The first amendment protections have been extended to every level of government, including state level. Furthermore, courts have clearly ruled that students in school still have civil rights, including protections from unreasonable search and seizure and protection of free speech. This is unsurprising, since, generally speaking, children are legally required to attend school and those schools are funded and run by the government.
A better reason to block Wikipedia would be that page vandals can possibly upload porn and articles vandalized frequently have obscene or maliciously incorrect text inserted, which the school might feel needs to be blocked;
Thank God, Wikipedia is the only place someone might upload porn or obscene text. Now that it's block, the students are free browse the rest of the perfectly safe web.
this problem is simply solved. create images with the subjects to be recognized in the center. now use image processing utilities to cut a semirandom rectangle out of the image (producing images of varying sizes) and to apply some effects to the image which will change all values in the image significantly without making it unrecognizable.
As I said, it's not good enough. Detecting a subset of an image such a well understood problem that a $20 optical mouse does it 30 or so times per second. Ultimately you have to keep the focus of the image present, and eventually the spammer will identify that focus, making further comparison even easier.
As for mutilating the picture to make it harder to identify, it doesn't buy you much. Researchers have been working on identifying "similar" images for a long time. There are lots of reasons why people want the technology. A disorganized digital photographer might use it to find all images he's made from a given source; I've used such functionality myself. Companies doing copyright infringement crawls across the web face much the same problem. Detecting an "image" from a database that may be at a different angle, colored funny, and slightly modified is exactly the problem being tackled by security companies trying to do facial recognition of crowds. Yes, the technology sucks now, but remember that 50% success rate is plenty for a spammer, and the technology is going to only get better.
If we're looking for the next CAPTCHA, we need to look to areas that computer scientists are still baffled by. Generalized computer vision is a good idea, but an attacker can replace it with a much easier problem: image comparison. You want to avoid areas in which there has been years of productive research. This is just such an area.
One possible improvement that leaps to mind is procedurally generated images; that is, rendering "3D" images from models, with random (but constrained) angled, backgrounds, positions, colors, lighting, and poses. This way your image set can be extremely large. Unfortunately this means you'll still need a large number of models to have enough variation and ensure that someone doesn't find a simplified attack against the Human_Male_Tall model which is 1/20th of source set. Similarly, you need to be careful with all of the possible variations as you can easily generate images that a human cannot distinguish. The more you constrain your randomization, the more likely that an attacker can find a simplified attack.
If they really wanted good captchas, they need to start using problems that are very easy for humans to solve, but very hard for computers to solve. For example, picking the one photo of a puppy out of a matrix of photos of full-grown dogs.
Image identification raises it's own set of problems. If you're working with photos, what is your source of photos? You're going to need a lot, if you've only got a thousand or so images, spammers will scrape them from your site and flag them by hand (possibly outsourcing the work, say through Amazon's Mechanical Turk). If you use a shared resource so you get get mind boggling numbers of photographs ("Bob's Puppy Captcha Service") you just create more incentive for attackers to index all of the service's images. (Yes, the service will try to make it hard, but armed with a botnet you can make large numbers of requests every day by visiting actual sites using the authentication system.) You won't want to go with free, publicly available images (say, pulling from Flickr's Creative Commons licensed images, since an attacker can easily scrape those images and pull the tags and description to automatically generate identification information. The only practical way to limit access to the database is to charge for it with a price high enough to discourage spammers, suddenly making the proposal fairly expensive.
Once you've got your system, you have to assume spammers are building up counter-databases that identify images they've seen before. You could try to fight back with simple distortions of the image to make them harder for a computer to identify, but you can't do much without making it hard for humans. And while having a computer identify objects in photographs is hard, having a computer identify highly similar images is pretty easy.
Ultimately a spammer or similar attacker interested in defeating Captchas doesn't need a 100% success rate. 50% is probably plenty; they're typically going for volume. Assuming a typical "three tries before we block your IP for a while or the exponential back off gets too long" system you can get a 50% success rate on those three attempts if you have a mere 21% success rate on each attempt. If the attacker wants a 90% success rate over those three tries, you only need a 55% success rate on each attempt.
Mike Elgan, the article's author brushes off the problem of an airborne cell phone seeing a large number of cell towers at once. He claims it could be easy to fix with a software upgrade to the towers. Nonsense. The fundamental problem is that there is only a finite range of frequencies for cell phone calls. The more towers a given phone's signal is visible to, the more towers whose frequencies you're chewing up. Redesigning the system to support cell calls would be massively expensive. Is the value of being able to make cell calls from a plane really that valuable? Who is going to pay for the overhaul? Elgan is just whining.
Elgan points out that Europe is working on making this work. Tellingly, they're not just letting the phones connect to towers normally; they're shielding the cabin and routing connections through dedicated on-plane hardware. This is reasonable as it means you have a single source (the plane's hardware) that can far more efficiently utilize tower frequency space. Furthermore, the cost of making the changes falls on the airlines, who will pass it on to the logical people: the fliers who want to use this service.
Well, if this strategy weren't the most successful, then the long-term-thinking companies would win out in the end, no? Capitalism won't allow an inefficient system to survive in a competitive marketplace.
In the long run, yes. But in the short run huge corporations crash and burn, glutting the market with unemployed. In the long run they'll usually get new jobs, but in the meanwhile some people will run into problems like a medical emergency, drown in bills, lose their house, and be forced to declare bankruptcy. People who relied on a pension from their business will find what they were promised reduced or eliminated. Shareholders who had been mislead have part of their portfolio reduced to nothing. In the short run a business can boost profits by turning as many costs into externalities as possible: polluting, overfishing, and the like.
Meanwhile, the CEOs, presidents, and other upper management made lots of money in direct salary, bonuses for raising the stock price in the short term, and profit some selling their own stock while it was artificially boosted. And since they made out just fine, there is incentive for others to follow in their footsteps, making short-sighted decisions for short term gain that doom other companies in the long run.
