Look at the percentages of young people who infringe copyright - almost half of the tracks in the study (of the 90% of the people who had mp3 players) were not legal. 95% of those in the study - literally, 95%, copied infringing music in some fashion (copying off friends' hard-drives etc)
Now, we can assume that many of them don't think about it any harder than 'ooh, free stuff', and also that many of them couldn't afford to buy any or at least most of what they copy. That attitude will likely change for some as they get older and they can afford to buy more instead of copyright infringing.
Even so - there is an entire generation that is now used to recorded music being effectively free. Just as radio and home taping was a way of life for my generation, sharing mp3s and ipods are now that for the current under 25s - and its a damn sight easier to get exactly what you want with near zero effort. Slashdot isn't representative of the general population, but then neither are elderly lawmakers.
Copyright is undergoing a fundamental change in terms of expectations of use. DRM and lawsuits will not change this, it's a spit in a tide of users. The copyright cartels need to understand that they have already lost - they need to change their approach and find ways of actually satisfying the wants of their customers, instead of destroying the lives of a tiny majority and hoping it scares everyone back to liking what they were told to like, and buying what they were told to buy.
They have to be accurate that they represent the copyright holder in question, under penalty of perjury. There is no requirement under the DMCA that they do due dilligence that the content in question is actually infringing.
The poster can of course submit a counter notice, and have the content restored - but how many will go through the effort of handing over all the real-life details to LLC (for them to decide whether to start a lawsuit) in order for youtube to eventually put the content back up, with no guarantee they will?
The ability of copyright holders' agents to spew out take-down notices with virtually no come back against them, and thus knocking perfectly legitimate content offline by default is one of the worst problems of the DMCA.
How do you know for sure they're searching for industry copyrighted content? Plug those same searches (except the first two) into google, and you'll get a whole bunch of material - still copyrighted - but put up by people who want to publish it for free viewing. PSP, pc games and 2008 are pretty generic!
There are two types of copyright infringement offences, the first is direct infringement. Bittorrent trackers and tracker search engines do not directly infringe copyright, as they do not host that actual material. They only potentially break the 2nd type, such as vicarious and contributory infringement in the US, where they actively and knowingly help others infringe copyright. Do such offences exist in Canada?
The USA passed a law specifically allowing the US to invade the Hague to retrieve any US soldier or citizen held at the International Criminal Court.
This is basically to prevent any of their soldiers or contractors being tried for war crimes by an international court. Obviously, even soldiers can be tried in a given country for offences committed there; but the US is not exactly easy to get extradited from, and even when you do face trial, the witnesses and evidence are hard to get hold of. Take the examples of the rape cases in Japan for example, or the italian cable car incident where drugged up pilots struck and severed the cables where US co-operation was less than stellar.
The UK did not have a single written constitution previously - it was a complex mix of precedent, agreement and law, dating back to magna carta.
Now, we have the European Human Rights Act, which guarantees many of the same rights as in the US constitution - more, in some cases such as privacy.
In addition, there's the treaty of lisbon, previously known as the EU constitution. This is currently on hold while the eurocrats work out how to bypass or over-ride the Irish veto (they had a referendum, which they are constitutionally required to do, and the people said no. I don't expect it to actually be respected). It's already been ratified by the rest of europe, so no doubt they'll find some way to make it binding soon enough.
Worse - I pay for things, and then use the pirate tools to make them work. How long do people hold out when they realise since they're pirating anyway, they might as well just stop paying to be fecked up the arse?
I came very close to converting my legit vista install to a SLIC-bios one after genuine disadvantage choked after the boot process on a network card driver update from windows update. It'd boot, then claim I wasn't genuine and black screen me. I'd reboot, be forced to reactivate, and pass with flying colours - I'm genuine! Then as soon as it got to the desktop, it would promptly fail genuine disadvantage again.
You know how I know it was the network card driver it didn't like? Process of elimination and system restore. The error message in the event log was completely fecking useless.
Genuine disadvantage pisses off legitimate customers only. Pirates just use SLIC bios patches, or the fake bios one - vista is easier to pirate than XP was!
The short answer to that is, don't submit your content to facebook if you don't want them publish it in ways you might not like further down the road. Create your own site, and post it there.
