FWIW, the Time poll that showed a double digit lead had some serious issues. First it was taken during the convention. The one poll taken during the DNC gave Kerry a thirteen point lead, and was ignored as it should have been - polls taken during a convention are inherently misleading. Second Time changed their methodology. For this one poll - they pushed on undecideds during the convention. The poll was conducted entirely unprofessionally - pushing undecideds while a convention is heppening is ludicrous. It almost looks like they were trying to get a bandwagon effect to swing other polls to Bush, though Time is typically professional, so I doubt this and hope that they were just really off the ball.
I haven't really spent time with NetRestore, but it just is an easy wrapper for Apple Software Restore. ASR can do block copies instead of file level copies but I don't know if NetRestore defaults to using that. 'man asr' might be useful, since you can really just skip the netrestore stuff once you know what is it wrapping.
Mac OS X Server includes a netinstall feature, though it really just netboots clients off an install image. I think there is supposed to be an 'unmanaged' install feature, though I haven't actually poked around with it. I expect since it uses Apple's Installer it might be slow too, since the installer definitely uses file level copies, and also requires everything you install be in the proper package format.
I would recommend poking around macosxlabs.org. They are probably the best info. source on the web for deploying OS X in Hi-Ed labs. They have info on radmind and other common imaging scenarios.
Re:Use of non-native species isn't always a disast
on
Purple Weed vs. Beetle
·
· Score: 1
Grass. I can be a poor typist.
Re:Use of non-native species isn't always a disast
on
Purple Weed vs. Beetle
·
· Score: 1
I know grass carp have been used fairly sucessfully in Texas, Washington, Georgia, and Florida. I live in Austin - we had severe problems with Hydrilla that they were used to manage. They are picky eaters, so they are of limited use for controlling certain aquatic weeds, but they have not created ecological disasters when they didn't eat the weeds that they were released to control.
A quick Google for 'sterile grass carp', will yield a great deal more info.
Use of non-native species isn't always a disaster
on
Purple Weed vs. Beetle
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The Cane Toad in Australia, and the Mongoose in Hawaii are both examples of massive ecological disasters. But there have been cases of successful non-native species to manage pests. The Asian Glass Carp has been used to manage Hydrilla infestations, they use sterile Carp, and their use has been successful, and there are other success stories out there. Now that we know about the seriousness of mistakes, there is a lot more careful testing before introducing non-native species to control problem invasive species.
Fighting the plant back is probably a good idea since it is a severe problem species. But this approach, while it might help for a while, would need a lot of maintenance unless the beetles hung around after they killed their host (in which case there are other problems). Each Purple Loostrife produces thousands of tiny seeds every year. These seeds lie dormant when buried in mud, and can survive buried for centuries, only to spring to life once the earth they were buried in is disturbed. Even if we got rid of every living plant in North America we would stil have centuries of fighting it to make it really go away.
While I am sure that you would like all terrorists to be idiots, it is pretty clear from the methods of operation of past attacks that terrorist minds can be clever. Sept. 11 had a fair amount of planning and coordination involved. An organization that had resources to get that many members up to speed on how to fly jumbo jets could get members to learn how to effectively use a computer to communicate in clever ways.
If you bothered to read the f*ing comments, you would have noticed that in fact there is no single Slashdot-hive-mind collective viewpoint. In the comments there has been an active discussion of whether this really is a vuln. and a large percent are actualy agreeing with your position.
I wish there was a 'Making Dumb Generalizations About Slashdot' downmod. You so deserve it.
If you are in a fight and every time you get punched somewhere, that's the place you block, you will get your ass kicked. Monitoring net access in libraries and net cafes is the same type of approach. You will always be a step behind. Once libraries are recognized as being monitored the bad guys will move on to open 802.11 access points, univerity campuses that have ethernet ports open all over the place, and so on. There is no end until we have complete monitoring of every node on the internet. And then the bad guys will figure out how to hide communications in postcards, junk mail, or some other method.
Taking away the right to privacy gains us nothing in the war on terror but helps erode the limits on power that help prevent abuses of power by our government. I am a lot more concerned about keeping the government in check (no matter which party is in office) than I am about terrorist attacks. Far more people have been murdered by their governments than terrorists.
>He claimed Bush let some Bin Laden family members out of the country during the air lockdown. This is not true.