For those companies that do have long term thinking, they're penalized by the stock market and other potential investors because they don't look as successful in the short term. If a potential investor waits to see a company's long term work, it could easily be thirty years later and the entire management team has changed, so it's still not a reliable indicator. (The fall of once reliable Hewlett-Packard comes to mine.)
The invisible hand isn't full of magical pixie dust that just makes everything work. Primarily because participants in capitalism have deeply imperfect information, there are large windows of opportunity for abuse. In the long run capitalism tends to sort things out; but in the meanwhile new abusers have arisen and created new problems.
Capitalism sucks. But like a cockroach you can't eliminate it. And no matter how much it sucks, the other options suck more.
Oh, how generous of board game manufacturers to deign to give us shorter games.
This is all nonsense. If you've got a good game store in your neighborhood, you can walk in and say, "I'm looking for a game that takes less than 30 minutes to play." If they can't show you at least a dozen games, you probably don't have a good game store.
If you want shorter games, look for games specifically designed to be short and quick. Hacking an existing game to be shorter is neat and all, but you'll get a better experience if the game was designed to be short from the start.
You know Nintendo is going to come out with new colors of Wii with extra features like DVD playback in a year or so.
Yes, because I've often thought that getting a DVD movie player was much too difficult and expensive.
Lack of DVD movie support was a good idea. At $30
everyone who wants a DVD player has one and has probably had it fom some time. It saved Nintendo a little money in licensing fees per machine. As an added bonus they don't need to worry about the complexity of adding Macrovision or other DRM complications to their hardware.
Analysts predict that some other publishers will need to clear 1 million units to get in the black--and start making about $1 per game sold.
The remaining $59 per game goes into many hands. The biggest portion--nearly 45%--goes toward simply programming and designing the game itself.
Aaah, no. This is terrible, terrible math. The article is claiming that for copies 0 through 1,000,000, the publisher makes nothing. Then for copies 1,000,001 and beyond, the publisher is only making a dollar per copy. Utter nonsense.
Why would be publisher not be profiting for the first million? Obviously because they're recovering their initial investment. The investment into programming, design, art, and the like. So once that millionth copy is shipped, you don't get to count it as an expense any more.
The attached graphic indicates that art/design is running about $15 per copy, and programming is running about $12. From this we can conclude: For copies 1 through 1,000,000, the publisher is making zero profit. For copy 1,000,001 and beyond, the publisher has recovered the art, design, and programming costs. Add in their $1 pre-planned profit (also in the graphic), and now they're making $28 per copy. A significant difference from the articles insanely wrong claim of $1 per copy.
If YouTube goes down, so does your favorite blogging service provider, be it LiveJournal, Blogger, or even MySpace. Down go the free web hosts like Google Page Creator and Geocities. Down goes the forums, even Slashdot. In all those cases random users can upload copyrighted works in at least text form. Copyrighted works are frequently reproduced without permission or under fair use on those sites.
The key element here is section 512 of the DMCA which was written specifically to protect online service providers in these cases. Congress correctly recognized that the criminal is the user illegally reproducing the work, not the company whose site hosts it without realizing the crime. Without this protection service providers would be crippled by the need to somehow try to filter incoming posts. Even assuming you could write automated tools to do the job, you're asking service providers to dedicate software developers and hardware to acting as police.
Clearly YouTube is a valid resource, used to legal and positive effect every day. The same goes for the free web hosting, the blogs, and Slashdot.
So, for those people who want YouTube to go down, what could YouTube have done to avoid the liability you feel they deserve. A few guidelines for your brilliant plans: No solutions that require registering a "real" identity; American democracy is founded on anonymous speech. No solutions that occasionally accidentally censor legit free speech.. No points for solutions that cost YouTube significant money (be it spent on employees, sofware, hardware, or other things); why should YouTube pay for law enforcement? Finally, be sure your solution will apply equally well to your favorite blogging service, your favorite web site host, and Slashdot.
You will need to spend a good 5 hours of your time just to make sure the components you buy are all compatible. At $200 the hour this is $1000 of my time (without including the cost of the hardware and config).
If you're making $200 an hour, I suggest outsourcing setting up your MythTV box to a college student for $40 an hour. Indeed, if you do go with a Tivo, I'd suggest getting a high school student to buy it and plug it in for you (at about $10 an hour) because your time is much too valuable to waste going to a store.
Therefore, the absolute cheapest you could purchase a TiVo Series 3 with 3 year service is $949.99 or as much as $1519.63.
Conversely I spent about $900 on all new parts for my Myth box. Service is free. I blew about 16 hours* total researching and setting it up. At a far more reasonable hourly rate of $50 an hour, it cost me about $800 of my time. It's been working for a year and a half now without problem. I have no reason to expect it to not last another year and a half. So $1,700 for three years of "service." More expensive than a TiVo, yes, but hardly outrageous. I think it's a reasonable premium for being able to burn to DVD without restriction, to be able to watch arbitrary videos from the internet or friends, to be able to watch DVDs on it (I'd been using a PS2, but it recently started refusing to play region coded DVDs, so this has been a useful free bonus), and generally not be locked into a single provider.
I've actually got both. I prefer my Tivo for straightforward recording and watching. But MythTV is a reasonable alternative and the price difference isn't overwhelming.
All of my rambling was to a few simple points. I'm going to try once more to make them clear:
1. Copyright infringement is wrong. It hurts individuals specifically and society as a whole. (Despite your claims, I have not argued otherwise. You're seeing attackers where they don't exist.)
2. Copyright infringement is different from theft (or rape, since you made the comparison). It has different victims, different levels of damage, and different prevention measures.
3. Since these three crimes are different, they should be considered separately. They should and do have different laws, enforcement, and punishment.
