One other thing people tend to overlook is that statically typed languages are a ton easier to optimise and compile than totally dynamic languages like Python/Ruby... one of the reason these languages have quite poor performance characteristics is because they aren't very static.
Right, it's not "in" currently because there's no compelling reason to use it. But look at what Ruby on Rails did for Ruby - up until RoR nobody really cared about Ruby and now it's the new hotness.
The world is crying out for a desktop/clientside development language that isn't total crap, and D is it. All the benefits of Java/C# as a language, with native code compilation and efficient memory usage characteristics - now all it needs is a RoR equivalent for the desktop.
ELF supports symbol versioning. And that's what is supposed to take care of these issues. That's what Solaris uses.
Yeah it's supposed to, but on Linux it unfortunately doesn't. The implementations of symbol versioning are slightly different between Solaris and Linux (the Solaris one is IMHO better), and also Solaris has what's known as "direct fixup" using the -Bdirect switch. This is what Michael Meeks has implemented for Linux, but the glibc developers won't accept the work.
However, what part of private libraries wasn't clear? That would include the application support libraries. Your versions. Indeed, statically link the thing -- its a binary. I really don't see the big deal here.
On a fairly, hmm, dare I say it - primitive? - desktop like Solaris statically linking everything is possible. On more modern desktops like Linux things tend to break in subtle ways when you do that: for instance, statically linking GTK+ or Qt will break theming, and statically linking libSDL won't work because it still dlopens other system libraries in order to load audio plugins. To change *that* you'd have to hack the SDL source yourself and what's the alternative? Embed libArts, and with it most of KDE, into your game? Not going to happen.
Dynamic linking is really hard to avoid these days, and besides, the faults occur because raw ELF (without Sun-style direct fixup extensions) tries to emulate static linking semantics! If ELF had been designed right from the start then this would never have been a problem.
So, go out and get a (or make a key pair). Modify the Linux loader to allow signing by wrapping the driver object.
There are a couple of problems here, really: firstly how can the userspace media player prove that the kernel has not been tampered with? With Windows this assumption is implicit - it's proprietary and closed source which makes anything except trivial modifications very hard. So, very smart coders can write rootkits that wrap syscalls, but actually patching out or modifying SAP is much more difficult. When you have the source code it becomes a lot eaiser. Secondly, how can you reconcile the idea of a kernel which cannot be modified at all (without requiring revalidation/resigning) with the idea of open source?
Anyway, Linux is HEAVILY used in "DRM" environments -- embedded systems (video), etc. Arguably, more so than Windows.
YEah sure but in those cases (TiVo etc) it's protected and re-enforced by custom hardware. I was thinking of generic PCs.
Successful is one of those words that isn't very useful as it can mean so many different things. I was using a business-related definition which is "profits:investment ratio is attractive". If you spend $10 billion on something and only make $1000 profit after 20 years, then I'd regard that business as unsuccessful despite it being profitable. Obviously the figures aren't that bad for Apple, but scale appropriately and you see the problem (and costs of developing OS X+apps alone are likely in the billions range).l
Not at all, go take a look at the projects that use autopackage. Developers from projects such as Inkscape and AbiWord have said they feel their project benefits from this form of software distribution.
The error is still yours - binary distribution does not imply proprietary. Even if autopackage did not exist and most 3rd party binaries were proprietary, correlation does not imply causation.
What a stupid thing to say. I have no financial links to StarForce, nor do I know any of the employees, nor do I work for a company that uses their products. In fact I have no links to them whatsoever. Lucky I'm not a litiguous person huh;)
My interest in this story is simply that I've been in a situation similar to the one StarForce is in, where people have talked total crap about my work in blogs, and this idea that it's OK to have zero journalistic standards in blogs when discussing other peoples work is offensive to me. If I were to claim other peoples software was buggy or malign in some respect I'd damn well double check my facts, something Cory shows no sign of having done.
Oh, and the burden of proof is again on you to prove that the StarForce driver is a "rootkit". As it does not hide things and I'm about 90% sure based on what I've read that it doesn't do syscall hooking either, I don't see how it could ever be defined as a rootkit. If you're going to use technical terms, make sure you can back them up.
They do install a device driver, but I have no idea if it interferes with CD burning by other software.
I doubt it does, but then any software can contain bugs and when the game is not running StarForce is designed to not do anything at all (it doesn't even have to be loaded), and it's definitely not supposed to interfere with CD burning. *shrug*
OK, well as I said those rules were specifically designed to put a stop to rumours that the software actually blew up your drivers. Yes people actually claimed that.
