The same way that Google caught Bing ripping off search results a while ago: find some idiosyncratic behaviors (e.g. bugs) that serve no practical purpose and are highly unlikely to end up in two independent projects, and demonstrate the same weirdness in each.
Aquaria is awesome. Proof that it doesn't take a big studio to create a beautiful, deep, consistently engaging game. I think there are Linux and Mac ports of it, too.
Anyone else notice that most of the words end in E? That seems likely to mean something.
According to the biographical details, the guy was "street smart" but lacked formal education. Based on his very white-sounding name, it's a good bet that he didn't speak any exotic foreign languages, or have access to the mathematical techniques that cryptanalysts are trained to look for. Seems like pretty good rationale for releasing it to the public—clever people with no formal training might actually be better at solving this kind of thing.
Of course, it could all be in some crazy, made-up language that existed only in the guy's head. And even if it's not, it could just as easily be a grocery list. But there's enough numeric data in there that if I were tasked with solving this case, I'd be intrigued, too. Hell, I'm intrigued anyway.
Wait, so they have a copy of something that was designed to replicate itself and is known to have spread to literally hundreds of thousands of unsecured machines? And they have a binary copy of it? I'm going to write the rest of this post from my bomb shelter.
The media talk about Anonymous like it's some shadowy terrorist super-villain collective, but that's really missing the point. Anonymous is, at its core, the world's most prolific troll. Look at the sites they attacked in the whole WikiLeaks affair. Visa.com and MasterCard.com? It's obvious to anyone with a clue that these are symbolic targets. If they'd had the desire (and arguably the capability) to inflict real damage, they'd have gone after the payment processing infrastructure instead. But their goal isn't to break stuff. It's to do something relatively inconsequential, and see how many media organizations they can get to shit their pants over it.
This is (roughly) the same group whose crowning achievement was getting Oprah to say "over 9000 penises" on national TV. Even if they have the capability to inflict real damage—and some members clearly do—they seem to be more interested in getting attention and playing the media for complete fools. Which is way more entertaining than indiscriminately wreaking havoc on the world.
And that's the bottom line. Everything they do is for entertainment value. Because they're not terrorists; they're trolls.
Yeah, we certainly don't want any dirty tricks or shenanigans corrupting our pristine, well-intentioned, incredibly effective political system. Especially on the Republican side.
Is paying for a game practically immoral? Almost, as you are supporting sharecropping.
This is an incredibly arrogant point of view. Just because someone doesn't create content for a living doesn't mean that they're not contributing to a project. In private industry, positions that don't add value to a product tend not to exist for very long.
To use your game development example, I'm assuming you're referring to publishers who fund projects that are developed externally. It's tempting to portray publishing firms as oppressive fat cats working poor, oppressed developers to death, but the fact of the matter is that they play an important role in the process. If development houses could bankroll their own projects and shoulder the risks involved in funding a game without involving a publisher, they would. And most publishers contribute a hell of a lot more than money.
Businesspeople are, by and large, not slavers. Even the highly-compensated ones--especially the highly-compensated ones--generate value commensurate with their paychecks. If they didn't, they wouldn't be receiving those checks for very long. I'm not saying there aren't exceptions, but not having technical skills doesn't preclude one from doing "real work."
(And before you ask, yes, I write code for a living.)
I got a HoN beta key a few months ago and played for a month or two. Based on my impressions, the OP is spot-on in his observations about the community. It's actually most of the reason I don't play anymore.
To put this in context, I led a fairly hardcore WoW raiding guild for a couple of years, and played Magic Online semi-seriously for a while. I have a pretty thick skin. I'm very familiar with the concepts of nerd rage and sexual frustration made manifest over the Internet. It's worse in HoN than anywhere else I've seen it. The game's lack of a proper matchmaking system is partially to blame, but as the OP said, a lot of it does fall on the community.
For people who have never played HoN, it's a very complex game. There are almost a hundred characters to choose from, each with a unique set of stats and abilities. Compounding this, there are dozens of different items that you can purchase over the course of a game, and each character has its own "build order"--what the community considers to be the optimal strategy for playing a given character. Learning this for even a handful of characters is a massive undertaking, but many types of matches don't let you choose which character you'll end up playing, or even restrict the options that much. The rules of the game also very heavily punish a team for having one sub-par member--if your opponents figure out where you're weak and exploit it successfully, the balance of the game will tip very quickly.