4. Given #3, confusing copyright infringement, theft, and rape is bad for the public debate.
I would like to respond to one specific point:
The only muddying is coming from folks that want to distinguish two separate items into a group of tangible vs. intangible because the general public is still trapped into blue collar lifestyles and thus incapable of understanding the second.
Are you seriously suggesting that your average person is too stupid to have an informed debate on the matter, and that as a result you're forced to engage in equivocation to fool them into agreeing with your conclusions? If so, that's exactly the sort of dishonesty and arrogance I abhor. Tricking people into supporting your cause has no place in a functioning democracy. Be honest with your fellow citizens. Trust them to be smart enough to understand the issue and dedicate yourself to educating them so they will agree with you for the correct reasons.
The game was pirated far more than any other game before its time, there were torrents *everywhere*, and *everyone* had a copy. Anticipation was high, and when a warez group let slip the ISO *days* before the retail date, sales were instantly decimated.
I'm curious where your information comes from. Doom 3 lost 10% of its sales because of the early illegal release? How can you know what the number would have been without that release? It was pirated more than any other game previously? I wasn't aware that NPD was tracking those numbers. "Everyone" had a copy? Hyperbole just makes you look like you lack real evidence.
Ultimately you're guessing. You have no more evidence that piracy caused fewer sales than expected than the grandparent post claiming that the game just sucked.
So, by this token, its alright to shoplift something out of a store for personal consumption, but dammit! don't lump me in with the guy that hijacks a truck full of cigarettes to sell back in Joisey.
The grandparent poster didn't say it is was all right, they said that there is a difference. Which there is. A gas station would rather you shoplifted a single pack of cigarettes instead of hijacking their next shipment of cigarettes. Both are still wrong, but they warrant entirely different responses.
Of course, it's a sillier comparison because you're comparing traditional theft (which deprives the legal owner of a scarce commodity) with copyright infringement (which reduces the artificial scarcity copyright creates). They're different problems with different economics to consider. Indeed...
Ignoring the idiots that are going to naturally tell me that even though I've lost a sale to someone that now has no need except for 'good will' to actually purchase my product, that piracy and theft are not the same. I'll never be able to explain to them how it is, and they will never have a rational explanation for why it isn't (yet some teen will try to explain).
I haven't been a teen for a bit over a decade now, but I'll try to explain anyway.
Theft of property and copyright infringement are different crimes. They have different victims and different economic effects. If a thief breaks in Best Buy and steals a $50 (retail price) Sony TV, Best Buy suffers because they no longer has a TV. Best Buy has lost $40 (or whatever wholesale is). Sony has lost nothing. If the thief breaks into my house and steals my TV, neither Best Buy nor Sony have lost anything, but I've lost $50.
Conversely, (for the sake of argument) if an infringer breaks into Best Buy and makes an infringing copy of a $50 (retail price) game, Best Buy still has the original. The value of that original is slightly reduced because the artificial scarcity has dropped. This is potentially a "lost sale." This lost revenue from potential sale impacts both Sony and Best Buy. How much? Definitely not $50. The reality is that some portion of copyright infringers, if infringement was not an option, would not purchase the game. It's hard guess what the percentage is, but let's guess only 10%. Now on average over multiple illegal copies, Sony has lost $36 (90% of the $40 they'd expect) and Best Buy $9. Total loss to "the world": $45.
By any stretch of the imagination, clearly individual copyright infringement cases are slightly less harmful than individual cases of theft. The total economic loss for the above hypothetical example is $45 to $50. Both are bad, but given the choice I'd prefer losing $45 to $50. The situation because even more clear if you believe the "can't or won't pay for it" percentage is higher, or if the thefts involve damage to other property (breaking a window to get in).
The situation gets even weirder when I buy the game. So when I bought my $50 Sony TV, I also bought this $50 game. Our hypothetical and slightly insane thief breaks in, steals my TV and makes a copy of the game. I'm out $50 for the TV, but for the game I've lost... nothing. Perhaps a very small amount of value from potential resale value on the game, but nothing significant. Despite the thief having broken into my house the real economic damage is done to Best Buy and Sony. That's a heck of a trick, to have a thief break into my house, "steal" my copy of the game, but have third parties suffer financially.
This is not to suggest that copyright infringement is "okay." Indeed, copyright infringement has a definite detrimental impact on society. But it's a different impact from theft. The steps to defend against these crimes are different.
Trace Memory & Hotel Dusk not for adventure ga
on
Hotel Dusk Review
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· Score: 1
If you're looking for a more traditional adventure game (in the style of the classic Sierra games like King's Quest or the Lucasarts games like the Secret of Monkey Island) you'll probably be disappointed by Trace Memory. It's highly linear, with typically only one or two puzzles open at a time. What puzzles you're presented with are typically very obvious. There are a few "head scratchers," but more of the "but that doesn't make any sense" than actual interesting problems to solve in world. Your inventory and the amount of accessable work is limited. A few that "really take advantage" of the DS are more stunts than actual interesting puzzles. The DS's microphone is used for an exciting "blowing" puzzle where you just blow at the DS to blow some dust off. Truly exciting, I need to blow. Another puzzle requires that you mostly close the DS to see a reflection between the two screens. It might have been an interesting idea, but on my DS, to see the effect I had to hold the screen right near the point where the DS enters sleep mode. The world of Trace Memory is the sort of strange place where people leave memory cards of important data scattered all over. This is also the sort of world with unnecessarily complex secret doors that feel more like puzzles than real problems to be surmounted. Trying to be clever, the electronic device that the main character has looks just like a DS. However, it's a first generation DS, so the game already looks dated. Text scrolls by with a very, very annoying bubbling sound per letter. You can push a button to speed it up, but you need to push the button for every. single. line. If you've already seen a dialogue, possibly because you've played before, or because you accidentally selected a choice a second time, there is no way to skip the entire dialogue. Cut scenes can't be skipped or sped up. I got the bad ending, and I'd like to try again to get the good ending, but I don't have the patience to wait, and wait, and wait through it all. Trying to be clever, you can't pick up objects that the character in game doesn't think she needs. This is deeply frustrating when you've already figured out the solution to a puzzle and want to collect the requirements, but the game demands you waste your time convincing the protagonist to do so. This leads to a fair amount of wasted backtracking. The game has dialogue trees, but for the vast majority of the game your best choice is to try every option presented, making your choice meaningless. In interface is sloppy, as you closely inspect objects the game bounces the focused area between the top and bottom screen.
