Yes and no. If the download records isn't enough to convict - too bad. Encrypted data are private by every standard no matter what they can decode to. This is analogous to copy protection. In most countries where you are allowed to make private copies of copyrighted stuff, you're not allowed to break the copy protection in order to do so. Same thing should apply to private data - if they're encrypted in a non-trivial way, they're off limits to the authorities.
Note that I want kiddie pornographers punished as much as the next guy. It just has to happen without anybody being forced to hand over passwords or similar. Note that most kiddie porn collectors are clueless about encryption (98% store their stash in the open on their harddrives or burned to DVDs usually stacked near the computer) so this isn't a big issue.
The data may be private but the contents of the data breaks Federal and State laws. Refusing to decrypt a drive which could contain evidence proves your guilt.
One thing I noticed a long time ago is that the barrels in Half Life 2 and Counterstrike: Source look practically the same. One has to wonder why they don't reuse props more in FPSes. We're at the stage where graphics are hardly advancing anymore, and reusing a digital model is a bit easier than reusing a physical prop.
Everything that uses the Source engine looks the same honestly.
Dude. I am an systems architect/programmer with an advanced degree, a liberal, a socialist even. I also support the right to bear arms and own several of them, including an "assault rifle". When the plutocrats and theocrats finish ruining this country, you will regret it if you don't have the arms to fight back.
If the country is ruined why would we want to live to see the darkest days? I mean it's over already...
They both still function perfectly, just like with a PC you can't enjoy online content like multiplayer gaming
The problem comes when a developer decides that all multiplayer must be online. A lot of games don't support split screen, and one Xbox 360 game even requires an online pass to activate LAN multiplayer.
It's a small minority that can't accept change and they are only hurting themselves.
You seriously compare free account ever created for whatever reasons to active payed accounts...
You must be dense. Why not compare the number of all WoW accounts every created, including during free weekends. And even then it doesn't compare because WoW is only on some occasions free to create an account while Maple story always is.
You just confirmed to me the level of intelligence of F2P losers once again.
I'm pretty sure Blizzard has stated that close to 50 million players have come and gone throughout the life of WoW.
That's basically it. I don't know anyone who was with WoW since the beginning and is still there. Of course, my sample size is not in the area of a few million, but I think we're hardly the odd people out.
The game was dumbed down again and again. To the point where it just isn't worth my time anymore. Yes, of course I like winning a battle and I like to succeed in a raid, but I don't want handouts and freebies, and WoW sure feels like handing out those. Insert time, get item. Skill is optional, but at least not interfering too much with success chances. If you're too stupid to understand the fairly trivial boss mechanics, just wait for a few days, someone will certainly post a guide somewhere.
Now add that the playerbase reflects that "I wanna and for free!" attitude WoW seems to instill and you might understand why "old school" MMO players get kinda turned away from it.
You do know that guides and videos have existed since Vanilla? It's more centralized now but the same stuff has always been around since day 1. The many aspects of the game that were dumbed down were ridiculous grinds. Farming herbs for potions for 2 hours a night. Incredible amounts of materials to level tradeskills. Hearthstone cooldowns reduced to speed up travel.
All these things they changed save you time as an individual. But if you equate time to difficulty then I guess grinding a faction for 36 hours versus 3 means you require more skill as a player.
I think you're on to something. Being an adult I'd prefer to play with adults, but every LFR or PUG I ende up in is full of xbox live kiddies. I can't stand them. Being stuck in a group of teenagers is pretty much the worst possible scenario - but I suppose that's where Blizzard is trying to pull in "new blood" from.
The majority of Wow players are 25-40. So your teenagers are moms, dads, sisters, brothers or co-workers. Some people turn into complete dicks when they go online.
yeah kael and vash and ilidan were just "burn down the boss". how about reliquary of souls? council? are you kidding? did you even play tbc?
Vanilla was by far the most simple of all with exception of Naxx which less than 1% of the players saw. Bosses had 1-3 abilities max. It was all about resist gear.
