The value of this data could theoretically extend far beyond prevention of current attacks. A large body of data on the types and frequency of attacks could potentially lead to statistical analyses allowing predictions of the most common origins of attacks. One could then use this data to inform the development of internet routers and filters to minimize international attacks.
Further, one could do post-hoc correlations of attacks to salient events, yearly cycles, etc. Such data could lead to more accurate predictions of the impacts of same on a company.
In other words, this will be useful for helping to figure out the big picture of how the internet creates and deals with attacks.
My friends first saw MTG at a local con when it first came out. We scoffed at these guys carrying around thousands of cards and called their game a silly thing.
We persisted in our aloof dismissal of Magic as a poser game until I was isolated from the pack for a summer. At that time, another friend had me play a few games with him, and that was it. I took the game back to my friends at school 2 months later and infected them. It spread like smallpox and stayed with us for years.
We're over it now, but every now and then I find someone who plays it and sits down for a game. Lots of fond memories about Magic, and I'm glad I succumbed to it.
Big corporations generally cannot maintain unprofitable and "frivolous" expenditures, no matter how much idealism lies behind the scene.
The bottom line always wins out in the end.
Idealistic eccesses are reserved for the small scale business, like mom & pop stores that tolerate inefficient practices merely because they want to. The reason, I suppose, is that these places are still under the direct control of the person with the idealism.
A coporate entity, on the other hand, gives up its idealism as it places its control in the hands of many people, especially investors, who generally have absolutely no motive other than profit. Maybe that's the next stage in the evolution of our business models, but frankly I doubt it.
Let's remember that we as common stock investors share blame for forcing this mentality on corporations.
Whether the laws to fight crime benefits citizens always depends on the means by which the criminals are sought and prosecuted. If their rights as people are completely trampled in the process, then I would prefer you leave them alone. These criminals may harm me less than a badly written piece of legislation that may cause me to be subject to undue pain should I become an innocent suspect in an investigation, and am consequently denied rights to defend myself.
The ends do not justify the means except in very very very special circumstances, this is a lesson history will teach us again and again until it sinks in.
Name scramblers had to hit the userbase because they require effort from the user. Napster's success hinged on the fact that the music directory was shared *by default*. If the users had had to click a button to share their files, most wouldn't have bothered. It was too much effort for most people to bother turning it off, even though it cost them nothing, and saved their upstream bandwidth.
So now having to download and install a program is required at both ends for this to work? There's no chance this would have worked. As much as a people laughed at name filters as a solution to Napster, it's going to work, at least for the purposes of eliminating a majority of the available music.
But I'm sure Napster knew this, they're the ones who made the directory shared by default. right now they're trying to keep as much of their userbase as they can so that when they switch to a subscription service, their numbers are larger.
If they keep just 10% of their remaining users, it'll still probably be a profitable business.
When I want to find out a piece of mundane information, no matter what it is, 99 times out of 100 I'll be able to find it quickly and easily on the web somewhere. Scroll back 15 years, and what was I doing? going through a card catalog at a library, or hitting an encyclopedia.
Now I'm not saying books have lost their place. One of the dangers is the net is people paying less attention to our paper legacy. But the amount of information on the web is staggering, and it actually isn't all that hard to find what you want, be it a snippet of MATLAB code to do wavelet transforms, a list of roman emporers, or names and reviews of all of Peter Jackson's films. It's in your face in 1-3 minutes. That kind of information turnaround was unthinkable 15 years ago, and its effect on my productivity is profound.
Now the net can hamper productivity as well, by providing easy distractions. But there's only person for me to blame when I allow myself to waste time. I don't blame the automotive industry if I hurt myself in a car wreck.
I think Katz is too cynically dismissive of the positive changes that have occurred as a result of the internet.
Is this a move towards pay-per-use policies on all DVD content? Or is it just an adaptation of a fairly accepted practice in the software industry. Remember that games have long used serial code authentication at online servers.