All in all, I found Trace Memory very disappointing.
Looking at Hotel Dusk, it looks like there are a lot of improvements. I've heard it still has stupid flaws like non-skippable dialogue and objects you can pick up until the character knows why he wants them. But the real killer is that everyone who likes it talks about what a great story it has, about how great it is to read. What I'm not hearing is, "there are all sorts of interesting problems you need to solve." I'm getting a distinct impression that like Trace Memory the player is almost unnecessary. It might a great visual novel, and there may be people who love that sort of game, but I'm getting the sense that it's not a very good adventure game.
Thats why most games don't embrace it- because most gamers (not all, but most) don't want it.
Which is, of course, why The Sims, the ultimate sandbox game, has been a catastrophic financial failure. I have no idea why they keep releasing more expansions into that money pit.
I pity the companies that invested in games with strong sandbox components like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivian, and Simcity. Those poor fools are just throwing good money after bad.
Yes, detectives. Note that he's talking about "police," not "security guards." Large enough campuses can benefit from having a focused police force. These aren't thugs in the employ of the university, these are just a real police just like the city-wide force, they just have a more specialized focus. They have the same powers and restrictions. As such it's only logical that they would have detectives, just like the city-wide force. By being specialized they can focus on the more specialized problems of a campus, including the complications of having a large population that moves in and out each year, frequently rotating. They've existed at a number of universities for decades. There is no evil conspiracy here.
Apple probably instead refuses to invest the programming hours to come up with a solution that flags whether encryption is required or not,
So you're arguing that Apple is too lazy to put in hard work to make the end user experience superior? I find that hard to believe of the company that it trying to reinvent the voice mail experience, that wrote a full PowerPC emulator so they could switch processors, that built a new operating system from the ground up.
What I do think they care about is consistency of user experience.
Damn straight! They should finish the job and give a completely consistant experience. Right now I've got on my perfectly average iPod* 22 DRMed songs and 978 non-DRMed ones. When I manage that collection iTunes I can burn unlimited copies of 978 of them, but not 22 of them. This is much too confusing! Fortunately this is easy to fix. If you import MP3 into iTunes it should transcode them to AAC with DRM. And if you rip your own CD using iTunes, it should apply the DRM as well. I'm tied of all this inconsistency in my collection; I demand that Apple make all of my music less useful so I don't have to worry my little head about it.
First some manipulation of statistics to tell a lie: Jobs claimed that just 3% of music on the average iPod came from iTMS, and since 3% is so small, clearly there is no lock in. Flaw one: his estimate requires that every iPod sold is still in use; it ignores ones that were broken or died. Flaw two: his estimate requires that every iPod sold hold about 1,000, which is obvious nonsense. Flaw three: no one has an "average" iPod. No one has an average iPod. I expect there are a large number of iPods with zero DRMed music on it, and a fair number with lots. Those people who are Apple's best iTMS customers are locked in. I know people with several hundred dollars of Apple-DRMed music. To suggest that they're not locked in is nonsense at best and a lie at worst.
As for his claim that he'd love a DRM-free world? While the majority of music sold from iTMS must have DRM for contractual reasons, not all of it does. There are songs in iTMS sold from other sites that don't have DRM. iTMS could easily have no DRM. It would add zero complexity for end users (simply don't advertise the functionality, just bury it in the details of the track for the subset of users who care). Doing so would create real value for users who cared. But Apple doesn't do this.
That anyone would take this seriously suggests that the famed reality-distortion-field is so powerful it can extend through a simple text web page.
Sure, Zelda, Deus Ex, and RPGs like Oblivion provide many of the same pleasures of a good adventure game. I like all of them. But you know what's meant by "adventure games" in this case. There is a strong emphasis on puzzles and a traditionally paced plot. These games are typically more slow paced with a strong focus on thinking. They have little to no emphasis on action, combat, or character skills and attributes. These are games like Zork, King's Quest, the Secret of Monkey Island, Myst, or Hotel Dusk.
Suggesting that Zelda, Deus Ex, or Oblivion are somehow replacements is as unhelpful. You might as well suggest that Oblivion is a first-person-shooter since you can shoot arrows or spells at people, or the Rainbow Six series of games is interchangable with real-time strategy games like Warcraft, since in both games your success relies on your ability to give AI controlled units commands. Sure, you can make reasonable definitions that blur those lines, but those lines are useful as they distinguish very different styles of play that different people like.
To anyone - ANYONE! - in this thread who thinks Viacom should be sued, answer me this - What damages is Irrlicht suing for?
So non-commercial speech doesn't get protection?
Free speech is free speech, it doesn't matter if it's commercial, political, or as in this case, educational. The silencing of any legal free speech because of a simple, obviously erroneous letter should be offensive to anyone who treasures the values the US is founded on.
It takes about ten minutes to kick off an email in response.
And then you wait 10 days before it goes back online, per DMCA requirements. Viacom gets to use a sloppy program and silence legal speech almost immediately with no opportunity for the owner to object. To get it put back, the owner has to wait 10 days to give Viacom a chance to object. Hardly fair. (And, of course, other Google properties have a "physical mail only" policy, which further delays one's ability to have legal speech restored.)
