So far, the only game in this genre that could be called a "success" is "The Beast" -- the original secret promotion campaign for A.I. (I'm not even talking about making money. By "success" I just mean getting a large player base and keeping them interested till the end). I never succeeded in solving a single puzzle in the Beast ahead of other people, but I loved that game. Much more than the movie that it was meant to help. I've tried Majestic and the other games later on, but none of them compared with the Beast. I can't put my finger on why that is. So I'll just throw out some ideas.
Some of the appeal of this genre is obviously the immersive aspect of gaming this way -- the way it blurs reality and the game work. Ironically, "The Beast" was also the game that had the least bit of "reality" in it -- it was more alternate than "real" I guess. The game's reality was set centuries in the future (even after the events in the movie it was supposed to promote) and so you had to make an effort to participate and put yourself into that world. Every web site in the game gave you warnings about "downgrading" itself to adjust to your primitive 21st century technology -- so there were constant reminders that this wasn't "real." There were some phone calls -- but not many at all.
Now Majestic and the other games try much harder to be "real" -- they are set in the present, and they try to contact you in all sorts of ways. So if this immersion is the thing people are going for, then the Beast should have failed miserably...
I think the reason these later games have not been as much a success with casual players like me has to do with how they misunderstood the reasons the AI game was successful. The AI game succeeded because it had good content. It succeeded because the writer for the Beast, Sean Stewart, was a great sci-fi novelist, and he took care to create the characters and the world they inhabited with words that suspended disbelief. Sure the graphics and everything else helped, but the writing was what really made it all work together. I can't really convey how good the writing for that game was -- but you can get a taste for it from his novels. Some of the writing in that game, such as a dialogue in words-and-pictures between a man and his slave-AI who wanted to be free, was done with more care and more evocative than anything I saw in the AI movie itself. It was really art.
In contrast, Majestic and the new games so far have terrible content. It really looks as if the creators in these games thought flashy graphics could make up for poor writing. These games always play on a conspiracy/occult storyline that lends itself to cliches and trite tabloid-style writing. Of course, by focusing on these themes, the new games can link to a bunch of existing web sites devoted to conspiracy theories and the occult and save themselves a lot of effort (whereas the people for the AI game had to create everything for this future world of theirs).
Therein lies the heart of the problem for me. I think the Beast worked because Sean Stewart and the team at Microsoft treated the players with respect. They did not take the lazy way out, and they backed up the flashy presentation with good, publishable, professional quality sci-fi writing, and they designed puzzles that required the knowledge of a diverse group of people with specific talents to solve (there were puzzles that drew on genetics -- and the sort of genetics that only graduate students would be comfortable with -- and puzzles that drew on the artistic ability of players to mold clay). In a word, they thought their players were interesting people with diverse backgrounds, who were very smart and had an appreciation for literary writing. This kind of respect came across in their work, and this is what it takes to keep most players interested.
In contrast, the writers for Majestic and subsequent games were condescending to the players, and treated them as either socially inept geeks or as conspiracy-obs
Um... no. The paper states that if a single-bit error can be induced, then the probability that this single-bit error will then allow the exploiting program to execute arbirary code (as opposed to causing the OS or the VM to crash, etc) is 70%.
So, keep in mind that there are two components to this exploit: 1) writing a program that takes advantage of single-bit errors to execute arbitrary code, and 2) wait for cosmic rays or direct some radiation yourself at the hardware to induce soft errors. The effectiveness depends largely on how quickly/reliably you can induce such errors w/out crashing the machine in the process.
Maybe the techniques for programming the exploit program described here are well known to more experienced programmers, but I found the article extremely interesting and enlightening. I've been taught for years about the superiority of Java's type system as a security measure, and I know that a lot of theoretical work and proofs have been done to show that Java's type system is secure, but this exploit manages to get around the type safety with such a simple trick that I'm kicking myself for not having seen it myself. It's almost elegant, the way they get it done.
Some people seem to think that the letter suggests that Microsoft should embrace OSS or that the letter is saying something very positive about OSS. The letter does no such thing.
It's a very candid evaluation of what the threat of open source looks like from someone who is not really interested in the values and politics of the movement and doesn't see open source as innovative:
If Microsoft is unable to innovate quickly enough, or to adapt to embrace network-based integration, the threat that it faces is the erosion of the economic value of software being caused by the open source software movement.
