This is an interesting problem, although perhaps ultimately not worth solving. Suppose we release an encrypted patch, and then the key a week later. If you can download the patch when your machine is turned on at any point during the week, then if your machine is not on when the key is released, your vulnerability window is from the time you next turn on your computer to the time you get the key, which should be quite short. The likelihood of a botnet finding your machine in that window is small (and, for those of us behind firewalls, the odds of us going out into the internet and finding malicious content during that period is much smaller).
If you DID want to solve it though, how? This is what comes immediately to mind for me; imagine that when I first turn on my computer, my computer connects to my firewall and says "Hey firewall, I want access to the internet, but first, do you have any patches for me?" If the firewall does, it sends the keys and/or patches to the machine, and doesn't let the machine onto the network until those patches are installed.
A little tricky to implement and make compatible with existing applications. Perhaps have the OS present the interface as down to user-space while this negotiation is going on?
You still need a firewall which is on all the time (and/or a firewall with no vulnerabilities). You could move this functionality up to the ISP level, assuming you trust your ISP.
As I said at the beginning, perhaps not worth the money and effort to implement, given the very small hole it is patching.
The "market" for malware consists of customers who want to buy computer cycles for shady purposes. The Mac users certainly aren't clamoring for malware, and the paying customers in this "industry" probably do not really care whether their spam is being delivered by Macs or PCs, even if the Mac ads are very cute. So, I imagine there's really very little money in Mac malware.
When I first read this, I thought "Cool!" I'm a big fan of the anime. However, with a series like Ghost in the Shell, one almost has to worry that Hollywood will take the signature wheels-within-wheels plot lines will and severely dumb them down for us "simpleton audiences" on this side of the big pond. Hopefully not; we'll have to wait and see.
I'm thinking TFA means web applications, and not web services. Even though "web service" is a stupid name, since web services have nothing to do with the world wide web, the two are very different things. I have a hard time seeing web service integration being all that useful in Firefox.
"[The] problem is so vast as to discourage investment in the carrots, positive solutions like Hulu."
And who's fault is that, exactly? Who sat on their heels, clinging desperately to their sinking and outdated business model while new distribution systems were built? Who refused to license content to the new distribution systems? Who, after years of being thrashed by modern technology, finally tried to counter the problem by building DRM encumbered systems that gave the customer far less value than the "pirate" option, while charging much more?
Content owners have, in effect, "trained" the public to be pirates. If a DRM-free system for downloading TV shows and music had existed 10 years ago, most people would probably never have bothered with Napster, and this whole problem would have never existed. If 6 years ago, the content owners had responded to Napster and other P2P technologies with innovation instead of lawsuits, likely software like Napster would have remained a niche product, used by the technically competent (as opposed to, say, my mother). All this senseless talk of "ISP level filtering" only tells us that the content owners have not yet learned the lesson. They are doomed to failure.
"Ma'am, do you have any idea who might have kidnapped your daughter? Has she been talking to anyone new lately? Has she had any new friends come by the house?"
"*sob* I don't know! She uses blowfish!"
You're legally responsible for your children until they reach the age of majority, and the only way you can possibly do that is to have some clue what your children are doing.
One day I'm sure I'll have a fiber optic cable coming into my house, but am I going to connect every machine in the house to its own fiber optic cable? What's going to distribute that high speed connection to all the machines in my house? The blogosphere?
I suppose you can make an argument that every machine will be addressable from the public network with its own IPv6 address, and thus they're all part of one big happy network. You're still going to have a firewall in between your machines and the rest of the network, though.
That was my initial reaction too. But, he lost his legs just above the knee, so the routing of the wire would either have to cross empty space somewhere, or else route up one leg, into the crotch of his trousers, and down the other leg. On the one hand, I can see either of those routings having issues, practical or comfort related. But still, seems like it would be worth it considering the advantages the wired version would give you in terms of reliability and battery longevity.
Do you think the world would be better off with a version of HTML that only works in Internet Explorer and a version of HTML that only works in Firefox? An interesting analogy, with one subtle but important difference. HTML is an open standard, but Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are both closed standards. A monopoly on a closed standard means you have one standards body which gets to dictate how the standard is used and evolves, which is what brought us all this stupidity with DVD; no Linux players, region locks, bizarre and useless DRM schemes enforced by even more bizarre and strange agreements between the DVD consortium and the implementors.
I wholly agree. I think the music industry has dug this hole for themselves.
If music had been available as MP3s from an online store pre-Napster, then a lot of people would probably never have bothered with Napster. Then Napster came along and it was just so convenient. People learned to use it.
The music industry went after Napster, and then started offering their own "online store" where you could buy music you could only play on your computer, and could only transfer to certain digital players, and every now and then your license to play it might get revoked and you might loose all the music you'd paid for. In short, they built a system that was far less convenient than driving to the store and buying a CD. "Piracy" continued to prevail, not because people are bad or don't want to pay for music and support their favorite bands, but because the piracy was still way more convenient than driving to the store.
