Why doesn't Blizzard provide facilities that enable these emulators to authenticate CD keys through Battle.net?
In order for us to keep our proprietary CD-key algorithms secure, we cannot allow outside servers to query for the validity of CD keys
See above. Blizzard puts bread on the table by making money through software sales. Why should they be required to open up their scheme to allow others to be able to pirate their software more easily?
Please don't comment on issues that you don't understand. This is a bare faced lie, and has nothing to do with encryption or security. Here's why:
There is nothing to stop bnetd from doing this already.
The bnetd server could simply open a socket to a Blizzard Battlenet server, and pass on all packets from the clients until it reaches the key challenge/response. It could then kick clients out if they fail the challenge (although the client should terminate itself if it receives a "go away" from the Battlenet server via bnetd).
Why don't they do this? Because one of the points of bnetd is to provide an independent network to Battlenet, which is buggy and prone to dreadful lag and downtime. Being reliant on Battlenet is counterproductive to the basic aims of bnetd.
However, if Blizzard were to set up separate authentication servers, that do nothing but authenticate encrypted CD keys without having to go through the whole login process, everybody wins. They can keep them up more easily, bnetd can use them with more confidence, and pirates can be kept offline. If the Battlenet authentication servers go down, bnetd could let in anyone, so pirates could only play when Battlenet goes down, and, hey, Blizzard aim for 100% uptime, right? By putting a delay on servicing requests from any given IP, Blizzard could protect themselves against crackers just throwing random packets at them, but they don't really have to, because unless you know the client side encryption scheme, that still doesn't help you get valid keys that you can use.
There is exactly zero implication for security. The bnetd server would send on exactly the same encrypted client packet that it already receives. All packet passing is verbatim, there is no need for Blizzard to reveal any details of their encryption scheme. Bnetd doesn't even need to know what a "yes/no" response from the Blizzard servers looks like, although it would be trivial to sniff, and better if they did know, as they could then forcibly terminate the client.
Reminder: bnetd could do this already. Your ISP's routers are doing this already.
There is one slight caveat. Blizzard might have done something "clever" like pack the result of a getpeername() into the CD key packet as Netrek does with it's RSA packets to stop people inserting hacked "borg" clients between an unhacked client and a server. But there would simply be no reason for Blizzard to do this, and it would actually be counterproductive, as it would place a known and easily manpulated piece of data into the encrypted CD key packet, give a hint as to the encryption scheme used.
To recap: this particular statement from Blizzard is a big fat lie. I'm a professional network programmer, and I've hacked enough lousy and not so lousy encryption schemes to know. If you disagree, please spell out where the security hole is, because I'm simply not seeing one.
I'll still buy Blizzard games as long as they provide enough entertainment for the money.
No, you won't. You'll pay money for and agree to Blizzard licenses that permit you very limited rights to use the data and applications that (quite incidentally) came in the boxen with the licenses. You won't read the licenses, nor will you understand that you are agreeing that Blizzard may change the terms under which you may use their content, or revoke your license at any time, or simply withdraw the services advertised on the back of the box, or (in future) wiping the game from your drive, and all without giving you any notice or explanation or assumption of innocence.
You won't care until - despite Blizzard's control freakery - a pirate clones or guesses your CD key, or one of your friends jots it down, with or without your knowledge, or you get sold a returned box that's already been registered - and this actually happened to me, which made for an interesting little debate with the retailler - and you get refused access to Battlenet. Or Blizzard (or whoever group of lawyers happens to own them at the time) just stop providing Battlenet. Then you'll care, but Blizzard won't care, because you agreed to a license that says they don't have to.
Then you'll wish there was a bnetd. Then you'll say "Why did nobody stand up for this when we had a chance?"
Why should the on-line piracy validation be integrated with the server? It is "relatively" easy to split the actual battle.net serving with the vadidation process
Quite correct. If Blizzard is really pro-hobbyist / anti-piracy, their first step should have been to publish the interface to their validation servers and invite bnetd (and any other interested parties) to use it.
Two problems with that. First, they're clearly just asswipes for their own laywers: "Blizzard products are intellectual property, and we are well within our legal rights to protect our products from software piracy" [translation: "You know that EULA you clicked through? Go and read it. You don't own a 'game', you own a 'license', the first clause of which is that we can change or revoke it at any time. How funny is that, butt monkey?" ]
Second, they're possibly concerned that if they make it too easy, then J. Random Hacker could zombie some Windows boxen and start firing random serial numbers at the validation servers in an attempt to find valid keys. I doubt that's really an issue though: a simple or exponential timeout on servicing requests from a given source IP would handle that. Plus, enough packet sniffing would allow a determined hacker to do it anyway, regardless of how obfuscated they try and make it.
OK, I have some sympathy for Blizzard. But anyone who's seen the erratic and tardy responses from Blizzard to the prolific duping and cheating on Bnet will know why there's very little reason to cut them slack on this issue, or to accept that they have gamers' interests at heart. It's about money, and it's about control, and nothing else. Perhaps you think that's enough of an excuse. Or perhaps not.
...when will advertisers start producing content in HD and/or widescreen format, and start insisting on HD/widescreen distribution in their contracts and payment plans?
subscribers should be able to moderate more often. I probably earn at least five karma points a day on my two accounts but haven't been able to moderate for MONTHS.