Now the claims have changed, and it's that the drivers themselves cause gradual deterioration over time... maybe even over a period of months. I don't see how that could be a side-effect of Windows slowing down writing, surely that'd occur during the write process itself and so be fairly reproducable. But OK, whatever.
Well, I did read the article and he doesn't offer any technical explanations. For instance I would like to have seen precise details about how to make the driver run 3rd party code, but no such detail is available nor is it anywhere on the website he links to. They just claim it's possible.
As to whether blogs can be libel, yes I think they definitely can be. Newspapers can publish corrections but if they publish things that are untrue then they can still be held liable for that, as people are forming opinions based on what they read in the newspapers so it's important for them to be at least partly based in fact.
Now, should StarForce have politely asked the guy to stop? Perhaps, but they've got experience of this kind of thing before. And maybe it's a stereotype but I know at least one other Russian and he is also of the "no nonsense, plain speaking" variety:) Cory is saying very nasty things about them and then links to a boycott site - somehow I don't think he's interested in rational debate. Still, bad PR for StarForce that they are so, uh, blunt. But IMHO it's worse PR for Cory.
Logic error - binary does not imply proprietary. After all, aren't most.deb files you download binary themselves? Aren't nearly all autopackages packages of open source software, in binary form?
That's interesting and I would like to see this article.
However, given that the claims people were making against StarForce were specifically that it physically broke drives, I'm not surprised that was a part of the rules... otherwise it would have turned into $10,000 for any bug report going which I doubt many software companies would be willing to make.
Clearly their software shouldn't interfere with legitimate CD/DVD burning and I'd hope they'd fix that though if the claims are true (could well be, especially if it's a weird hardware specific bug).
I don't see any evidence on that site. Their claims are fairly specific, but they're still just claims. They don't even try - I was half expecting links to somebodies blog where they said StarForce had killed their DVD burner over a period of months, yet nothing. Cory had just copy/pasted from some random website he found.
More to the point, even if the claims are completely true, surely physical drive failure because Windows put it into compatibility mode is a serious fault with the drive itself? Other things can cause packet loss, yet I would not expect this to torch anything!
Wow, can you say "astroturf comment"? Either that or troll, not sure which.
Er, why? Because he said he hadn't experienced those problems, and pointed out that there are two sides to every story?
OK, so I have some karma to burn. Here is the other side from somebody you may trust more, an UbiSoft developer posting in the forums in response to people who claimed StarForce was riddled with problems and would cause huge issues when they started using it.
Some relevant quotes may help:
So the subject of this post is to detail the problems encountered with the Starforce system.
My study is based on four games published earlier this year by Ubisoft, totalling more than half a million copies over a few months, protected by Starforce. I believe this is a large enough population to derive statistics from.
The number of reported problems totals 0,3% of sold copies. Splinter Cell 3, being a very popular title, generated more reports than usual (see below), and without this title, the level of problems drops to 0,1%. That's one user out of a thousand, and less than 500 reports all in all, worldwide.
.. and..
Most problems (more than 60%) have to do with the activation key or the disc check... The reported problems are either that the key was mistyped, or not valid anymore, or that the disc check failed, or not found. When the disc check is failed, it is easy to solve, so the legal user will have opportunity to play anyway... A large number of problems (20%) are specific to SC3, and linked with users trying to start an ISO image of the game with an emulator. In such a case, the protection prevents the game to be launched, as it is supposed to do... What can be considered real troubles are system crashes, or driver problems, or hardware problems. This is around 10% of reports. So that's about one player in ten thousands. I think this is a level consistent with ANY windows application.
C++ support: it does work. No, a single binary MAY NOT WORK. *Unless* you also distribute the needed libraries. Nothing AT ALL is preventing you from doing that
I guess I should have elaborated, go read this section of the page and then read the ELF section as well. If you understand what's written there you'll see the problem - the lack of a stable C++ ABI is not fatal in and of itself, though it does cause major pain, but combined with the lack of predictable symbol scoping it means it's impossible to reason about the interactions between a binary (any binary, even a C based one) and the rest of the operating system.
For instance, if a game written in C++ loads a private copy of libSDL (C), then it may crash because libSDL may dlopen libaRts (C++) for audio in KDE, and STL inlines in libaRts will collide with the equivalent inlines in the game itself despite libstdc++.so symbol versioning. That'll probably cause a crash or hang.
