Except the news report itself said that the reason he was labeled a cheater was because he "used external means to acquire achievements without actually playing a game". I'm pretty sure being disabled doesn't give you a "cheat for free" card.
BUT HE HAS ***AUTISM***. It's not like he's just some average person playing games. How can you even THINK of raising questions about someone's credibility or honesty when they have AUTISM?!?!?!?!
I don't get what being autistic has to do with this. If there are false positives, there are false positives. Having autism or diabetes or halitosis doesn't really seem relevant. Also, they don't just randomly mark people as cheaters. It takes a significant amount of action to result in that. When people flag someone during a game, it only counts as ONE flag (ie, if you're playing COD with 12 people and 10 of them flag you, it only counts as ONE flag). Then they investigate those with the highest number of incidents.
Of course, if "cheating" involves some sort of very detectible exploit (say, there is an absolute tell that you've gamed BFBC2's leader board or something), ten they can just automate the response.
They mention that it's used both as inspiration and as a training sim for terrorists. How does that work? I mean, the No Russian level is very linear and controlled. It's all on rails. Further, you don't have to kill people to beat the level. You can opt not to fire your gun at all.
Wait a second. So, you're telling me that when your government keeps pushing for some sort of kill switch on the entire internet, they might activate it to prevent people from dissenting? Who ever would have thought?! Boy, I'm glad we're getting one here, too! I'm sure it'll never be misused!
People (usually the navel-gazing semi-incestuous circle of tech journalists and "social-media" gurus) promote social media as having some sort of nearly mystical power, rather than it just being a non-story that a device is used for communication in the same way a phone or a beeper or a posting on the supermarket bulletin board is.
As a result, you have these countless morons who think they're "doing something" and are "good people" merely for putting the latest (widely publicized) missing child as their facebook photo or the Iranian flag as their Twitter photo or re-tweeting #supportturkey or something. People feel that clicking "I'm a Fan" or "Like" makes them part of some grand solution to things. Or even a tiny part of anything. If that were the case, then that fucking "I bet this pickle will get a million fans before Sarah Palin" (or whatever it was, I forget) would be the fucking king of the world by now and there would be a new amendment to the US Constitution about "I like the feeling of warm socks fresh from the drier".
I mean, unless I'm wrong and some countries have recently decided to solve all their international conflicts or internal elections by counting the number of facebook fans they have.
I love video games, but the most popular games in the world are not facilitators of the kind of positive benefits being suggested. Trust me, if you play Call of Duty: Black Ops for three to four hours a day, the quantity of hateful racial and homophobic slurs (not to mention the inane sounds and chatter from people's fucking children who are playing an M game with adults and idiots who won't turn their fucking mic off while they carry on conversations with people on their end) is enough to GIVE you PTSD. In fact, as much as I was enjoying COD: Black Ops and playing it every free moment I had for weeks . . . I eventually woke up Christmas morning and said to myself "I can't play it any more. I can't bring myself to login and play it today. My ears can't take one more minute of it." And I haven't touched it, since.
If games have any potential for saving the world, it's most likely going to be by occupying the worst human beings in the world. Keep all of the mouth-breathing morons busy shooting each other and hurling slurs at each other (for almost 30,000 combined man-years in the first six or eight weeks of COD:BO, alone) and those people aren't out there doing drug deals, date-raping, or tagging up private property with cans of spray paint or setting neighborhood pets on fire.
This wouldn't fly in America, where using encryption is in and of itself often considered "probable cause". The attitude is typically that if you are encrypting something (or care about your privacy), then you must be hiding something.
Actually, the *entire* rail thing is a fucking joke. It's ridiculously expensive and isn't all that fast. It does have to, you know, make plenty of stops. It's essentially more corporate welfare for specific companies. Americans like to talk about "high speed bullet trains", because it makes them feel all sophisticated and European, but they have no fucking clue what's really supposedly so great about it.