TBC followed the same path.
Vash took really good communication and we killed RoS on our 3rd try. We weren't even top 25. Council took 5 interrupts, a mage who could spellsteal and a healers who didn't dispell the buff. Kael was difficult but that's one boss.
Today's raid content has at minimum 3 abilities per phase and most bosses have multiple phases introducing new abilities. Very rarely can you stand in the same place for 3 minutes as you're either spreading out, stacking or running from the fire.
This is unique insofar as they released their own cracked version, whereas I believe Earthbound and Serious Sam would detect modified launchers and activate their DRM. One of the Batman games (Arkham asylum, I think) did the same thing, it messed up your batarang so you couldn't complete certain parts. People posted about the issue, thinking it was a bug, on the official forums and then got publicly shamed by a moderator who exposed the fact the 'bug' was related to pirating the game. I don't like DRM but at least they're being creative! But with Game Dev Sim, you could argue it's not DRM.
yep most of the others who have done this have been able to actually write some cracking detection and haven't been stupid enough to a) distribute the data files without strings attached on p2p networks by themselves and b) to admit that they did do a release that way.
You mean the big name publishers with millions to spend on development? Of course they can come up with a better solution. An $8 game won't justify that amount of work.
The game creators kind of created the statistics by making the title easily available, so the data is skewed.
The titles are competing of a share of the amount of money (and time) a gamer is willing to spend. The available sum doesn't magically accumulate when new titles are released, so I'd guess that better / more marketed games will get a larger share.
They only have statistics on the pirated version that they released. There's surely a legal version which isn't broken that's out there which they have no way to track so realistically the pirated copies are worse.
For chrissakes, will somebody just fork Java and have done with this persistent Oracle nonsense?
I mean, sure, it's good Oracle is doing this. They're just way late, as usual.
Why doesn't somebody just fork it (from back when it was easily forkable), then re-implement the security fixes?
Granted, it would take a lot of work to do that NOW, but if somebody had done it way back when it should have been done, it would have been lots easier.
I firmly believe that an active open source community would be a much better caretaker of Java. Oracle has proven again and again that it doesn't care much about people who actually use Java.
Better yet. Why don't the people being paid to write Java stop making ridiculous security mistakes? You can blame Oracle management but somewhere there's a developer taking shortcuts.
Doesn't' a 'renewed' focus on security imply the existence of a focus on security at some prior point in time?
a "renewed" focus on security implies that they were focused on security but then quit, and now are going back to it. So the real question is why did they abandon the focus on security.
Of course, the obvious answer is that there never was any focus on security and now saying that they have a "renewed focus on security" is 100% pure Public Relations Bullshit.
I'm sure the developers from Sun stopped caring after they all nearly lost their jobs to bankruptcy. Then they were purchased by Oracle and as any big company transition happens, they lose certain perks. It sounds like management has put their foot down and told people to fix their shit.
Considering that I've seen MSE max out the processor for minutes at a time on several different machines, I'm not sure I'd dismiss this report simply because it's from Symantec.
It's probably scanning an archive. Most AV clients will spike the CPU during these scans.
Experience has shown that it makes NO difference what anti-virus I install on people's machines.
The only thing that makes a difference is how to manage those machines you install the product on. McAfee has the best management console when working with thousands of pc's.
NO, it hasn't been getting bad reviews, it has had some negative press based on some dodgy tests that try to use essentials for something it isn't really meant for. They throw zero day malware to test its heuristics, which are not wonderful. however in known malware (the stuff 99.9% of people need protection against) it is exceptionally good.
This is considered the leading AV review site in the world, not achieving their "certification" (the icon in the third column) in test is certainly a bad review, most well known security software manage to exceed that threshold. MSE didn't in the last two tests.
Windows update has fried at least two pieces of my hardware in the last year. First it torched my videocard immediately after restarting for a windows update. Next, the PCI express slot wouldn't register on my motherboard, good thing I had another one!