He did not claim this, and his rebuttlas against those who have pushed this make it wuite clear. He did show that the Bin Laden family were fying within the U.S. at a point when air travle was locked down. Then Bin Ladens were flying in the U.S. when the only ones who enjoyed that privilege did so under Federal order.
>They were clearly let out of the country after the air restrictions were lifted.
If you had watched the film you would know this. Moore actually has already responded to this as well, so before you continue to repeat the disinformation that you heard from some biased review, you might check his response to the criticism or actually see the movie.
(1) the idiot that authorized that kind of treatment should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
It turns out that Rumsfeld approved the use of torture. He testified about half a year ago before Congress that he did not. This is a man who needs to go to jail.
those prisoners, although embarrassed, lived.
That is incorrect. You might have missed the pictures of Miss England next to the corpse giving the thumbs up, but Taguba's report referred to prisoners dying during torture, and the various efforts at coverups for those murders.
Beyond that, those who were tortured are going to be left with blood in their eye. We will be very lucky if they don't join the ranks of those sawing off the heads off contractors. We can take it for granted that their story will at least inspire others to join up.
I tried to install WindowShadeX to see if it required root privileges to install. It turns out it requires APE... I then tried to install Silk. It turns out it requires APE... I expect that in earlier versions they were standalone apps and required root privileges to install. A Haxie can be installed without root privileges which is one of the problems with it, as I have pointed out previously.
RCDefaultApp alone can protect you from the exploits as described, which I have verified. While Paranoid Android might in theory afford some extra level of protection in some respect, it is not needed to protect against the current exploits as they are described.
My analogy was not perfect, but it is not analogous to lookupd either since that requires root privileges to exploit while an APE based exploit would not. OTOH a malicious Haxie could be used to elevate privileges.
I think that APE has a pooor design security wise. That is really all I have been saying. Theoretically it could serve as a vector for malware. Exploits that took advantage of it would most likely be trojans that sneak in a malicious haxie. In the same way that spyware installed on Win boxes comes from many and various sources, often from installers of other products, many of those same methods could be used to install a Haxie. It isn't being done, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
Malicious Haxies are theoretical, but then again there are no known malicious exploits in the wild against the URL handler that you installed two apps to protect yourself against. Good security is about protecting yourself from theoretical exploits before they are actual exploits. If you like the benefits of APE enough to leave that theoretical hole open that is your business, I really don't care. But you should quit downplaying the fact that it is a security problem.
While Paranoid Android can increase security, so can RCDefaults which has the added benefit of being very unobtrusive.
I was very clear that my points were entirely theoretical and that I had no reason to believe that there were any current security issues with APE/APE modules. I don't think Unsanity is shipping their software with malicious intent.
But you make one point that is entirely false that I have to address: "as far as security goes, there's nothing that APE can do that a sneaky application can't do"
That is true in a sense that a malicious app could do the same thing that APE does, though it would be complicated to get all those pieces set up. The thing that APE provides a convenient framework for that. What most apps can't do is to look around in any user's running app's memory space and do whatever it wants with what it finds. Normal apps can't go poking around in another app's memory space at all. APE lets you write code to do that and a malicious coder could use this for lots and lots of bad things.
I don't think it is too likely to be exploited since there aren't a lot of systems out there running APE. But the very fact that when installing APE one is installing a program that opens yourself up to that degree of a serious sercurity hole makes it untenable. Expecially when installing a haxie doesn't require much work, and is easy to hide for a clever developer, so it would be easy to exploit. APE make a complicated and difficult exploit requiring root prive really easy to run in user space.
It is analogous to creating a new app that runs as a daemon to do some cool peer to peer file sharing thing you really like, though it also allows remote users to run any commands on your system with no authentication. Even if you really like what the app does, the app is uncommon, and only runs on an obscure platform, it is still insecure by design.
Interesting that you bring up protected memory. In a way APE defeats the purpose of protected memory since it injects code into every running application. Here is the scary part about what that means - once someone has APE running all haxies can poke around anywhere they want in any running apps memory space, so they can know every application password used, they can read anything out of your keychain that an app is allowed to read prompting you on behalf of the app for the keychain password, and so on. APE is a serious security nightmare. I have no reason to think that this has been exploited as yet, but installing APE opens the door for the abuse, especially if you are running closed-source haxies.
