...and I'll help people with whatever they have and want to run. Linux, Windows, whatever, so long as they are willing to pay the service rate.
As long as we're namecalling, that's prostitution. But let's not.
What I think GP was talking about is people "fixing" computers for friends/family members by installing pirated copies of XP (replacing 98, say) -- in fact, since I don't work in computer repair, if I can't answer your question in a minute or two, I'll give the standard "switch to Linux" line -- not because Linux is so much better, but because I would actually know what to do if they needed help.
The answer to this so far has either been: A) put some fucking annoying and useless DRM on it, or B) make games that require a corporate server that isn't being distributed to run (WoW).
A somewhat rarer solution is C) Use either light enough DRM that people don't care, or no DRM at all.
See, if you use no DRM at all, there are still going to be a fair number of people buying the game -- people who are honest, people who don't yet know about BitTorrent, etc.
If, however, you use DRM so aggressive it can make their computer unusable -- or which limits the number of times you can install the game -- or requires you to be online 100% of the time -- or requires a CD to always be present -- in short, if you use DRM which actually interferes with ways a legitimate customer might want to use your game...
Then they will go looking for cracks.
And they will discover how easy it is to find a decent crack. Or a pre-cracked torrent.
I don't remember the original comment which illustrated it this way, but here you go:
1) Buy game 2) Try to install game 3) Get pissed off 4) Download cracked version
If that's your typical process, it won't be too long till you eliminate steps 2 and 3, and at that point, step 1 becomes "Buy game, to put on shelf." How long before you eliminate step 1?
Too much DRM causes more piracy than it prevents. If you believe that too little DRM lets piracy run rampant, you still have to try to strike a balance -- one most games, in particular, don't get. Or you could err on the side of caution and use no DRM.
If you're not going to take advantage of them then working on a Wii title isn't going to feel very rewarding.
It will, however, be available to more people.
And who says it has to do either? There are plenty of good, addicting games that take advantage of pretty much none of the capabilities of modern consoles. People still play Tetris.
So how do you convince someone who'd rather be working on the next Gears of War to make something on the Wii?
If someone would rather be working on the next Gears of War, I'm not sure I want them making stuff for the Wii. It takes someone who's actually capable of original thought, not someone who wants to turn out yet another shooter with shiny graphics.
In short, I think to most publishers, the Wii is just a big mystery that they have yet to figure out.
There are actually specs now that newer browsers should support, which would allow the host to be sent with the initial request, so that name-based virtualhosts will work with SSL exactly the way one might naively expect.
I've always found it easier, if you've got a nice, easy domain name, to add paths on top of that. We occasionally have to bludgeon some of the more brain-dead software to make it work, though...
If it's actually live, then the discussion is moot -- you can't seek through a live stream, either, as the index hasn't been built yet, but a good player should be able to at least play straight through, or generate its own index.
If it's only "live" as in "a pre-recorded file that everyone's watching", then the end of the file (and the index) does exist.
What they were selling you was a license to use the software.
In which case, they should have had, in big bold print -- or even in a small-print footnote -- "License to Use Farcry under terms and conditons enclosed."
I doubt even that would be legal in Australia, unless you were allowed to open the box in the store and read the EULA right there.
Unfortunately, you only bought a license to use the game according to the terms of the EULA, not the game itself.
I wasn't presented with the EULA at the time of purchase. As far as the purchase goes, I bought a box with a little plastic platter inside, with which I can do whatever I want.
How would you feel if you brought an orange home, started to peel it, and found a little slip of paper inside that says "Orange EULA: You didn't buy an orange, only a license to eat it, and only while standing on one leg and wearing an eye patch. If you don't agree to this, well, it's not your orange, so please return it."
You wouldn't tolerate this kind of bullshit with your groceries. Why do you tolerate it with your software?
I understand the need for licenses, but present them up front, in the store, before money is exchanged.
They're the original copyright holders, and if the license under which they published their game doesn't allow for cracks like this (which it almost assuredly doesn't), they've done nothing wrong in taking the code and repurposing it.
Sorry, no, it doesn't work that way. Unless the license explicitly gives them copyright of any cracks like this, the crack itself is still owned by whoever wrote it.