However those methods are only used when playing online in a multiplayer sense, and not when playing single player. The difference is not trivial, because it means that with these playstation games, if your net connection is out, you can't play *anything*, whereas most computer games always work in single player mode (as good as any game works on a Windows box these days *cough*).
Although maybe parents will applaud this measure, as they might be able to get a package which lets them turn on or off the cable modem, thus controlling exactly when their kids can play.
But for myself and other adults, it's yet another reason to never touch the PS2.
I disagree that we should be taking an approach that simulates life as we know it. Why should we assume that life has to resemble us in any way? The concept of life for a computer is going to be entirely alien. For example, replication, which is a big deal for organic life, is a trivial problem for a computer program.
Making simulations of DNA life with assembly programs that recreate, such as Tierra, and RedCode, are fascinating ways to study alife, but they're not the way to go.
Computer virii are currently the best example of how alife can exist. It would be good however if we could write some good virii. Imagine a series of open source computer virii that self propagate between linux and/or windows boxes and automatically tighten up security loopholes. They fulfill a function on the machine, and in turn are fed CPU time they need to survive and reproduce. So you put a box on the net and within minutes it's self-secured. I know this is a ridiculous pipe dream, just a speculative example of how alife might work.
But to really be considered life, such an organism would need the ability to modify itself in a coherent way.
Now if this author gets into nanobots self replication, I can see why he would be going on about atoms.
You keep using that word, I don't believe it....
on
The History of Pong
·
· Score: 1
Gameplay is more than a fancy choice of weapons and nice graphics which is all that Quake seems to specialize in. Half-life puts you there, from the first instant you start a game on that train ride, you are immersed in another reality. Games like this, System Shock, Fallout, BG and Thief rise above the crowd in creating a world that grips your imagination. System Shock especially could really creep you out. Turn the lights out, and try to survive that level with the invisible slimes. I swear I was actually screaming when they jumped me. Half-life was very similar.
Now I'm not saying FPS games like Quake and Unreal aren't intense and addictive. Far from it, but their intensity comes from your human opponents. Yes the gameplay is an important element, but it doesn't grab your imagination in the same way as the games I mentioned above.
Thanks for a reply, sorry if that sounded a bit harsh, but it was just the impression of a casual first exploration.
I guess what I meant by lack of a central plan is that you seem to be working on several different things at the same time, which seems to be a tough road to hoe.
Best of luck, I'll be keeping track. Is there any plan to solicit donations for server maintenance?
I think the entire thing is a fabulous idea. But I've been watching from the sidelines for awhile and it hasn't seemed to go very far. I wish I had the time to help give it a kickstart.
I realize it's a development project and not a finished product, but I think they need to present a more coherent website. There are dozens of projects listed and it's very difficult to understand what one should download and install if one wants to observe their progress.
I would love to see WorldForge succeed, and I might have been a part-time contributor, but there doesn't seem to be any clear direction or central motivation. Ultimately, they're going to need some to make a decent game because MMORPG's are huge productions.
If you ask me which is more likely: that a company with a bad reputation is actually a sleazeball operation, or someone sat down forged megabytes of ascii text icq logs, I'll go with the sleazeball. It's occams razor, plain and simple. Hell, it would be less effort to forge a.jpg of Ted Eckel shooting heroin in a crack house than write all this.
If you want clear and incontrovertible proof, you're going to have to develop some kind of clairsentient abilities, because all evidence can be forged at some level.
While I agree that there is a strong need to be vigilent against the onset of proprietary devices, even they cannot defeat the fundamental market forces. They would have to create a demand for these specialized computers.
Currently, a very significant percentage of us, especially at work, need and want a general purpose computer for word processing, presentations, web authoring, and numerous other critical tasks that simply cannot be done on a some specialized web pad. A general purpose computer is the most efficient way to deal with all of these functions. You can't hand me a webpad or a palm pilot and tell me to write my thesis on it.
I look around at the huge array of companies that provide equipment to the scientific labs and take comfort, because they are operating just fine with a microscopic target market (relative to PC's of course). They have to charge alot more, however, because they can't move as much product.