That's more of a problem with the existing mod system. Mod points go to the arithmetic median users, the "once every second day" brigade. Those who actually read and contribute the most to Slashdot don't generally get to moderate.
It's annoying, but at least it's consistent, right? Except of course it isn't, as editors have unlimited mod points, based on the observation that they contribute the most. So it's daft and hypocritical in equal measure.
it is hard to see how the class action can possibly be successful. If Paypal loses the court case it is unlikely they will be in a position to continue operations
I'm guessing that this is the intention. After all, these are people who really have nothing to lose. It's hard to argue that they should sit tight and shut up just to protect the PayPal customers that haven't been scammed yet. PayPal is clearly acting as a bank, and they should have been bitchslapped a long time ago. It's surprising that it's taken so long, really.
It's funny how hard it is to prevent overdrawing when someone got into my account and tried to take $12,000
Yuh, I had $900 debited out of my account to credit a bunch of cell phones. The thieves used my debit card (not credit card) number to take it straight out of my main account. I got chatting to the CSO that sorted it for me (I used to work there) and she explained that this was pretty common now, and after some initial griping about customers using card online and leaving receipts lying around (nope and nope for me) they'd just acknowledged that these numbers were either coming from legitimate merchants (with or without their knowlege) or were just randomly generated, and were crediting them straight back and doing chargebacks, or (more and more) kicking it to their legal department.
The basic trouble with the whole banking system is that it's entirely based on trust. Once you get into it as a trusted peer, you can initiate any transactions you like, for pretty much any values you like, and there's not a damn thing anyone will do to stop you until well after the fact. When I used to work in banking, we make a cursory effort to look at the paper checks over $1500 dollars when they came back to the branch, but we never caught anything that way, while at the same time, we'd regularly see fraudulent e-transactions for tens of thousands of dollars get presented, and we had both local and federal law enforcement drop by more than once trying to catch a couple of individuals who'd been drawing their ill gotten gains from our branch - and we were a small, sleepy suburban branch.
The level of fraud was high but manageable before every vendor and their dog got into the system. It seems like it's starting to get out of hand now, and there are apparently no plans to deal with it, other than punishing basically honest vendors in high risk areas (e.g. porn sites) by charging them more per transaction. Sooner or later, we're all going to get stung; it's just a question of how much, and how quickly you can convince your bank of your innocence.:-(
"He can't be sure how many atoms they trapped, but says you would get only a tiny amount of energy by combining the antimatter with matter--not even enough to warm a small cup of coffee."
Seriously though, we're never going to power a warp drive with that. And let's face it, that's what we really care about, right? So we can all become starship engineers, get neat uniforms, and boldy go and score with hot alien chicks.
For those interested, in the UK, viewing figures are collated by the Broadcaster' Audience Research Board. The system monitors minute by minute (catching commercial hopping), and it also fingerprints VCR recordings, and identifies them when they are played back. BARB figures are collated nightly, are available the very next day, and BARB also takes great care to ensure that their sample viewers are demographically representative.
The trouble is, new technology is a real pain for them. The UK has been slow to jump on the channel-explosion bandwagon, but we're there with a vengeance now. Viewing figures are currenty in a real mess, partly because BARB was stonewalled on getting access to some set top boxes. In fact, it's an open secret that their figures for digital TV have been pretty much a big old guesstimate for the past couple of years.
Nobody likes that. BARB doesn't like it, because their subscribers wonder why they're paying for the data. The networks don't like it, because advertisers assume that bad data means viewing figures are being overestimated (which appears to be true as the new BARB system comes on line). Advertisers don't like it, because they don't know how many eyeballs they're getting (and remember, they've been getting minute-by-minute, they do know when we're channel hopping).
And now here comes digital VCR's and looking forward, DVD recorders. BARB can currently fingerprint VCR recordings, but that's a no brainer using a simple in-line analogue device, like a non-invasive Macromedia. But digital, phew, that's a whole new ballgame. Who knows how Replays and TIVO's (and other digital tech) filters or compress information. Even if you can insert the watermark, it might be stripped or mangled on replay. It might give you garbage, or it might give you the wrong show. And if your sample viewer decides to plug in a PC with TV capture/out cards, god knows what data you're going to get.
I wonder if the big issue that networks (et al) have with digital VCR's is simply that they don't know what a very small number of people are watching on them. The BARB sample size is something like 0.025% of the UK population. It's possible that they don't really give a rat's arse about what the other 99.975% of us are watching or doing with them, just that they're screwing the figures for the sample group. After all, that's really all that matters to them, materially.
The concern might not be about what we're doing with new technology, merely that it exists, and they can't keep up with it.
What would happen if every time John Katz posted an article, NOONE responded to it
Everyone except you? I only picked this up in metamoderation, I already block Katz articles. I have no idea what this article is about, in fact, I'm just responding to your (unfairly downmodded) comment. Filter him our, it'll do wonders for your blood pressure, and you find you won't even miss ranting about him after a few days.
What MediaPlayer is doing is nothing new -- it's equivalent to nearly every other player out there [...] It's not uploading anything back to anyone...
...yet. The important difference is that it's a Microsoft player on a Microsoft OS that's registered to you and identifies you uniquely (by default) to Microsoft when you make the queries. Note that Microsoft's answer to "Will you use this information" isn't "We can't", but rather "We're not planning to, but we won't rule it out".