That's very similar to my laptop which tries to kill me during the Winter months. I try very hard to sneak up on it by wearing socks on a soft carpet but it always seems to hear me coming and zaps me the moment I touch it.
What is useful? Another posted his CLI doesn't work, and for another neither he nor MSFT said WHAT HARDWARE CAUSES THE FAULT which frankly without THAT knowledge is worth fuck and all because I've applied the patch to a couple dozen bog standard desktops and laptops and? I got nothing. Its gotta either be a funky driver or a piece of funky hardware that is causing this because if its anything bog standard I usually run into it but so far AMD, Intel and Nvidia graphics, Realtek and Sigmatel sound, AMD and Intel chipsets (don't have any Nvidia chipsets on hand ATM) and I haven't seen squat, just been another patch Tues round here.
Oh I did have to reboot my old nettop a couple of times but considering the fact the hard drive already has some bad sectors and the entire system is older than dirt and I'm just waiting on the hardware to finally die because i REALLY don't want to deal with one of my own machines on top of all the other machines I got to deal with? I honestly can't say it was the patch, might have just tried to write to a failing sector. Its an old XP box and XP never was great at dealing with failing sectors...meh its working fine now, left it on for 3 days and its still going when I came in so who cares.
So if anybody knows what actual hardware or software actually causes the thing it would be nice to know, then I'd at least know if any of these systems are at risk, because right now they seem to be running fine and the 2 that got picked up I haven't heard squat from the owners so I'm guessing they are running fine as well.
The article says it's conflicting with certain endpoint security software. That would be antivirus or encryption and I know from using McAfee EPE modifying a kernel driver can cause your machine to blue screen. So it makes perfect sense.
Then again if you have an Endpoint Encryption suite running and you aren't testing your Windows updates prior to pushing them you should be asking yourself if you're qualified to do your job.
If PlayStation 4 is moving to a PC architecture, then what's the point of buying a PlayStation 4 over a home theater PC running a less-closed operating system such as Windows 8 or GNU/Linux?
Maybe because you want to play PS4 games? Apple moved to a PC architecture and people still purchase their products instead of a home theater PC or Windows 8 or GNU/Linux. Probably because they want to run OS X.
By the way, exactly how is running Windows 8 any less closed than running a Playstation?
It's less about running OSX and more about tinkering. It's just like using these DVR solutions. I would rather pay $6.50 a month for a DVR box from comcast then fiddle around with a conversion card and software on my PC. The same goes for consoles. People want to be able to sit down and have it just work. Zero configuration. Plug and play!
how awesome will bioshock infinite 2 or assassin's creed V look?
Exactly as awesome as the PC version, minus 20%. For what it's worth, AMD just released the 7790, a $150 graphics card with very, VERY similar numbers, and the PS4 hasn't even shipped yet.
You can avoid Sony and still have the best graphics. Just go PC.
I'm sorry but if you have a PC from 2006 throwing a new video card in won't make it perform to the level of a PS4. So realistically it's cheaper to buy a PS4 than a new PC + upgraded video card.
This is the real point: People are so used to listening to music with no dynamic range, on ear buds, in crappy acoustic environments that they wouldn't know where to start listening for a difference.
Nor can they afford any better so while they are listening to a lesser quality, they couldn't begin to purchase equipment to give them what these artists say they are missing.
Yes. If you are going fast enough that if the light changed you wouldn't be able to go through it before it turns red, and you wouldn't be able to stop before the line then you are driving too fast for the current conditions.
If you are driving too fast for the current conditions then you should slow down. That may involve braking.
Except the timing on stop lights is different in every city, state, block, etc. How can you anticipate this if two blocks down the road the yellow light is 1 second shorter?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes and no. If the download records isn't enough to convict - too bad. Encrypted data are private by every standard no matter what they can decode to. This is analogous to copy protection. In most countries where you are allowed to make private copies of copyrighted stuff, you're not allowed to break the copy protection in order to do so. Same thing should apply to private data - if they're encrypted in a non-trivial way, they're off limits to the authorities.