This is a "do not pass go" type problem. It means any program, no matter how bug-free or what language it's written in, can potentially crash in undebuggable ways in certain legal system configurations. It's broken by design and the relevant people either ignore the problem or don't see fixing it as a priority.
Other implementations are, of course, possible. How is the digital data protected after it is decrypted?
I was thinking of something like the Windows Secure Audio Path. The problem with your SSL scheme is that the program which renders the audio/video can be trivially turned into a decryptor just by redirecting audio output to a file. Now you can do this with Windows XP too but it requires running the OS under a virtualizer like VMware (but not VMware as IIRC the drivers for that aren't signed for SAP compliance) which emulates commodity hardware with SAP signed drivers. Setting one of these up is a bit of a pain and most users won't be able to do so.
For your Ashlee Simpsons and the like maybe somebody somewhere will do so and put it up on P2P for some reason, but for more obscure stuff this sort of thing can make it very hard to find (and anti-virtualisation code in Windows/hardware itself could seal that off too), which would make the analog hole the only way forward. And realistically not many people bother with that either.
And since your answers are so full of crap you either don't bother to use the system you develop for or you're just a troll... but whatever I'll "inform" you anyway.
Nice. Why don't you go "inform" yourself? In the past I've written an entire software installation framework on Linux, a binary portability environment, modifications to the dynamic linker, patches for Wine, ALSA, GNOME and a bunch of other projects I forget, and me and my team pretty much wrote the book on Linux binary compatibility.
NViDEA provides binary drivers and has an installer to do the compiling if it can't find a compatable kernel. Their installer is GPL. Slap a graphical front end on it and then you no longer have a problem.
No longer have a problem? This is insane... you realise that the kernel developers make a sport out of breaking the nVidia drivers right? Having a source wrapper doesn't protect them from everything, nowhere near. For instance the 4k stacks fiasco.
Not to mention that this solution is light-years behind Windows 95 in terms of usability. What happens when you put the driver CD containing this magic source code wrapper in the CD drive? Nothing. What happens if you don't have developer tools and the kernel headers installed? Errors. What happens if the driver is more than 12 months old and the kernel API changed? Errors.
And finally what if you're a little company and Mr Kroah-Hartman smells blood? You get sued. This is about the most uninviting landscape for hardware developers imaginable.
C++ support Then get apps from the vendor or compile them on the system with glibc... or fix glibc yourself if you don't like it.
Michael Meeks has already attempted to "fix" glibc, and his work was ignored. This is the modus operandi of the glibc people, and as a result a generic patch he wrote to solve many of the symbol fixup and performance problems that plague Linux (eg OpenOffice startup time) is now a SuSE specific file format extension. Yay standards.
And for what it's worth many of the C++ problems are GCC related, not glibc. But Michaels work would have alleviated the symtoms.
As opposed to what? Windows XP?
As opposed to every other program in the world that users don't already have but might want to try.
Linus says he doesn't mind having it. So develop it. Some people don't care because we don't all want it.
Explain to me how to build a DRM system for an operating system in which you have no guarantees about the way it works. Now, you can't built a 100% perfect DRM system ever, but you can get close enough that it's worth doing and Windows is pretty good at it these days (and will get better as hardware support starts appearing for it). But Linux can't mount credible competition in this area. If there was a Red Hat music store or something then it wouldn't matter so much - the iTunes DRM is fairly weak, but it doesn't matter because Apple are simultaneosuly platform and media provider. But Linux is just a platform, so it doesn't have that luxury.
Games companies use technologies like StarForce, SafeDisc etc because they do make good business sense. Most copy protection companies can make very credible business cases for their products, in the case of StarForce I think you only need about 800 people to buy the game who would otherwise have cracked it to break even which is peanuts for a successful commercial game.
The real problem is that vast numbers of people don't think twice about piracy. If you don't like it, try solving that problem instead of picking at the band-aid.
I saw nothing in the post the back up his assertions.
That's because there isn't anything to back up his assertions.
If Cory had actually found the problems he's claiming are in this software, he could have won $10,000 and a free trip to Moscow to demonstrate them. In fact, he appears to simply be repeating things he read on various anonymous warez forums (I've read the same forums and seen the same claims myself).
I love how Slashdot immediately assumes Cory is in the right here, because StarForce make copy protection, despite the fact that Cory appears to be talking out of his backside and is certainly pushing an very transparent agenda.