There you have it. His point, if you read the rest of the article, is that Microsoft is too focused on the PC-client side of things, and that's hopeless because anything Microsoft can create on the PC client document-centric side of things the Open Source "cloners" (his word) will just copy and give away for free, and this eats into MS's profit margin. He wants Microsoft to go into network-centric software that will presumably be difficult for open source to clone.
Basically, he sees OSS as cheap, inferior copies of MS's beautiful software (the "best client") not worthy of admiration except for the fact that cheap customers are willing to settle for the inferior thing.
Westlaw and Lexis provide an incredibly valuable service: they make the millions of judicial opinions actually useful for lawyers. Basically, they are like the google for judicial documents, except that in order to index all this information, they have to use teams of lawyers rather than pigeon clusters. We do not yet have sufficient technical knowledge to index judicial opinions, and so for now this process is very labor-intensive.
For example, Westlaw and Lexis have teams of lawyers to read over every decision as soon as it's handed down. They have to parse through the legalese to make a judgment about whether the case narrowed some precedent or broadened it. They need to find the most important passages in the opinion and put those clippings into conceptual pigeonholes (the "West Topic and Key" classification system defies comprehension). They need to write little summaries for each of these important passages so that lawyers glancing through thousands of query results will know whether something is relevant (these "Headnotes" are difficult to write). None of these tasks are easy. Not only can we not yet automate them, but a person not trained as a lawyer won't even recognize the relevant things to pick up on. Westlaw and Lexis really do spend an enormous amount of *expensive* human capital (these lawyers don't come cheap) to do the human indexing of the semantic web of legal documents, and that's what they are charging for. Law firms gladly pay up because using the index form Westlaw or Lexis gives you such an advantage over your adversary if he's stucking doing research with law books that he has no chance. The big lawyers these days never touch law books -- they are too disorganized and slow.
Thus, these companies have not "hijacked" the actual collection of case opinions. Even if they wanted to, they can't. Judicial opinions and statutes, like other governmental work products, enjoy no copyright protection whatsoever. This is why you are free to post as many gigabytes of Supreme Court opinions for free downloading as you like.
But just getting the opinions is useless. Either we come up with a technical means to index these documents as effectively as the teams of lawyers at Westlaw (very difficult) or we decide that in the public interest we need to use some of our tax money to support a public interest effort to make a similar database for the public (even more difficult).
This is a perfectly valid attempt by the record companies to fight for their survival. In fact, I applaud it because, for once, they are not resorting to the courts or the coercive power of the state to crush the "criminals" who share music. Instead, they are playing a technological game in our arena, on our own turf. This is simply a variation of the way a.s.t used to invade newsgroups by flooding the channel with bogus trolls.
And since they are playing our game, we can strike back the same way. We can institute the equivalent of killfiles (if we know the IP of these bogus sharers), or, even better, we can add audio fingerprinting to P2P networks to filter out the bogus files. That sounds like a good open source project.
So long as they try to play this game with us, they can't win.
Some people are passionate and excited about a field precisely because it is new and full of potential. I think there's nothing wrong with picking your concentration based on its "newness" and the potential to make important advances and discoveries yourself.
E.O. Wilson wrote in his autobiography that he picked ants to study because no one else was studying them -- and he freely concedes that he's probably not as brilliant as some of the other biologists, but he picked a field that was new and exciting and he ended up having a lot more satisfaction as a result because he could make important contributions personally in a field that was still sparsely populated.
Back when the Sony-Betamax case was pending Supreme Court review, people asked how it could be that VCR manufacturers could be liable for contributory infringement of copyright simply by providing a tool that some people misused when gun manufacturers were immune from suit by murder victims. There were political cartoons to this effect.
Then the Supreme Court thanfully (it was a close one though, 5-4, I believe, and according to some historians the dissent was originally the majority) gave VCRs a fair use out.
Basically, the Mickey Mouse lobby is invincible. Why should they be deterred by a little logic?
The DMCA only requires that the criminal defendant produced software aimed at circumventing copy protection. Using such software to actually circumventing copy protection is a separate offense (also under the DMCA). So the fact that they found no evidence of the software actually being used for piracy will not save the defendant from the offense of having produced the software in the first place
One of the functions that big media companies serve is to act as the consumers' agents in discovering good talented artists for them. In theory it's more efficient for consumers to pay the media companies a fee so that consumers do not need to spend the time, energy, money required to discover talent themselves (same theory with book publishers). Very few people can afford to sift through all those indie bands to find the few gems in all that trash. I think that's what you are getting at here.