So I don't think computers like the one I'm typing on will go away soon, but we might be in for a price hike if the market shrinks because a majority of customers (or lawmakers) are convinced that they need proprietary devices.
Imagine working on this beast, even a single mistake would mean a catastrophic fall, probably setting you back months.
So in addition to the increased mass/power supply issues of making a large robot, you can't make mistakes, which compounds the design hassles even further.
I'm guessing this is a last gasp attempt by Napster to prove good faith in the coming lawsuits. Whether it works or not is not important because it will look good on the court transcript regardless.
But if I had to guess, this is going to be very effective in the short term and probably throughout Napster's final days. I'm not about to start going through my files and renaming them just so that other people can download them, nor will I bother running a script or program to do it for me because it's not going to improve the selection of songs I can steal from other people.
Napster worked so well because it put no appreciable burden on the user for sharing his or her files(as long as his pipe was fat). As soon as you add a cost for the average user to share his stuff with the rest of the world, he won't bother if he can still download for free.
I think we're going to be surprised at how well this name filter works.
It's just a news article about a noteworthy development. I don't recall any editorializing bemoaning it's demise.
I'm guessing this is a last gasp attempt by Napster to prove good faith in the coming lawsuits. Whether it works or not is not important because it will look good on the court transcript regardless.
But if I had to guess, this is going to be very effective in the short term and probably throughout Napster's final days. I'm not about to start going through my files and renaming them just so that other people can download them, nor will I bother running a script or program to do it for me because it's not going to improve the selection of songs I can steal from other people.
Napster worked so well because it put no appreciable burden on the user for sharing his or her files(as long as his pipe was fat). As soon as you add a cost for the average user to share his stuff with the rest of the world, he won't bother if he can still download for free.
I think we're going to be surprised at how well this name filter works.
I agree this is a problem, but I disagree that it's a fatal flaw. People could, for example set up local automated scripts(or download bots from TUCOWS) to take care of the pop ups behind the scenes (e.g. they authorize sites X Y and Z automatically). They still have to deal with new sites, but there are still schemes yet to be discovered to deal with these situations with a minimal amount of hassle. And let's look at what we get in return, quality websites. The days of great sites like this arrising from ad revenue are numbered. I'm not saying Slashdot will fail, it's already achieved critical mass. I'm saying the entry cost for web sites is getting large enough that some form of payment will be necessary, and ads won't cut it.
As for flat fees, your point only applies to the United States. I've heard that in other countries Internet access fees are generally per hour. As much as we like to think we're the only part of the world that matters, we're not:)
The author specifically states that the customer authorizes micropayments on a per-merchant, per-time and per-amount basis. If a merchant did this to you, all they would get is the amount you authorized them for, money you were willing to give them anyway. But you're not going to back after they pull this scam, so it's not profitable.
Nice try, but you're going to need a more substantive objection to micropayments than this minor technicality if you wish to convince me of its inadequacy.
They understand and expect that noone will adhere to these guidelines. These rules are an idealistic extreme, written to nudge the general game development community a little bit to the side.
And by the way, I think a great game could be written within these rules, just as a great movie could(and has been) be made with a camcorder.
The true heart of the game is not in its technology. This is their point, and I think they make it well, barring one or two minor aspects I disagree with.
I'm not sure Katz emphasized the critical points
on
Pride Before The Fall
·
· Score: 1
While I haven't read the book, I heard the author today on NPR. He's not claiming that Microsoft is economically finished. Rather, their public image is shattered by the trial, by the facts discussed and by the MS attitude during the whole ordeal. Even a save by the court of appeals won't fix this damage.
Obviously MS is still in control of the OS market, and I think Katz's review is a bit skewed in that he fails to present the author's idea that the public image of MS is what has sustained the real damage.
Slashdot Mirror
The value of this data could theoretically extend far beyond prevention of current attacks. A large body of data on the types and frequency of attacks could potentially lead to statistical analyses allowing predictions of the most common origins of attacks. One could then use this data to inform the development of internet routers and filters to minimize international attacks.