Too right. I've had a selection of nvidia boards since nforce 2, but all the fun of xfi+4GB ram+conroe+nvidia boards became too much of a headache, and I jumped ship to intel. Nvidia boards have better features - a lot more pci-e lanes, for a start - but having a board that doesn't constantly fall over at random or cause the sound-card to be completely non-functional under certain conditions is worth it. I went through 4 nvidia boards from different vendors (nforce 4, a couple of 650's and a 680i) before I gave up trying to get one that was any good. I stuck with nvidia because I've used sli in the past, and figured I might want to in future.
However, since I already had an intel board with crossfire (X38), it made sense to upgrade my old 8800 to a pair of ati 4850's. I don't think I'm going back to their motherboard chipsets any time soon.
If you live in europe, the websites you visit are already being logged by your ISP, and available on demand by the government in most countries.
The sites you visit also keep logs. You think you've got much anonymity from the bank when you login to the bank website? They all keep detailed records for police and governments.
No individual notary would see much of a list of your site vists. All they'll get is that you visited your bank, or gmail, or wherever - the domain; the same information logged by your ISP.
A blackhat MitM attack would intercept your gmail login, or your bank login. They can read the details of your communication, and with that information go on to steal a lot of your money, or get you into debt in your name, or any of the other nasty things they do while pretending to be you.
The only time it'll make a difference is if you're already using a third party anonymising proxy - in which case, it's still not a bad idea to check that your proxy isn't pulling a fast one - after all, the notary will see one request from your new anonymous IP for that secure domain, which tells them pretty much diddly.
Because there will be a lot of notaries. Sure, if someone's determined enough to spoof a large number of them through DNS, over a long enough period of time, he can break this.
The point is not that it's totally unbeatable, it clearly is, but it makes the work a MitM attacker has to do to spoof an important site that much greater. Security is layered, and about raising the bar for attacks to succeed.
"You ask me if I can work out the exact location of where every drop of water will fall in advance, and I will have to say that I cannot. If however, you ask me what will happen if you stand next to that sprinkler, I can confidently predict you will get wet."
Circumventing DRM on a game (a copyrighted work) is already illegal under the DMCA*. As is making the no-cd crack, and distributing the no-cd crack.
In addition, sharing a no-cd crack on a P2P service (uploading) would most likely also be illegal under standard copyright, at least until 'making available' is overturned. The no-cd crack is a modified exe, which is a derivative work under copyright.
*17 U.S.C. 1201
(a)(1)(A): Illegal to circumvent a technical measure copyright owners use to control access to their works
(a)(2): Illegal to make/distribute tool to circumvent access controls
(b)(1): Illegal to make/distribute tool to bypass other technical measures used by copyright owners to protect rights in works
Socket and interface patents. Intel have patents on various bits of the interface between the CPU and the motherboard, which is one of the reasons why AMD use a different one for their CPUs.
Assuming nVidia is going to make a pin-compatible processor with one of the motherboard sockets already out there, they'll need a licence from intel or AMD. That's assuming they don't produce a small low power chip wedded to a particular board, like say the intel atom or the via nano, aiming for the new netbook market or the mini pc segment.
As I understand it, they already had to cough up a SLI licence to intel in order to get a licence from intel to make nehalem compatible motherboard chipsets, which means we'll finally see realistic motherboards with sli and crossfire.
That's because vista business is the equivalent of XP professional. Vista home premium is a hybrid of XP home and MCE 2005. XP home doesn't have remote desktop either.
The deliberately took the 'business' features like remote desktop out of the cheaper home versions, because otherwise why would you have a reason to buy the hugely overpriced vista ultimate?
That home users probably use remote desktop rather than businesses (they have proper terminal servers and remote control solutions) just shows how braindead their reasoning is. They should have released two versions. vista ultimate and vista light. Make vista ultimate the same price as xp pro, and sell a really cheap vista light with most of the bells and whistles (but not aero) removed.
It wouldn't solve the technical disasters, but at least it would have reduced the bloody confusion over the 40 odd different versions of vista. Is that OEM home premium, or academic upgrade home premium? Do I get the x64 disc wih that, or do I need to buy retail vista ultimate? Utterly braindead.
After some time away 'on vacation' playing tf2, coming back to Q3A and UT3 at a lan party, it did feel like I needed to be on a high dose mix of ritalin and caffeine to keep up.
They're only faster if the supermarket is full of technophobic customers and the checkouts have a queue going out the door.
Which is great, because in the UK that means there's at most 1 other person in the store using them every time I've had the misfortune to go to tesco. You don't need to bag the item, btw - just stick it on the conveyer belt, and have your partner bag, or just bag it up afterwards.