While there are no known cases of APE based spyware at this point, APE could potentially be exploited a very effective vector for spyware (and viruses).
It is pretty poor analogy to compare APE to QT Codecs or Internet Plugins. Their behavior is for the app to dynamically load and run their code when needed, and they will not be loaded unless they are called. When I launch TextEdit there is no DivX or Flash code loaded into TextEdit's memory space. APE inserts code into all running apps. That is quite different.
Input Managers are a better analogy, and honestly I do not install 3rd party Input Manager since I understand their behavior.
Hmmm... check one for didn't read the key point of the parent post: "it inserts code into every running program. Blindly."
That is the point that Rosyna didn't touch in his article. He just pretends that since it is the particular module's code that is injected and not APE Framework that this is somehow okay. If you think it is acceptable to let essentially arbitrary code be injected into every running application, that is your business, but critics are right to point out that it is a security nightmare, and it will destabilize all apps on the system by design.
Rosyna pretended that since there was one bug filed against the APE framework that this means that it would not destabilize apps. But no apps were not designed to have additional code injected into them via APE, and most were generally not tested in that environment. The behavior of the framework is the issue not the fact that the framework and daemon itself are stable.
The whole doc is really fascinating, and full of witty Larry Wallisms, but for those who don't read it all the way through to the last page, the Apocalypse ends with a 'Optional Mandatory Cross-Disciplinary Joke for People Tired of Dogs' section:
Biologist: What's worse than being chased by a Velociraptor?
Physicist: Obviously, being chased by an Acceloraptor.
Followed by a 'Future Directions' section:
Away from Acceloraptors, obviously.
I have a lot of Perl code out there that is probably going to take a while to port, but I have to say that a lot of the changes here really do make me sigh in relief. Lots of what Larry was going over here are the bits I am looking forward to in Perl 6. I use OOPerl, but never have really liked it. The object system will finally make a lot more sense, and be a lot more intuitive for those coming from other OO languages. The fact that we will real classes instead of magic packages, we get to use the keywords 'class' and 'method' rather than 'package' and 'sub', we se dots to dereference objects instead of ->, and so on are nice. There still are a lot of the clever perlisms left over, and there are a lot of cool looking innovations in perl 6, and I am happy with that.
Over all I am really excited about Perl 6. I know it will take a lot of relearning, and some code is going to be a bitch to update, but porting isn't necessarily required unless there is a compelling reason to move to 6, and the more I read about the cleaner approaches to old problems in Perl 6 the more I like it. I also expect many of the changes should help raise Perl above some of the criticisms of language snobs.
I was just playing Super Monkey Ball 2, and it occurred to me that deregulation could make a smoother playing field that allows us to reach our goals with fewer obstacles. Super Monkey Ball 2 can be a profound metaphor for life on many levels, actually. I like to think that my time playing Super Monkey Ball 2 is really time spent in deep reflection on the more important truths in life.
I read somewhere that this was brought up at a WWDC session at one point, and an Apple dev explained that "we dont want to use Open Source as dumping ground for dead technology."
I used Perl with Net::AIM, Expect, and frotz to make a zork bot a few years back as an amusement. I used it as a simple project before I wrote a bot to do various work related things. It is really handy to be able to check the status of certain things from AIM. The frotz bot was almost all just glue code except for the session handling bit which I added after a while to allow concurrent users - that was more complicated. To think that if I had told someone about it besides my coworkers I might have been featured in Wired...
I have a GC. I love it. I also have a PS2, which I love, but I spend more time with the GC. I know a lot of folks with two systems.
I don't think the GC was originally meant to be a secondary system, but it is cheap enough that it works well as one. And as a second system, the titles that matter are the unique ones. And Nintendo has a lot of great titles that are unique to the platform.
As an aside, some people say that they are not innovative since the same characters are used, but I don't see why they care. Even if Super Monkey Ball 2 still has a monkey in a ball, it is still a blast to play, and the same with Mario Cart, Super Smash Brothers, and other titles. The game play is fun, and for a game that is the important part.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, the Time poll that showed a double digit lead had some serious issues. First it was taken during the convention. The one poll taken during the DNC gave Kerry a thirteen point lead, and was ignored as it should have been - polls taken during a convention are inherently misleading. Second Time changed their methodology. For this one poll - they pushed on undecideds during the convention. The poll was conducted entirely unprofessionally - pushing undecideds while a convention is heppening is ludicrous. It almost looks like they were trying to get a bandwagon effect to swing other polls to Bush, though Time is typically professional, so I doubt this and hope that they were just really off the ball.