The DMCA safe harbor provisions are a good idea, but the current implementation is flawed. There is no practical penalty for maliciously misusing the DMCA to temporarily silence legal speech during key windows of time, and there is no practical penalty for being really sloppy and blocking legal speech. Free speech is so critical that people who abuse the DMCA intentionally, or by being deeply negligant deserve punishment. It turns my stomach to know that some people care so little for this vital freedom.
Restraint of trade is probably the wrong charge, but Viacom's actions are so reprehensible that they deserve punishment. The only realistic way to punish Viacom is through a lawsuit.
6. Include the following statement: "A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
This isn't a random rule YouTube/Google made up, it's part of the DMCA.
(Link to the relevant section of the DMCA will probably break soon, stupid Library of Congress. Start here, click "[H.R.2281.ENR]", then click "Sec. 512" in "TITLE II".)
Halo? A highly repetitive game that features midget aliens that ran around like toddlers on cocaine? A dark future where the elite special forces get issues crap guns by default? Sure, it was an exception FPS for consoles, but that has more to do with the high level of suck of FPSs on consoles.
Doom 3? A single trick pony, not that "sucks that in the future we'll forget how to attach lights to guns" is much of a pony to start with. It's gorgeous, but it's a crappy game. Game design has moved on since the original Doom.
It's not that there aren't better games. Where is Far Cry, which blew Halo's outdoor scenes away (It jumps the shark midway through, but there is still a lot of great gameplay)? How about Quake 4, which took Doom 3's amazing technology and coupled it with rock solid gameplay (and features the radical idea that a future military might issue its troops useful assault rifles!). NOLF2? Return to Castle Wolfenstein?
Slashdot Mirror
The first amendment protections have been extended to every level of government, including state level. Furthermore, courts have clearly ruled that students in school still have civil rights, including protections from unreasonable search and seizure and protection of free speech. This is unsurprising, since, generally speaking, children are legally required to attend school and those schools are funded and run by the government.
Thank God, Wikipedia is the only place someone might upload porn or obscene text. Now that it's block, the students are free browse the rest of the perfectly safe web.
As I said, it's not good enough. Detecting a subset of an image such a well understood problem that a $20 optical mouse does it 30 or so times per second. Ultimately you have to keep the focus of the image present, and eventually the spammer will identify that focus, making further comparison even easier.
As for mutilating the picture to make it harder to identify, it doesn't buy you much. Researchers have been working on identifying "similar" images for a long time. There are lots of reasons why people want the technology. A disorganized digital photographer might use it to find all images he's made from a given source; I've used such functionality myself. Companies doing copyright infringement crawls across the web face much the same problem. Detecting an "image" from a database that may be at a different angle, colored funny, and slightly modified is exactly the problem being tackled by security companies trying to do facial recognition of crowds. Yes, the technology sucks now, but remember that 50% success rate is plenty for a spammer, and the technology is going to only get better.
If we're looking for the next CAPTCHA, we need to look to areas that computer scientists are still baffled by. Generalized computer vision is a good idea, but an attacker can replace it with a much easier problem: image comparison. You want to avoid areas in which there has been years of productive research. This is just such an area.
One possible improvement that leaps to mind is procedurally generated images; that is, rendering "3D" images from models, with random (but constrained) angled, backgrounds, positions, colors, lighting, and poses. This way your image set can be extremely large. Unfortunately this means you'll still need a large number of models to have enough variation and ensure that someone doesn't find a simplified attack against the Human_Male_Tall model which is 1/20th of source set. Similarly, you need to be careful with all of the possible variations as you can easily generate images that a human cannot distinguish. The more you constrain your randomization, the more likely that an attacker can find a simplified attack.
Image identification raises it's own set of problems. If you're working with photos, what is your source of photos? You're going to need a lot, if you've only got a thousand or so images, spammers will scrape them from your site and flag them by hand (possibly outsourcing the work, say through Amazon's Mechanical Turk). If you use a shared resource so you get get mind boggling numbers of photographs ("Bob's Puppy Captcha Service") you just create more incentive for attackers to index all of the service's images. (Yes, the service will try to make it hard, but armed with a botnet you can make large numbers of requests every day by visiting actual sites using the authentication system.) You won't want to go with free, publicly available images (say, pulling from Flickr's Creative Commons licensed images, since an attacker can easily scrape those images and pull the tags and description to automatically generate identification information. The only practical way to limit access to the database is to charge for it with a price high enough to discourage spammers, suddenly making the proposal fairly expensive.
Once you've got your system, you have to assume spammers are building up counter-databases that identify images they've seen before. You could try to fight back with simple distortions of the image to make them harder for a computer to identify, but you can't do much without making it hard for humans. And while having a computer identify objects in photographs is hard, having a computer identify highly similar images is pretty easy.
Ultimately a spammer or similar attacker interested in defeating Captchas doesn't need a 100% success rate. 50% is probably plenty; they're typically going for volume. Assuming a typical "three tries before we block your IP for a while or the exponential back off gets too long" system you can get a 50% success rate on those three attempts if you have a mere 21% success rate on each attempt. If the attacker wants a 90% success rate over those three tries, you only need a 55% success rate on each attempt.
Mike Elgan, the article's author brushes off the problem of an airborne cell phone seeing a large number of cell towers at once. He claims it could be easy to fix with a software upgrade to the towers. Nonsense. The fundamental problem is that there is only a finite range of frequencies for cell phone calls. The more towers a given phone's signal is visible to, the more towers whose frequencies you're chewing up. Redesigning the system to support cell calls would be massively expensive. Is the value of being able to make cell calls from a plane really that valuable? Who is going to pay for the overhaul? Elgan is just whining.
Elgan points out that Europe is working on making this work. Tellingly, they're not just letting the phones connect to towers normally; they're shielding the cabin and routing connections through dedicated on-plane hardware. This is reasonable as it means you have a single source (the plane's hardware) that can far more efficiently utilize tower frequency space. Furthermore, the cost of making the changes falls on the airlines, who will pass it on to the logical people: the fliers who want to use this service.