Fuck, I can sympathise even if I think threats about calling in the FBI are silly. I've had people say nasty things about software I've written before, that it lets in viruses or that it's buggy or that it has a stupid design and guess what? Each time somebody said that it turned out they were pushing an agenda and on investigation their claims turned out to be misleading at best or baseless at worst. I've been on the receiving end of this kind of thing, and I wouldn't mind seeing Cory dragged through the mud for what he's written, especially as he offers no proof nor suggestions for alternative solutions. What's that Cory? Information wants to be free? Sure, feel free to release your products for nothing when you run your own game company.
If Cory really said the things the summary claims he said, then he way overstepped the line between criticism and libel. IIRC StarForce actually have a competition or prize around for anybody who can reproducibly demonstrate their software harming a system after a bunch of rumours started about how it damages CD burners etc - so far the prize has gone unclaimed and in fact they even raised it after it'd been out a while and nobody had been able to do it. They also claim they did extensive internal testing for months with as many CD burners as they could get their hands on after the rumours started coming out, yet were unable to duplicate the (many) different claims. Given that it's their main product I can well believe they would do this!
StarForce is a funny thing, it's rapidly taking over the copy protection market because it's generally considered to be the best out there right now, I think defeating it requires you to do some complicated 6-step dance that culminates in you actually unplugging some of your hardware (ie there's no one-click generic crack).
Given the extremely vague nature of what Cory has posted I'm not surprised they are suing. Is it right for them to sue? Probably not, our society should be less litiguous. But seriously - they've written some software and this guy is equating it with bots and adware programs, which it isn't at all, and he's also claiming it has serious bugs but not backing up his claims with any proof either.
He might as well have claimed that StarForce enjoy being Evil because they're Russian while he was at it. It would have been about as worthwhile as his other comments.
I suspect it's more to do with the fact that he loves graphics coding, and is good at it. If you were great at something you loved doing, and you were your own boss, why would you burn out? IIRC he lives quite a humble lifestyle apart from his cars.
Nobody who buys a Porsche cares what other people drive. If anything they like being "exclusive".
Everybody who buys a Mac implicitly cares what other people use, because if more people used what they used, they'd get more apps and maybe cheaper upgrades.
That's the key difference that makes Apple unsuccessful and Porsche successful.
There is another way to look at this. If producing your own OS+Hardware combo was such a ragingly awesome business model, I suspect Apple would have competitors by now. After all, whilst building a modern desktop OS certainly isn't easy, it's easier now than it's ever been before as there's so much code out there already written in the form of Linux components (eg FreeType, Xgl, Cairo, GTK+ etc). Just swap the ones you don't like out, write your own, go. Yet, nobody does this, nobody even bothers to try and compete with Apple, the last company that did - Be - went bust almost immediately despite having at the time a well regarded, perhaps even 'superior' desktop OS.
I think the reason is that it's actually a very stupid business model, and that Apple pursue it only through sheer bloody-mindedness... given the vast investment required, huge competition and saturated market, you'd have to be insane to create a new business doing what Apple do. Regardless of how fashionable Apple may be, the basic economics of computing don't change, and the Macs numerical lack of success reflects that.
Realistically, and I say this as a desktop Linux developer myself, Linux is missing a metric fuckton of things that I'd class as absolutely central to being a workable desktop (note; we're not even talking competitive here, we're talking workable). For instance:
Driver API. Centralised driver development doesn't work - period. Assume the existance of a totally awesome vendor who is happy to release GPLd drivers with their new widget. They put a penguin on the side of the box. They immediately get their ass sued off by people who buy the widget, plug it into Goobuntu or whatever, nothing happens and for some reason they aren't satisfied by the explanation of "Well it'll Just Work in 12 months when the driver has been accepted upstream, been merged with your distros kernel patches, and you upgrade your OS". They want it to work now damnit, and Windows/MacOS can do this so why can't Linux?
More driver stupidity. Not every program people run on Linux is GPLd today, and nobody tries to force them to be so. It's obvious to many people involved with Free software that the victories come when developers see why open sourcing their work is beneficial and choose to do it of their own free will, not when their arms are twisted into it. Yet the kernel developers do exactly this for drivers, and threaten (or actually do) sue random vendors who distribute binary drivers (except not nVidia, as that'd cause mass civil war). Worse, the kernel developers are getting more militant not less. This is simply not a tenable situation for desktops which deal with far wider variety of hardware than servers. In its current state Linux can never be a desktop kernel, unless you redefine "desktop" so far it loses all meaning.