Also, they've already proposed greater attention to bus and rail travel, as far as security. The idea that they would somehow not impose the same violations of your liberty on trains is absurd. (And they already flag you for paying in cash for a train ticket).
The real outrage of the whole fucking thing is the idea that we're going to cut spending by spending lots of money. Fucking ridiculous. Also, no politician will ever have the balls to make the cuts needed. Dont' dare piss off anyone and their precious little programs. here's an idea. Everyone takes a 30% cut across the board. Period. And the bullshit programs get a 100% cut.
And, therefore, it is Axxo's account which is the source of that content on whatever given site is in discussion. They're not taking about Warner Brothers being the source of the content, because they made the damn film that was uploaded. They're talking about 100 people (accounts) on the site being responsible for the uploads. Most likely, they mean "if you look at the name of the account on the torrent that was uploaded, most of them are from the same 100 accounts".
You can't download the new Kanye West album on Minonova, because they ceased their torrent service well over a year ago and have since then only operated as a "content distribution service" of legally licensed content.
They flat out state that uploaders are compensated through revenue from ads displayed on the sites and from money paid by other users for VIP subscriptions to "get faster downloads". Of course, you didn't have to read that far to smell the bullshit. Right at the beginning, they cite "The Pirate Bay and Mininova" as the sites they use for this material. You know, Mininova. The site that went LEGIT and does not contain any copyright infringing torrent links whatsoever and has not for a year and a half, now.
This "study" is complete bullshit. The only source of data for their study are two sites. One is Mininova, which doesn't deal in material that infringes copyright and hasn't for a year and a half. The other is The Pirate Bay, which I don't even know what the hell the current status is, because I remember they sold themselves, then they didn't sell themselves, then they did and created two new public indexers, then were going to go legit and . . . whatever. Anyway, the point being, who the fuck still uses TPB and how is it a relevant source of data on Bit Torrent anymore?
So, the source of their data is clearly flawed. They're stressing points about "piracy" when one site isn't even "piracy" related and the other is . . . whatever the fuck it is, anymore.
Second, they claim that 100 people are responsible for almost all of the UPLOADS (that is, 100 people are responsible for almost all of the content being put out there). You can assume that they're counting scene release accounts as one person, when they're probably many more. Also, again, they're saying that 100 people are responsible for that much content . . . ON THOSE TWO SITES. Not "all of bit torrent". That would be fucking absurd of them to claim *that*.
And, finally, yes, they actually do say that the incentive for most of the uploaders is that they get revenue from ads on the indexing sites as well as money from VIP subscriptions to the sites for faster bandwidth. All of which is essentially bullshit, unless there is some secret deal where TPB and other sites are cutting big checks to Axxo and Klaxxon and all these other guys who are out there spreading content around, which I doubt.
It seems that these "researches" simply can't grasp the idea that a lot of these people get a kick out of sharing for sharing's sake and that respect (and maybe credits toward their future download ratio at private sites) is all they're looking to receive.
We can't even coax ourselves into going back to the moon. At this point, we might as well be contemplating inter-dimensional travel, for all it matters.
This is American politics. You don't need evidence for anything. The overwhelming majority of the country believes in religion, alien abductions, psychics, ghosts, and that Iraq had WMDs with which we were sure to be struck any moment. Make an assertion frequently enough and people will accept it as truth. People still believe the bullshit that more women are victims of domestic violence on Superbowl Sunday than any other day of the year.
+ Is not legally enforceable. Neither are motion picture ratings. It would be a first amendment issue, if they were. Many politicians and busy-body groups would like this, though and are pushing for it. ESRB and MPAA ratings are entirely voluntary as is their enforcement in retail by the retail stores themselves. If you work at a game store and sell an M rated game to a child, your boss might fire you, but neither you nor your boss nor the company have committed any crime. If that were to ever change, you'd have to also start seeing special library cards so that librarians could not check books out to children that were beyond their designated category. (I probably wouldn't have been allowed to read Tommyknockers or The Stand, when I was ten, I guess).