Events like the Sony rootkit fiasco made it clear that the industry was going to do their best to make even the tried and true act of buying CDs far more complicated. You can steal the music, where there's a slim possibility you'll pick up a virus, or you can buy it, where you definitely will.
Now the music industry is finally starting to see the light, but I fear it's likely too little, too late. Consumers have already been trained to steal the music, and to distrust the offerings from the music industry. The less-than-tech-savvy were fooled by the labels when they didn't understand what DRM was, but now they know, and convincing the masses that "It's OK to buy from iTunes now! Really, our music works with your non-iPod player," is going to be a big challenge.
Since many Adobe products now require product activation (not sure about After Effects specifically), you may not be able to do an OS reinstall without a phone call to Adobe to plead with them to let you reinstall your software.
DRM, if by DRM you mean a method to stop files from being copied, is based on security through obscurity. It has to be.
In cryptography, Alice wants to send a message to Bob without it being intercepted by Charlie. With DRM, Alice wants to send a message to Bob without it being intercepted by... Bob. This makes no sense. You have to send Bob both the document, and the key to the document, otherwise Bob won't be able to read the document. But, if you send Bob the key, then Bob can also strip the encryption from the document, destroying your DRM. Typically, DRM systems try to make the algorithm used and the location of the key difficult to find, by hiding it with convoluted code. This is why these systems always fail.
In an open source world, though, you have to give away the location of the key and the algorithm used; it's open source, and anyone can look at the source code. Open source and security-through-obscurity are fundamentally incompatible.
I played the demo, and I would've bought the game for PC if not for the activation system. But, really, it was a linear first person shooter with a cool art-deco style, and from what I hear a nice story line. I suppose if there are awards for art direction and best story, (which, I'm sure there are) then sure.
But "Outstanding Innovation in Gaming"? Not so much. (Portal takes it there, without a doubt).
So, in security, we have this notion called an "attack tree". Let's suppose you want to stop someone from stealing your family jewels. You put the in a safe, and all is well, right? Well... maybe not. We create this tree, where the root is "steal the jewels", and the children under the root are various ways you might accomplish this ("Use a key to open the safe", "Drill out the hinges on the safe", "Create hole in safe"). And each of these nodes can be divided out further into more children, so to use a key for example, you either need to steal a key, or be one of the people who has a legitimate use for the key, or be the locksmith who installed the lock.
Similarly, if the attackers goal is "molest my children", then you have an attack tree that might have "hang out by the school", or "give candy full of drugs", and so forth. "Lure children on the internet" is one child of that tree, and "lure children using MySpace" would be a subchild.
For each of these nodes, there's a cost associated with fixing the problem. Ideally, you fix the problem right at the top of the tree, so for example we could make sure our keys are only given to a select group of people whom we trust, that our keys are locked securely in other safes (excepting the obvious recursion problem), and kill the locksmith. OR, we could go up one node in the tree, and eliminate the key altogether, and use an electronic keypad with a user definable code, which neatly solves the entire problems of keys.
Similarly, we can do some sort of bizzare and flawed attempt to do age verification using email addresses to stop pervs on MySpace (How do we stop kids from creating multiple accounts? How do we know the parents are the ones submitting the email address and not a malicious party intent on removing a MySpace page?), and we can implement the same system on all the social networking sites, and all the online games, and all the other online communications systems in the world, effectively black-holing our children and removing them from this filthy online world... Or, we could go up one node in the tree, and tell our kids "Don't go visit weirdos on the internet without telling us first", just like we tell our kids "Don't take candy from strangers", and "Don't get into cars with people you don't know".
Not to say that we can't take steps at multiple levels in the tree; I just think there are steps we could take which are more effective.
Using the Rock Band drum kit as an instrument
on
Rock Band Drum Kit Modded
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· Score: 5, Informative
If you have the PS3 version of Rock Band, then here's how to mod your drum kit:
Step 1: Plug drum kit into PC.
Done. Your PC will detect the PS3 drum kit as a MIDI device.
Check out this link for details for the Xbox-360 version:
I would suspect this largely depends on the kind of application you're developing.
Major problems in "cool blog software", for example, aren't really a huge issue. If it takes them a few weeks to be solved, then poor bloggers will be without some magic-pixie-dust feature for a bit.
In the telecomm world, though, customers expect a root cause for a "critical" defect in less than 24 hours (and there's a definition for critical, although I won't get into that here). My company actually writes that into our support contracts, so we need to root cause in 24 hours in a very real and legally binding way (although we do not contractually need to provide a fix in that time; sometimes we do, sometimes we just give a workaround).
Financial customers are even less forgiving.
A critical problem in, say, the fire control on an assault aircraft, is expected to never exist in the first place.