The result of all this is that the game heavily rewards people who spend the time to learn it, and by the same token, severely punishes people who haven't invested that level of commitment. Which is great if you think HoN is your life's calling. But for those of us who play casually, well, you can only have your sexual orientation questioned in Portuguese so many times before you decide there are more constructive things you could be doing with your free time.
Long story short: HoN's community is unusually hardcore and unfriendly, and will certainly be an impediment to the game's mainstream adoption if certain issues are not addressed.
I'd imagine he only encouraged you to break into systems within the department. If he told you otherwise, he was probably exceeding his authority.
It's one thing to let students screw around on servers within the engineering department, and entirely another to let them loose upon the campus at large. As a previous poster mentioned, he had access to personal e-mail, credit card numbers, and magnetic door access keys. Rape is fairly common on college campuses; any staff that turned a blind eye to some nitwit playing with dorm keys would be ignoring their responsibility to provide a safe living environment for students.
All that aside, students at your school had permission. This guy didn't. And it's not like his methods were all that innovative or sophisticated. Any 14-year old can install a keylogger and mine the results.
Fun isn't the right word.
I was addicted to WoW for a long time, and while the game starts out fun, by the time I was raiding seven nights a week (five nights on mains; two alt nights on weekends), it wasn't usually any fun at all. What drives people to keep playing, in my opinion, is a complex and unending stream of carrots and sticks. I've heard guildmates say hundreds of times, "I just need that last piece of gear, and then I can quit happily," or "once this last boss goes down, I'm done with this game."
But WoW is set up in a way that that seldom happens. You just can't acquire loot fast enough to be "done." (Raid bosses are generally once-a-week deals.) There's always something else on the horizon, and just before you can get that last piece of Tier X armor or whatever, a whole new dungeon is released with more purple pixels to acquire. This grind is bad enough on a single character, but most WoW junkies I know maintain several. There's always something to waste your life doing in that game.
I think that's the crux of most WoW addictions: that phantom sense of accomplishment. The feeling that you've done something to progress your character over the course of that night. To most reasonable outside observers, the whole thing seems insane--and it is--but it's that sense that you're doing something with lasting effect that seems to keep most people coming back.
It's not the fans that make the difference; it's their incredibly deep pockets that let them fund additional years of development with no finished product.
I think that in general, games do sell systems. However, most systems are essentially the same--power and price are the only real variables. Wii is conceptually different. People don't buy Wii for the games; they buy it for the gimmick. But other systems still sell on the strength of their game libraries.
This should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone. The WSVG was insultingly dumbed-down and content-free ("Wow! Was that an ice block?!?"). I'm a semi-serious WoW player, and my friends and I all found their arena coverage to be completely devoid of any meaningful content. I realize that their aim was to attract a wider range of viewers, but "normal people" don't give a rat's ass about competitive videogaming (and probably never will in the US), and people who do care would probably prefer coverage and analysis from people who have actually played the games before.
Just look at the judging methodology for the Guitar Hero competition: ten points each for style, technical correctness and difficulty, each determined by a single judge. Two of the three judges were D-list celebrities who had probably never even played Guitar Hero. The extensive statistics provided by the game after each song were completely ignored in the decision process. The whole thing was structured much more like an episode of Nickelodeon GUTS than a serious competition designed to determine the best player.
The 2:1 commercial-to-programming ratio couldn't have helped, either.
In short, the whole thing was a commercially oversaturated, content-starved mess; I'd like back the hour of my life that I spent watching it, and no one will be the least bit sad to see it go.
The fact that you got worked up enough to write a long rebuttal to a completely offhand claim that the iPhone's surface is not sufficiently scratch-resistant says pretty much everything I possibly could. Especially if you're not on Apple's payroll.
The state of the US mobile phone market is borderline exploitative. I didn't even realize anyone had a dissenting opinion on that. We pay more--and get less for it--than any other developed country in the world. The reality, unfortunately, seems to be that the free market isn't so good at solving problems in sectors with a billion-dollar cost of entry. But anyway...