+ The ESRB rating indicates that there may be violence, mild violence, comic violence, language, drugs, sex within a game. It does not have a giant warning label telling you that if you play Call of Duty you are more likely to start committing murders and engaging in wonton acts of violence as a result of it.
+ There is, of course, absolutely no correlation between violent movies, music, games, books, art and actual acts of violence, which makes the legislation even more idiotic.
The group of people that think video games are not just for children or that geeks are cool is a very limited one and the impression that it is a generally accepted feeling is an inaccuracy merely reinforced by our own ranks. Kind of like if you spend all your time swinging, you might start to think that swinging is something far more accepted by society than it really is, because -- of course -- you're around a subset that is into it all the time.
I remember a very specific incident with a girl who is a good friend of mine. In response to some ridiculously geeky tangent I went on, I snickered that "I'm such a geek . .." and her response was to sincerely try and convince me that I wasn't a geek the same way a friend might respond to you if you had called yourself a loser or an asshole.
Then you have video games. While most gamers are adults and the average age of gamers is around 35 years old, most adults are not gamers. If you're an adult - especially once you're out of your 20s, you are bordering on being a pathetic curiosity to the rest of the grown-ups around you, who see you as less responsible and less mature merely for what you spend your recreational time doing.
One might suggest that it merely indicates the age of such prejudice, misunderstanding, and judgement is a lot younger than the "old folks" we would associate the attitude with, but if you are an adult and have been playing games online any time, recently, you've probably experienced comments from very young people, too. I was astonished when I was playing Black Ops with a couple buddies a few weeks ago and when some teenagers asked us how old we were (between 30 and 40), they couldn't believe it. They thought we must be a bunch of losers, because they couldn't imagine that anyone would sit around playing video games when they're an adult. I actually heard that repeated from kids to older players (not just ourselves) too many times to count over a period of about a month that we got together and played regularly.
It was mirrored by a conversation/poll/discussion I saw more than once online . . . in video game websites. Places you would expect the attitude to be more rational. Instead, I've seen questions and forum discussions by what are clearly younger people asking "How old do you think you will be when you stop playing video games?". Probably more than half of the responses are typically things like "as soon as I turn eighteen and get out of the house" or "probably when I have a kid" or "when I get married" or "when I'm thirty". Kind of absurd that there seems to be a huge population of young people who love video games, but only see it as something children do and not something they'll keep doing. Imagine if you spent your childhood reading a lot of great books or maybe hiking and you said "I'll probably stop reading books and going on hikes when I'm 23". What the fuck?
Anyway, the attitude may change. It's not going to be in our life time.
Just think of all the labels that would be required for religious texts. Especially since they ARE actually linked to violence and terrorism of all sorts. Not to mention delusional behavior. When was the last time someone chopped off their daughters limbs or chained their child to a tree and beat them because "GTA told me to"?
Anyway, I'm all for randomly assigning bullshit blame to various things and then putting warning labels on them. Lets put some on butter knives. And stereos. And books. And shovels. And clothing. OOH, that's it! Let's put a RAPE-WARNING on all clothing deemed to be even remotely suggestive. After all, the connection between rape and revealing clothes is about the same as that between videogames and violence.
It's fine, but I don't like the giant facebook and twitter icons in the top. You might as well be pimping AOL, while you're at it for as relevant as it is to the Slashdot community who generally has a great distaste for the two web-cluttering-shit-services.
This is entirely relevant, if you're still thirteen years old and you pay for your meals using the change found in the family sofa cushions. The rest of us prefer food that contains food. And flavor.
Slashdot Mirror
Except the news report itself said that the reason he was labeled a cheater was because he "used external means to acquire achievements without actually playing a game". I'm pretty sure being disabled doesn't give you a "cheat for free" card.
And if he didn't have autism, it wouldn't have been a story.