C++ support. It doesn't work. It's unbelievably slow, the glibc developers refuse patches to fix it, and is only reliable as long as you use "pure" binaries built with the same compiler that everything else is. This makes robust binary distribution of C++ apps impossible and as nearly every large desktop app is written in C++ this is a problem. Just try distributing a C++ application on Linux without getting all N^2 distros involved or requiring the user to know what a compiler is. Hell, try distributing any application at all without getting distros involved. And for all kinds of reasons centralized software distribution is a big usability and political nono.
No easy install/uninstall - if you're comfortable with partitioning etc then you can get Fedora installed without too much bother, but Ubuntu doesn't even have a graphical installer, and as far as I'm aware no distro today offers an easy way to remove it and put Windows back to 100% disk usage. Who in their right mind would try a program that ate 10gigs of disk space and didn't come with a way to uninstall it?
No credible DRM support. Every major company that deals with media uses it, Microsoft and Apple support it and Linux sucks at it. This effectively freezes Linux out from the upcoming world of legal online media (music/video stores etc).
I could go on... unfortunately there's a general attitude of "who cares" in the community with regards to most of these issues so they aren't getting fixed or even talked about. Without these fundamental things I don't see how Linux can ever be a credible general purpose consumer desktop OS. The best you might get is a closed-box, unupgradable "console" type machine. But I wouldn't class that as a competitor to Windows or the Mac.
Re:The problem is implementation rather than desig
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Buy Vista or Else
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Users then don't trash everything when they fubar their profile or homedir.
For most users, trashing their profile or homedir IS trashing everything. The OS can be reinstalled quickly, but having to pick your way through your home directory selecting only what's needed and making sure you don't back up any crap takes time.
Windows has all the necessary features to do it, It's had them since the first versions of NT.
Disagree - to correctly sandbox software you really need something like SELinux, which is arguably still in the research stages.
By doing vertex/object elimination on the server side and transferring only relevant coordinates.
That would lead to incredibly low or laggy framerates, as you couldn't update the screen until the next frames set of co-ordinates had come down from the server. It'd also make it very awkward to do in-world mirrors. Graphics accelerators are designed to do that sort of clipping very rapidly and they should be able to do their job.
I have no idea what you're talking about. The only problem with enforcing rules in real time is the speed of light, which prohibits e.g. running fighting games between the US and Europe, due to necessary latency. There *can* be a problem with client bandwidth, of course - alas, there's no simple way to fix that.
Even with very high bandwidth latency will kill any such scheme. Latency just isn't improving enough to make such schemes peformant. By "enforcing rules in real time" I mean things like preventing you from using auto-aim bots and such: unless you also calculate camera transforms server-side (which is only one step away from streaming rendered video) you need clientside protection.
The real problem is the assumption of client security
Sure, I know that. A generic PC just can't do what is needed of it today, though perhaps things like LaGrange will fix it. But it doesn't have to be bullet-proof, it just has to be hard enough that making resellable hacks isn't economic, and things like the Warden or VAC do quite a good job. Even though they hadn't even entered kernel mode it was enough to shut down Wow!Sharp as a commercial operation. While some groups may take it to the next level, it stopped some %age of cheaters for a certain period of time, which is good enough.
Slashdot Mirror
One other thing people tend to overlook is that statically typed languages are a ton easier to optimise and compile than totally dynamic languages like Python/Ruby ... one of the reason these languages have quite poor performance characteristics is because they aren't very static.
The world is crying out for a desktop/clientside development language that isn't total crap, and D is it. All the benefits of Java/C# as a language, with native code compilation and efficient memory usage characteristics - now all it needs is a RoR equivalent for the desktop.
Yeah it's supposed to, but on Linux it unfortunately doesn't. The implementations of symbol versioning are slightly different between Solaris and Linux (the Solaris one is IMHO better), and also Solaris has what's known as "direct fixup" using the -Bdirect switch. This is what Michael Meeks has implemented for Linux, but the glibc developers won't accept the work.
On a fairly, hmm, dare I say it - primitive? - desktop like Solaris statically linking everything is possible. On more modern desktops like Linux things tend to break in subtle ways when you do that: for instance, statically linking GTK+ or Qt will break theming, and statically linking libSDL won't work because it still dlopens other system libraries in order to load audio plugins. To change *that* you'd have to hack the SDL source yourself and what's the alternative? Embed libArts, and with it most of KDE, into your game? Not going to happen.