As for the buttons, you don't have conversations with your geek friends wherein you evaluate new products on their technical merits? And if you don't, then what makes you think you know more about it than the rest of us?
The cost of my phone's zero-movie storage capacity cost me a whopping sum of zero dollars. It's hard to put an exact price on the iPhone's movie playback capabilities, but suffice it to say it's probably significantly more than that.
Finally, I'd like to point out two things: First, that anyone who dissects a Slashdot post into ten blockquotes and responds to each fragment individually has no right to claim lack of time as a restriction for anything. Second, that dropping phrases like "rectangle blitting components" into your posts isn't fooling anybody who actually knows what those words mean into thinking you know what you're talking about.
This is really not much different than officers looking at plats normally, just more efficient.
No, it's not all that different. But I'd argue that the efficiency makes a major difference.
Have you read a lot of the laws in effect where you live? I'll bet there are tons of them, and it's likely that you break a lot every day. This generally isn't a problem, because they can't all possibly be enforced. There aren't enough policemen to stand at every corner and fine everyone with an out-of-date inspection sticker, or bust everyone who goes 1 MPH over the speed limit. A lot of the laws we view as completely innocuous will become extremely intrusive if they can be mechanically enforced.
Do you really want to live in a world where everything you do is monitored? Traffic watching and public surveillance cameras are only the first step; it could get much, much worse from there. I'm not suggesting that we're necessarily headed for some kind of dystopic Orwellian future, but we need to acknowledge that, for the first time, such a thing will soon be technologically feasible. And provided that the development of technology goes on unimpeded, there will be some hard questions to answer. Because unless there are legal restrictions imposed on some of this activity, we could be headed for a bona fide police state.
Your post would probably be a lot more coherent if you could manage to stop making out with your iPhone for a few minutes while you typed.
Before I get into an iPhone rant, let me just point out that the article isn't even about the iPhone. It's about the poor selection and ridiculous rates imposed on us by major wireless carriers in the US. (Somehow saying "everyone should just get an iPhone" rebuts that?) And it's absolutely true. Please explain to me why I should have to pay orders of magnitude more to send a 20-character text message than I do to make a minute-long call. Or why Verizon et. al. can get away with locking out most of the functionality in every handset they sell, only to resell those functions in diluted form for a monthly fee. It probably comes down to an apathetic consumer movement or some sort of collusion among the major providers or something like that. But anyway, about your hot, sweaty romance with the iPhone...
The only person I know of who thinks removing buttons from user interfaces is a good idea is Steve Jobs. Personally, I like tactile feedback. Maybe it doesn't appeal to your minimalist aesthetic tastes, but I can dial my Samsung A690 in the car without causing a major traffic accident.
I also care a great deal about vendor lock-in. I'm stuck with a large collection of iTMS songs that I flat-out can't use, because the Vista 64 implementation of iTunes is so poorly written that just playing a song drags the whole system to a crawl.
I also have yet to talk to anyone I respect who thinks people will be lining up in droves to develop web apps for iPhone. And wow, it runs OS X. What, exactly, does that get you? Especially in exchange for the multi-gig OS image that effectively renders the thing incapable of storing more than one movie at a time?
I'm glad you like your iPhone. But it doesn't mean the rest of us are stupid for not being impressed with an overpriced, underfeatured toy that can't do several things my four-year old Samsung can do. (Voice recognition? How can a phone without buttons not have voice recognition? That doesn't strike anyone else as incredibly stupid?) I'm much more impressed with people that evaluate products on their merits, and not on the brand stamped on the back.
Oh, and enjoy your $2,000 Cingular contract. If that exclusive deal wasn't a poison pill that drove hundreds of thousands of potential customers away, I don't know what is.
Slashdot Mirror
The same way that Google caught Bing ripping off search results a while ago: find some idiosyncratic behaviors (e.g. bugs) that serve no practical purpose and are highly unlikely to end up in two independent projects, and demonstrate the same weirdness in each.
Aquaria is awesome. Proof that it doesn't take a big studio to create a beautiful, deep, consistently engaging game. I think there are Linux and Mac ports of it, too.