I haven't really spent time with NetRestore, but it just is an easy wrapper for Apple Software Restore. ASR can do block copies instead of file level copies but I don't know if NetRestore defaults to using that. 'man asr' might be useful, since you can really just skip the netrestore stuff once you know what is it wrapping.
Mac OS X Server includes a netinstall feature, though it really just netboots clients off an install image. I think there is supposed to be an 'unmanaged' install feature, though I haven't actually poked around with it. I expect since it uses Apple's Installer it might be slow too, since the installer definitely uses file level copies, and also requires everything you install be in the proper package format.
I would recommend poking around macosxlabs.org. They are probably the best info. source on the web for deploying OS X in Hi-Ed labs. They have info on radmind and other common imaging scenarios.
Grass. I can be a poor typist.
I know grass carp have been used fairly sucessfully in Texas, Washington, Georgia, and Florida. I live in Austin - we had severe problems with Hydrilla that they were used to manage. They are picky eaters, so they are of limited use for controlling certain aquatic weeds, but they have not created ecological disasters when they didn't eat the weeds that they were released to control.
A quick Google for 'sterile grass carp', will yield a great deal more info.
The Cane Toad in Australia, and the Mongoose in Hawaii are both examples of massive ecological disasters. But there have been cases of successful non-native species to manage pests. The Asian Glass Carp has been used to manage Hydrilla infestations, they use sterile Carp, and their use has been successful, and there are other success stories out there. Now that we know about the seriousness of mistakes, there is a lot more careful testing before introducing non-native species to control problem invasive species.
Fighting the plant back is probably a good idea since it is a severe problem species. But this approach, while it might help for a while, would need a lot of maintenance unless the beetles hung around after they killed their host (in which case there are other problems). Each Purple Loostrife produces thousands of tiny seeds every year. These seeds lie dormant when buried in mud, and can survive buried for centuries, only to spring to life once the earth they were buried in is disturbed. Even if we got rid of every living plant in North America we would stil have centuries of fighting it to make it really go away.
While I am sure that you would like all terrorists to be idiots, it is pretty clear from the methods of operation of past attacks that terrorist minds can be clever. Sept. 11 had a fair amount of planning and coordination involved. An organization that had resources to get that many members up to speed on how to fly jumbo jets could get members to learn how to effectively use a computer to communicate in clever ways.
If you bothered to read the f*ing comments, you would have noticed that in fact there is no single Slashdot-hive-mind collective viewpoint. In the comments there has been an active discussion of whether this really is a vuln. and a large percent are actualy agreeing with your position.
I wish there was a 'Making Dumb Generalizations About Slashdot' downmod. You so deserve it.
If you are in a fight and every time you get punched somewhere, that's the place you block, you will get your ass kicked. Monitoring net access in libraries and net cafes is the same type of approach. You will always be a step behind. Once libraries are recognized as being monitored the bad guys will move on to open 802.11 access points, univerity campuses that have ethernet ports open all over the place, and so on. There is no end until we have complete monitoring of every node on the internet. And then the bad guys will figure out how to hide communications in postcards, junk mail, or some other method.
Taking away the right to privacy gains us nothing in the war on terror but helps erode the limits on power that help prevent abuses of power by our government. I am a lot more concerned about keeping the government in check (no matter which party is in office) than I am about terrorist attacks. Far more people have been murdered by their governments than terrorists.
>He claimed Bush let some Bin Laden family members out of the country during the air lockdown. This is not true.
He did not claim this, and his rebuttlas against those who have pushed this make it wuite clear. He did show that the Bin Laden family were fying within the U.S. at a point when air travle was locked down. Then Bin Ladens were flying in the U.S. when the only ones who enjoyed that privilege did so under Federal order.
>They were clearly let out of the country after the air restrictions were lifted.
If you had watched the film you would know this. Moore actually has already responded to this as well, so before you continue to repeat the disinformation that you heard from some biased review, you might check his response to the criticism or actually see the movie.