Motherboard changes. x-fi sound card, various nvidia chipsets and finally an intel motherboard, with different selections of 4GB DDR2 so the thing will boot reliably. The first one did, but that gigabyte piece of crap went bang, so I had to replace it. Repeatedly, trying to get a stable system with working sound under XP and vista that didn't decide that today it wasn't going to boot any more until I flashed the BIOS. All the rejected motherboards are fine under linux, so it's just crap nvidia windows drivers combined with crappy creative engineering. And drivers.
That said. what the hell business is it of yours, or EA's how often I update my PC? I buy the game, it's my own damn property, not EA's any more. I shouldn't have to beg permission to play my own property whether I have a hardware problem or an obsession with dodgy porn. Oh, and I live in a country with a functional 'forst sale doctrine' with exemptions from copyright for normal operation of software, so don't bother trying to argue EULA crap.
I reinstall windows or upgrade every few months, recently. So if I'd bought spore 6 months ago, I'd now be out of installs with only 1 pc. What if I'd wanted to play on my laptop, or upgrade to vista? I'd plan on playing spore for years, I still dig out civilization or sim city or other old games years after I bought them. If they had the level of DRM of spore, I'd have been locked out long ago.
The mass effect DRM was broken before the game was even in the shops in my country - it lasted literally hours, not weeks (they had practice with bioshock). It's going to screw a lot more than 2% of customers, and for NOTHING.
The solution is, don't put DRM on it! Install restrictions do nothing but frustrate legitimate paying customers, and prevent people who would be legitimate paying customers from buying. Pirates will be playing it quite happily, while legitimate customers will be cursing EA.
Just read up on the horror stories of mass effect buyers who've been told to just go out and buy another copy, or worse, ignored entirely by tech support for months.
Bioshock still has DRM; they just turned off the activation limit after 18 months. You still need to download files off the internet to install, and are at the mercy of the securom servers to play it. They were also under huge pressure after launch, and promised to turn it off at some point, and produced a revoke tool. EA have made no such promises, and their customer 'support' for mass effect customers leaves me little belief that spore will be any better.
If I buy, then they take that as approval or at least acceptance of the DRM. I'm not giving them that, and would rather go without.
Has he said anything new about the securom DRM recently? Since it's supposedly going to have the same 3 install limit as mass effect, I cancelled my pre-order.
I simply won't accept a game that so heavily restricts how many times I'm allowed to reinstall windows or upgrade my PC in the lifetime of the game before having to make an expensive phone call to plead with EA tech support to be allowed to continue playing, with no guarantee they'll say yes. Even for a game that looks as tasty as spore.
It takes real effort to make the $80 version you buy in the shops (yes, that's the equivalent retail price in the UK for new games) worth less than the one you can download for free in the comfort of your own home.
The same applies to DRM'd music - and look, the labels have finally started to come round to the realization that making your product less convenient and more annoying and less robust and liable to self-destruct than the FREE VERSION that's easy to get with no nagware, online activation or any other horseshit is a bad idea.
Hopefully PC makers will realise that DRM doesn't slow down infringers in the slightest, while it does drive away plenty of real informed customers. Look how poisonous starforce became to a game's brand - the new online limited activation securom is rapidly catching up to it in terms of 'don't want this on my system, ever'
This is all well and good, but pretty much all the data that they want to collect is already being *voluntarily* stored by ISPs and telecoms for up to a year at their own expense.
This law, pushed through the EU in 2005 with a lot of help from the UK government so it would be europe wide, is now being implemented here - but it just gives the force of law to what is already being done by gentleman's agreement, and extends the length it can be held somewhat.
Telecoms data (who you called, when, and where you were according to the cell towers) is already kept for 12 months, email headers (from, to, time) for 6 months, the list goes on. The only major extension over what they're already doing will be web logs (domains, not urls or pages) from 4 days up to possibly 2 years.
Councils, customs and excise, the police, security services etc etc all have access to these records at will without the oversight of a court or the need for a warrant - with the right paperwork, pretty much any government body can pull up huge amounts of personal detail about you already. The tories want to reduce the time it takes to do the paperwork, but they're quite happy for the police to carry on having access to this mass public surveillance data collected by the ISPs and telecoms companies.