In the long run, yes. But in the short run huge corporations crash and burn, glutting the market with unemployed. In the long run they'll usually get new jobs, but in the meanwhile some people will run into problems like a medical emergency, drown in bills, lose their house, and be forced to declare bankruptcy. People who relied on a pension from their business will find what they were promised reduced or eliminated. Shareholders who had been mislead have part of their portfolio reduced to nothing. In the short run a business can boost profits by turning as many costs into externalities as possible: polluting, overfishing, and the like.
Meanwhile, the CEOs, presidents, and other upper management made lots of money in direct salary, bonuses for raising the stock price in the short term, and profit some selling their own stock while it was artificially boosted. And since they made out just fine, there is incentive for others to follow in their footsteps, making short-sighted decisions for short term gain that doom other companies in the long run.
For those companies that do have long term thinking, they're penalized by the stock market and other potential investors because they don't look as successful in the short term. If a potential investor waits to see a company's long term work, it could easily be thirty years later and the entire management team has changed, so it's still not a reliable indicator. (The fall of once reliable Hewlett-Packard comes to mine.)
The invisible hand isn't full of magical pixie dust that just makes everything work. Primarily because participants in capitalism have deeply imperfect information, there are large windows of opportunity for abuse. In the long run capitalism tends to sort things out; but in the meanwhile new abusers have arisen and created new problems.
Capitalism sucks. But like a cockroach you can't eliminate it. And no matter how much it sucks, the other options suck more.
Oh, how generous of board game manufacturers to deign to give us shorter games.
This is all nonsense. If you've got a good game store in your neighborhood, you can walk in and say, "I'm looking for a game that takes less than 30 minutes to play." If they can't show you at least a dozen games, you probably don't have a good game store.
If you want shorter games, look for games specifically designed to be short and quick. Hacking an existing game to be shorter is neat and all, but you'll get a better experience if the game was designed to be short from the start.
Yes, because I've often thought that getting a DVD movie player was much too difficult and expensive.
Lack of DVD movie support was a good idea. At $30 everyone who wants a DVD player has one and has probably had it fom some time. It saved Nintendo a little money in licensing fees per machine. As an added bonus they don't need to worry about the complexity of adding Macrovision or other DRM complications to their hardware.
Aaah, no. This is terrible, terrible math. The article is claiming that for copies 0 through 1,000,000, the publisher makes nothing. Then for copies 1,000,001 and beyond, the publisher is only making a dollar per copy. Utter nonsense.
Why would be publisher not be profiting for the first million? Obviously because they're recovering their initial investment. The investment into programming, design, art, and the like. So once that millionth copy is shipped, you don't get to count it as an expense any more.
The attached graphic indicates that art/design is running about $15 per copy, and programming is running about $12. From this we can conclude: For copies 1 through 1,000,000, the publisher is making zero profit. For copy 1,000,001 and beyond, the publisher has recovered the art, design, and programming costs. Add in their $1 pre-planned profit (also in the graphic), and now they're making $28 per copy. A significant difference from the articles insanely wrong claim of $1 per copy.
If YouTube goes down, so does your favorite blogging service provider, be it LiveJournal, Blogger, or even MySpace. Down go the free web hosts like Google Page Creator and Geocities. Down goes the forums, even Slashdot. In all those cases random users can upload copyrighted works in at least text form. Copyrighted works are frequently reproduced without permission or under fair use on those sites.
The key element here is section 512 of the DMCA which was written specifically to protect online service providers in these cases. Congress correctly recognized that the criminal is the user illegally reproducing the work, not the company whose site hosts it without realizing the crime. Without this protection service providers would be crippled by the need to somehow try to filter incoming posts. Even assuming you could write automated tools to do the job, you're asking service providers to dedicate software developers and hardware to acting as police.
The Betamax case made it very clear that technology with legitimate uses should not be banned because some people use the technology illegally. YouTube is full of copyright infringement, but there are also lots of valid things there. People are trying to document government coverups. Other people are fact checking the first group. Some people share their music skills. There are the infamous lonelygirl15 videos, which have since been revealed as a marketing hoax, but certainly doesn't infringe copyright. And the blendtec videos are shameless marketing, but they're legal and fun. (Amusingly, there is even accusations of fraud in the blendtec videos.)
Clearly YouTube is a valid resource, used to legal and positive effect every day. The same goes for the free web hosting, the blogs, and Slashdot.
So, for those people who want YouTube to go down, what could YouTube have done to avoid the liability you feel they deserve. A few guidelines for your brilliant plans: No solutions that require registering a "real" identity; American democracy is founded on anonymous speech. No solutions that occasionally accidentally censor legit free speech.. No points for solutions that cost YouTube significant money (be it spent on employees, sofware, hardware, or other things); why should YouTube pay for law enforcement? Finally, be sure your solution will apply equally well to your favorite blogging service, your favorite web site host, and Slashdot.
If you're making $200 an hour, I suggest outsourcing setting up your MythTV box to a college student for $40 an hour. Indeed, if you do go with a Tivo, I'd suggest getting a high school student to buy it and plug it in for you (at about $10 an hour) because your time is much too valuable to waste going to a store.
Meanwhile in reality:
Conversely I spent about $900 on all new parts for my Myth box. Service is free. I blew about 16 hours* total researching and setting it up. At a far more reasonable hourly rate of $50 an hour, it cost me about $800 of my time. It's been working for a year and a half now without problem. I have no reason to expect it to not last another year and a half. So $1,700 for three years of "service." More expensive than a TiVo, yes, but hardly outrageous. I think it's a reasonable premium for being able to burn to DVD without restriction, to be able to watch arbitrary videos from the internet or friends, to be able to watch DVDs on it (I'd been using a PS2, but it recently started refusing to play region coded DVDs, so this has been a useful free bonus), and generally not be locked into a single provider.