(1) the idiot that authorized that kind of treatment should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
It turns out that Rumsfeld approved the use of torture. He testified about half a year ago before Congress that he did not. This is a man who needs to go to jail.
those prisoners, although embarrassed, lived.
That is incorrect. You might have missed the pictures of Miss England next to the corpse giving the thumbs up, but Taguba's report referred to prisoners dying during torture, and the various efforts at coverups for those murders.
Beyond that, those who were tortured are going to be left with blood in their eye. We will be very lucky if they don't join the ranks of those sawing off the heads off contractors. We can take it for granted that their story will at least inspire others to join up.
I tried to install WindowShadeX to see if it required root privileges to install. It turns out it requires APE...
I then tried to install Silk. It turns out it requires APE... I expect that in earlier versions they were standalone apps and required root privileges to install. A Haxie can be installed without root privileges which is one of the problems with it, as I have pointed out previously.
RCDefaultApp alone can protect you from the exploits as described, which I have verified. While Paranoid Android might in theory afford some extra level of protection in some respect, it is not needed to protect against the current exploits as they are described.
My analogy was not perfect, but it is not analogous to lookupd either since that requires root privileges to exploit while an APE based exploit would not. OTOH a malicious Haxie could be used to elevate privileges.
I think that APE has a pooor design security wise. That is really all I have been saying. Theoretically it could serve as a vector for malware. Exploits that took advantage of it would most likely be trojans that sneak in a malicious haxie. In the same way that spyware installed on Win boxes comes from many and various sources, often from installers of other products, many of those same methods could be used to install a Haxie. It isn't being done, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
Malicious Haxies are theoretical, but then again there are no known malicious exploits in the wild against the URL handler that you installed two apps to protect yourself against. Good security is about protecting yourself from theoretical exploits before they are actual exploits. If you like the benefits of APE enough to leave that theoretical hole open that is your business, I really don't care. But you should quit downplaying the fact that it is a security problem.
I haven't, though I would be interested to see what it does. Unfortunately I think you misspelled that URL since I can't resolve rentzsch.com.
While Paranoid Android can increase security, so can RCDefaults which has the added benefit of being very unobtrusive.
I was very clear that my points were entirely theoretical and that I had no reason to believe that there were any current security issues with APE/APE modules. I don't think Unsanity is shipping their software with malicious intent.
But you make one point that is entirely false that I have to address:
"as far as security goes, there's nothing that APE can do that a sneaky application can't do"
That is true in a sense that a malicious app could do the same thing that APE does, though it would be complicated to get all those pieces set up. The thing that APE provides a convenient framework for that. What most apps can't do is to look around in any user's running app's memory space and do whatever it wants with what it finds. Normal apps can't go poking around in another app's memory space at all. APE lets you write code to do that and a malicious coder could use this for lots and lots of bad things.
I don't think it is too likely to be exploited since there aren't a lot of systems out there running APE. But the very fact that when installing APE one is installing a program that opens yourself up to that degree of a serious sercurity hole makes it untenable. Expecially when installing a haxie doesn't require much work, and is easy to hide for a clever developer, so it would be easy to exploit. APE make a complicated and difficult exploit requiring root prive really easy to run in user space.
It is analogous to creating a new app that runs as a daemon to do some cool peer to peer file sharing thing you really like, though it also allows remote users to run any commands on your system with no authentication. Even if you really like what the app does, the app is uncommon, and only runs on an obscure platform, it is still insecure by design.
Interesting that you bring up protected memory. In a way APE defeats the purpose of protected memory since it injects code into every running application. Here is the scary part about what that means - once someone has APE running all haxies can poke around anywhere they want in any running apps memory space, so they can know every application password used, they can read anything out of your keychain that an app is allowed to read prompting you on behalf of the app for the keychain password, and so on. APE is a serious security nightmare. I have no reason to think that this has been exploited as yet, but installing APE opens the door for the abuse, especially if you are running closed-source haxies.
While there are no known cases of APE based spyware at this point, APE could potentially be exploited a very effective vector for spyware (and viruses).
It is pretty poor analogy to compare APE to QT Codecs or Internet Plugins. Their behavior is for the app to dynamically load and run their code when needed, and they will not be loaded unless they are called. When I launch TextEdit there is no DivX or Flash code loaded into TextEdit's memory space. APE inserts code into all running apps. That is quite different.