What's the big deal? It sounds like a simple security breach at someone's combination midget zoo/aerospace museum.
Anyone else notice that most of the words end in E? That seems likely to mean something.
According to the biographical details, the guy was "street smart" but lacked formal education. Based on his very white-sounding name, it's a good bet that he didn't speak any exotic foreign languages, or have access to the mathematical techniques that cryptanalysts are trained to look for. Seems like pretty good rationale for releasing it to the public—clever people with no formal training might actually be better at solving this kind of thing.
Of course, it could all be in some crazy, made-up language that existed only in the guy's head. And even if it's not, it could just as easily be a grocery list. But there's enough numeric data in there that if I were tasked with solving this case, I'd be intrigued, too. Hell, I'm intrigued anyway.
And I'm going to have sex with Natalie Portman tonight.
There, now that's been predicted, too. Now it's practically guaranteed to happen.
Wait, so they have a copy of something that was designed to replicate itself and is known to have spread to literally hundreds of thousands of unsecured machines? And they have a binary copy of it? I'm going to write the rest of this post from my bomb shelter.
The media talk about Anonymous like it's some shadowy terrorist super-villain collective, but that's really missing the point. Anonymous is, at its core, the world's most prolific troll. Look at the sites they attacked in the whole WikiLeaks affair. Visa.com and MasterCard.com? It's obvious to anyone with a clue that these are symbolic targets. If they'd had the desire (and arguably the capability) to inflict real damage, they'd have gone after the payment processing infrastructure instead. But their goal isn't to break stuff. It's to do something relatively inconsequential, and see how many media organizations they can get to shit their pants over it.
This is (roughly) the same group whose crowning achievement was getting Oprah to say "over 9000 penises" on national TV. Even if they have the capability to inflict real damage—and some members clearly do—they seem to be more interested in getting attention and playing the media for complete fools. Which is way more entertaining than indiscriminately wreaking havoc on the world.
And that's the bottom line. Everything they do is for entertainment value. Because they're not terrorists; they're trolls.
Hotmail has had accounts you can throw away for years. Just ask every porn site I've ever signed up for.
If you wanted to do something productive, you certainly wouldn't be in the comments section. :p
Yeah, we certainly don't want any dirty tricks or shenanigans corrupting our pristine, well-intentioned, incredibly effective political system. Especially on the Republican side.
...to elect a career Republican. :p
PS3's security might be dead, but it was effective for a hell of a lot longer than the "EPIC FAIL" meme was funny.
This is an incredibly arrogant point of view. Just because someone doesn't create content for a living doesn't mean that they're not contributing to a project. In private industry, positions that don't add value to a product tend not to exist for very long.
To use your game development example, I'm assuming you're referring to publishers who fund projects that are developed externally. It's tempting to portray publishing firms as oppressive fat cats working poor, oppressed developers to death, but the fact of the matter is that they play an important role in the process. If development houses could bankroll their own projects and shoulder the risks involved in funding a game without involving a publisher, they would. And most publishers contribute a hell of a lot more than money.
Businesspeople are, by and large, not slavers. Even the highly-compensated ones--especially the highly-compensated ones--generate value commensurate with their paychecks. If they didn't, they wouldn't be receiving those checks for very long. I'm not saying there aren't exceptions, but not having technical skills doesn't preclude one from doing "real work."
(And before you ask, yes, I write code for a living.)
I got a HoN beta key a few months ago and played for a month or two. Based on my impressions, the OP is spot-on in his observations about the community. It's actually most of the reason I don't play anymore.
To put this in context, I led a fairly hardcore WoW raiding guild for a couple of years, and played Magic Online semi-seriously for a while. I have a pretty thick skin. I'm very familiar with the concepts of nerd rage and sexual frustration made manifest over the Internet. It's worse in HoN than anywhere else I've seen it. The game's lack of a proper matchmaking system is partially to blame, but as the OP said, a lot of it does fall on the community.