Now, there's certainly nothing wrong with them releasing their own crack, but this is what was meant by "two wrongs don't make a right" -- take WoWGlider. Blizzard can shut the guy down and stop him from distributing his software, but it doesn't automagically give them the right to use it.
It's especially laughable for someone (the crackers) who broke someone else's copyright protection to complain that someone is now "abusing" their rights.
Do you make a habit of not checking the facts?
As far as I know, the crackers themselves have not complained. A whole bunch of other people have pointed out the irony of Ubisoft flip-flopping on this -- first banning all discussion that the crack even exists, and now distributing it as part of an official patch.
No one is suggesting that the crackers are "right" here. But Ubi is clearly wrong.
Let me turn your own argument against you:
IP rights either exist, or they don't.
Ignoring for the moment that there is no such thing as "IP rights" -- there are copyrights, trademarks, and patents, which are all entirely different things...
If IP rights (in this case, copyright) exist(s), then Ubi is violating the copyright of the crackers. The fact that the crackers violated their EULA is an entirely separate issue -- in an ideal court, both would be fined and cease-and-desisted.
If IP rights don't exist, then Ubi shouldn't have attempted to stop the crack in the first place.
Yet, strangely enough, EA is behind Mirror's Edge, which everyone seems to like. Or at least, want to play -- can't say too much about it until it's actually out.
remember that the crack was made to circumvent anti-piracy schemes.
And there always is a crack. Any even remotely popular game -- even quite a few indie games -- have their copy protection cracked wide open within weeks of release, if not days.
There wouldn't be any need for anti-piracy schemes if people were trustworthy and didn't steal software.
That isn't going to happen, so we have to deal with the reality that people will steal software.
Now the question becomes, what is the point of an anti-piracy scheme if it doesn't work? (See above.)
So everyone uses cracks to go around copy protection schemes when they're not supposed to, and then when that company uses that crack to fix a problem, everyone is outraged.
You're assuming that this is the same "everyone". You know there's more than one person on the Internet, right? More than one group?
Ubisoft is apparently notorious for cracking down (so to speak) on the mere mention of the possibility of using a crack, even when it's not in the context of piracy. Even when it's in the context of, say, playing the game you legally bought.
There are many legitimate reasons for wanting a crack.
Now, I don't know that anyone is actually outraged that Ubi is "stealing" the crack, or providing a better experience for their users. I think it's mostly the hypocrisy that they have censored the very mention of this exact crack, only to turn around and release it for their users.
something that was made specifically to target that company's product making it easier to pirate.
There's another fallacy -- do you actually know that it was created with this purpose in mind?
To my knowledge, most No-CD cracks are made -- that's right -- to allow you to play the game without a CD.
This allows piracy, yes. It also allows shocking things like playing the game on a machine without a working optical drive. Or taking multiple games on your laptop without having to bring all the game discs. Or play the game even if the original disc is scratched. Or, for some games (not sure about Ubisoft), to reinstall your OS, or buy a new computer, and still be able to play your game.
Never mind that. Glanced down, and another comment appears to be claiming that it's "seamless", which suggests Flash.
Still not a guarantee, though; I tried to watch Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog in FLV form, and it either skipped and popped or played way too fast. We'll see, I suppose.
Given that they could well be writing a brand new, proprietary plugin (rather than simply relying on Flash), we don't know it will be cracked quickly.
It will be cracked, of course. But it's not really a step in the right direction, other than that if I can make it work well with Linux and mplayer/VLC, I'll be able to pay for more. But that's a big if.
No offense, but as it looks like there's a (somewhat) English version, I'd rather stay here. Things aren't looking good for net neutrality in the US, but it's not quite sunk to Golden Shield status yet.
If something like this takes off, maybe this would actually encourage ISPs to enable multicast.
Given that they haven't done this with BitTorrent -- that they've decided to throttle it instead -- I wouldn't get my hopes up.
many firewalls block everything other than HTTP on port 80, so now many apps have just moved to talking HTTP on port 80, or inventing pseudo-protocols on top of HTTP.
I haven't seen a lot of that with desktop apps, but I will say two things:
First, read up on REST. There are many things for which HTTP actually isn't a bad idea.