There's already been cases where councils snooped on email records and phone logs over dog mess and rubbish dumping, our put surveillance on a 4 year old to see if she really lived within the cachement area for a good school.
In the minus column, you can't resell your games, you're one false accusation of VAC cheating away from losing access to your enitre account and all games, and you need to login to the net to use it at least once. This makes it a pain to allow family members to play say, peggle, when you're playing tf2, though it can be done.
On the plus side, you can download the games as many times as you like, on as many machines as you like. You can clone the steam folder between machines as often as you like when you upgrade hardware. This is a huge bonus, and one I've really grown to love. They're automatically fully patched to the latest versions, TF2 gets regular free upgrades and extra maps, for example. There's some decent anti-cheat mechanisms to keep things fair, though there are wallhacks etc floating about. The social aspects and achievements are really pretty cool tool, and we use them regularly amongst my gaming group. It's definitely the real 'Live for Windows'. and it's free! Oh, and games bought in dollars are usually way cheaper than buying the same game in UKP, even with the exchange rate. And I can buy and download immediately, no need to wait for the postman or trek into town and pay exhorbitant prices for a piece of plastic.
The DRM is pretty transparent, and I haven't been given a problem by it yet. I cloned my steam files on my laptop, logged in and went offline. I then had games available the entire 2 week holiday with no 'net connection required.
So steam has its downsides for sure, and they were enough to make me really bitch back when I had very slow broadband and hl2 first came out, and I couldn't play my retail copy for hours because of the unlock required. These days though, the convenience is pretty compelling.
Compared to securom, which restricts, makes awkward requires an internet connection and limits the number of times you can install to a rediculous low number? Stuff that.
I've given up largely on PC gaming because of the DRM being an absolute pain in the ass.
Bioshock, Mass Effect, Spore... I bought the first one, and returned it unopened when the excessive install limits were not removed, and cancelled orders for the other two. The same applies for games like DIRT, GRID etc etc. They all got cracked in hours, or at most a few days.
I bought company of heroes because it had no DRM, but not opposing front because they retrofitted it.
I've gone over to the wii and 360 mostly, with a few steam games too, because I'm fed up with the fecking hassle DRM has made PC gaming these days. Limited activations, deauthorisation tools before wiping windows, begging over the phone for extra activations... SOD THAT.
Currently, ISPs *voluntarily* collect and hold (at the ISP) website logs visited for up to 4 days, sms records (including location in lat/long) for 6 months, logon records for 6 months, email for 6 months, telephone calls (including location at time of call) made for 12 months and subscriber information for 12 months.
In all cases, details about the communication is kept, but not the content itself. I.e. email headers store the username used, the from and to email address, time and date but not the subject or body of the email. Website logs log the website domain with time and date, but not the individual page visited.
The UK police, local councils, customs and excise, the secret services, all sorts of local government bodies have access to this data upon request, no judge or warrant required under the RIP act.
The police also have the capability to install taps on individuals or in bulk with a warrant - the equipment is already in place, and is paid for by the ISPs. Recording telephone calls, turning on the microphone of mobiles remotely, triangulating mobile phone position in real time etc.
The main difference about implementing this EU legislation, passed in 2005 - and passed in part because the UK government lobbied heavily for it in the EU institutions - is it would extend all the traffic logging dates to up to 24 months, and make it mandatory rather than voluntary. It also proposes centralising all the logs in a government database in near real time. Currently the plod have to set up shop at the individual ISP to get the data, a bit of a pain if they need information from multiple sources.
The most worrying thing is the ease of access by all sorts of bodies, such as local councils, with no oversight by a court at all, which has already been abused.Councils have already used the information to investigate dog fouling and noise complaints, for example.
There are entire sections of Britain that were so badly and totally screwed by Maggie Thathcher and the conservatives that they've refused point blank to vote Tory for the last 25 years. With the rural southern vote guaranteed to make large swathes of the countryside Tory, regardless of the merits of any particular MP, that wraps up about 50% of the vote, even when both party leaders are frankly scary men - Michael Howard was a BAD choice as tory leader, he reminded people of the bad old days.
Hell, there are 25% of Americans who think GW Bush is doing a good job, even now. Some people you just can't reach.