Note that I want kiddie pornographers punished as much as the next guy. It just has to happen without anybody being forced to hand over passwords or similar. Note that most kiddie porn collectors are clueless about encryption (98% store their stash in the open on their harddrives or burned to DVDs usually stacked near the computer) so this isn't a big issue.
The data may be private but the contents of the data breaks Federal and State laws. Refusing to decrypt a drive which could contain evidence proves your guilt.
One thing I noticed a long time ago is that the barrels in Half Life 2 and Counterstrike: Source look practically the same. One has to wonder why they don't reuse props more in FPSes. We're at the stage where graphics are hardly advancing anymore, and reusing a digital model is a bit easier than reusing a physical prop.
Everything that uses the Source engine looks the same honestly.
Dude. I am an systems architect/programmer with an advanced degree, a liberal, a socialist even. I also support the right to bear arms and own several of them, including an "assault rifle". When the plutocrats and theocrats finish ruining this country, you will regret it if you don't have the arms to fight back.
If the country is ruined why would we want to live to see the darkest days? I mean it's over already...
They both still function perfectly, just like with a PC you can't enjoy online content like multiplayer gaming
The problem comes when a developer decides that all multiplayer must be online. A lot of games don't support split screen, and one Xbox 360 game even requires an online pass to activate LAN multiplayer.
It's a small minority that can't accept change and they are only hurting themselves.
You seriously compare free account ever created for whatever reasons to active payed accounts... You must be dense. Why not compare the number of all WoW accounts every created, including during free weekends. And even then it doesn't compare because WoW is only on some occasions free to create an account while Maple story always is. You just confirmed to me the level of intelligence of F2P losers once again.
I'm pretty sure Blizzard has stated that close to 50 million players have come and gone throughout the life of WoW.
Someone hand that guy an insightful?
That's basically it. I don't know anyone who was with WoW since the beginning and is still there. Of course, my sample size is not in the area of a few million, but I think we're hardly the odd people out.
The game was dumbed down again and again. To the point where it just isn't worth my time anymore. Yes, of course I like winning a battle and I like to succeed in a raid, but I don't want handouts and freebies, and WoW sure feels like handing out those. Insert time, get item. Skill is optional, but at least not interfering too much with success chances. If you're too stupid to understand the fairly trivial boss mechanics, just wait for a few days, someone will certainly post a guide somewhere.
Now add that the playerbase reflects that "I wanna and for free!" attitude WoW seems to instill and you might understand why "old school" MMO players get kinda turned away from it.
You do know that guides and videos have existed since Vanilla? It's more centralized now but the same stuff has always been around since day 1. The many aspects of the game that were dumbed down were ridiculous grinds. Farming herbs for potions for 2 hours a night. Incredible amounts of materials to level tradeskills. Hearthstone cooldowns reduced to speed up travel. All these things they changed save you time as an individual. But if you equate time to difficulty then I guess grinding a faction for 36 hours versus 3 means you require more skill as a player.
I think you're on to something. Being an adult I'd prefer to play with adults, but every LFR or PUG I ende up in is full of xbox live kiddies. I can't stand them. Being stuck in a group of teenagers is pretty much the worst possible scenario - but I suppose that's where Blizzard is trying to pull in "new blood" from.
The majority of Wow players are 25-40. So your teenagers are moms, dads, sisters, brothers or co-workers. Some people turn into complete dicks when they go online.
yeah kael and vash and ilidan were just "burn down the boss". how about reliquary of souls? council? are you kidding? did you even play tbc?
Vanilla was by far the most simple of all with exception of Naxx which less than 1% of the players saw. Bosses had 1-3 abilities max. It was all about resist gear. TBC followed the same path. Vash took really good communication and we killed RoS on our 3rd try. We weren't even top 25. Council took 5 interrupts, a mage who could spellsteal and a healers who didn't dispell the buff. Kael was difficult but that's one boss. Today's raid content has at minimum 3 abilities per phase and most bosses have multiple phases introducing new abilities. Very rarely can you stand in the same place for 3 minutes as you're either spreading out, stacking or running from the fire.