Better questions to ask them would be:
Do you log the CDDB queries on your end (so they don't have to "upload" anything).
If not, will you guarantee that you never will.
If not, why not?
Why do you use a unique ID anyway?
When will you be removing the unique ID?
Failing that, when will you be turning it off by default?
Where is the local cache stored?
How do I turn it off?
How do I delete it?
This story raised a lot more questions than it answers.
We've been over this before, with cotton moths. It's a very cynical perpertual income scam, and the farcical nature of it can be summed up as: "Breed them into extinction".
To have an appreciable effect on fly numbers in the next generation, you have to pretty much double the number of flies in this generation, ensuring that half of them are sterile.
So first you've got to breed up your lab flies from fertile flies. Then you've got to keep back a proportion of them to use to breed up more lab flies. Then you nuke your flies to sterilise them, hopefully successfully, and hopefully without creating too many SuperFlies.
You release them into the wild, blithely ignoring the impossiblity of achieving a uniform distribution. Congratulations, you've just doubled the number of flies in the wild!
But it's all worth it, because in the next generation you only get 50% as many flies, right?
Wrong. Flies breed like, well, flies. The check on their numbers isn't the number of fertile breeding pairs, but the number of predators and (mostly) the available resources for them to feed on.
So while you perhaps see a small drop, you still have an assload of flies out there, and you've got one generation to address it. No problem, you just need to breed up even more flies in the lab, and do it again. And again. And again. And each time, you charge a fat fee for doing it. And you'll never wipe them out, or even have an appreciable effect on their numbers, because you'll always have fertile flies out there, breeding like crazy and spreading back into any local pockets that you've actually managed to have an impact on. And you always have to keep breeding your own flies in the lab (all this is just great for the overall fly population, you might notice) and then releasing them into the wild, where they're just as big a problem during their lifetime as wild flies. Even assuming that you could wipe out the wild flies, if you then released another million nuked flies "just to be sure", it's odds on that a fertile pair would slip through and start the whole problem all over again. Pop quiz: would this be a bad thing or a good thing for the fly sellers?
I'm not suggesting that this method is worse than using pesticides, just that it's equally as token and futile. The intentions are noble: these little bastards are a disease vector, and can literally eat cattle alive. But this "solution" is really just another way for high tech companies to obtain a perpetual revenue stream from the third world by offering a magic wand to deal with a very real, but very endemic problem. The real problem is that the flies will expand to match the available resources, and we just keep giving them more resources to nibble on.
It'll probably be a real cheap solution at first though. Remember, the first one is always free.
[Patents are] are, in short, nothing other than a naked gift to large companies. [...]
Funnily enough, I've always been inclined to believe that that "naked gifts" of the roofied cheerleader variety played a big part in the corporate-government relationship.
It's phrased to be funny, but it's actually nauseating. Our "democratic processes" (US and EU) allow us to choose between one corrupt politician, another corrupt politician, or (if we're lucky) some honest people that never get chosen because we feel that we have to vote tactically to keep out whoever we view as the most corrupt of the two main candidates. And not voting is painted as being undemocratic (or it's illegal, as in Australia).
Thanks all the same, but I'll vote when I have a single transferable vote, 100% proportional representation, or a "none of the above" option. Voting for the lesser of two evils is not an option that I'm prepared to accept.
What happens if [patented] software is also copyrighted
The patent protects what it does. The copyright protects how it does it. You don't have to disclose the source to get the patent, merely describe what it's supposed to do.
You could, for example, patent a self healing filesystem. Not just a journalling system or a RAID cluster, I'm thinking of a generic system that makes background backups of commonly used areas, looks for bad areas, and repairs them with a best guess of what data should be in them, all without interaction. That's probably new enough to count. I don't know how I'd do it, but if I decribe what I'd want it to do in enough detail, and pay my 10,000 euros, then I get a mortal lock on any poor bastard who does implement this and tries to sell it (or even give it away!) in Europe in the next 20 years.
You put a genuine smile on my face. Thanks for the perspective.;-)
Here's some cultural sharing. Over half of the laws that effect any given citizen of an European Union nation are European Union laws. We - de facto - already have a United States of Europe. Despite this, the European Parliament receives almost no coverage in the mainstream British press. Instead, we remain firmly focussed on internal petty political struggles.
We ocassionally get a shlock piece on corruption in Europe, but invariable focussing on the role that the Italians/French/Spanish/Germans/insert other country played. Good old fashioned xenophobia at its best, in both senses. We ignore the fact that we're ruled by Europe, and when we can't ignore it, we blame any problems on The Other Guy.
Is this analogous to the US? I know there's still a degree of state pride and independence, but it's very extreme in Britain. I, and almost everyone I know, consider myself Scottish (/Welsh/English), then British, then European, in that order. I imagine that's much like considering yourself a Texan first, then a Southerner, then a citizen of the USA, even though all the really important decisions that effect you (like spending a zillion dollars on an aggressive defence policy) are made at the Federal level.
every time I boot, I'm reading copyrighted Microsoft (sorry, but it's true) material into my system's memory, goddamit
There's a specific exemption in the DMCA for transient memory copies necessary to produce functionality. It's not pertinent to the case in hand, I just thought I'd mention it.