Still, 37%, with the tories on 34% should have made a bigger difference than it did to the labour majority. Due to first-past-the-post, and the bias against rural communities with it, Labour won nearly twice the number of seats as the tories. The electoral system is pretty broken.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the percentages of young people who infringe copyright - almost half of the tracks in the study (of the 90% of the people who had mp3 players) were not legal. 95% of those in the study - literally, 95%, copied infringing music in some fashion (copying off friends' hard-drives etc)
Now, we can assume that many of them don't think about it any harder than 'ooh, free stuff', and also that many of them couldn't afford to buy any or at least most of what they copy. That attitude will likely change for some as they get older and they can afford to buy more instead of copyright infringing.
Even so - there is an entire generation that is now used to recorded music being effectively free. Just as radio and home taping was a way of life for my generation, sharing mp3s and ipods are now that for the current under 25s - and its a damn sight easier to get exactly what you want with near zero effort. Slashdot isn't representative of the general population, but then neither are elderly lawmakers.
Copyright is undergoing a fundamental change in terms of expectations of use. DRM and lawsuits will not change this, it's a spit in a tide of users. The copyright cartels need to understand that they have already lost - they need to change their approach and find ways of actually satisfying the wants of their customers, instead of destroying the lives of a tiny majority and hoping it scares everyone back to liking what they were told to like, and buying what they were told to buy.
They have to be accurate that they represent the copyright holder in question, under penalty of perjury. There is no requirement under the DMCA that they do due dilligence that the content in question is actually infringing.
The poster can of course submit a counter notice, and have the content restored - but how many will go through the effort of handing over all the real-life details to LLC (for them to decide whether to start a lawsuit) in order for youtube to eventually put the content back up, with no guarantee they will?
The ability of copyright holders' agents to spew out take-down notices with virtually no come back against them, and thus knocking perfectly legitimate content offline by default is one of the worst problems of the DMCA.
How do you know for sure they're searching for industry copyrighted content? Plug those same searches (except the first two) into google, and you'll get a whole bunch of material - still copyrighted - but put up by people who want to publish it for free viewing. PSP, pc games and 2008 are pretty generic!
There are two types of copyright infringement offences, the first is direct infringement. Bittorrent trackers and tracker search engines do not directly infringe copyright, as they do not host that actual material. They only potentially break the 2nd type, such as vicarious and contributory infringement in the US, where they actively and knowingly help others infringe copyright. Do such offences exist in Canada?
The USA passed a law specifically allowing the US to invade the Hague to retrieve any US soldier or citizen held at the International Criminal Court.
This is basically to prevent any of their soldiers or contractors being tried for war crimes by an international court. Obviously, even soldiers can be tried in a given country for offences committed there; but the US is not exactly easy to get extradited from, and even when you do face trial, the witnesses and evidence are hard to get hold of. Take the examples of the rape cases in Japan for example, or the italian cable car incident where drugged up pilots struck and severed the cables where US co-operation was less than stellar.
The UK did not have a single written constitution previously - it was a complex mix of precedent, agreement and law, dating back to magna carta.
Now, we have the European Human Rights Act, which guarantees many of the same rights as in the US constitution - more, in some cases such as privacy.
In addition, there's the treaty of lisbon, previously known as the EU constitution. This is currently on hold while the eurocrats work out how to bypass or over-ride the Irish veto (they had a referendum, which they are constitutionally required to do, and the people said no. I don't expect it to actually be respected). It's already been ratified by the rest of europe, so no doubt they'll find some way to make it binding soon enough.
Worse - I pay for things, and then use the pirate tools to make them work. How long do people hold out when they realise since they're pirating anyway, they might as well just stop paying to be fecked up the arse?
I came very close to converting my legit vista install to a SLIC-bios one after genuine disadvantage choked after the boot process on a network card driver update from windows update. It'd boot, then claim I wasn't genuine and black screen me. I'd reboot, be forced to reactivate, and pass with flying colours - I'm genuine! Then as soon as it got to the desktop, it would promptly fail genuine disadvantage again.
You know how I know it was the network card driver it didn't like? Process of elimination and system restore. The error message in the event log was completely fecking useless.
Genuine disadvantage pisses off legitimate customers only. Pirates just use SLIC bios patches, or the fake bios one - vista is easier to pirate than XP was!
The short answer to that is, don't submit your content to facebook if you don't want them publish it in ways you might not like further down the road. Create your own site, and post it there.