For people who have never played HoN, it's a very complex game. There are almost a hundred characters to choose from, each with a unique set of stats and abilities. Compounding this, there are dozens of different items that you can purchase over the course of a game, and each character has its own "build order"--what the community considers to be the optimal strategy for playing a given character. Learning this for even a handful of characters is a massive undertaking, but many types of matches don't let you choose which character you'll end up playing, or even restrict the options that much. The rules of the game also very heavily punish a team for having one sub-par member--if your opponents figure out where you're weak and exploit it successfully, the balance of the game will tip very quickly.
The result of all this is that the game heavily rewards people who spend the time to learn it, and by the same token, severely punishes people who haven't invested that level of commitment. Which is great if you think HoN is your life's calling. But for those of us who play casually, well, you can only have your sexual orientation questioned in Portuguese so many times before you decide there are more constructive things you could be doing with your free time.
Long story short: HoN's community is unusually hardcore and unfriendly, and will certainly be an impediment to the game's mainstream adoption if certain issues are not addressed.
The only way to beat World of Warcraft is to quit. Forever.
Or it could have been, you know, a joke about the poor quality of the food served at those fine establishments.
I'd imagine he only encouraged you to break into systems within the department. If he told you otherwise, he was probably exceeding his authority.
It's one thing to let students screw around on servers within the engineering department, and entirely another to let them loose upon the campus at large. As a previous poster mentioned, he had access to personal e-mail, credit card numbers, and magnetic door access keys. Rape is fairly common on college campuses; any staff that turned a blind eye to some nitwit playing with dorm keys would be ignoring their responsibility to provide a safe living environment for students.
All that aside, students at your school had permission. This guy didn't. And it's not like his methods were all that innovative or sophisticated. Any 14-year old can install a keylogger and mine the results.
Fun isn't the right word. I was addicted to WoW for a long time, and while the game starts out fun, by the time I was raiding seven nights a week (five nights on mains; two alt nights on weekends), it wasn't usually any fun at all. What drives people to keep playing, in my opinion, is a complex and unending stream of carrots and sticks. I've heard guildmates say hundreds of times, "I just need that last piece of gear, and then I can quit happily," or "once this last boss goes down, I'm done with this game." But WoW is set up in a way that that seldom happens. You just can't acquire loot fast enough to be "done." (Raid bosses are generally once-a-week deals.) There's always something else on the horizon, and just before you can get that last piece of Tier X armor or whatever, a whole new dungeon is released with more purple pixels to acquire. This grind is bad enough on a single character, but most WoW junkies I know maintain several. There's always something to waste your life doing in that game. I think that's the crux of most WoW addictions: that phantom sense of accomplishment. The feeling that you've done something to progress your character over the course of that night. To most reasonable outside observers, the whole thing seems insane--and it is--but it's that sense that you're doing something with lasting effect that seems to keep most people coming back.
Enhancement and ret are both fairly playable in arena if you don't suck, and desirable in raids.
It's not the fans that make the difference; it's their incredibly deep pockets that let them fund additional years of development with no finished product.
Yeah, that's what the IT department is for. Strategic advantage. Not to, like, make the stuff work or anything like that.
I think that in general, games do sell systems. However, most systems are essentially the same--power and price are the only real variables. Wii is conceptually different. People don't buy Wii for the games; they buy it for the gimmick. But other systems still sell on the strength of their game libraries.
This should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone. The WSVG was insultingly dumbed-down and content-free ("Wow! Was that an ice block?!?"). I'm a semi-serious WoW player, and my friends and I all found their arena coverage to be completely devoid of any meaningful content. I realize that their aim was to attract a wider range of viewers, but "normal people" don't give a rat's ass about competitive videogaming (and probably never will in the US), and people who do care would probably prefer coverage and analysis from people who have actually played the games before.
Just look at the judging methodology for the Guitar Hero competition: ten points each for style, technical correctness and difficulty, each determined by a single judge. Two of the three judges were D-list celebrities who had probably never even played Guitar Hero. The extensive statistics provided by the game after each song were completely ignored in the decision process. The whole thing was structured much more like an episode of Nickelodeon GUTS than a serious competition designed to determine the best player.
The 2:1 commercial-to-programming ratio couldn't have helped, either.
In short, the whole thing was a commercially oversaturated, content-starved mess; I'd like back the hour of my life that I spent watching it, and no one will be the least bit sad to see it go.