Do you really believe the Sony/Nintendo/RIAA theory that anything that could possibly be used in an illegal manner should itself be illegal
Unfortunately, in this case Nintendo are just following the law as written (apart from trying to sieze the goods). They actually have a duty to their shareholders to do this. The problem is with the dumb law and the corrupt politicians that passed it, not the predatory people using it to their advantage, or the businesses who bought those politicians.
Let's stay focussed on the issue, which is to tell (not ask, tell) our elected representatives to repeal the law. The courts are a gamble, the predactory companies are a certainty. Fix the cause, not the symptoms.
Since when did US Customs become an authority on copyright law
Customs officers have a shitty job. They are overworked, underpaid, and they know that any obvious contraband they do stop is only the tip of the iceberg. Luckily for them, they have the authority to cavity search Jesus Christ Himself if they feel like it, and the - de facto - power to seize anything they like and hold it to ransom. This seizure is extra-legal and extra-consitutional, but luckily they live in a gray zone outside of the normal bounds of time and space. Er, law, I mean. Specifically, the goods aren't in the country until they pass customs, so the our feeble human laws do not yet apply to them.
What part of the DMCA gives NOA the right to ask for the unsold stock
I dunno, how much of it (the DMCA) did they pay for?
Seriously, it's a good question. The DMCA bans import of contravening devices, but that's post facto now, and beyond the (spurious) jurisdiction of the demigods at customs. It also bans the sale or trafficking in the devices. But it doesn't provide a mechanism for seizing them. The current owner can keep them, and curiously enough, can even use them. He just can't give them to anyone else, nor tell anyone how to make one or where to get one. But that's for a court to decide now, not customs, and not Nintendo.
Sigh, time to dig out the addresses of my elected representatives again. Anyone else get the feeling that SSSCA was just a smokescreen to protect the DMCA? Like it turned the debate into "how much further should we go?" when it should be "have we gone too far already?".
Do you have any recent incidents [of spam from Roadrunner]
D'oh. I've just deleted one! I don't get a lot from Roadrunner any more, maybe on e a month, but the response is always the same: "It's not from us"
The most recent one got bounced with the "It's not us" lie, even though the entry point was "smtp-something.something.rr.com". The originating IP was unroutable, so it might even be an open relay, I wasn't really in a mood to check. It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that because the originating IP (but not the first accepting smtp server) was outside the rr netblock, they didn't care. But that's exactly the sort of "Not our problem" crap that leads to open relays going uncaught.
I agree with you with regard to email, but what about instant messages
Fair point. CmdrTaco trolled me into responding in too narrow a fashion.;-)
That is going to be precedent setting. Given that most IM clients have a one-click logging feature, it could go either way.
I expect the lesson to potential training-bra fetishists will be to get your cyber-partner to make a clear statement that they are not recording the conversation.
federal law only requires the consent of one person before a telephone call or Internet communication can be recorded
Um, OK, but email is de facto recorded. It's (quite literally) practically impossible to remove all recordings of an email that you personally have received. That would be like requiring all recipients of snail mail to shred it unless they have explicit consent to retain it.
You've got a good point, but I do believe that the court will use the "reasonable expectation" test about the emails. The IM's are another issue. They might lose some sleep over that one.
A show of hands please...who here has to log into their answer machine to get messages
You're missing the point. When you send a message - particularly an email - you have to expect that the intended recipient will have a copy of it.
The very notion that anything I e-mail to someone is available for downloading/printing by anyone but the receipient is a huge privacy violation.
Spot the guy who didn't even bother reading the story. If you bother to read it, you'll find that the email was submitted as evidence by the intended recipient, a 15 year old girl, and the IM's by the intended recipient, a law enforcement agent posing as a minor. At no time did law enforcement make a 3rd party interception or recording. The guy sent the messages. The intended recipients got them. The intended recipient submitted them as evidence. No wiretap. No interception. Go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200.
Moderators, you might also want to read the story before applying your mod points. This is an important and emotive issue; let's be sure we have the facts before getting all riled up and picking the wrong side.
The article doesn't make clear whether the instant messages that are being used at trial were made available by the girl
It's a good point, but it reads as being most likely that they were obtained by the entrapping agent, after the victim's emails were handed over.
In either case, the messages were submitted to law enforcement and then as evidence after reaching the intended recipient. No third party tap took place. As you say, this isn't a wiretap issue. It's arguable that you might have a reasonable expectation that an IM (but not an email) would not be recorded. Given that most IM clients have one click session logging though, it's rather stretching the argument. If the guy asked if the "girl" was logging it, and the agent lied, then he's got a good chance, but I doubt very much if he did.
It'll be interesting to see what the court makes of the IM's, but email simply has to be viewed as persistent. The recipient gets a persistent copy, you know they do, and you really can't have a beef about it being submitted as evidence. Hopefully the conviction can stand just on the email evidence, regardless of how they rule on the IM.
Duh? In what way? To me this looks pretty clear cut: this evidence - in this case - was 100% admissible, because it's not a wiretap. And here's why.
When making a phone call, you have a reasonable expectation that it is not being recorded. That's why law enforcement needs a wiretap order.
When sending a snail mail letter, you do not have a reasonable expectation that there will be no record of it after it has been received, nor that the recipient will not give it to law enforcement of their own free will, after they have received it. You have a reasonable expectation that it will not be intercepted in transit, but once it reaches the recipient to which you sent it, it's in their possession, you know it's in their possession, and it's fair game.