Dynamic linking is really hard to avoid these days, and besides, the faults occur because raw ELF (without Sun-style direct fixup extensions) tries to emulate static linking semantics! If ELF had been designed right from the start then this would never have been a problem.
There are a couple of problems here, really: firstly how can the userspace media player prove that the kernel has not been tampered with? With Windows this assumption is implicit - it's proprietary and closed source which makes anything except trivial modifications very hard. So, very smart coders can write rootkits that wrap syscalls, but actually patching out or modifying SAP is much more difficult. When you have the source code it becomes a lot eaiser. Secondly, how can you reconcile the idea of a kernel which cannot be modified at all (without requiring revalidation/resigning) with the idea of open source?
YEah sure but in those cases (TiVo etc) it's protected and re-enforced by custom hardware. I was thinking of generic PCs.
If you want hard statistics on reported problems, go ask UbiSoft.
Successful is one of those words that isn't very useful as it can mean so many different things. I was using a business-related definition which is "profits:investment ratio is attractive". If you spend $10 billion on something and only make $1000 profit after 20 years, then I'd regard that business as unsuccessful despite it being profitable. Obviously the figures aren't that bad for Apple, but scale appropriately and you see the problem (and costs of developing OS X+apps alone are likely in the billions range).l
The error is still yours - binary distribution does not imply proprietary. Even if autopackage did not exist and most 3rd party binaries were proprietary, correlation does not imply causation.
My interest in this story is simply that I've been in a situation similar to the one StarForce is in, where people have talked total crap about my work in blogs, and this idea that it's OK to have zero journalistic standards in blogs when discussing other peoples work is offensive to me. If I were to claim other peoples software was buggy or malign in some respect I'd damn well double check my facts, something Cory shows no sign of having done.
Oh, and the burden of proof is again on you to prove that the StarForce driver is a "rootkit". As it does not hide things and I'm about 90% sure based on what I've read that it doesn't do syscall hooking either, I don't see how it could ever be defined as a rootkit. If you're going to use technical terms, make sure you can back them up.
I doubt it does, but then any software can contain bugs and when the game is not running StarForce is designed to not do anything at all (it doesn't even have to be loaded), and it's definitely not supposed to interfere with CD burning. *shrug*
Now the claims have changed, and it's that the drivers themselves cause gradual deterioration over time ... maybe even over a period of months. I don't see how that could be a side-effect of Windows slowing down writing, surely that'd occur during the write process itself and so be fairly reproducable. But OK, whatever.
As to whether blogs can be libel, yes I think they definitely can be. Newspapers can publish corrections but if they publish things that are untrue then they can still be held liable for that, as people are forming opinions based on what they read in the newspapers so it's important for them to be at least partly based in fact.
Now, should StarForce have politely asked the guy to stop? Perhaps, but they've got experience of this kind of thing before. And maybe it's a stereotype but I know at least one other Russian and he is also of the "no nonsense, plain speaking" variety :) Cory is saying very nasty things about them and then links to a boycott site - somehow I don't think he's interested in rational debate. Still, bad PR for StarForce that they are so, uh, blunt. But IMHO it's worse PR for Cory.
Well, better go boycott Apple then, as this is exactly what iTunes does (yes no kidding, iTunes installs its own kernel code to do CD burning).
Logic error - binary does not imply proprietary. After all, aren't most .deb files you download binary themselves? Aren't nearly all autopackages packages of open source software, in binary form?
However, given that the claims people were making against StarForce were specifically that it physically broke drives, I'm not surprised that was a part of the rules ... otherwise it would have turned into $10,000 for any bug report going which I doubt many software companies would be willing to make.
Clearly their software shouldn't interfere with legitimate CD/DVD burning and I'd hope they'd fix that though if the claims are true (could well be, especially if it's a weird hardware specific bug).
More to the point, even if the claims are completely true, surely physical drive failure because Windows put it into compatibility mode is a serious fault with the drive itself? Other things can cause packet loss, yet I would not expect this to torch anything!
Er, why? Because he said he hadn't experienced those problems, and pointed out that there are two sides to every story?
OK, so I have some karma to burn. Here is the other side from somebody you may trust more, an UbiSoft developer posting in the forums in response to people who claimed StarForce was riddled with problems and would cause huge issues when they started using it.
Some relevant quotes may help:
I guess I should have elaborated, go read this section of the page and then read the ELF section as well. If you understand what's written there you'll see the problem - the lack of a stable C++ ABI is not fatal in and of itself, though it does cause major pain, but combined with the lack of predictable symbol scoping it means it's impossible to reason about the interactions between a binary (any binary, even a C based one) and the rest of the operating system.
