The problem is for "everyone can see the source" to work you need to have a guarantee that they are all looking at the same code. In this case I guess all the developers where looking at their CVS trees, while average Joe was just downloading and compiling the backdoored tarball. To stop this kind of problem from happening you would need to secure the source code via GPG signatures and make sure that users actually check those signatures. The first thing is what they are now doing and what many other projects do, the second part would however require that we stop using tar or at least wrapper it up to make the signature check an automatic thing of the extraction process. As long as the GPG check is thing that you need to take care of manually, most people will just never do it.
Followed by a few hours of search for the newest drivers and another few hours of search for the apps you want to use and another few hours to get all your games patched up to the current revision. Getting Windows to work from scratch takes ages, especially when you use anything that a is a bit non-mainstream.
Now given, Linux avoids the game patching problem mostly by not having games, but getting all the apps you want to run is a hell of a lot easier when you can just do "apt-get install " instead of googling around.
You had civilians that went into a war zone still engaged in combat without letting anyone know they were there.
Except that there was no war zone. You can see civilians all over the place in that video, you can even see a women and child walk right by after the heli shoot up the van (12:10, full length video). There was a bit of gunfire an hour earlier, but that didn't really seem to bother any of the civilians. Also none of the people acted like being in combat. If I'd go to war, I take a gun with me, a large number of people in that group clearly didn't.
So saying that there was a lack of effort to minimize civilian casualties really doesn't come close to the reality of the situation.
Quite the opposite, it hits the reality of the situation spot on. The video doesn't show a crazy helicopter gunner shooting random civilians, it shows a gunner that follows normal procedure and shoots up people without ever having clear indication that those people where insurgence, he even ask for permission to engage and gets it without problem. If the military has to shoot up ten civilians to keep one of its own soldiers out of danger it will do so, thats the reality of the situation.
And don't get me started on the whole issue with the US having started the war for no reason whatsoever, they are responsible for each and every civilian that they kill. I can't break into your house, kill you and then claim I did it in self defense cause you had a gun. Makes no sense in the small scale, makes even less sense in the large one, but that is exactly the bullshit justification with which the military is getting away.
The group in the van were grabbing bodies AND weapons, they are part of the conflict.
Except of course that this is a simple lie, they never did pick up weapons, they weren't even near them (weapons where by the dead dudes at the corner, not the guy crawling to the left.).
The kids, they are dead because their parents brought them to war.
The kids survived, which is even mentioned in the video. Also I would like to see that video where the van is dropping off the the men, as that neither happens in the commented version nor in the unedited one.
Yeah, except that same helicopter (same day, before the 17min Collateral Murder vid) crew DIDN'T fire when children and other noncombatants were present
And that makes firing on a van full of civilians ok exactly how?
The problem with the sprite was that it was 2D with skeletal animation, which naturally ends up looking like a jumping jack. Alternatives would have been full 3D sprites or lots and lots of hand drawn animations, both much more complicated to do then what it did use.
If Yahoo tells you up front what you're signing up for when you use their service,
The whole point is that they didn't tell you upfront. It is a feature that they introduced to a service that has been running for years and now they take your data that was never ever meant to go public and publish it without your consent (and no, the ability to opt-out is not consent).
That aside I have yet to see a single service that actually makes it clear what data you automatically publish online, it might be explained somewhere in the TOS or in the preferences or in the help menu or whatever, but its never obvious as in "If you click Ok this will be visible to those people".
Configuring the security settings is a big deal, as it means the whole thing is opt-out, not opt-in, which in turn means that lots of people will end up sharing data that they don't want to share. What is especially stupid is sharing data with all people in your address book, that is not the place to look for trustworthy friends, that's just a place for people you have had contact with.
To do this on-network isn't easy. You would need to gradually zero in on a node with the key via a "key search attack"
You are not thinking like law enforcement. Law enforcement doesn't care much about the originator, all they care about is to capture somebody in the network chain and that is really trivial. Just download CP and look who forwarded you the datapackage, get his IP and sue him.
Darknet is more tricky, but if they really would care about it, they just install a bit statistic software at the ISP to detect people whose traffic signature looks like Freenet. Also a Darknet is near impossible to actually create in the first place, unless you already have a trusted social network you can build on and if you have that, you could just use rapidshare with passworded files.
However, in a democracy they wouldn't have probable cause to do that
I don't think they care. In Germany somebody was just declared guilty of music piracy on his open WLAN, even so he was on vacation, his WLAN had a random password and was probably even switched off. It just doesn't matter much who commited the crime as long as it happenes over your IP connection or somebody claims that it happens over your IP (IP addresses aren't all that reliable to begin with).
