choices during the install, and seems to install more command-line tools. It seems targeted a little more at someone who has used Linux before. The 4-CD Commercial version has an even more simplified install, and seems targeted at someone coming from Windows. This is frustrating when there are certain things that the simplified install just does wrong - like networking setup, or not installing a command line FTP client!
Also, even when you tell it to install "everything", it doesn't. That's a pain - I have a fast machine and a 40GB drive, and having to go through the CD's after a fresh install adding more RPM's that the installer skipped is just a nuisance.
Still, it's my favorite, perhaps because I have learned my way around it by now. I've used each Mandrake since 6.0, and now I know how to fix things to work the way I like them.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)