Pop quiz: do emails that you receive:
A: Automagically evaporate after you have read them?
B: Remain on your machine as long as you want them to?
Given that you've ever received an email and know the correct answer to this, do you have a reasonable expectation that an email that you have sent will not be used by the recipient as evidence?
Perhaps Slashdot editors could consider taking a minute to read the article before kneejerking a commentary. I know it's a common lament, but this case is open and shut. The guy sent emails soliciting sex from a minor. The emails that he sent were given by the intended recipient to law enforcement after they were received. There was no wiretap. Perhaps the sender really was dumb enough to expect that there would be no record of his emails after they were received , but that was an unreasonable expectation, given that he was clued enough to send an email.
It's an interesting case, but it's really not about wiretapping or privacy or the evil feds. It's about a child abuser who was really dumb and got caught. The fact that it involves emails is neither here nor there - he might as well have been sending snail mail letters.
Are we all quite clear on that now? Please, please, please, read the news story before responding.
Slashdot Mirror
Why doesn't Blizzard provide facilities that enable these emulators to authenticate CD keys through Battle.net?
In order for us to keep our proprietary CD-key algorithms secure, we cannot allow outside servers to query for the validity of CD keys
See above. Blizzard puts bread on the table by making money through software sales. Why should they be required to open up their scheme to allow others to be able to pirate their software more easily?
Please don't comment on issues that you don't understand. This is a bare faced lie, and has nothing to do with encryption or security. Here's why:
There is nothing to stop bnetd from doing this already.
The bnetd server could simply open a socket to a Blizzard Battlenet server, and pass on all packets from the clients until it reaches the key challenge/response. It could then kick clients out if they fail the challenge (although the client should terminate itself if it receives a "go away" from the Battlenet server via bnetd).
Why don't they do this? Because one of the points of bnetd is to provide an independent network to Battlenet, which is buggy and prone to dreadful lag and downtime. Being reliant on Battlenet is counterproductive to the basic aims of bnetd.
However, if Blizzard were to set up separate authentication servers, that do nothing but authenticate encrypted CD keys without having to go through the whole login process, everybody wins. They can keep them up more easily, bnetd can use them with more confidence, and pirates can be kept offline. If the Battlenet authentication servers go down, bnetd could let in anyone, so pirates could only play when Battlenet goes down, and, hey, Blizzard aim for 100% uptime, right? By putting a delay on servicing requests from any given IP, Blizzard could protect themselves against crackers just throwing random packets at them, but they don't really have to, because unless you know the client side encryption scheme, that still doesn't help you get valid keys that you can use.
There is exactly zero implication for security. The bnetd server would send on exactly the same encrypted client packet that it already receives. All packet passing is verbatim, there is no need for Blizzard to reveal any details of their encryption scheme. Bnetd doesn't even need to know what a "yes/no" response from the Blizzard servers looks like, although it would be trivial to sniff, and better if they did know, as they could then forcibly terminate the client.
Reminder: bnetd could do this already. Your ISP's routers are doing this already.
There is one slight caveat. Blizzard might have done something "clever" like pack the result of a getpeername() into the CD key packet as Netrek does with it's RSA packets to stop people inserting hacked "borg" clients between an unhacked client and a server. But there would simply be no reason for Blizzard to do this, and it would actually be counterproductive, as it would place a known and easily manpulated piece of data into the encrypted CD key packet, give a hint as to the encryption scheme used.
To recap: this particular statement from Blizzard is a big fat lie. I'm a professional network programmer, and I've hacked enough lousy and not so lousy encryption schemes to know. If you disagree, please spell out where the security hole is, because I'm simply not seeing one.
No, you won't. You'll pay money for and agree to Blizzard licenses that permit you very limited rights to use the data and applications that (quite incidentally) came in the boxen with the licenses. You won't read the licenses, nor will you understand that you are agreeing that Blizzard may change the terms under which you may use their content, or revoke your license at any time, or simply withdraw the services advertised on the back of the box, or (in future) wiping the game from your drive, and all without giving you any notice or explanation or assumption of innocence.
You won't care until - despite Blizzard's control freakery - a pirate clones or guesses your CD key, or one of your friends jots it down, with or without your knowledge, or you get sold a returned box that's already been registered - and this actually happened to me, which made for an interesting little debate with the retailler - and you get refused access to Battlenet. Or Blizzard (or whoever group of lawyers happens to own them at the time) just stop providing Battlenet. Then you'll care, but Blizzard won't care, because you agreed to a license that says they don't have to.
Then you'll wish there was a bnetd. Then you'll say "Why did nobody stand up for this when we had a chance?"
Quite correct. If Blizzard is really pro-hobbyist / anti-piracy, their first step should have been to publish the interface to their validation servers and invite bnetd (and any other interested parties) to use it.
Two problems with that. First, they're clearly just asswipes for their own laywers: "Blizzard products are intellectual property, and we are well within our legal rights to protect our products from software piracy" [translation: "You know that EULA you clicked through? Go and read it. You don't own a 'game', you own a 'license', the first clause of which is that we can change or revoke it at any time. How funny is that, butt monkey?" ]
Second, they're possibly concerned that if they make it too easy, then J. Random Hacker could zombie some Windows boxen and start firing random serial numbers at the validation servers in an attempt to find valid keys. I doubt that's really an issue though: a simple or exponential timeout on servicing requests from a given source IP would handle that. Plus, enough packet sniffing would allow a determined hacker to do it anyway, regardless of how obfuscated they try and make it.