Too right. I've had a selection of nvidia boards since nforce 2, but all the fun of xfi+4GB ram+conroe+nvidia boards became too much of a headache, and I jumped ship to intel. Nvidia boards have better features - a lot more pci-e lanes, for a start - but having a board that doesn't constantly fall over at random or cause the sound-card to be completely non-functional under certain conditions is worth it. I went through 4 nvidia boards from different vendors (nforce 4, a couple of 650's and a 680i) before I gave up trying to get one that was any good. I stuck with nvidia because I've used sli in the past, and figured I might want to in future.
However, since I already had an intel board with crossfire (X38), it made sense to upgrade my old 8800 to a pair of ati 4850's. I don't think I'm going back to their motherboard chipsets any time soon.
If you live in europe, the websites you visit are already being logged by your ISP, and available on demand by the government in most countries.
The sites you visit also keep logs. You think you've got much anonymity from the bank when you login to the bank website? They all keep detailed records for police and governments.
No individual notary would see much of a list of your site vists. All they'll get is that you visited your bank, or gmail, or wherever - the domain; the same information logged by your ISP.
A blackhat MitM attack would intercept your gmail login, or your bank login. They can read the details of your communication, and with that information go on to steal a lot of your money, or get you into debt in your name, or any of the other nasty things they do while pretending to be you.
The only time it'll make a difference is if you're already using a third party anonymising proxy - in which case, it's still not a bad idea to check that your proxy isn't pulling a fast one - after all, the notary will see one request from your new anonymous IP for that secure domain, which tells them pretty much diddly.
Because there will be a lot of notaries. Sure, if someone's determined enough to spoof a large number of them through DNS, over a long enough period of time, he can break this.
The point is not that it's totally unbeatable, it clearly is, but it makes the work a MitM attacker has to do to spoof an important site that much greater. Security is layered, and about raising the bar for attacks to succeed.
I always like the analogy of a lawn sprinkler.
"You ask me if I can work out the exact location of where every drop of water will fall in advance, and I will have to say that I cannot. If however, you ask me what will happen if you stand next to that sprinkler, I can confidently predict you will get wet."
Circumventing DRM on a game (a copyrighted work) is already illegal under the DMCA*. As is making the no-cd crack, and distributing the no-cd crack.
In addition, sharing a no-cd crack on a P2P service (uploading) would most likely also be illegal under standard copyright, at least until 'making available' is overturned. The no-cd crack is a modified exe, which is a derivative work under copyright.
*17 U.S.C. 1201
(a)(1)(A): Illegal to circumvent a technical measure copyright owners use to control access to their works
(a)(2): Illegal to make/distribute tool to circumvent access controls
(b)(1): Illegal to make/distribute tool to bypass other technical measures used by copyright owners to protect rights in works
Socket and interface patents. Intel have patents on various bits of the interface between the CPU and the motherboard, which is one of the reasons why AMD use a different one for their CPUs.
Assuming nVidia is going to make a pin-compatible processor with one of the motherboard sockets already out there, they'll need a licence from intel or AMD. That's assuming they don't produce a small low power chip wedded to a particular board, like say the intel atom or the via nano, aiming for the new netbook market or the mini pc segment.
As I understand it, they already had to cough up a SLI licence to intel in order to get a licence from intel to make nehalem compatible motherboard chipsets, which means we'll finally see realistic motherboards with sli and crossfire.
That's because vista business is the equivalent of XP professional. Vista home premium is a hybrid of XP home and MCE 2005. XP home doesn't have remote desktop either.
The deliberately took the 'business' features like remote desktop out of the cheaper home versions, because otherwise why would you have a reason to buy the hugely overpriced vista ultimate?
That home users probably use remote desktop rather than businesses (they have proper terminal servers and remote control solutions) just shows how braindead their reasoning is. They should have released two versions. vista ultimate and vista light. Make vista ultimate the same price as xp pro, and sell a really cheap vista light with most of the bells and whistles (but not aero) removed.
It wouldn't solve the technical disasters, but at least it would have reduced the bloody confusion over the 40 odd different versions of vista. Is that OEM home premium, or academic upgrade home premium? Do I get the x64 disc wih that, or do I need to buy retail vista ultimate? Utterly braindead.
After some time away 'on vacation' playing tf2, coming back to Q3A and UT3 at a lan party, it did feel like I needed to be on a high dose mix of ritalin and caffeine to keep up.
They're only faster if the supermarket is full of technophobic customers and the checkouts have a queue going out the door.
Which is great, because in the UK that means there's at most 1 other person in the store using them every time I've had the misfortune to go to tesco. You don't need to bag the item, btw - just stick it on the conveyer belt, and have your partner bag, or just bag it up afterwards.