I've actually got both. I prefer my Tivo for straightforward recording and watching. But MythTV is a reasonable alternative and the price difference isn't overwhelming.
You're just willfully misinterpreting me now.
All of my rambling was to a few simple points. I'm going to try once more to make them clear:
1. Copyright infringement is wrong. It hurts individuals specifically and society as a whole. (Despite your claims, I have not argued otherwise. You're seeing attackers where they don't exist.)
2. Copyright infringement is different from theft (or rape, since you made the comparison). It has different victims, different levels of damage, and different prevention measures.
3. Since these three crimes are different, they should be considered separately. They should and do have different laws, enforcement, and punishment.
4. Given #3, confusing copyright infringement, theft, and rape is bad for the public debate.
I would like to respond to one specific point:
Are you seriously suggesting that your average person is too stupid to have an informed debate on the matter, and that as a result you're forced to engage in equivocation to fool them into agreeing with your conclusions? If so, that's exactly the sort of dishonesty and arrogance I abhor. Tricking people into supporting your cause has no place in a functioning democracy. Be honest with your fellow citizens. Trust them to be smart enough to understand the issue and dedicate yourself to educating them so they will agree with you for the correct reasons.
I'm curious where your information comes from. Doom 3 lost 10% of its sales because of the early illegal release? How can you know what the number would have been without that release? It was pirated more than any other game previously? I wasn't aware that NPD was tracking those numbers. "Everyone" had a copy? Hyperbole just makes you look like you lack real evidence.
Ultimately you're guessing. You have no more evidence that piracy caused fewer sales than expected than the grandparent post claiming that the game just sucked.
Here are some actual numbers. You've suggested that "Piracy ruined Doom 3...." Doom 3 sold 3.5 million copies. Most publishers would love to sell 3.5 million copies of a game. Games generally considered to be highly successful, like Warcraft III , Baldur's Gate , and Unreal Tournament didn't sell 3.5 million copies. There are only perhaps a dozen or two PC games that can claim to have topped that. id claimed Doom 3 was "...id's most successful game to date." If that's ruination, I'm afraid of success. Assuming you claim of decimation is correct, we're talking about id losing about 350,000 sales. That is a huge number of sales; many PC games never sell that many. But really is the different between 3.5 and 3.85 million copies really ruination?
You're putting words into the grandparent poster's mouth.
The grandparent poster didn't say it is was all right, they said that there is a difference. Which there is. A gas station would rather you shoplifted a single pack of cigarettes instead of hijacking their next shipment of cigarettes. Both are still wrong, but they warrant entirely different responses.
Of course, it's a sillier comparison because you're comparing traditional theft (which deprives the legal owner of a scarce commodity) with copyright infringement (which reduces the artificial scarcity copyright creates). They're different problems with different economics to consider. Indeed...
I haven't been a teen for a bit over a decade now, but I'll try to explain anyway.
Theft of property and copyright infringement are different crimes. They have different victims and different economic effects. If a thief breaks in Best Buy and steals a $50 (retail price) Sony TV, Best Buy suffers because they no longer has a TV. Best Buy has lost $40 (or whatever wholesale is). Sony has lost nothing. If the thief breaks into my house and steals my TV, neither Best Buy nor Sony have lost anything, but I've lost $50.
Conversely, (for the sake of argument) if an infringer breaks into Best Buy and makes an infringing copy of a $50 (retail price) game, Best Buy still has the original. The value of that original is slightly reduced because the artificial scarcity has dropped. This is potentially a "lost sale." This lost revenue from potential sale impacts both Sony and Best Buy. How much? Definitely not $50. The reality is that some portion of copyright infringers, if infringement was not an option, would not purchase the game. It's hard guess what the percentage is, but let's guess only 10%. Now on average over multiple illegal copies, Sony has lost $36 (90% of the $40 they'd expect) and Best Buy $9. Total loss to "the world": $45.
By any stretch of the imagination, clearly individual copyright infringement cases are slightly less harmful than individual cases of theft. The total economic loss for the above hypothetical example is $45 to $50. Both are bad, but given the choice I'd prefer losing $45 to $50. The situation because even more clear if you believe the "can't or won't pay for it" percentage is higher, or if the thefts involve damage to other property (breaking a window to get in).
The situation gets even weirder when I buy the game. So when I bought my $50 Sony TV, I also bought this $50 game. Our hypothetical and slightly insane thief breaks in, steals my TV and makes a copy of the game. I'm out $50 for the TV, but for the game I've lost... nothing. Perhaps a very small amount of value from potential resale value on the game, but nothing significant. Despite the thief having broken into my house the real economic damage is done to Best Buy and Sony. That's a heck of a trick, to have a thief break into my house, "steal" my copy of the game, but have third parties suffer financially.
This is not to suggest that copyright infringement is "okay." Indeed, copyright infringement has a definite detrimental impact on society. But it's a different impact from theft. The steps to defend against these crimes are different.
All in all, I found Trace Memory very disappointing.
Looking at Hotel Dusk, it looks like there are a lot of improvements. I've heard it still has stupid flaws like non-skippable dialogue and objects you can pick up until the character knows why he wants them. But the real killer is that everyone who likes it talks about what a great story it has, about how great it is to read. What I'm not hearing is, "there are all sorts of interesting problems you need to solve." I'm getting a distinct impression that like Trace Memory the player is almost unnecessary. It might a great visual novel, and there may be people who love that sort of game, but I'm getting the sense that it's not a very good adventure game.
Which is, of course, why The Sims, the ultimate sandbox game, has been a catastrophic financial failure. I have no idea why they keep releasing more expansions into that money pit.