For instance, if a game written in C++ loads a private copy of libSDL (C), then it may crash because libSDL may dlopen libaRts (C++) for audio in KDE, and STL inlines in libaRts will collide with the equivalent inlines in the game itself despite libstdc++.so symbol versioning. That'll probably cause a crash or hang.
This is a "do not pass go" type problem. It means any program, no matter how bug-free or what language it's written in, can potentially crash in undebuggable ways in certain legal system configurations. It's broken by design and the relevant people either ignore the problem or don't see fixing it as a priority.
I was thinking of something like the Windows Secure Audio Path. The problem with your SSL scheme is that the program which renders the audio/video can be trivially turned into a decryptor just by redirecting audio output to a file. Now you can do this with Windows XP too but it requires running the OS under a virtualizer like VMware (but not VMware as IIRC the drivers for that aren't signed for SAP compliance) which emulates commodity hardware with SAP signed drivers. Setting one of these up is a bit of a pain and most users won't be able to do so.
For your Ashlee Simpsons and the like maybe somebody somewhere will do so and put it up on P2P for some reason, but for more obscure stuff this sort of thing can make it very hard to find (and anti-virtualisation code in Windows/hardware itself could seal that off too), which would make the analog hole the only way forward. And realistically not many people bother with that either.
Nice. Why don't you go "inform" yourself? In the past I've written an entire software installation framework on Linux, a binary portability environment, modifications to the dynamic linker, patches for Wine, ALSA, GNOME and a bunch of other projects I forget, and me and my team pretty much wrote the book on Linux binary compatibility.
NViDEA provides binary drivers and has an installer to do the compiling if it can't find a compatable kernel. Their installer is GPL. Slap a graphical front end on it and then you no longer have a problem.
No longer have a problem? This is insane ... you realise that the kernel developers make a sport out of breaking the nVidia drivers right? Having a source wrapper doesn't protect them from everything, nowhere near. For instance the 4k stacks fiasco.
Not to mention that this solution is light-years behind Windows 95 in terms of usability. What happens when you put the driver CD containing this magic source code wrapper in the CD drive? Nothing. What happens if you don't have developer tools and the kernel headers installed? Errors. What happens if the driver is more than 12 months old and the kernel API changed? Errors.
And finally what if you're a little company and Mr Kroah-Hartman smells blood? You get sued. This is about the most uninviting landscape for hardware developers imaginable.
C++ support Then get apps from the vendor or compile them on the system with glibc ... or fix glibc yourself if you don't like it.
Michael Meeks has already attempted to "fix" glibc, and his work was ignored. This is the modus operandi of the glibc people, and as a result a generic patch he wrote to solve many of the symbol fixup and performance problems that plague Linux (eg OpenOffice startup time) is now a SuSE specific file format extension. Yay standards.
And for what it's worth many of the C++ problems are GCC related, not glibc. But Michaels work would have alleviated the symtoms.
As opposed to what? Windows XP?
As opposed to every other program in the world that users don't already have but might want to try.
Linus says he doesn't mind having it. So develop it. Some people don't care because we don't all want it.
Explain to me how to build a DRM system for an operating system in which you have no guarantees about the way it works. Now, you can't built a 100% perfect DRM system ever, but you can get close enough that it's worth doing and Windows is pretty good at it these days (and will get better as hardware support starts appearing for it). But Linux can't mount credible competition in this area. If there was a Red Hat music store or something then it wouldn't matter so much - the iTunes DRM is fairly weak, but it doesn't matter because Apple are simultaneosuly platform and media provider. But Linux is just a platform, so it doesn't have that luxury.
The real problem is that vast numbers of people don't think twice about piracy. If you don't like it, try solving that problem instead of picking at the band-aid.
That's because there isn't anything to back up his assertions.
If Cory had actually found the problems he's claiming are in this software, he could have won $10,000 and a free trip to Moscow to demonstrate them. In fact, he appears to simply be repeating things he read on various anonymous warez forums (I've read the same forums and seen the same claims myself).
I love how Slashdot immediately assumes Cory is in the right here, because StarForce make copy protection, despite the fact that Cory appears to be talking out of his backside and is certainly pushing an very transparent agenda.