BUT HE HAS ***AUTISM***. It's not like he's just some average person playing games. How can you even THINK of raising questions about someone's credibility or honesty when they have AUTISM?!?!?!?!
I don't get what being autistic has to do with this. If there are false positives, there are false positives. Having autism or diabetes or halitosis doesn't really seem relevant. Also, they don't just randomly mark people as cheaters. It takes a significant amount of action to result in that. When people flag someone during a game, it only counts as ONE flag (ie, if you're playing COD with 12 people and 10 of them flag you, it only counts as ONE flag). Then they investigate those with the highest number of incidents.
Of course, if "cheating" involves some sort of very detectible exploit (say, there is an absolute tell that you've gamed BFBC2's leader board or something), ten they can just automate the response.
In Soviet Russia, Modern Warfare 2 links Russian media with Moscow bombing!
They mention that it's used both as inspiration and as a training sim for terrorists. How does that work? I mean, the No Russian level is very linear and controlled. It's all on rails. Further, you don't have to kill people to beat the level. You can opt not to fire your gun at all.
Wait a second. So, you're telling me that when your government keeps pushing for some sort of kill switch on the entire internet, they might activate it to prevent people from dissenting? Who ever would have thought?! Boy, I'm glad we're getting one here, too! I'm sure it'll never be misused!
People (usually the navel-gazing semi-incestuous circle of tech journalists and "social-media" gurus) promote social media as having some sort of nearly mystical power, rather than it just being a non-story that a device is used for communication in the same way a phone or a beeper or a posting on the supermarket bulletin board is.
As a result, you have these countless morons who think they're "doing something" and are "good people" merely for putting the latest (widely publicized) missing child as their facebook photo or the Iranian flag as their Twitter photo or re-tweeting #supportturkey or something. People feel that clicking "I'm a Fan" or "Like" makes them part of some grand solution to things. Or even a tiny part of anything. If that were the case, then that fucking "I bet this pickle will get a million fans before Sarah Palin" (or whatever it was, I forget) would be the fucking king of the world by now and there would be a new amendment to the US Constitution about "I like the feeling of warm socks fresh from the drier".
I mean, unless I'm wrong and some countries have recently decided to solve all their international conflicts or internal elections by counting the number of facebook fans they have.
Social Media has as about as much to do with revolutions as wearing a red ribbon on your lapel does with curing AIDS.
I love video games, but the most popular games in the world are not facilitators of the kind of positive benefits being suggested. Trust me, if you play Call of Duty: Black Ops for three to four hours a day, the quantity of hateful racial and homophobic slurs (not to mention the inane sounds and chatter from people's fucking children who are playing an M game with adults and idiots who won't turn their fucking mic off while they carry on conversations with people on their end) is enough to GIVE you PTSD. In fact, as much as I was enjoying COD: Black Ops and playing it every free moment I had for weeks . . . I eventually woke up Christmas morning and said to myself "I can't play it any more. I can't bring myself to login and play it today. My ears can't take one more minute of it." And I haven't touched it, since.
If games have any potential for saving the world, it's most likely going to be by occupying the worst human beings in the world. Keep all of the mouth-breathing morons busy shooting each other and hurling slurs at each other (for almost 30,000 combined man-years in the first six or eight weeks of COD:BO, alone) and those people aren't out there doing drug deals, date-raping, or tagging up private property with cans of spray paint or setting neighborhood pets on fire.
This wouldn't fly in America, where using encryption is in and of itself often considered "probable cause". The attitude is typically that if you are encrypting something (or care about your privacy), then you must be hiding something.
Actually, the *entire* rail thing is a fucking joke. It's ridiculously expensive and isn't all that fast. It does have to, you know, make plenty of stops. It's essentially more corporate welfare for specific companies. Americans like to talk about "high speed bullet trains", because it makes them feel all sophisticated and European, but they have no fucking clue what's really supposedly so great about it.