Motherboard changes. x-fi sound card, various nvidia chipsets and finally an intel motherboard, with different selections of 4GB DDR2 so the thing will boot reliably. The first one did, but that gigabyte piece of crap went bang, so I had to replace it. Repeatedly, trying to get a stable system with working sound under XP and vista that didn't decide that today it wasn't going to boot any more until I flashed the BIOS. All the rejected motherboards are fine under linux, so it's just crap nvidia windows drivers combined with crappy creative engineering. And drivers.
That said. what the hell business is it of yours, or EA's how often I update my PC? I buy the game, it's my own damn property, not EA's any more. I shouldn't have to beg permission to play my own property whether I have a hardware problem or an obsession with dodgy porn. Oh, and I live in a country with a functional 'forst sale doctrine' with exemptions from copyright for normal operation of software, so don't bother trying to argue EULA crap.
I reinstall windows or upgrade every few months, recently. So if I'd bought spore 6 months ago, I'd now be out of installs with only 1 pc. What if I'd wanted to play on my laptop, or upgrade to vista? I'd plan on playing spore for years, I still dig out civilization or sim city or other old games years after I bought them. If they had the level of DRM of spore, I'd have been locked out long ago.
The mass effect DRM was broken before the game was even in the shops in my country - it lasted literally hours, not weeks (they had practice with bioshock). It's going to screw a lot more than 2% of customers, and for NOTHING.
The solution is, don't put DRM on it! Install restrictions do nothing but frustrate legitimate paying customers, and prevent people who would be legitimate paying customers from buying. Pirates will be playing it quite happily, while legitimate customers will be cursing EA.
Just read up on the horror stories of mass effect buyers who've been told to just go out and buy another copy, or worse, ignored entirely by tech support for months.
Bioshock still has DRM; they just turned off the activation limit after 18 months. You still need to download files off the internet to install, and are at the mercy of the securom servers to play it. They were also under huge pressure after launch, and promised to turn it off at some point, and produced a revoke tool. EA have made no such promises, and their customer 'support' for mass effect customers leaves me little belief that spore will be any better.
If I buy, then they take that as approval or at least acceptance of the DRM. I'm not giving them that, and would rather go without.
Has he said anything new about the securom DRM recently? Since it's supposedly going to have the same 3 install limit as mass effect, I cancelled my pre-order.
I simply won't accept a game that so heavily restricts how many times I'm allowed to reinstall windows or upgrade my PC in the lifetime of the game before having to make an expensive phone call to plead with EA tech support to be allowed to continue playing, with no guarantee they'll say yes. Even for a game that looks as tasty as spore.
It takes real effort to make the $80 version you buy in the shops (yes, that's the equivalent retail price in the UK for new games) worth less than the one you can download for free in the comfort of your own home.
The same applies to DRM'd music - and look, the labels have finally started to come round to the realization that making your product less convenient and more annoying and less robust and liable to self-destruct than the FREE VERSION that's easy to get with no nagware, online activation or any other horseshit is a bad idea.
Hopefully PC makers will realise that DRM doesn't slow down infringers in the slightest, while it does drive away plenty of real informed customers. Look how poisonous starforce became to a game's brand - the new online limited activation securom is rapidly catching up to it in terms of 'don't want this on my system, ever'
This is all well and good, but pretty much all the data that they want to collect is already being *voluntarily* stored by ISPs and telecoms for up to a year at their own expense.
This law, pushed through the EU in 2005 with a lot of help from the UK government so it would be europe wide, is now being implemented here - but it just gives the force of law to what is already being done by gentleman's agreement, and extends the length it can be held somewhat.
Telecoms data (who you called, when, and where you were according to the cell towers) is already kept for 12 months, email headers (from, to, time) for 6 months, the list goes on. The only major extension over what they're already doing will be web logs (domains, not urls or pages) from 4 days up to possibly 2 years.
Councils, customs and excise, the police, security services etc etc all have access to these records at will without the oversight of a court or the need for a warrant - with the right paperwork, pretty much any government body can pull up huge amounts of personal detail about you already. The tories want to reduce the time it takes to do the paperwork, but they're quite happy for the police to carry on having access to this mass public surveillance data collected by the ISPs and telecoms companies.