They don't have to access your disk to figure out that you distributed child porn, they just have to download child porn from Freenet and then prosecute every Freenet node that submitted a chunk of the final file. I seriously doubt that they will make much of a difference between you forwarding a chunk and you storing the chunk in your datastore, as both happen automatically and are not in your control.
So has anybody actually tested Freenet or any other caching anonymous style app in court?
No, but open WLANs have been tested in German court recently, not in relation to child porn, just music piracy, but the verdict was that you are basically always guilty for stuff that goes over your connection, even if you never intended to have an open WLAN and it only happened by accident or break-in.
I've looked at the source for other games and they all seemed to share such "features".
Its is just a part of doing good game design with limited time. When you could spend days coding a clean framework to integrate the special feature you want in level 15 or just a few minutes to hack it into the code, the choice is not that difficult to make. Sure its not good practice, but it doesn't really do harm either, as game specific code isn't meant to be reused and there is no value gain in coding a data driven framework for a feature that is used exactly once in the whole game.
Its kind of like complaining that a movie set looks only good from one side, while from the other side its clear that its just painted plywood and styropor. It just doesn't matter for a game to have pretty code, when the actual game itself is good. And from those games I have seen, the good ones end up having a little ugly code, while the ones with the good code hang around in some sourceforge repository and never get stuff done.
There are many things that like acupuncture that have been used medicinally for centuries.
Just because something is old, doesn't mean it works. There are plenty of old treatments that are either useless or even harmful. Which is why testing is the important part, you can't trust anecdotes, even if they have a long tradition.
Just because we may not, at the time, understand any underlying mechanisms doesn't mean that they don't work;
The issue isn't so much that we don't understand the underlying mechanism, but that we don't even have a clear indication that it works in the first place and you don't need to understand the workings of something to do the testing for its effectiveness.
Again, this isn't really true. The game itself may only get a few patches, but most of the time the engine is reused.
That is true for modern 3D games, it is not true for the indie 2D game we are talking about here. In those games there really isn't all that much that you can recycle. The low level stuff that can be reused is already handled by SDL, OpenGL and other libraries and the higher level stuff very quickly becomes game specific and thus isn't much good for recycling.
Or you might end up open sourcing it.
The main point of open sourcing a game like this is for future compatibility, not so much for modifications on the core game itself.
The difference between a game and business software is that a game is done after the release. There is no version 2.0 that needs new features, maintenance and stuff, instead you start more or less from scratch with the next game. It just doesn't make economic sense to write the best highly maintainable code when you already know you know you will never touch it again. And with a small game like this you don't have new team members jumping in either, so as long as the developers are fine with it, there really is no problem.
Now that of course doesn't make the code pretty, but when the choice is between implementing a new user visible game feature or spending time refactoring the code, time is quite often better spend working on the new user visible feature, as no user will ever care about the quality of the source code.
Magazin publishers don't publish on Wii, Xbox360 or PS3, they however do publish on the iPad. So its only natural that they actually care about the platforms they use and don't care about those they don't use.
Violent video games can be rated, indexed and completly banned in Germany. When they just get rated, an 18+ sticker gets onto the box and sales to minors is forbidden (somewhat similar to M rating). When they get indexed, it is also forbidden to do advertisment or public sales of those games (i.e. no more buying them at amazon.de), you are still allowed in theory to purcase them under the counter, in practice however Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo won't even publish those games in Germany, so you have to import them (similar to the effects of AO rating). The last stage is completly banning a game, it doesn't happen often, but it does happen (i.e. Dead Rising), then even the sale is forbidden.
Another difference is that the rating system is enforced by the state, while in the US its just the cooperation that do the enforcement of ESRB stuff.
Germans tolerate nudity, not porn. When you want to publish a pornographic webpage in Germany you have to jump to quite some hoops to not get into conflict with the law, a simple age-gate isn't enough here.
Nudity on the other side is pretty much a non-issue, you see naked people on public TV quite frequently and even in advertisment.
Some people care about creating beautiful games, other care about creating beautiful code. The former end up shipping a good game, the later kind never gets stuff done.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is for "everyone can see the source" to work you need to have a guarantee that they are all looking at the same code. In this case I guess all the developers where looking at their CVS trees, while average Joe was just downloading and compiling the backdoored tarball. To stop this kind of problem from happening you would need to secure the source code via GPG signatures and make sure that users actually check those signatures. The first thing is what they are now doing and what many other projects do, the second part would however require that we stop using tar or at least wrapper it up to make the signature check an automatic thing of the extraction process. As long as the GPG check is thing that you need to take care of manually, most people will just never do it.