Ah, well, yes, you bring up a good point. Technically, U.S. government is not a Sovereign. The States and The People, however, are.
And if you're a terrorist who happened to have their communications intercepted you have no immunity anyways. :)
This is unique insofar as they released their own cracked version, whereas I believe Earthbound and Serious Sam would detect modified launchers and activate their DRM. One of the Batman games (Arkham asylum, I think) did the same thing, it messed up your batarang so you couldn't complete certain parts. People posted about the issue, thinking it was a bug, on the official forums and then got publicly shamed by a moderator who exposed the fact the 'bug' was related to pirating the game. I don't like DRM but at least they're being creative! But with Game Dev Sim, you could argue it's not DRM.
yep most of the others who have done this have been able to actually write some cracking detection and haven't been stupid enough to a) distribute the data files without strings attached on p2p networks by themselves and b) to admit that they did do a release that way.
You mean the big name publishers with millions to spend on development? Of course they can come up with a better solution. An $8 game won't justify that amount of work.
The game creators kind of created the statistics by making the title easily available, so the data is skewed.
The titles are competing of a share of the amount of money (and time) a gamer is willing to spend. The available sum doesn't magically accumulate when new titles are released, so I'd guess that better / more marketed games will get a larger share.
They only have statistics on the pirated version that they released. There's surely a legal version which isn't broken that's out there which they have no way to track so realistically the pirated copies are worse.
For chrissakes, will somebody just fork Java and have done with this persistent Oracle nonsense? I mean, sure, it's good Oracle is doing this. They're just way late, as usual. Why doesn't somebody just fork it (from back when it was easily forkable), then re-implement the security fixes? Granted, it would take a lot of work to do that NOW, but if somebody had done it way back when it should have been done, it would have been lots easier. I firmly believe that an active open source community would be a much better caretaker of Java. Oracle has proven again and again that it doesn't care much about people who actually use Java.
Better yet. Why don't the people being paid to write Java stop making ridiculous security mistakes? You can blame Oracle management but somewhere there's a developer taking shortcuts.
Doesn't' a 'renewed' focus on security imply the existence of a focus on security at some prior point in time?
a "renewed" focus on security implies that they were focused on security but then quit, and now are going back to it. So the real question is why did they abandon the focus on security.
Of course, the obvious answer is that there never was any focus on security and now saying that they have a "renewed focus on security" is 100% pure Public Relations Bullshit.
I'm sure the developers from Sun stopped caring after they all nearly lost their jobs to bankruptcy. Then they were purchased by Oracle and as any big company transition happens, they lose certain perks. It sounds like management has put their foot down and told people to fix their shit.
Considering that I've seen MSE max out the processor for minutes at a time on several different machines, I'm not sure I'd dismiss this report simply because it's from Symantec.
It's probably scanning an archive. Most AV clients will spike the CPU during these scans.
Experience has shown that it makes NO difference what anti-virus I install on people's machines.
The only thing that makes a difference is how to manage those machines you install the product on. McAfee has the best management console when working with thousands of pc's.
NO, it hasn't been getting bad reviews, it has had some negative press based on some dodgy tests that try to use essentials for something it isn't really meant for. They throw zero day malware to test its heuristics, which are not wonderful. however in known malware (the stuff 99.9% of people need protection against) it is exceptionally good.
This is considered the leading AV review site in the world, not achieving their "certification" (the icon in the third column) in test is certainly a bad review, most well known security software manage to exceed that threshold. MSE didn't in the last two tests.
http://www.av-test.org/en/tests/test-reports/
I've never heard of them before and I've worked in IT for 14 years. They obviously aren't that well known, maybe in Germany, but not in the US.
Windows update has fried at least two pieces of my hardware in the last year. First it torched my videocard immediately after restarting for a windows update. Next, the PCI express slot wouldn't register on my motherboard, good thing I had another one!