There's already been cases where councils snooped on email records and phone logs over dog mess and rubbish dumping, our put surveillance on a 4 year old to see if she really lived within the cachement area for a good school.
Steam has pluses and minues.
In the minus column, you can't resell your games, you're one false accusation of VAC cheating away from losing access to your enitre account and all games, and you need to login to the net to use it at least once. This makes it a pain to allow family members to play say, peggle, when you're playing tf2, though it can be done.
On the plus side, you can download the games as many times as you like, on as many machines as you like. You can clone the steam folder between machines as often as you like when you upgrade hardware. This is a huge bonus, and one I've really grown to love. They're automatically fully patched to the latest versions, TF2 gets regular free upgrades and extra maps, for example. There's some decent anti-cheat mechanisms to keep things fair, though there are wallhacks etc floating about. The social aspects and achievements are really pretty cool tool, and we use them regularly amongst my gaming group. It's definitely the real 'Live for Windows'. and it's free! Oh, and games bought in dollars are usually way cheaper than buying the same game in UKP, even with the exchange rate. And I can buy and download immediately, no need to wait for the postman or trek into town and pay exhorbitant prices for a piece of plastic.
The DRM is pretty transparent, and I haven't been given a problem by it yet. I cloned my steam files on my laptop, logged in and went offline. I then had games available the entire 2 week holiday with no 'net connection required.
So steam has its downsides for sure, and they were enough to make me really bitch back when I had very slow broadband and hl2 first came out, and I couldn't play my retail copy for hours because of the unlock required. These days though, the convenience is pretty compelling.
Compared to securom, which restricts, makes awkward requires an internet connection and limits the number of times you can install to a rediculous low number? Stuff that.
I've given up largely on PC gaming because of the DRM being an absolute pain in the ass.
Bioshock, Mass Effect, Spore... I bought the first one, and returned it unopened when the excessive install limits were not removed, and cancelled orders for the other two. The same applies for games like DIRT, GRID etc etc. They all got cracked in hours, or at most a few days.
I bought company of heroes because it had no DRM, but not opposing front because they retrofitted it.
I've gone over to the wii and 360 mostly, with a few steam games too, because I'm fed up with the fecking hassle DRM has made PC gaming these days. Limited activations, deauthorisation tools before wiping windows, begging over the phone for extra activations... SOD THAT.
Currently, ISPs *voluntarily* collect and hold (at the ISP) website logs visited for up to 4 days, sms records (including location in lat/long) for 6 months, logon records for 6 months, email for 6 months, telephone calls (including location at time of call) made for 12 months and subscriber information for 12 months.
In all cases, details about the communication is kept, but not the content itself. I.e. email headers store the username used, the from and to email address, time and date but not the subject or body of the email. Website logs log the website domain with time and date, but not the individual page visited.
The UK police, local councils, customs and excise, the secret services, all sorts of local government bodies have access to this data upon request, no judge or warrant required under the RIP act.
The police also have the capability to install taps on individuals or in bulk with a warrant - the equipment is already in place, and is paid for by the ISPs. Recording telephone calls, turning on the microphone of mobiles remotely, triangulating mobile phone position in real time etc.
The main difference about implementing this EU legislation, passed in 2005 - and passed in part because the UK government lobbied heavily for it in the EU institutions - is it would extend all the traffic logging dates to up to 24 months, and make it mandatory rather than voluntary. It also proposes centralising all the logs in a government database in near real time. Currently the plod have to set up shop at the individual ISP to get the data, a bit of a pain if they need information from multiple sources.
The most worrying thing is the ease of access by all sorts of bodies, such as local councils, with no oversight by a court at all, which has already been abused.Councils have already used the information to investigate dog fouling and noise complaints, for example.
There are entire sections of Britain that were so badly and totally screwed by Maggie Thathcher and the conservatives that they've refused point blank to vote Tory for the last 25 years. With the rural southern vote guaranteed to make large swathes of the countryside Tory, regardless of the merits of any particular MP, that wraps up about 50% of the vote, even when both party leaders are frankly scary men - Michael Howard was a BAD choice as tory leader, he reminded people of the bad old days.
Hell, there are 25% of Americans who think GW Bush is doing a good job, even now. Some people you just can't reach.
Still, 37%, with the tories on 34% should have made a bigger difference than it did to the labour majority. Due to first-past-the-post, and the bias against rural communities with it, Labour won nearly twice the number of seats as the tories. The electoral system is pretty broken.