Second, I think most of this isn't done because of firewalls. I think it's done either because people like HTTP/REST, or because they're forced into it by browsers. I'm not sure if XMLHttpRequest limits things to Port 80, but it certainly insists on sending real HTTP, rather than implementing anything resembling a real socket API for web apps.
Given that it appears to be actually using BitTorrent (though I don't know for sure), I suspect it'll be no better (or worse) than ordinary BitTorrent.
I cannot even begin to imagine the ramifications of this if it is adopted by the "pirate" scene.
That's because there really aren't any.
Ramifications, that is. Seriously, piracy is all about redistributing existed content. What would we have a live stream of, PirateBryan's ass?
Live streaming television of any channel in the world, or at least, anyone who wants to hook up a capture card, for starters.
Any show that people care about is online within an hour of airing. Maybe two.
And this wouldn't be as reliable as a straight download, either -- a straight download can die for a few minutes, and you lose nothing. You can download something in three hours that has a running time of two hours, for better quality. But this has to be realtime, and it's going to be hurt by the asynchronous/throttled nature of most connections.
I think we're watching the Internet change, fundamentally and dramatically, before our very eyes.
I think that's a vacuous statement -- the kind of thing a PHB or a politician would say to make himself sound in touch.
The Internet is always changing. It's always dramatic, and often fundamental -- or never fundamental, depending on how you look at it (we still use TCP, IP, UDP, ICMP...) That's the nature of the beast.
Moore's Law, and similar properties -- simple raw numbers changing, in terms of bandwidth, storage, processing power, and mobile power/size/weight/features/battery life -- all of these proceed, for months or years at a time, simply making our lives easier.
Then, suddenly, someone realizes that this extra capacity has made something new possible. Suddenly, the Internet is ubiquitous enough that Google Docs is acceptable. Suddenly, bandwidth is fast enough that YouTube is possible. Suddenly, Google has enough sheer CPU hours to do a search engine via voice recognition.
There are other ways in which change happens, but it is the nature of the beast for technology to change.
In other words, what you just said is roughly equivalent to this. I'm not so much disagreeing with you as saying "Duh!"
So no, I don't think that "streaming BitTorrent" will be that earth-shattering. It will be cool -- it might even become as cool as YouTube. But if you have some perspective, YouTube is hardly the biggest thing that ever happened to the Internet.
Well the point is that the tracker can handle requests much more efficiently than a full on fileserver.
Yes, I understand how BitTorrent works.
its still waaaay better than a traditional server when you're getting hit hard.
And it's still going to implode when you're Slashdotted if you're not careful.
It's not as bad as hosting that file locally, but it may well be as bad as hosting a webpage locally. When websites get hit, they still get Slashdotted, so I have every reason to expect that most torrents would.
No, by "bells and whistles" I specifically mean features like the magnetic power cable, a modem (who needs a modem now anyway?), bluetooth, firewire, DVI (or minidvi) output, a webcam...
multicast requires that everyone be watching it at the same time.
If it's a live stream, isn't that a given?
Otherwise, it could follow the same model as pay per view -- start a new multicast session every hour or so.
And assume it isn't a stream -- Multicast is still an advantage. Imagine they simply replay it over and over, at a reasonable download speed -- then bandwidth costs are close to zero, for everyone involved.
What I don't understand is why everyone keeps trying to s..t...r.e...a....m stuff over the internet.
Two reasons.
First, if it's actually live, it kind of has to be a stream. Otherwise, well, it wouldn't be live. Kind of the point, and that one's a "duh".
I don't care for most things, but it's not difficult to imagine wanting audience participation, or simply putting up a live stream of whatever's going on in a particular area right now -- thus, whenever you tune it, it's there, but no point even caching it on the server.
Second, it helps protect against piracy. Well, not really, but it means you have to reverse engineer the app doing the streaming and/or the protocol, not just a file sitting somewhere in the cache.
Slashdot Mirror
...and I'll help people with whatever they have and want to run. Linux, Windows, whatever, so long as they are willing to pay the service rate.
As long as we're namecalling, that's prostitution. But let's not.