Further, one could do post-hoc correlations of attacks to salient events, yearly cycles, etc. Such data could lead to more accurate predictions of the impacts of same on a company.
In other words, this will be useful for helping to figure out the big picture of how the internet creates and deals with attacks.
My friends first saw MTG at a local con when it first came out. We scoffed at these guys carrying around thousands of cards and called their game a silly thing.
We persisted in our aloof dismissal of Magic as a poser game until I was isolated from the pack for a summer. At that time, another friend had me play a few games with him, and that was it. I took the game back to my friends at school 2 months later and infected them. It spread like smallpox and stayed with us for years.
We're over it now, but every now and then I find someone who plays it and sits down for a game. Lots of fond memories about Magic, and I'm glad I succumbed to it.
Big corporations generally cannot maintain unprofitable and "frivolous" expenditures, no matter how much idealism lies behind the scene.
The bottom line always wins out in the end.
Idealistic eccesses are reserved for the small scale business, like mom & pop stores that tolerate inefficient practices merely because they want to. The reason, I suppose, is that these places are still under the direct control of the person with the idealism.
A coporate entity, on the other hand, gives up its idealism as it places its control in the hands of many people, especially investors, who generally have absolutely no motive other than profit. Maybe that's the next stage in the evolution of our business models, but frankly I doubt it.
Let's remember that we as common stock investors share blame for forcing this mentality on corporations.
Whether the laws to fight crime benefits citizens always depends on the means by which the criminals are sought and prosecuted. If their rights as people are completely trampled in the process, then I would prefer you leave them alone. These criminals may harm me less than a badly written piece of legislation that may cause me to be subject to undue pain should I become an innocent suspect in an investigation, and am consequently denied rights to defend myself.
The ends do not justify the means except in very very very special circumstances, this is a lesson history will teach us again and again until it sinks in.
Now all we need is a matter-reduction ray to shrink down the monitor and we're all set. Sigh.
Name scramblers had to hit the userbase because they require effort from the user. Napster's success hinged on the fact that the music directory was shared *by default*. If the users had had to click a button to share their files, most wouldn't have bothered. It was too much effort for most people to bother turning it off, even though it cost them nothing, and saved their upstream bandwidth.
So now having to download and install a program is required at both ends for this to work? There's no chance this would have worked. As much as a people laughed at name filters as a solution to Napster, it's going to work, at least for the purposes of eliminating a majority of the available music.
But I'm sure Napster knew this, they're the ones who made the directory shared by default. right now they're trying to keep as much of their userbase as they can so that when they switch to a subscription service, their numbers are larger.
If they keep just 10% of their remaining users, it'll still probably be a profitable business.
When I want to find out a piece of mundane information, no matter what it is, 99 times out of 100 I'll be able to find it quickly and easily on the web somewhere. Scroll back 15 years, and what was I doing? going through a card catalog at a library, or hitting an encyclopedia.
Now I'm not saying books have lost their place. One of the dangers is the net is people paying less attention to our paper legacy. But the amount of information on the web is staggering, and it actually isn't all that hard to find what you want, be it a snippet of MATLAB code to do wavelet transforms, a list of roman emporers, or names and reviews of all of Peter Jackson's films. It's in your face in 1-3 minutes. That kind of information turnaround was unthinkable 15 years ago, and its effect on my productivity is profound.
Now the net can hamper productivity as well, by providing easy distractions. But there's only person for me to blame when I allow myself to waste time. I don't blame the automotive industry if I hurt myself in a car wreck.
I think Katz is too cynically dismissive of the positive changes that have occurred as a result of the internet.
Is this a move towards pay-per-use policies on all DVD content? Or is it just an adaptation of a fairly accepted practice in the software industry. Remember that games have long used serial code authentication at online servers.