The fact that you got worked up enough to write a long rebuttal to a completely offhand claim that the iPhone's surface is not sufficiently scratch-resistant says pretty much everything I possibly could. Especially if you're not on Apple's payroll.
The state of the US mobile phone market is borderline exploitative. I didn't even realize anyone had a dissenting opinion on that. We pay more--and get less for it--than any other developed country in the world. The reality, unfortunately, seems to be that the free market isn't so good at solving problems in sectors with a billion-dollar cost of entry. But anyway...
As for the buttons, you don't have conversations with your geek friends wherein you evaluate new products on their technical merits? And if you don't, then what makes you think you know more about it than the rest of us?
The cost of my phone's zero-movie storage capacity cost me a whopping sum of zero dollars. It's hard to put an exact price on the iPhone's movie playback capabilities, but suffice it to say it's probably significantly more than that.
Finally, I'd like to point out two things: First, that anyone who dissects a Slashdot post into ten blockquotes and responds to each fragment individually has no right to claim lack of time as a restriction for anything. Second, that dropping phrases like "rectangle blitting components" into your posts isn't fooling anybody who actually knows what those words mean into thinking you know what you're talking about.
No, it's not all that different. But I'd argue that the efficiency makes a major difference.
Have you read a lot of the laws in effect where you live? I'll bet there are tons of them, and it's likely that you break a lot every day. This generally isn't a problem, because they can't all possibly be enforced. There aren't enough policemen to stand at every corner and fine everyone with an out-of-date inspection sticker, or bust everyone who goes 1 MPH over the speed limit. A lot of the laws we view as completely innocuous will become extremely intrusive if they can be mechanically enforced.
Do you really want to live in a world where everything you do is monitored? Traffic watching and public surveillance cameras are only the first step; it could get much, much worse from there. I'm not suggesting that we're necessarily headed for some kind of dystopic Orwellian future, but we need to acknowledge that, for the first time, such a thing will soon be technologically feasible. And provided that the development of technology goes on unimpeded, there will be some hard questions to answer. Because unless there are legal restrictions imposed on some of this activity, we could be headed for a bona fide police state.
Your post would probably be a lot more coherent if you could manage to stop making out with your iPhone for a few minutes while you typed.
Before I get into an iPhone rant, let me just point out that the article isn't even about the iPhone. It's about the poor selection and ridiculous rates imposed on us by major wireless carriers in the US. (Somehow saying "everyone should just get an iPhone" rebuts that?) And it's absolutely true. Please explain to me why I should have to pay orders of magnitude more to send a 20-character text message than I do to make a minute-long call. Or why Verizon et. al. can get away with locking out most of the functionality in every handset they sell, only to resell those functions in diluted form for a monthly fee. It probably comes down to an apathetic consumer movement or some sort of collusion among the major providers or something like that. But anyway, about your hot, sweaty romance with the iPhone...
The only person I know of who thinks removing buttons from user interfaces is a good idea is Steve Jobs. Personally, I like tactile feedback. Maybe it doesn't appeal to your minimalist aesthetic tastes, but I can dial my Samsung A690 in the car without causing a major traffic accident.
I also care a great deal about vendor lock-in. I'm stuck with a large collection of iTMS songs that I flat-out can't use, because the Vista 64 implementation of iTunes is so poorly written that just playing a song drags the whole system to a crawl.
I also have yet to talk to anyone I respect who thinks people will be lining up in droves to develop web apps for iPhone. And wow, it runs OS X. What, exactly, does that get you? Especially in exchange for the multi-gig OS image that effectively renders the thing incapable of storing more than one movie at a time?
I'm glad you like your iPhone. But it doesn't mean the rest of us are stupid for not being impressed with an overpriced, underfeatured toy that can't do several things my four-year old Samsung can do. (Voice recognition? How can a phone without buttons not have voice recognition? That doesn't strike anyone else as incredibly stupid?) I'm much more impressed with people that evaluate products on their merits, and not on the brand stamped on the back.
Oh, and enjoy your $2,000 Cingular contract. If that exclusive deal wasn't a poison pill that drove hundreds of thousands of potential customers away, I don't know what is.