What I think GP was talking about is people "fixing" computers for friends/family members by installing pirated copies of XP (replacing 98, say) -- in fact, since I don't work in computer repair, if I can't answer your question in a minute or two, I'll give the standard "switch to Linux" line -- not because Linux is so much better, but because I would actually know what to do if they needed help.
The answer to this so far has either been: A) put some fucking annoying and useless DRM on it, or B) make games that require a corporate server that isn't being distributed to run (WoW).
A somewhat rarer solution is C) Use either light enough DRM that people don't care, or no DRM at all.
See, if you use no DRM at all, there are still going to be a fair number of people buying the game -- people who are honest, people who don't yet know about BitTorrent, etc.
If, however, you use DRM so aggressive it can make their computer unusable -- or which limits the number of times you can install the game -- or requires you to be online 100% of the time -- or requires a CD to always be present -- in short, if you use DRM which actually interferes with ways a legitimate customer might want to use your game...
Then they will go looking for cracks.
And they will discover how easy it is to find a decent crack. Or a pre-cracked torrent.
I don't remember the original comment which illustrated it this way, but here you go:
1) Buy game
2) Try to install game
3) Get pissed off
4) Download cracked version
If that's your typical process, it won't be too long till you eliminate steps 2 and 3, and at that point, step 1 becomes "Buy game, to put on shelf." How long before you eliminate step 1?
Too much DRM causes more piracy than it prevents. If you believe that too little DRM lets piracy run rampant, you still have to try to strike a balance -- one most games, in particular, don't get. Or you could err on the side of caution and use no DRM.
Alright, insert Mandarin.
I'm not sure how long English has as the language to learn.
I need to use preview more... probably the same person reading it.
Reminds me of this letter -- probably the same person.
Whoosh.
Well, I hope. The kind of people who actually believe numerology tend to stay away from Slashdot... right?...
If you're not going to take advantage of them then working on a Wii title isn't going to feel very rewarding.
It will, however, be available to more people.
And who says it has to do either? There are plenty of good, addicting games that take advantage of pretty much none of the capabilities of modern consoles. People still play Tetris.
So how do you convince someone who'd rather be working on the next Gears of War to make something on the Wii?
If someone would rather be working on the next Gears of War, I'm not sure I want them making stuff for the Wii. It takes someone who's actually capable of original thought, not someone who wants to turn out yet another shooter with shiny graphics.
In short, I think to most publishers, the Wii is just a big mystery that they have yet to figure out.
That much is true.
There are actually specs now that newer browsers should support, which would allow the host to be sent with the initial request, so that name-based virtualhosts will work with SSL exactly the way one might naively expect.
I've always found it easier, if you've got a nice, easy domain name, to add paths on top of that. We occasionally have to bludgeon some of the more brain-dead software to make it work, though...
If it's actually live, then the discussion is moot -- you can't seek through a live stream, either, as the index hasn't been built yet, but a good player should be able to at least play straight through, or generate its own index.
If it's only "live" as in "a pre-recorded file that everyone's watching", then the end of the file (and the index) does exist.
What they were selling you was a license to use the software.
In which case, they should have had, in big bold print -- or even in a small-print footnote -- "License to Use Farcry under terms and conditons enclosed."
I doubt even that would be legal in Australia, unless you were allowed to open the box in the store and read the EULA right there.
Unfortunately, you only bought a license to use the game according to the terms of the EULA, not the game itself.
I wasn't presented with the EULA at the time of purchase. As far as the purchase goes, I bought a box with a little plastic platter inside, with which I can do whatever I want.
How would you feel if you brought an orange home, started to peel it, and found a little slip of paper inside that says "Orange EULA: You didn't buy an orange, only a license to eat it, and only while standing on one leg and wearing an eye patch. If you don't agree to this, well, it's not your orange, so please return it."
You wouldn't tolerate this kind of bullshit with your groceries. Why do you tolerate it with your software?
I understand the need for licenses, but present them up front, in the store, before money is exchanged.
They're the original copyright holders, and if the license under which they published their game doesn't allow for cracks like this (which it almost assuredly doesn't), they've done nothing wrong in taking the code and repurposing it.