OK, I have some sympathy for Blizzard. But anyone who's seen the erratic and tardy responses from Blizzard to the prolific duping and cheating on Bnet will know why there's very little reason to cut them slack on this issue, or to accept that they have gamers' interests at heart. It's about money, and it's about control, and nothing else. Perhaps you think that's enough of an excuse. Or perhaps not.
...when will advertisers start producing content in HD and/or widescreen format, and start insisting on HD/widescreen distribution in their contracts and payment plans?
That's more of a problem with the existing mod system. Mod points go to the arithmetic median users, the "once every second day" brigade. Those who actually read and contribute the most to Slashdot don't generally get to moderate.
It's annoying, but at least it's consistent, right? Except of course it isn't, as editors have unlimited mod points, based on the observation that they contribute the most. So it's daft and hypocritical in equal measure.
I'm guessing that this is the intention. After all, these are people who really have nothing to lose. It's hard to argue that they should sit tight and shut up just to protect the PayPal customers that haven't been scammed yet. PayPal is clearly acting as a bank, and they should have been bitchslapped a long time ago. It's surprising that it's taken so long, really.
Yuh, I had $900 debited out of my account to credit a bunch of cell phones. The thieves used my debit card (not credit card) number to take it straight out of my main account. I got chatting to the CSO that sorted it for me (I used to work there) and she explained that this was pretty common now, and after some initial griping about customers using card online and leaving receipts lying around (nope and nope for me) they'd just acknowledged that these numbers were either coming from legitimate merchants (with or without their knowlege) or were just randomly generated, and were crediting them straight back and doing chargebacks, or (more and more) kicking it to their legal department.
The basic trouble with the whole banking system is that it's entirely based on trust. Once you get into it as a trusted peer, you can initiate any transactions you like, for pretty much any values you like, and there's not a damn thing anyone will do to stop you until well after the fact. When I used to work in banking, we make a cursory effort to look at the paper checks over $1500 dollars when they came back to the branch, but we never caught anything that way, while at the same time, we'd regularly see fraudulent e-transactions for tens of thousands of dollars get presented, and we had both local and federal law enforcement drop by more than once trying to catch a couple of individuals who'd been drawing their ill gotten gains from our branch - and we were a small, sleepy suburban branch.
The level of fraud was high but manageable before every vendor and their dog got into the system. It seems like it's starting to get out of hand now, and there are apparently no plans to deal with it, other than punishing basically honest vendors in high risk areas (e.g. porn sites) by charging them more per transaction. Sooner or later, we're all going to get stung; it's just a question of how much, and how quickly you can convince your bank of your innocence. :-(
It's lukewarm. Didn't you read the article?
Seriously though, we're never going to power a warp drive with that. And let's face it, that's what we really care about, right? So we can all become starship engineers, get neat uniforms, and boldy go and score with hot alien chicks.
For those interested, in the UK, viewing figures are collated by the Broadcaster' Audience Research Board. The system monitors minute by minute (catching commercial hopping), and it also fingerprints VCR recordings, and identifies them when they are played back. BARB figures are collated nightly, are available the very next day, and BARB also takes great care to ensure that their sample viewers are demographically representative.
The trouble is, new technology is a real pain for them. The UK has been slow to jump on the channel-explosion bandwagon, but we're there with a vengeance now. Viewing figures are currenty in a real mess, partly because BARB was stonewalled on getting access to some set top boxes. In fact, it's an open secret that their figures for digital TV have been pretty much a big old guesstimate for the past couple of years.
Nobody likes that. BARB doesn't like it, because their subscribers wonder why they're paying for the data. The networks don't like it, because advertisers assume that bad data means viewing figures are being overestimated (which appears to be true as the new BARB system comes on line). Advertisers don't like it, because they don't know how many eyeballs they're getting (and remember, they've been getting minute-by-minute, they do know when we're channel hopping).
And now here comes digital VCR's and looking forward, DVD recorders. BARB can currently fingerprint VCR recordings, but that's a no brainer using a simple in-line analogue device, like a non-invasive Macromedia. But digital, phew, that's a whole new ballgame. Who knows how Replays and TIVO's (and other digital tech) filters or compress information. Even if you can insert the watermark, it might be stripped or mangled on replay. It might give you garbage, or it might give you the wrong show. And if your sample viewer decides to plug in a PC with TV capture/out cards, god knows what data you're going to get.
I wonder if the big issue that networks (et al) have with digital VCR's is simply that they don't know what a very small number of people are watching on them. The BARB sample size is something like 0.025% of the UK population. It's possible that they don't really give a rat's arse about what the other 99.975% of us are watching or doing with them, just that they're screwing the figures for the sample group. After all, that's really all that matters to them, materially.
The concern might not be about what we're doing with new technology, merely that it exists, and they can't keep up with it.
You use a laser or maser to create an ionised path to the target. Apparently. ;-)
Or a pack of teddy bears armed with rope and tree trunks. Apparently. ;-)
How about asking them to volunteer information, then not assuming that they are liars?
Everyone except you? I only picked this up in metamoderation, I already block Katz articles. I have no idea what this article is about, in fact, I'm just responding to your (unfairly downmodded) comment. Filter him our, it'll do wonders for your blood pressure, and you find you won't even miss ranting about him after a few days.