Also, they've already proposed greater attention to bus and rail travel, as far as security. The idea that they would somehow not impose the same violations of your liberty on trains is absurd. (And they already flag you for paying in cash for a train ticket).
The real outrage of the whole fucking thing is the idea that we're going to cut spending by spending lots of money. Fucking ridiculous. Also, no politician will ever have the balls to make the cuts needed. Dont' dare piss off anyone and their precious little programs. here's an idea. Everyone takes a 30% cut across the board. Period. And the bullshit programs get a 100% cut.
And, therefore, it is Axxo's account which is the source of that content on whatever given site is in discussion. They're not taking about Warner Brothers being the source of the content, because they made the damn film that was uploaded. They're talking about 100 people (accounts) on the site being responsible for the uploads. Most likely, they mean "if you look at the name of the account on the torrent that was uploaded, most of them are from the same 100 accounts".
You can't download the new Kanye West album on Minonova, because they ceased their torrent service well over a year ago and have since then only operated as a "content distribution service" of legally licensed content.
http://blog.mininova.org/articles/2009/11/26/mininova-limits-its-activities-to-content-distribution-service/
They flat out state that uploaders are compensated through revenue from ads displayed on the sites and from money paid by other users for VIP subscriptions to "get faster downloads". Of course, you didn't have to read that far to smell the bullshit. Right at the beginning, they cite "The Pirate Bay and Mininova" as the sites they use for this material. You know, Mininova. The site that went LEGIT and does not contain any copyright infringing torrent links whatsoever and has not for a year and a half, now.
No, the article says UPLOADING. Not downloading. The article is talking about the sources of content, like Axxo, Klaxxon, etc.
This "study" is complete bullshit. The only source of data for their study are two sites. One is Mininova, which doesn't deal in material that infringes copyright and hasn't for a year and a half. The other is The Pirate Bay, which I don't even know what the hell the current status is, because I remember they sold themselves, then they didn't sell themselves, then they did and created two new public indexers, then were going to go legit and . . . whatever. Anyway, the point being, who the fuck still uses TPB and how is it a relevant source of data on Bit Torrent anymore?
So, the source of their data is clearly flawed. They're stressing points about "piracy" when one site isn't even "piracy" related and the other is . . . whatever the fuck it is, anymore.
Second, they claim that 100 people are responsible for almost all of the UPLOADS (that is, 100 people are responsible for almost all of the content being put out there). You can assume that they're counting scene release accounts as one person, when they're probably many more. Also, again, they're saying that 100 people are responsible for that much content . . . ON THOSE TWO SITES. Not "all of bit torrent". That would be fucking absurd of them to claim *that*.
And, finally, yes, they actually do say that the incentive for most of the uploaders is that they get revenue from ads on the indexing sites as well as money from VIP subscriptions to the sites for faster bandwidth. All of which is essentially bullshit, unless there is some secret deal where TPB and other sites are cutting big checks to Axxo and Klaxxon and all these other guys who are out there spreading content around, which I doubt.
It seems that these "researches" simply can't grasp the idea that a lot of these people get a kick out of sharing for sharing's sake and that respect (and maybe credits toward their future download ratio at private sites) is all they're looking to receive.
We can't even coax ourselves into going back to the moon. At this point, we might as well be contemplating inter-dimensional travel, for all it matters.
Also, is it just me or does the "new slashdot" make it nearly impossible to detect that text is hyperlinked in a post?
This is American politics. You don't need evidence for anything. The overwhelming majority of the country believes in religion, alien abductions, psychics, ghosts, and that Iraq had WMDs with which we were sure to be struck any moment. Make an assertion frequently enough and people will accept it as truth. People still believe the bullshit that more women are victims of domestic violence on Superbowl Sunday than any other day of the year.