Of course media companies, as agents, try to extract as much rent as possible from their principals -- the consumers. They try to shape our tastes to easily, cheaply copied versions of artists they know consumers already like. They try to extract as much as possible out of their existing set of artists and invest as little as possible in discovering new talent. This is just the typical kind of agency cost you have in any principal-agent relationship.
If the market were properly competitive, with a sufficient number of media companies all competing hard with each other for the attention/money of the consumers, then we'd have an optimal balance of filtering and discovering done by the media companies, and consumers would have good, reasonably priced music from interesting artists satisfying all kinds of tastes without having to invest in discovery for themselves. The problem is that I think we have a few media companies that are too large, so that the agency problem is a big deal. The media companies can afford to shirk and persist in being complacent and feed us recycled garbage over and over again simply because there are so few of them and they dominate distribution.
If we really want to solve the problem, a site offering lots of free indie music will not do the job. We need to find agents as alternatives to the media companies who can perform this filtering function and discover good talent for the consumers who can't afford to do the search themselves. That requires a trust relationship to be built up between the agents and the consumers (so we'll respect their choices), and a pay structure to provide incentive, and sufficient competition to keep the agents honest. I think that's a much harder problem and one that may not be solved by technological means alone.
Sociologists and legal people
on
Sensors Gone Wild
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The implications of this are so huge that we need to get sociologists and legal people thinking about this early," says Roger T. Howe, the director of the Sensor & Actuator Center at the University of California at Berkeley.
Yes, people are always calling for laws and regulation before the technology has worked itself out. But tt shouldn't work that way. The technology needs to get its fingers everywhere and become popular before we can think about legal and social issues sensibly. Otherwise we are just speculating wildly and choking off the possibility of genuine innovation. (witness the unfortunate too-early regulation of digital music).
I, for one, am at the same time terrified and excited by the idea of sensors everywhere, communicating wirelessly and powering themselves from ambient heat. I have no idea what kind of applications will come of it, but I don't want any regulation until it's "too late."
This is the same problem that coursepacks already went through. When photocopying first became widely available, professors contracted with copyshops to make coursepacks, collections of excerpts from copyrighted books, so that students in their classes would not have to purchase an entire library of books. Neither the professors nor the copyshops thought about paying the publisher royalties for this. When the publishers finally took them to court, one of the arguments made by the copyshops/professors was that it would simply be too complicated/costly to get copyright clearance for every little piece in a typical coursepack. The courts squashed that argument in no time.
But the professors and students wanted coursepacks and they were willing to pay, and lo and behold, the publishers got their act together and formed associations to make copyright clearance for coursepacks extremely easy and efficient. It's basically all automated now.
There's no reason that this same system can't be adopted for web publication of coursepacks. Copyright clearance need not be time-consuming or painful. The trouble, of course, is that whereas the students were willing to pay for their coursepacks (even with the added premium of the royalties), no one is going to pay for stuff on the web. Unless we make the current students pay higher tuition to subsidize web publication of their coursepacks or get the government to subsidize the effort, the publishers won't want to adopt the licensing scheme to this new use.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the appeal of this genre is obviously the immersive aspect of gaming this way -- the way it blurs reality and the game work. Ironically, "The Beast" was also the game that had the least bit of "reality" in it -- it was more alternate than "real" I guess. The game's reality was set centuries in the future (even after the events in the movie it was supposed to promote) and so you had to make an effort to participate and put yourself into that world. Every web site in the game gave you warnings about "downgrading" itself to adjust to your primitive 21st century technology -- so there were constant reminders that this wasn't "real." There were some phone calls -- but not many at all.
Now Majestic and the other games try much harder to be "real" -- they are set in the present, and they try to contact you in all sorts of ways. So if this immersion is the thing people are going for, then the Beast should have failed miserably...
I think the reason these later games have not been as much a success with casual players like me has to do with how they misunderstood the reasons the AI game was successful. The AI game succeeded because it had good content. It succeeded because the writer for the Beast, Sean Stewart, was a great sci-fi novelist, and he took care to create the characters and the world they inhabited with words that suspended disbelief. Sure the graphics and everything else helped, but the writing was what really made it all work together. I can't really convey how good the writing for that game was -- but you can get a taste for it from his novels. Some of the writing in that game, such as a dialogue in words-and-pictures between a man and his slave-AI who wanted to be free, was done with more care and more evocative than anything I saw in the AI movie itself. It was really art.