However those methods are only used when playing online in a multiplayer sense, and not when playing single player. The difference is not trivial, because it means that with these playstation games, if your net connection is out, you can't play *anything*, whereas most computer games always work in single player mode (as good as any game works on a Windows box these days *cough*).
Although maybe parents will applaud this measure, as they might be able to get a package which lets them turn on or off the cable modem, thus controlling exactly when their kids can play.
But for myself and other adults, it's yet another reason to never touch the PS2.
Didn't I just say that we should not worry about creating life in our own image? That life in computer form can be completely alien?
So why is it necessary to stipulate that Alife shouldn't be able to self modify just because *we* can't.
I disagree that we should be taking an approach that simulates life as we know it. Why should we assume that life has to resemble us in any way? The concept of life for a computer is going to be entirely alien. For example, replication, which is a big deal for organic life, is a trivial problem for a computer program.
Making simulations of DNA life with assembly programs that recreate, such as Tierra, and RedCode, are fascinating ways to study alife, but they're not the way to go.
Computer virii are currently the best example of how alife can exist. It would be good however if we could write some good virii. Imagine a series of open source computer virii that self propagate between linux and/or windows boxes and automatically tighten up security loopholes. They fulfill a function on the machine, and in turn are fed CPU time they need to survive and reproduce. So you put a box on the net and within minutes it's self-secured. I know this is a ridiculous pipe dream, just a speculative example of how alife might work.
But to really be considered life, such an organism would need the ability to modify itself in a coherent way.
Now if this author gets into nanobots self replication, I can see why he would be going on about atoms.
Gameplay is more than a fancy choice of weapons and nice graphics which is all that Quake seems to specialize in. Half-life puts you there, from the first instant you start a game on that train ride, you are immersed in another reality. Games like this, System Shock, Fallout, BG and Thief rise above the crowd in creating a world that grips your imagination. System Shock especially could really creep you out. Turn the lights out, and try to survive that level with the invisible slimes. I swear I was actually screaming when they jumped me. Half-life was very similar.
Now I'm not saying FPS games like Quake and Unreal aren't intense and addictive. Far from it, but their intensity comes from your human opponents. Yes the gameplay is an important element, but it doesn't grab your imagination in the same way as the games I mentioned above.
Thanks for a reply, sorry if that sounded a bit harsh, but it was just the impression of a casual first exploration.
I guess what I meant by lack of a central plan is that you seem to be working on several different things at the same time, which seems to be a tough road to hoe.
Best of luck, I'll be keeping track. Is there any plan to solicit donations for server maintenance?
I think the entire thing is a fabulous idea. But I've been watching from the sidelines for awhile and it hasn't seemed to go very far. I wish I had the time to help give it a kickstart.
I realize it's a development project and not a finished product, but I think they need to present a more coherent website. There are dozens of projects listed and it's very difficult to understand what one should download and install if one wants to observe their progress.
I would love to see WorldForge succeed, and I might have been a part-time contributor, but there doesn't seem to be any clear direction or central motivation. Ultimately, they're going to need some to make a decent game because MMORPG's are huge productions.
If you ask me which is more likely: that a company with a bad reputation is actually a sleazeball operation, or someone sat down forged megabytes of ascii text icq logs, I'll go with the sleazeball. It's occams razor, plain and simple. Hell, it would be less effort to forge a .jpg of Ted Eckel shooting heroin in a crack house than write all this.
If you want clear and incontrovertible proof, you're going to have to develop some kind of clairsentient abilities, because all evidence can be forged at some level.
While I agree that there is a strong need to be vigilent against the onset of proprietary devices, even they cannot defeat the fundamental market forces. They would have to create a demand for these specialized computers.
Currently, a very significant percentage of us, especially at work, need and want a general purpose computer for word processing, presentations, web authoring, and numerous other critical tasks that simply cannot be done on a some specialized web pad. A general purpose computer is the most efficient way to deal with all of these functions. You can't hand me a webpad or a palm pilot and tell me to write my thesis on it.