Input Managers are a better analogy, and honestly I do not install 3rd party Input Manager since I understand their behavior.
I don't know enough about CMMs to comment.
Hmmm... check one for didn't read the key point of the parent post: "it inserts code into every running program. Blindly."
That is the point that Rosyna didn't touch in his article. He just pretends that since it is the particular module's code that is injected and not APE Framework that this is somehow okay. If you think it is acceptable to let essentially arbitrary code be injected into every running application, that is your business, but critics are right to point out that it is a security nightmare, and it will destabilize all apps on the system by design.
Rosyna pretended that since there was one bug filed against the APE framework that this means that it would not destabilize apps. But no apps were not designed to have additional code injected into them via APE, and most were generally not tested in that environment. The behavior of the framework is the issue not the fact that the framework and daemon itself are stable.
I am not sure I follow you here. Maybe I missed your point, but this runs fine for me:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my @array;
$array[6][4][2][5][6] = "whoa!";
print $array[6][4][2][5][6];
The whole doc is really fascinating, and full of witty Larry Wallisms, but for those who don't read it all the way through to the last page, the Apocalypse ends with a 'Optional Mandatory Cross-Disciplinary Joke for People Tired of Dogs' section:
Biologist: What's worse than being chased by a Velociraptor?
Physicist: Obviously, being chased by an Acceloraptor.
Followed by a 'Future Directions' section:
Away from Acceloraptors, obviously.
Larry Wall is so cool.
I have a lot of Perl code out there that is probably going to take a while to port, but I have to say that a lot of the changes here really do make me sigh in relief. Lots of what Larry was going over here are the bits I am looking forward to in Perl 6. I use OOPerl, but never have really liked it. The object system will finally make a lot more sense, and be a lot more intuitive for those coming from other OO languages. The fact that we will real classes instead of magic packages, we get to use the keywords 'class' and 'method' rather than 'package' and 'sub', we se dots to dereference objects instead of ->, and so on are nice. There still are a lot of the clever perlisms left over, and there are a lot of cool looking innovations in perl 6, and I am happy with that.
Over all I am really excited about Perl 6. I know it will take a lot of relearning, and some code is going to be a bitch to update, but porting isn't necessarily required unless there is a compelling reason to move to 6, and the more I read about the cleaner approaches to old problems in Perl 6 the more I like it. I also expect many of the changes should help raise Perl above some of the criticisms of language snobs.
> (a word the media hasn't even heard of)
That's not entirely true. I recall the news stories about that Libertarian guy from Montana who drank colloidal silver and turned blue.
I was just playing Super Monkey Ball 2, and it occurred to me that deregulation could make a smoother playing field that allows us to reach our goals with fewer obstacles. Super Monkey Ball 2 can be a profound metaphor for life on many levels, actually. I like to think that my time playing Super Monkey Ball 2 is really time spent in deep reflection on the more important truths in life.
I read somewhere that this was brought up at a WWDC session at one point, and an Apple dev explained that "we dont want to use Open Source as dumping ground for dead technology."
"However, on slashdot, we're only allowed to point out when Republicans say stupid things, not when Democrats do. Didn't you read the F.A.Q.?"
1 53213.shtm l
Yeah, I missed that somehow:
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/03/11/1
I used Perl with Net::AIM, Expect, and frotz to make a zork bot a few years back as an amusement. I used it as a simple project before I wrote a bot to do various work related things. It is really handy to be able to check the status of certain things from AIM. The frotz bot was almost all just glue code except for the session handling bit which I added after a while to allow concurrent users - that was more complicated. To think that if I had told someone about it besides my coworkers I might have been featured in Wired...
I have a GC. I love it. I also have a PS2, which I love, but I spend more time with the GC. I know a lot of folks with two systems.
I don't think the GC was originally meant to be a secondary system, but it is cheap enough that it works well as one. And as a second system, the titles that matter are the unique ones. And Nintendo has a lot of great titles that are unique to the platform.
As an aside, some people say that they are not innovative since the same characters are used, but I don't see why they care. Even if Super Monkey Ball 2 still has a monkey in a ball, it is still a blast to play, and the same with Mario Cart, Super Smash Brothers, and other titles. The game play is fun, and for a game that is the important part.