No, the ESRB:
+ Is not legally enforceable. Neither are motion picture ratings. It would be a first amendment issue, if they were. Many politicians and busy-body groups would like this, though and are pushing for it. ESRB and MPAA ratings are entirely voluntary as is their enforcement in retail by the retail stores themselves. If you work at a game store and sell an M rated game to a child, your boss might fire you, but neither you nor your boss nor the company have committed any crime. If that were to ever change, you'd have to also start seeing special library cards so that librarians could not check books out to children that were beyond their designated category. (I probably wouldn't have been allowed to read Tommyknockers or The Stand, when I was ten, I guess).
+ The ESRB rating indicates that there may be violence, mild violence, comic violence, language, drugs, sex within a game. It does not have a giant warning label telling you that if you play Call of Duty you are more likely to start committing murders and engaging in wonton acts of violence as a result of it.
+ There is, of course, absolutely no correlation between violent movies, music, games, books, art and actual acts of violence, which makes the legislation even more idiotic.
Good luck with that.
The group of people that think video games are not just for children or that geeks are cool is a very limited one and the impression that it is a generally accepted feeling is an inaccuracy merely reinforced by our own ranks. Kind of like if you spend all your time swinging, you might start to think that swinging is something far more accepted by society than it really is, because -- of course -- you're around a subset that is into it all the time.
I remember a very specific incident with a girl who is a good friend of mine. In response to some ridiculously geeky tangent I went on, I snickered that "I'm such a geek . . ." and her response was to sincerely try and convince me that I wasn't a geek the same way a friend might respond to you if you had called yourself a loser or an asshole.
Then you have video games. While most gamers are adults and the average age of gamers is around 35 years old, most adults are not gamers. If you're an adult - especially once you're out of your 20s, you are bordering on being a pathetic curiosity to the rest of the grown-ups around you, who see you as less responsible and less mature merely for what you spend your recreational time doing.
One might suggest that it merely indicates the age of such prejudice, misunderstanding, and judgement is a lot younger than the "old folks" we would associate the attitude with, but if you are an adult and have been playing games online any time, recently, you've probably experienced comments from very young people, too. I was astonished when I was playing Black Ops with a couple buddies a few weeks ago and when some teenagers asked us how old we were (between 30 and 40), they couldn't believe it. They thought we must be a bunch of losers, because they couldn't imagine that anyone would sit around playing video games when they're an adult. I actually heard that repeated from kids to older players (not just ourselves) too many times to count over a period of about a month that we got together and played regularly.
It was mirrored by a conversation/poll/discussion I saw more than once online . . . in video game websites. Places you would expect the attitude to be more rational. Instead, I've seen questions and forum discussions by what are clearly younger people asking "How old do you think you will be when you stop playing video games?". Probably more than half of the responses are typically things like "as soon as I turn eighteen and get out of the house" or "probably when I have a kid" or "when I get married" or "when I'm thirty". Kind of absurd that there seems to be a huge population of young people who love video games, but only see it as something children do and not something they'll keep doing. Imagine if you spent your childhood reading a lot of great books or maybe hiking and you said "I'll probably stop reading books and going on hikes when I'm 23". What the fuck?
Anyway, the attitude may change. It's not going to be in our life time.
Just think of all the labels that would be required for religious texts. Especially since they ARE actually linked to violence and terrorism of all sorts. Not to mention delusional behavior. When was the last time someone chopped off their daughters limbs or chained their child to a tree and beat them because "GTA told me to"?
Anyway, I'm all for randomly assigning bullshit blame to various things and then putting warning labels on them. Lets put some on butter knives. And stereos. And books. And shovels. And clothing. OOH, that's it! Let's put a RAPE-WARNING on all clothing deemed to be even remotely suggestive. After all, the connection between rape and revealing clothes is about the same as that between videogames and violence.
It's fine, but I don't like the giant facebook and twitter icons in the top. You might as well be pimping AOL, while you're at it for as relevant as it is to the Slashdot community who generally has a great distaste for the two web-cluttering-shit-services.
This is entirely relevant, if you're still thirteen years old and you pay for your meals using the change found in the family sofa cushions. The rest of us prefer food that contains food. And flavor.