That's very similar to my laptop which tries to kill me during the Winter months. I try very hard to sneak up on it by wearing socks on a soft carpet but it always seems to hear me coming and zaps me the moment I touch it.
What is useful? Another posted his CLI doesn't work, and for another neither he nor MSFT said WHAT HARDWARE CAUSES THE FAULT which frankly without THAT knowledge is worth fuck and all because I've applied the patch to a couple dozen bog standard desktops and laptops and? I got nothing. Its gotta either be a funky driver or a piece of funky hardware that is causing this because if its anything bog standard I usually run into it but so far AMD, Intel and Nvidia graphics, Realtek and Sigmatel sound, AMD and Intel chipsets (don't have any Nvidia chipsets on hand ATM) and I haven't seen squat, just been another patch Tues round here.
Oh I did have to reboot my old nettop a couple of times but considering the fact the hard drive already has some bad sectors and the entire system is older than dirt and I'm just waiting on the hardware to finally die because i REALLY don't want to deal with one of my own machines on top of all the other machines I got to deal with? I honestly can't say it was the patch, might have just tried to write to a failing sector. Its an old XP box and XP never was great at dealing with failing sectors...meh its working fine now, left it on for 3 days and its still going when I came in so who cares.
So if anybody knows what actual hardware or software actually causes the thing it would be nice to know, then I'd at least know if any of these systems are at risk, because right now they seem to be running fine and the 2 that got picked up I haven't heard squat from the owners so I'm guessing they are running fine as well.
The article says it's conflicting with certain endpoint security software. That would be antivirus or encryption and I know from using McAfee EPE modifying a kernel driver can cause your machine to blue screen. So it makes perfect sense. Then again if you have an Endpoint Encryption suite running and you aren't testing your Windows updates prior to pushing them you should be asking yourself if you're qualified to do your job.
If PlayStation 4 is moving to a PC architecture, then what's the point of buying a PlayStation 4 over a home theater PC running a less-closed operating system such as Windows 8 or GNU/Linux?
Maybe because you want to play PS4 games? Apple moved to a PC architecture and people still purchase their products instead of a home theater PC or Windows 8 or GNU/Linux. Probably because they want to run OS X.
By the way, exactly how is running Windows 8 any less closed than running a Playstation?
It's less about running OSX and more about tinkering. It's just like using these DVR solutions. I would rather pay $6.50 a month for a DVR box from comcast then fiddle around with a conversion card and software on my PC. The same goes for consoles. People want to be able to sit down and have it just work. Zero configuration. Plug and play!
how awesome will bioshock infinite 2 or assassin's creed V look?
Exactly as awesome as the PC version, minus 20%. For what it's worth, AMD just released the 7790, a $150 graphics card with very, VERY similar numbers, and the PS4 hasn't even shipped yet.
You can avoid Sony and still have the best graphics. Just go PC.
I'm sorry but if you have a PC from 2006 throwing a new video card in won't make it perform to the level of a PS4. So realistically it's cheaper to buy a PS4 than a new PC + upgraded video card.
A lot of my PS1 games still didn't work properly on my PS2. I had to bust out my PS1 to play them so it wasn't all it's cracked up to be.
Better to let them continue the DDOS so you can lock them up for life.
Intelligence and Wisdom are two different things.
Don't forget Charisma, Dexterity, Constitution, and Strength
Those attributes are only required after pointing the laser...particularly when you're feeling from the FBI.
This is the real point: People are so used to listening to music with no dynamic range, on ear buds, in crappy acoustic environments that they wouldn't know where to start listening for a difference.
Nor can they afford any better so while they are listening to a lesser quality, they couldn't begin to purchase equipment to give them what these artists say they are missing.
Yes. If you are going fast enough that if the light changed you wouldn't be able to go through it before it turns red, and you wouldn't be able to stop before the line then you are driving too fast for the current conditions.
If you are driving too fast for the current conditions then you should slow down. That may involve braking.
Except the timing on stop lights is different in every city, state, block, etc. How can you anticipate this if two blocks down the road the yellow light is 1 second shorter?