Everyone knows hoverboards don't work over water, same is likely true for hovering vehicles and frozen water.
All you have to do is pop-in a CD and install.
Followed by a few hours of search for the newest drivers and another few hours of search for the apps you want to use and another few hours to get all your games patched up to the current revision. Getting Windows to work from scratch takes ages, especially when you use anything that a is a bit non-mainstream.
Now given, Linux avoids the game patching problem mostly by not having games, but getting all the apps you want to run is a hell of a lot easier when you can just do "apt-get install " instead of googling around.
Best movie ever!
You had civilians that went into a war zone still engaged in combat without letting anyone know they were there.
Except that there was no war zone. You can see civilians all over the place in that video, you can even see a women and child walk right by after the heli shoot up the van (12:10, full length video). There was a bit of gunfire an hour earlier, but that didn't really seem to bother any of the civilians. Also none of the people acted like being in combat. If I'd go to war, I take a gun with me, a large number of people in that group clearly didn't.
So saying that there was a lack of effort to minimize civilian casualties really doesn't come close to the reality of the situation.
Quite the opposite, it hits the reality of the situation spot on. The video doesn't show a crazy helicopter gunner shooting random civilians, it shows a gunner that follows normal procedure and shoots up people without ever having clear indication that those people where insurgence, he even ask for permission to engage and gets it without problem. If the military has to shoot up ten civilians to keep one of its own soldiers out of danger it will do so, thats the reality of the situation.
And don't get me started on the whole issue with the US having started the war for no reason whatsoever, they are responsible for each and every civilian that they kill. I can't break into your house, kill you and then claim I did it in self defense cause you had a gun. Makes no sense in the small scale, makes even less sense in the large one, but that is exactly the bullshit justification with which the military is getting away.
The group in the van were grabbing bodies AND weapons, they are part of the conflict.
Except of course that this is a simple lie, they never did pick up weapons, they weren't even near them (weapons where by the dead dudes at the corner, not the guy crawling to the left.).
The kids, they are dead because their parents brought them to war.
The kids survived, which is even mentioned in the video. Also I would like to see that video where the van is dropping off the the men, as that neither happens in the commented version nor in the unedited one.
Yeah, except that same helicopter (same day, before the 17min Collateral Murder vid) crew DIDN'T fire when children and other noncombatants were present
And that makes firing on a van full of civilians ok exactly how?
The problem with the sprite was that it was 2D with skeletal animation, which naturally ends up looking like a jumping jack. Alternatives would have been full 3D sprites or lots and lots of hand drawn animations, both much more complicated to do then what it did use.
On the other hand, I wonder how much amazing stuff I would see had I been born even just 20 years later.
Answer: Not much, as you would take it all for granted and be unable to appreciate it.
If Yahoo tells you up front what you're signing up for when you use their service,
The whole point is that they didn't tell you upfront. It is a feature that they introduced to a service that has been running for years and now they take your data that was never ever meant to go public and publish it without your consent (and no, the ability to opt-out is not consent).
That aside I have yet to see a single service that actually makes it clear what data you automatically publish online, it might be explained somewhere in the TOS or in the preferences or in the help menu or whatever, but its never obvious as in "If you click Ok this will be visible to those people".
Configuring the security settings is a big deal, as it means the whole thing is opt-out, not opt-in, which in turn means that lots of people will end up sharing data that they don't want to share. What is especially stupid is sharing data with all people in your address book, that is not the place to look for trustworthy friends, that's just a place for people you have had contact with.
I think the better question is how Freenet is unlike a distributed version of Rapidshare etc. with passworded files.
Rapidshare deletes illegal content if you notify them, Freenet doesn't.
To do this on-network isn't easy. You would need to gradually zero in on a node with the key via a "key search attack"
You are not thinking like law enforcement. Law enforcement doesn't care much about the originator, all they care about is to capture somebody in the network chain and that is really trivial. Just download CP and look who forwarded you the datapackage, get his IP and sue him.
Darknet is more tricky, but if they really would care about it, they just install a bit statistic software at the ISP to detect people whose traffic signature looks like Freenet. Also a Darknet is near impossible to actually create in the first place, unless you already have a trusted social network you can build on and if you have that, you could just use rapidshare with passworded files.