I pity the companies that invested in games with strong sandbox components like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivian, and Simcity. Those poor fools are just throwing good money after bad.
Yes, detectives. Note that he's talking about "police," not "security guards." Large enough campuses can benefit from having a focused police force. These aren't thugs in the employ of the university, these are just a real police just like the city-wide force, they just have a more specialized focus. They have the same powers and restrictions. As such it's only logical that they would have detectives, just like the city-wide force. By being specialized they can focus on the more specialized problems of a campus, including the complications of having a large population that moves in and out each year, frequently rotating. They've existed at a number of universities for decades. There is no evil conspiracy here.
Using less on countable items has a history of hundreds of years. There is no irony in the grandparent's usage of less, although there is a bit in yours.
So you're arguing that Apple is too lazy to put in hard work to make the end user experience superior? I find that hard to believe of the company that it trying to reinvent the voice mail experience, that wrote a full PowerPC emulator so they could switch processors, that built a new operating system from the ground up.
Damn straight! They should finish the job and give a completely consistant experience. Right now I've got on my perfectly average iPod* 22 DRMed songs and 978 non-DRMed ones. When I manage that collection iTunes I can burn unlimited copies of 978 of them, but not 22 of them. This is much too confusing! Fortunately this is easy to fix. If you import MP3 into iTunes it should transcode them to AAC with DRM. And if you rip your own CD using iTunes, it should apply the DRM as well. I'm tied of all this inconsistency in my collection; I demand that Apple make all of my music less useful so I don't have to worry my little head about it.
* Perfectly average iPod may not actually exist.
First some manipulation of statistics to tell a lie: Jobs claimed that just 3% of music on the average iPod came from iTMS, and since 3% is so small, clearly there is no lock in. Flaw one: his estimate requires that every iPod sold is still in use; it ignores ones that were broken or died. Flaw two: his estimate requires that every iPod sold hold about 1,000, which is obvious nonsense. Flaw three: no one has an "average" iPod. No one has an average iPod. I expect there are a large number of iPods with zero DRMed music on it, and a fair number with lots. Those people who are Apple's best iTMS customers are locked in. I know people with several hundred dollars of Apple-DRMed music. To suggest that they're not locked in is nonsense at best and a lie at worst.
As for his claim that he'd love a DRM-free world? While the majority of music sold from iTMS must have DRM for contractual reasons, not all of it does. There are songs in iTMS sold from other sites that don't have DRM. iTMS could easily have no DRM. It would add zero complexity for end users (simply don't advertise the functionality, just bury it in the details of the track for the subset of users who care). Doing so would create real value for users who cared. But Apple doesn't do this.
That anyone would take this seriously suggests that the famed reality-distortion-field is so powerful it can extend through a simple text web page.
Sure, Zelda, Deus Ex, and RPGs like Oblivion provide many of the same pleasures of a good adventure game. I like all of them. But you know what's meant by "adventure games" in this case. There is a strong emphasis on puzzles and a traditionally paced plot. These games are typically more slow paced with a strong focus on thinking. They have little to no emphasis on action, combat, or character skills and attributes. These are games like Zork, King's Quest, the Secret of Monkey Island, Myst, or Hotel Dusk.
Suggesting that Zelda, Deus Ex, or Oblivion are somehow replacements is as unhelpful. You might as well suggest that Oblivion is a first-person-shooter since you can shoot arrows or spells at people, or the Rainbow Six series of games is interchangable with real-time strategy games like Warcraft, since in both games your success relies on your ability to give AI controlled units commands. Sure, you can make reasonable definitions that blur those lines, but those lines are useful as they distinguish very different styles of play that different people like.
So non-commercial speech doesn't get protection?
Free speech is free speech, it doesn't matter if it's commercial, political, or as in this case, educational. The silencing of any legal free speech because of a simple, obviously erroneous letter should be offensive to anyone who treasures the values the US is founded on.
And then you wait 10 days before it goes back online, per DMCA requirements. Viacom gets to use a sloppy program and silence legal speech almost immediately with no opportunity for the owner to object. To get it put back, the owner has to wait 10 days to give Viacom a chance to object. Hardly fair. (And, of course, other Google properties have a "physical mail only" policy, which further delays one's ability to have legal speech restored.)
The DMCA safe harbor provisions are a good idea, but the current implementation is flawed. There is no practical penalty for maliciously misusing the DMCA to temporarily silence legal speech during key windows of time, and there is no practical penalty for being really sloppy and blocking legal speech. Free speech is so critical that people who abuse the DMCA intentionally, or by being deeply negligant deserve punishment. It turns my stomach to know that some people care so little for this vital freedom.
Restraint of trade is probably the wrong charge, but Viacom's actions are so reprehensible that they deserve punishment. The only realistic way to punish Viacom is through a lawsuit.
Excepting, of course, that they did:
This isn't a random rule YouTube/Google made up, it's part of the DMCA.
(Link to the relevant section of the DMCA will probably break soon, stupid Library of Congress. Start here, click "[H.R.2281.ENR]", then click "Sec. 512" in "TITLE II".)
Halo? A highly repetitive game that features midget aliens that ran around like toddlers on cocaine? A dark future where the elite special forces get issues crap guns by default? Sure, it was an exception FPS for consoles, but that has more to do with the high level of suck of FPSs on consoles.
Doom 3? A single trick pony, not that "sucks that in the future we'll forget how to attach lights to guns" is much of a pony to start with. It's gorgeous, but it's a crappy game. Game design has moved on since the original Doom.
It's not that there aren't better games. Where is Far Cry, which blew Halo's outdoor scenes away (It jumps the shark midway through, but there is still a lot of great gameplay)? How about Quake 4, which took Doom 3's amazing technology and coupled it with rock solid gameplay (and features the radical idea that a future military might issue its troops useful assault rifles!). NOLF2? Return to Castle Wolfenstein?
*Bah*