In contrast, Majestic and the new games so far have terrible content. It really looks as if the creators in these games thought flashy graphics could make up for poor writing. These games always play on a conspiracy/occult storyline that lends itself to cliches and trite tabloid-style writing. Of course, by focusing on these themes, the new games can link to a bunch of existing web sites devoted to conspiracy theories and the occult and save themselves a lot of effort (whereas the people for the AI game had to create everything for this future world of theirs).
Therein lies the heart of the problem for me. I think the Beast worked because Sean Stewart and the team at Microsoft treated the players with respect. They did not take the lazy way out, and they backed up the flashy presentation with good, publishable, professional quality sci-fi writing, and they designed puzzles that required the knowledge of a diverse group of people with specific talents to solve (there were puzzles that drew on genetics -- and the sort of genetics that only graduate students would be comfortable with -- and puzzles that drew on the artistic ability of players to mold clay). In a word, they thought their players were interesting people with diverse backgrounds, who were very smart and had an appreciation for literary writing. This kind of respect came across in their work, and this is what it takes to keep most players interested.
In contrast, the writers for Majestic and subsequent games were condescending to the players, and treated them as either socially inept geeks or as conspiracy-obs
Um... no. The paper states that if a single-bit error can be induced, then the probability that this single-bit error will then allow the exploiting program to execute arbirary code (as opposed to causing the OS or the VM to crash, etc) is 70%.
So, keep in mind that there are two components to this exploit: 1) writing a program that takes advantage of single-bit errors to execute arbitrary code, and 2) wait for cosmic rays or direct some radiation yourself at the hardware to induce soft errors. The effectiveness depends largely on how quickly/reliably you can induce such errors w/out crashing the machine in the process.
Maybe the techniques for programming the exploit program described here are well known to more experienced programmers, but I found the article extremely interesting and enlightening. I've been taught for years about the superiority of Java's type system as a security measure, and I know that a lot of theoretical work and proofs have been done to show that Java's type system is secure, but this exploit manages to get around the type safety with such a simple trick that I'm kicking myself for not having seen it myself. It's almost elegant, the way they get it done.
Some people seem to think that the letter suggests that Microsoft should embrace OSS or that the letter is saying something very positive about OSS. The letter does no such thing.
It's a very candid evaluation of what the threat of open source looks like from someone who is not really interested in the values and politics of the movement and doesn't see open source as innovative:
There you have it. His point, if you read the rest of the article, is that Microsoft is too focused on the PC-client side of things, and that's hopeless because anything Microsoft can create on the PC client document-centric side of things the Open Source "cloners" (his word) will just copy and give away for free, and this eats into MS's profit margin. He wants Microsoft to go into network-centric software that will presumably be difficult for open source to clone.
Basically, he sees OSS as cheap, inferior copies of MS's beautiful software (the "best client") not worthy of admiration except for the fact that cheap customers are willing to settle for the inferior thing.
Westlaw and Lexis provide an incredibly valuable service: they make the millions of judicial opinions actually useful for lawyers. Basically, they are like the google for judicial documents, except that in order to index all this information, they have to use teams of lawyers rather than pigeon clusters. We do not yet have sufficient technical knowledge to index judicial opinions, and so for now this process is very labor-intensive.
For example, Westlaw and Lexis have teams of lawyers to read over every decision as soon as it's handed down. They have to parse through the legalese to make a judgment about whether the case narrowed some precedent or broadened it. They need to find the most important passages in the opinion and put those clippings into conceptual pigeonholes (the "West Topic and Key" classification system defies comprehension). They need to write little summaries for each of these important passages so that lawyers glancing through thousands of query results will know whether something is relevant (these "Headnotes" are difficult to write). None of these tasks are easy. Not only can we not yet automate them, but a person not trained as a lawyer won't even recognize the relevant things to pick up on. Westlaw and Lexis really do spend an enormous amount of *expensive* human capital (these lawyers don't come cheap) to do the human indexing of the semantic web of legal documents, and that's what they are charging for. Law firms gladly pay up because using the index form Westlaw or Lexis gives you such an advantage over your adversary if he's stucking doing research with law books that he has no chance. The big lawyers these days never touch law books -- they are too disorganized and slow.
Thus, these companies have not "hijacked" the actual collection of case opinions. Even if they wanted to, they can't. Judicial opinions and statutes, like other governmental work products, enjoy no copyright protection whatsoever. This is why you are free to post as many gigabytes of Supreme Court opinions for free downloading as you like.