Sorry, no, it doesn't work that way. Unless the license explicitly gives them copyright of any cracks like this, the crack itself is still owned by whoever wrote it.
Now, there's certainly nothing wrong with them releasing their own crack, but this is what was meant by "two wrongs don't make a right" -- take WoWGlider. Blizzard can shut the guy down and stop him from distributing his software, but it doesn't automagically give them the right to use it.
It's especially laughable for someone (the crackers) who broke someone else's copyright protection to complain that someone is now "abusing" their rights.
Do you make a habit of not checking the facts?
As far as I know, the crackers themselves have not complained. A whole bunch of other people have pointed out the irony of Ubisoft flip-flopping on this -- first banning all discussion that the crack even exists, and now distributing it as part of an official patch.
No one is suggesting that the crackers are "right" here. But Ubi is clearly wrong.
Let me turn your own argument against you:
IP rights either exist, or they don't.
Ignoring for the moment that there is no such thing as "IP rights" -- there are copyrights, trademarks, and patents, which are all entirely different things...
If IP rights (in this case, copyright) exist(s), then Ubi is violating the copyright of the crackers. The fact that the crackers violated their EULA is an entirely separate issue -- in an ideal court, both would be fined and cease-and-desisted.
If IP rights don't exist, then Ubi shouldn't have attempted to stop the crack in the first place.
Yet, strangely enough, EA is behind Mirror's Edge, which everyone seems to like. Or at least, want to play -- can't say too much about it until it's actually out.
remember that the crack was made to circumvent anti-piracy schemes.
And there always is a crack. Any even remotely popular game -- even quite a few indie games -- have their copy protection cracked wide open within weeks of release, if not days.
There wouldn't be any need for anti-piracy schemes if people were trustworthy and didn't steal software.
That isn't going to happen, so we have to deal with the reality that people will steal software.
Now the question becomes, what is the point of an anti-piracy scheme if it doesn't work? (See above.)
So everyone uses cracks to go around copy protection schemes when they're not supposed to, and then when that company uses that crack to fix a problem, everyone is outraged.
You're assuming that this is the same "everyone". You know there's more than one person on the Internet, right? More than one group?
Ubisoft is apparently notorious for cracking down (so to speak) on the mere mention of the possibility of using a crack, even when it's not in the context of piracy. Even when it's in the context of, say, playing the game you legally bought.
There are many legitimate reasons for wanting a crack.
Now, I don't know that anyone is actually outraged that Ubi is "stealing" the crack, or providing a better experience for their users. I think it's mostly the hypocrisy that they have censored the very mention of this exact crack, only to turn around and release it for their users.
something that was made specifically to target that company's product making it easier to pirate.
There's another fallacy -- do you actually know that it was created with this purpose in mind?
To my knowledge, most No-CD cracks are made -- that's right -- to allow you to play the game without a CD.
This allows piracy, yes. It also allows shocking things like playing the game on a machine without a working optical drive. Or taking multiple games on your laptop without having to bring all the game discs. Or play the game even if the original disc is scratched. Or, for some games (not sure about Ubisoft), to reinstall your OS, or buy a new computer, and still be able to play your game.
Never mind that. Glanced down, and another comment appears to be claiming that it's "seamless", which suggests Flash.
Still not a guarantee, though; I tried to watch Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog in FLV form, and it either skipped and popped or played way too fast. We'll see, I suppose.
Given that they could well be writing a brand new, proprietary plugin (rather than simply relying on Flash), we don't know it will be cracked quickly.
It will be cracked, of course. But it's not really a step in the right direction, other than that if I can make it work well with Linux and mplayer/VLC, I'll be able to pay for more. But that's a big if.
No offense, but as it looks like there's a (somewhat) English version, I'd rather stay here. Things aren't looking good for net neutrality in the US, but it's not quite sunk to Golden Shield status yet.
If something like this takes off, maybe this would actually encourage ISPs to enable multicast.
Given that they haven't done this with BitTorrent -- that they've decided to throttle it instead -- I wouldn't get my hopes up.
many firewalls block everything other than HTTP on port 80, so now many apps have just moved to talking HTTP on port 80, or inventing pseudo-protocols on top of HTTP.