Fuck, I can sympathise even if I think threats about calling in the FBI are silly. I've had people say nasty things about software I've written before, that it lets in viruses or that it's buggy or that it has a stupid design and guess what? Each time somebody said that it turned out they were pushing an agenda and on investigation their claims turned out to be misleading at best or baseless at worst. I've been on the receiving end of this kind of thing, and I wouldn't mind seeing Cory dragged through the mud for what he's written, especially as he offers no proof nor suggestions for alternative solutions. What's that Cory? Information wants to be free? Sure, feel free to release your products for nothing when you run your own game company.
StarForce is a funny thing, it's rapidly taking over the copy protection market because it's generally considered to be the best out there right now, I think defeating it requires you to do some complicated 6-step dance that culminates in you actually unplugging some of your hardware (ie there's no one-click generic crack).
Given the extremely vague nature of what Cory has posted I'm not surprised they are suing. Is it right for them to sue? Probably not, our society should be less litiguous. But seriously - they've written some software and this guy is equating it with bots and adware programs, which it isn't at all, and he's also claiming it has serious bugs but not backing up his claims with any proof either.
He might as well have claimed that StarForce enjoy being Evil because they're Russian while he was at it. It would have been about as worthwhile as his other comments.
I suspect it's more to do with the fact that he loves graphics coding, and is good at it. If you were great at something you loved doing, and you were your own boss, why would you burn out? IIRC he lives quite a humble lifestyle apart from his cars.
Nobody who buys a Porsche cares what other people drive. If anything they like being "exclusive".
Everybody who buys a Mac implicitly cares what other people use, because if more people used what they used, they'd get more apps and maybe cheaper upgrades.
That's the key difference that makes Apple unsuccessful and Porsche successful.
There is another way to look at this. If producing your own OS+Hardware combo was such a ragingly awesome business model, I suspect Apple would have competitors by now. After all, whilst building a modern desktop OS certainly isn't easy, it's easier now than it's ever been before as there's so much code out there already written in the form of Linux components (eg FreeType, Xgl, Cairo, GTK+ etc). Just swap the ones you don't like out, write your own, go. Yet, nobody does this, nobody even bothers to try and compete with Apple, the last company that did - Be - went bust almost immediately despite having at the time a well regarded, perhaps even 'superior' desktop OS.
I think the reason is that it's actually a very stupid business model, and that Apple pursue it only through sheer bloody-mindedness ... given the vast investment required, huge competition and saturated market, you'd have to be insane to create a new business doing what Apple do. Regardless of how fashionable Apple may be, the basic economics of computing don't change, and the Macs numerical lack of success reflects that.
I could go on ... unfortunately there's a general attitude of "who cares" in the community with regards to most of these issues so they aren't getting fixed or even talked about. Without these fundamental things I don't see how Linux can ever be a credible general purpose consumer desktop OS. The best you might get is a closed-box, unupgradable "console" type machine. But I wouldn't class that as a competitor to Windows or the Mac.
For most users, trashing their profile or homedir IS trashing everything. The OS can be reinstalled quickly, but having to pick your way through your home directory selecting only what's needed and making sure you don't back up any crap takes time.
Windows has all the necessary features to do it, It's had them since the first versions of NT.
Disagree - to correctly sandbox software you really need something like SELinux, which is arguably still in the research stages.
That would lead to incredibly low or laggy framerates, as you couldn't update the screen until the next frames set of co-ordinates had come down from the server. It'd also make it very awkward to do in-world mirrors. Graphics accelerators are designed to do that sort of clipping very rapidly and they should be able to do their job.
I have no idea what you're talking about. The only problem with enforcing rules in real time is the speed of light, which prohibits e.g. running fighting games between the US and Europe, due to necessary latency. There *can* be a problem with client bandwidth, of course - alas, there's no simple way to fix that.
Even with very high bandwidth latency will kill any such scheme. Latency just isn't improving enough to make such schemes peformant. By "enforcing rules in real time" I mean things like preventing you from using auto-aim bots and such: unless you also calculate camera transforms server-side (which is only one step away from streaming rendered video) you need clientside protection.
The real problem is the assumption of client security
Sure, I know that. A generic PC just can't do what is needed of it today, though perhaps things like LaGrange will fix it. But it doesn't have to be bullet-proof, it just has to be hard enough that making resellable hacks isn't economic, and things like the Warden or VAC do quite a good job. Even though they hadn't even entered kernel mode it was enough to shut down Wow!Sharp as a commercial operation. While some groups may take it to the next level, it stopped some %age of cheaters for a certain period of time, which is good enough.