But just getting the opinions is useless. Either we come up with a technical means to index these documents as effectively as the teams of lawyers at Westlaw (very difficult) or we decide that in the public interest we need to use some of our tax money to support a public interest effort to make a similar database for the public (even more difficult).
This is a perfectly valid attempt by the record companies to fight for their survival. In fact, I applaud it because, for once, they are not resorting to the courts or the coercive power of the state to crush the "criminals" who share music. Instead, they are playing a technological game in our arena, on our own turf. This is simply a variation of the way a.s.t used to invade newsgroups by flooding the channel with bogus trolls.
And since they are playing our game, we can strike back the same way. We can institute the equivalent of killfiles (if we know the IP of these bogus sharers), or, even better, we can add audio fingerprinting to P2P networks to filter out the bogus files. That sounds like a good open source project.
So long as they try to play this game with us, they can't win.
E.O. Wilson wrote in his autobiography that he picked ants to study because no one else was studying them -- and he freely concedes that he's probably not as brilliant as some of the other biologists, but he picked a field that was new and exciting and he ended up having a lot more satisfaction as a result because he could make important contributions personally in a field that was still sparsely populated.
Back when the Sony-Betamax case was pending Supreme Court review, people asked how it could be that VCR manufacturers could be liable for contributory infringement of copyright simply by providing a tool that some people misused when gun manufacturers were immune from suit by murder victims. There were political cartoons to this effect.
Then the Supreme Court thanfully (it was a close one though, 5-4, I believe, and according to some historians the dissent was originally the majority) gave VCRs a fair use out.
Basically, the Mickey Mouse lobby is invincible. Why should they be deterred by a little logic?
The DMCA only requires that the criminal defendant produced software aimed at circumventing copy protection. Using such software to actually circumventing copy protection is a separate offense (also under the DMCA). So the fact that they found no evidence of the software actually being used for piracy will not save the defendant from the offense of having produced the software in the first place
Of course media companies, as agents, try to extract as much rent as possible from their principals -- the consumers. They try to shape our tastes to easily, cheaply copied versions of artists they know consumers already like. They try to extract as much as possible out of their existing set of artists and invest as little as possible in discovering new talent. This is just the typical kind of agency cost you have in any principal-agent relationship.
If the market were properly competitive, with a sufficient number of media companies all competing hard with each other for the attention/money of the consumers, then we'd have an optimal balance of filtering and discovering done by the media companies, and consumers would have good, reasonably priced music from interesting artists satisfying all kinds of tastes without having to invest in discovery for themselves. The problem is that I think we have a few media companies that are too large, so that the agency problem is a big deal. The media companies can afford to shirk and persist in being complacent and feed us recycled garbage over and over again simply because there are so few of them and they dominate distribution.
If we really want to solve the problem, a site offering lots of free indie music will not do the job. We need to find agents as alternatives to the media companies who can perform this filtering function and discover good talent for the consumers who can't afford to do the search themselves. That requires a trust relationship to be built up between the agents and the consumers (so we'll respect their choices), and a pay structure to provide incentive, and sufficient competition to keep the agents honest. I think that's a much harder problem and one that may not be solved by technological means alone.
In the long term, we are all dead.
Yes, people are always calling for laws and regulation before the technology has worked itself out. But tt shouldn't work that way. The technology needs to get its fingers everywhere and become popular before we can think about legal and social issues sensibly. Otherwise we are just speculating wildly and choking off the possibility of genuine innovation. (witness the unfortunate too-early regulation of digital music).
I, for one, am at the same time terrified and excited by the idea of sensors everywhere, communicating wirelessly and powering themselves from ambient heat. I have no idea what kind of applications will come of it, but I don't want any regulation until it's "too late."
But the professors and students wanted coursepacks and they were willing to pay, and lo and behold, the publishers got their act together and formed associations to make copyright clearance for coursepacks extremely easy and efficient. It's basically all automated now.
There's no reason that this same system can't be adopted for web publication of coursepacks. Copyright clearance need not be time-consuming or painful. The trouble, of course, is that whereas the students were willing to pay for their coursepacks (even with the added premium of the royalties), no one is going to pay for stuff on the web. Unless we make the current students pay higher tuition to subsidize web publication of their coursepacks or get the government to subsidize the effort, the publishers won't want to adopt the licensing scheme to this new use.