...yet. The important difference is that it's a Microsoft player on a Microsoft OS that's registered to you and identifies you uniquely (by default) to Microsoft when you make the queries. Note that Microsoft's answer to "Will you use this information" isn't "We can't", but rather "We're not planning to, but we won't rule it out".
Better questions to ask them would be:
This story raised a lot more questions than it answers.
We've been over this before, with cotton moths. It's a very cynical perpertual income scam, and the farcical nature of it can be summed up as: "Breed them into extinction".
To have an appreciable effect on fly numbers in the next generation, you have to pretty much double the number of flies in this generation, ensuring that half of them are sterile.
So first you've got to breed up your lab flies from fertile flies. Then you've got to keep back a proportion of them to use to breed up more lab flies. Then you nuke your flies to sterilise them, hopefully successfully, and hopefully without creating too many SuperFlies.
You release them into the wild, blithely ignoring the impossiblity of achieving a uniform distribution. Congratulations, you've just doubled the number of flies in the wild!
But it's all worth it, because in the next generation you only get 50% as many flies, right?
Wrong. Flies breed like, well, flies. The check on their numbers isn't the number of fertile breeding pairs, but the number of predators and (mostly) the available resources for them to feed on.
So while you perhaps see a small drop, you still have an assload of flies out there, and you've got one generation to address it. No problem, you just need to breed up even more flies in the lab, and do it again. And again. And again. And each time, you charge a fat fee for doing it. And you'll never wipe them out, or even have an appreciable effect on their numbers, because you'll always have fertile flies out there, breeding like crazy and spreading back into any local pockets that you've actually managed to have an impact on. And you always have to keep breeding your own flies in the lab (all this is just great for the overall fly population, you might notice) and then releasing them into the wild, where they're just as big a problem during their lifetime as wild flies. Even assuming that you could wipe out the wild flies, if you then released another million nuked flies "just to be sure", it's odds on that a fertile pair would slip through and start the whole problem all over again. Pop quiz: would this be a bad thing or a good thing for the fly sellers?
I'm not suggesting that this method is worse than using pesticides, just that it's equally as token and futile. The intentions are noble: these little bastards are a disease vector, and can literally eat cattle alive. But this "solution" is really just another way for high tech companies to obtain a perpetual revenue stream from the third world by offering a magic wand to deal with a very real, but very endemic problem. The real problem is that the flies will expand to match the available resources, and we just keep giving them more resources to nibble on.
It'll probably be a real cheap solution at first though. Remember, the first one is always free.
Funnily enough, I've always been inclined to believe that that "naked gifts" of the roofied cheerleader variety played a big part in the corporate-government relationship.
It's phrased to be funny, but it's actually nauseating. Our "democratic processes" (US and EU) allow us to choose between one corrupt politician, another corrupt politician, or (if we're lucky) some honest people that never get chosen because we feel that we have to vote tactically to keep out whoever we view as the most corrupt of the two main candidates. And not voting is painted as being undemocratic (or it's illegal, as in Australia).
Thanks all the same, but I'll vote when I have a single transferable vote, 100% proportional representation, or a "none of the above" option. Voting for the lesser of two evils is not an option that I'm prepared to accept.
The patent protects what it does. The copyright protects how it does it. You don't have to disclose the source to get the patent, merely describe what it's supposed to do.
You could, for example, patent a self healing filesystem. Not just a journalling system or a RAID cluster, I'm thinking of a generic system that makes background backups of commonly used areas, looks for bad areas, and repairs them with a best guess of what data should be in them, all without interaction. That's probably new enough to count. I don't know how I'd do it, but if I decribe what I'd want it to do in enough detail, and pay my 10,000 euros, then I get a mortal lock on any poor bastard who does implement this and tries to sell it (or even give it away!) in Europe in the next 20 years.
You put a genuine smile on my face. Thanks for the perspective. ;-)
Here's some cultural sharing. Over half of the laws that effect any given citizen of an European Union nation are European Union laws. We - de facto - already have a United States of Europe. Despite this, the European Parliament receives almost no coverage in the mainstream British press. Instead, we remain firmly focussed on internal petty political struggles.
We ocassionally get a shlock piece on corruption in Europe, but invariable focussing on the role that the Italians/French/Spanish/Germans/insert other country played. Good old fashioned xenophobia at its best, in both senses. We ignore the fact that we're ruled by Europe, and when we can't ignore it, we blame any problems on The Other Guy.
Is this analogous to the US? I know there's still a degree of state pride and independence, but it's very extreme in Britain. I, and almost everyone I know, consider myself Scottish (/Welsh/English), then British, then European, in that order. I imagine that's much like considering yourself a Texan first, then a Southerner, then a citizen of the USA, even though all the really important decisions that effect you (like spending a zillion dollars on an aggressive defence policy) are made at the Federal level.
There's a specific exemption in the DMCA for transient memory copies necessary to produce functionality. It's not pertinent to the case in hand, I just thought I'd mention it.
Unfortunately, in this case Nintendo are just following the law as written (apart from trying to sieze the goods). They actually have a duty to their shareholders to do this. The problem is with the dumb law and the corrupt politicians that passed it, not the predatory people using it to their advantage, or the businesses who bought those politicians.