I look around at the huge array of companies that provide equipment to the scientific labs and take comfort, because they are operating just fine with a microscopic target market (relative to PC's of course). They have to charge alot more, however, because they can't move as much product.
So I don't think computers like the one I'm typing on will go away soon, but we might be in for a price hike if the market shrinks because a majority of customers (or lawmakers) are convinced that they need proprietary devices.
Imagine working on this beast, even a single mistake would mean a catastrophic fall, probably setting you back months.
So in addition to the increased mass/power supply issues of making a large robot, you can't make mistakes, which compounds the design hassles even further.
I'm guessing this is a last gasp attempt by Napster to prove good faith in the coming lawsuits. Whether it works or not is not important because it will look good on the court transcript regardless.
But if I had to guess, this is going to be very effective in the short term and probably throughout Napster's final days. I'm not about to start going through my files and renaming them just so that other people can download them, nor will I bother running a script or program to do it for me because it's not going to improve the selection of songs I can steal from other people.
Napster worked so well because it put no appreciable burden on the user for sharing his or her files(as long as his pipe was fat). As soon as you add a cost for the average user to share his stuff with the rest of the world, he won't bother if he can still download for free.
I think we're going to be surprised at how well this name filter works.
It's just a news article about a noteworthy development. I don't recall any editorializing bemoaning it's demise.
I'm guessing this is a last gasp attempt by Napster to prove good faith in the coming lawsuits. Whether it works or not is not important because it will look good on the court transcript regardless.
But if I had to guess, this is going to be very effective in the short term and probably throughout Napster's final days. I'm not about to start going through my files and renaming them just so that other people can download them, nor will I bother running a script or program to do it for me because it's not going to improve the selection of songs I can steal from other people.
Napster worked so well because it put no appreciable burden on the user for sharing his or her files(as long as his pipe was fat). As soon as you add a cost for the average user to share his stuff with the rest of the world, he won't bother if he can still download for free.
I think we're going to be surprised at how well this name filter works.
Without articles like this, we wouldn't know when to jump onboard for one last orgy of downloads. :)
Telnet, and non anonymous ftp. The new world would be a harsh and desolate landscape... for script kiddies.
I agree this is a problem, but I disagree that it's a fatal flaw. People could, for example set up local automated scripts(or download bots from TUCOWS) to take care of the pop ups behind the scenes (e.g. they authorize sites X Y and Z automatically). They still have to deal with new sites, but there are still schemes yet to be discovered to deal with these situations with a minimal amount of hassle. And let's look at what we get in return, quality websites. The days of great sites like this arrising from ad revenue are numbered. I'm not saying Slashdot will fail, it's already achieved critical mass. I'm saying the entry cost for web sites is getting large enough that some form of payment will be necessary, and ads won't cut it.
:)
As for flat fees, your point only applies to the United States. I've heard that in other countries Internet access fees are generally per hour. As much as we like to think we're the only part of the world that matters, we're not
The author specifically states that the customer authorizes micropayments on a per-merchant, per-time and per-amount basis. If a merchant did this to you, all they would get is the amount you authorized them for, money you were willing to give them anyway. But you're not going to back after they pull this scam, so it's not profitable.
Nice try, but you're going to need a more substantive objection to micropayments than this minor technicality if you wish to convince me of its inadequacy.
They understand and expect that noone will adhere to these guidelines. These rules are an idealistic extreme, written to nudge the general game development community a little bit to the side.
And by the way, I think a great game could be written within these rules, just as a great movie could(and has been) be made with a camcorder.
The true heart of the game is not in its technology. This is their point, and I think they make it well, barring one or two minor aspects I disagree with.
While I haven't read the book, I heard the author today on NPR. He's not claiming that Microsoft is economically finished. Rather, their public image is shattered by the trial, by the facts discussed and by the MS attitude during the whole ordeal. Even a save by the court of appeals won't fix this damage.
Obviously MS is still in control of the OS market, and I think Katz's review is a bit skewed in that he fails to present the author's idea that the public image of MS is what has sustained the real damage.