However, in a democracy they wouldn't have probable cause to do that
I don't think they care. In Germany somebody was just declared guilty of music piracy on his open WLAN, even so he was on vacation, his WLAN had a random password and was probably even switched off. It just doesn't matter much who commited the crime as long as it happenes over your IP connection or somebody claims that it happens over your IP (IP addresses aren't all that reliable to begin with).
They don't have to access your disk to figure out that you distributed child porn, they just have to download child porn from Freenet and then prosecute every Freenet node that submitted a chunk of the final file. I seriously doubt that they will make much of a difference between you forwarding a chunk and you storing the chunk in your datastore, as both happen automatically and are not in your control.
So has anybody actually tested Freenet or any other caching anonymous style app in court?
No, but open WLANs have been tested in German court recently, not in relation to child porn, just music piracy, but the verdict was that you are basically always guilty for stuff that goes over your connection, even if you never intended to have an open WLAN and it only happened by accident or break-in.
There are plenty of tools to build Flash content, there aren't nearly as much or as advanced tools to build Javascript/HTML5 apps.
I've looked at the source for other games and they all seemed to share such "features".
Its is just a part of doing good game design with limited time. When you could spend days coding a clean framework to integrate the special feature you want in level 15 or just a few minutes to hack it into the code, the choice is not that difficult to make. Sure its not good practice, but it doesn't really do harm either, as game specific code isn't meant to be reused and there is no value gain in coding a data driven framework for a feature that is used exactly once in the whole game.
Its kind of like complaining that a movie set looks only good from one side, while from the other side its clear that its just painted plywood and styropor. It just doesn't matter for a game to have pretty code, when the actual game itself is good. And from those games I have seen, the good ones end up having a little ugly code, while the ones with the good code hang around in some sourceforge repository and never get stuff done.
There are many things that like acupuncture that have been used medicinally for centuries.
Just because something is old, doesn't mean it works. There are plenty of old treatments that are either useless or even harmful. Which is why testing is the important part, you can't trust anecdotes, even if they have a long tradition.
Just because we may not, at the time, understand any underlying mechanisms doesn't mean that they don't work;
The issue isn't so much that we don't understand the underlying mechanism, but that we don't even have a clear indication that it works in the first place and you don't need to understand the workings of something to do the testing for its effectiveness.
Again, this isn't really true. The game itself may only get a few patches, but most of the time the engine is reused.
That is true for modern 3D games, it is not true for the indie 2D game we are talking about here. In those games there really isn't all that much that you can recycle. The low level stuff that can be reused is already handled by SDL, OpenGL and other libraries and the higher level stuff very quickly becomes game specific and thus isn't much good for recycling.
Or you might end up open sourcing it.
The main point of open sourcing a game like this is for future compatibility, not so much for modifications on the core game itself.
The difference between a game and business software is that a game is done after the release. There is no version 2.0 that needs new features, maintenance and stuff, instead you start more or less from scratch with the next game. It just doesn't make economic sense to write the best highly maintainable code when you already know you know you will never touch it again. And with a small game like this you don't have new team members jumping in either, so as long as the developers are fine with it, there really is no problem.
Now that of course doesn't make the code pretty, but when the choice is between implementing a new user visible game feature or spending time refactoring the code, time is quite often better spend working on the new user visible feature, as no user will ever care about the quality of the source code.
So why is the iPad different?
Magazin publishers don't publish on Wii, Xbox360 or PS3, they however do publish on the iPad. So its only natural that they actually care about the platforms they use and don't care about those they don't use.
Violent video games can be rated, indexed and completly banned in Germany. When they just get rated, an 18+ sticker gets onto the box and sales to minors is forbidden (somewhat similar to M rating). When they get indexed, it is also forbidden to do advertisment or public sales of those games (i.e. no more buying them at amazon.de), you are still allowed in theory to purcase them under the counter, in practice however Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo won't even publish those games in Germany, so you have to import them (similar to the effects of AO rating). The last stage is completly banning a game, it doesn't happen often, but it does happen (i.e. Dead Rising), then even the sale is forbidden.
Another difference is that the rating system is enforced by the state, while in the US its just the cooperation that do the enforcement of ESRB stuff.
Germans tolerate nudity, not porn. When you want to publish a pornographic webpage in Germany you have to jump to quite some hoops to not get into conflict with the law, a simple age-gate isn't enough here.
Nudity on the other side is pretty much a non-issue, you see naked people on public TV quite frequently and even in advertisment.
Some people care about creating beautiful games, other care about creating beautiful code. The former end up shipping a good game, the later kind never gets stuff done.