Let's stay focussed on the issue, which is to tell (not ask, tell) our elected representatives to repeal the law. The courts are a gamble, the predactory companies are a certainty. Fix the cause, not the symptoms.
Customs officers have a shitty job. They are overworked, underpaid, and they know that any obvious contraband they do stop is only the tip of the iceberg. Luckily for them, they have the authority to cavity search Jesus Christ Himself if they feel like it, and the - de facto - power to seize anything they like and hold it to ransom. This seizure is extra-legal and extra-consitutional, but luckily they live in a gray zone outside of the normal bounds of time and space. Er, law, I mean. Specifically, the goods aren't in the country until they pass customs, so the our feeble human laws do not yet apply to them.
I dunno, how much of it (the DMCA) did they pay for?
Seriously, it's a good question. The DMCA bans import of contravening devices, but that's post facto now, and beyond the (spurious) jurisdiction of the demigods at customs. It also bans the sale or trafficking in the devices. But it doesn't provide a mechanism for seizing them. The current owner can keep them, and curiously enough, can even use them. He just can't give them to anyone else, nor tell anyone how to make one or where to get one. But that's for a court to decide now, not customs, and not Nintendo.
Sigh, time to dig out the addresses of my elected representatives again. Anyone else get the feeling that SSSCA was just a smokescreen to protect the DMCA? Like it turned the debate into "how much further should we go?" when it should be "have we gone too far already?".
D'oh. I've just deleted one! I don't get a lot from Roadrunner any more, maybe on e a month, but the response is always the same: "It's not from us"
The most recent one got bounced with the "It's not us" lie, even though the entry point was "smtp-something.something.rr.com". The originating IP was unroutable, so it might even be an open relay, I wasn't really in a mood to check. It wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that because the originating IP (but not the first accepting smtp server) was outside the rr netblock, they didn't care. But that's exactly the sort of "Not our problem" crap that leads to open relays going uncaught.
Fair point. CmdrTaco trolled me into responding in too narrow a fashion. ;-)
That is going to be precedent setting. Given that most IM clients have a one-click logging feature, it could go either way.
I expect the lesson to potential training-bra fetishists will be to get your cyber-partner to make a clear statement that they are not recording the conversation.
Um, OK, but email is de facto recorded. It's (quite literally) practically impossible to remove all recordings of an email that you personally have received. That would be like requiring all recipients of snail mail to shred it unless they have explicit consent to retain it.
You've got a good point, but I do believe that the court will use the "reasonable expectation" test about the emails. The IM's are another issue. They might lose some sleep over that one.
You're missing the point. When you send a message - particularly an email - you have to expect that the intended recipient will have a copy of it.
Spot the guy who didn't even bother reading the story. If you bother to read it, you'll find that the email was submitted as evidence by the intended recipient, a 15 year old girl, and the IM's by the intended recipient, a law enforcement agent posing as a minor. At no time did law enforcement make a 3rd party interception or recording. The guy sent the messages. The intended recipients got them. The intended recipient submitted them as evidence. No wiretap. No interception. Go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200.
Moderators, you might also want to read the story before applying your mod points. This is an important and emotive issue; let's be sure we have the facts before getting all riled up and picking the wrong side.
It's a good point, but it reads as being most likely that they were obtained by the entrapping agent, after the victim's emails were handed over.
In either case, the messages were submitted to law enforcement and then as evidence after reaching the intended recipient. No third party tap took place. As you say, this isn't a wiretap issue. It's arguable that you might have a reasonable expectation that an IM (but not an email) would not be recorded. Given that most IM clients have one click session logging though, it's rather stretching the argument. If the guy asked if the "girl" was logging it, and the agent lied, then he's got a good chance, but I doubt very much if he did.
It'll be interesting to see what the court makes of the IM's, but email simply has to be viewed as persistent. The recipient gets a persistent copy, you know they do, and you really can't have a beef about it being submitted as evidence. Hopefully the conviction can stand just on the email evidence, regardless of how they rule on the IM.
Duh? In what way? To me this looks pretty clear cut: this evidence - in this case - was 100% admissible, because it's not a wiretap. And here's why.
When making a phone call, you have a reasonable expectation that it is not being recorded. That's why law enforcement needs a wiretap order.
When sending a snail mail letter, you do not have a reasonable expectation that there will be no record of it after it has been received, nor that the recipient will not give it to law enforcement of their own free will, after they have received it. You have a reasonable expectation that it will not be intercepted in transit, but once it reaches the recipient to which you sent it, it's in their possession, you know it's in their possession, and it's fair game.
Pop quiz: do emails that you receive:
Given that you've ever received an email and know the correct answer to this, do you have a reasonable expectation that an email that you have sent will not be used by the recipient as evidence?
Perhaps Slashdot editors could consider taking a minute to read the article before kneejerking a commentary. I know it's a common lament, but this case is open and shut. The guy sent emails soliciting sex from a minor. The emails that he sent were given by the intended recipient to law enforcement after they were received. There was no wiretap. Perhaps the sender really was dumb enough to expect that there would be no record of his emails after they were received , but that was an unreasonable expectation, given that he was clued enough to send an email.
It's an interesting case, but it's really not about wiretapping or privacy or the evil feds. It's about a child abuser who was really dumb and got caught. The fact that it involves emails is neither here nor there - he might as well have been sending snail mail letters.
Are we all quite clear on that now? Please, please, please, read the news story before responding.