I haven't seen a lot of that with desktop apps, but I will say two things:
First, read up on REST. There are many things for which HTTP actually isn't a bad idea.
Second, I think most of this isn't done because of firewalls. I think it's done either because people like HTTP/REST, or because they're forced into it by browsers. I'm not sure if XMLHttpRequest limits things to Port 80, but it certainly insists on sending real HTTP, rather than implementing anything resembling a real socket API for web apps.
Given that it appears to be actually using BitTorrent (though I don't know for sure), I suspect it'll be no better (or worse) than ordinary BitTorrent.
I cannot even begin to imagine the ramifications of this if it is adopted by the "pirate" scene.
That's because there really aren't any.
Ramifications, that is. Seriously, piracy is all about redistributing existed content. What would we have a live stream of, PirateBryan's ass?
Live streaming television of any channel in the world, or at least, anyone who wants to hook up a capture card, for starters.
Any show that people care about is online within an hour of airing. Maybe two.
And this wouldn't be as reliable as a straight download, either -- a straight download can die for a few minutes, and you lose nothing. You can download something in three hours that has a running time of two hours, for better quality. But this has to be realtime, and it's going to be hurt by the asynchronous/throttled nature of most connections.
I think we're watching the Internet change, fundamentally and dramatically, before our very eyes.
I think that's a vacuous statement -- the kind of thing a PHB or a politician would say to make himself sound in touch.
The Internet is always changing. It's always dramatic, and often fundamental -- or never fundamental, depending on how you look at it (we still use TCP, IP, UDP, ICMP...) That's the nature of the beast.
Moore's Law, and similar properties -- simple raw numbers changing, in terms of bandwidth, storage, processing power, and mobile power/size/weight/features/battery life -- all of these proceed, for months or years at a time, simply making our lives easier.
Then, suddenly, someone realizes that this extra capacity has made something new possible. Suddenly, the Internet is ubiquitous enough that Google Docs is acceptable. Suddenly, bandwidth is fast enough that YouTube is possible. Suddenly, Google has enough sheer CPU hours to do a search engine via voice recognition.
There are other ways in which change happens, but it is the nature of the beast for technology to change.
In other words, what you just said is roughly equivalent to this. I'm not so much disagreeing with you as saying "Duh!"
So no, I don't think that "streaming BitTorrent" will be that earth-shattering. It will be cool -- it might even become as cool as YouTube. But if you have some perspective, YouTube is hardly the biggest thing that ever happened to the Internet.
Well the point is that the tracker can handle requests much more efficiently than a full on fileserver.
Yes, I understand how BitTorrent works.
its still waaaay better than a traditional server when you're getting hit hard.
And it's still going to implode when you're Slashdotted if you're not careful.
It's not as bad as hosting that file locally, but it may well be as bad as hosting a webpage locally. When websites get hit, they still get Slashdotted, so I have every reason to expect that most torrents would.
BatBatman. Nice.
No, by "bells and whistles" I specifically mean features like the magnetic power cable, a modem (who needs a modem now anyway?), bluetooth, firewire, DVI (or minidvi) output, a webcam...
Eventually, it starts to add up.
multicast requires that everyone be watching it at the same time.
If it's a live stream, isn't that a given?
Otherwise, it could follow the same model as pay per view -- start a new multicast session every hour or so.
And assume it isn't a stream -- Multicast is still an advantage. Imagine they simply replay it over and over, at a reasonable download speed -- then bandwidth costs are close to zero, for everyone involved.
What I don't understand is why everyone keeps trying to s..t...r.e...a....m stuff over the internet.
Two reasons.
First, if it's actually live, it kind of has to be a stream. Otherwise, well, it wouldn't be live. Kind of the point, and that one's a "duh".
I don't care for most things, but it's not difficult to imagine wanting audience participation, or simply putting up a live stream of whatever's going on in a particular area right now -- thus, whenever you tune it, it's there, but no point even caching it on the server.
Second, it helps protect against piracy. Well, not really, but it means you have to reverse engineer the app doing the streaming and/or the protocol, not just a file sitting somewhere in the cache.
The more participants in the torrent, the more robust it is.
Assuming the tracker can handle it.