Yes. As far as I'm concerned, the copy protection renders the game unplayable, since I can't purchase it, and I won't "rent" it. Instead of focusing on "replayability", perhaps they should work on "playability".
An application of what, specifically? Machines that talk to each other and not to the whole group and do something useful? You mean, like Bittorrent?:)
Seriously, though, this is some very cool research; the robots talk to each other via infrared, which is why they can only talk to their neighbors. But, with the infrared setup they're using, they can estimate direction and distance to each of their neighbors. You COULD do this with a bunch of robots talking bluetooth with GPS receivers, but it would be insanely expensive by comparison. These guys would be dirt cheap if mass produced. Dirt cheap means you don't care if you loose a few, which makes them excellent options in harsh environments.
A lot of the research in this area right now is in algorithms. Designing an algorithm to run distributed over a group of small, dumb, physical devices, where individual devices might suddenly disappear (batteries die, fall down a hole, consumed by fire, eaten by ewoks, etc...) is quite difficult.
If you're looking for a practical application; thousands of bug sized robots which scour a collapsed building for survivors, and direct rescue efforts. If you loose a few, who cares? They're cheap! Or how about thousands of small rovers which explore the surface of an alien planet? If you send a single rover to Mars, you're putting all your eggs in one basket; if something goes wrong with that rover, you're whole mission fails. A collection of cheaper robots which can work together dramatically looses your odds of failure, since the failure of 10% or 20% of the swarm would be immaterial.
I saw Mr. McLurkin give his presentation here in Ottawa. Fascinating stuff. Each component of the swarm is very dumb, with very little storage. If you want to store a location for future reference, it's very easy; park a robot there.
All the robots have a sound system, though; the first thing Mr. McLurkin did during his presentation was to have a single robot request that 6 other robots follow it, and the swarm picked and allocated 6 robots, and they all went off in a chain, singing "Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work we go".
Check out James McLurkin's website for some presentations and videos:
No bearing... unless you can't play it
on
BioShock Review
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· Score: 1
Lots of people who picked up the game when it came out, and ran out of activations because of problems with the game and/or the activation server, would disagree with you that it has "no bearing on the quality of the actual gameplay". Being unable to play at all is quite a stroke against the quality of the gameplay, in my mind.
If your target is buisness users, this sort of "phone-home product activation" scheme is going to cause you and your customers a lot of grief. The install might be "painless" on someone's home computer (assuming the someone isn't ethically opposed to product activation), but it won't be in a corporate environment, where your product may have to traverse a proxy server (or even an authenticating proxy server) to reach the internet.
I'm sorry, but I just can't support a game with product activation with my dollars. I went through these headaches when I received a copy of Flight Simulator X as a gift over the holidays last year, and I'm now running a cracked-but-legal copy of FSX. I refuse to "rent" a game for $75.
Steam doesn't bother me, BTW, since there's no restriction on the number of times you install anything, or the number of times you upgrade your video card. But, if this activation thing gets popular, it won't be long before I think "Should I buy a new video card? No, better not. Too much hassle reactivating and repurchasing all my games."
Ken says the activation will eventually be removed, although refuses to give a time line. I hope that's true, because I really would like to play this thing, but I won't buy it on a promise that it will eventually be unbroken.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an interesting problem, although perhaps ultimately not worth solving. Suppose we release an encrypted patch, and then the key a week later. If you can download the patch when your machine is turned on at any point during the week, then if your machine is not on when the key is released, your vulnerability window is from the time you next turn on your computer to the time you get the key, which should be quite short. The likelihood of a botnet finding your machine in that window is small (and, for those of us behind firewalls, the odds of us going out into the internet and finding malicious content during that period is much smaller).
If you DID want to solve it though, how? This is what comes immediately to mind for me; imagine that when I first turn on my computer, my computer connects to my firewall and says "Hey firewall, I want access to the internet, but first, do you have any patches for me?" If the firewall does, it sends the keys and/or patches to the machine, and doesn't let the machine onto the network until those patches are installed.
A little tricky to implement and make compatible with existing applications. Perhaps have the OS present the interface as down to user-space while this negotiation is going on?
You still need a firewall which is on all the time (and/or a firewall with no vulnerabilities). You could move this functionality up to the ISP level, assuming you trust your ISP.
As I said at the beginning, perhaps not worth the money and effort to implement, given the very small hole it is patching.
The "market" for malware consists of customers who want to buy computer cycles for shady purposes. The Mac users certainly aren't clamoring for malware, and the paying customers in this "industry" probably do not really care whether their spam is being delivered by Macs or PCs, even if the Mac ads are very cute. So, I imagine there's really very little money in Mac malware.
When I first read this, I thought "Cool!" I'm a big fan of the anime. However, with a series like Ghost in the Shell, one almost has to worry that Hollywood will take the signature wheels-within-wheels plot lines will and severely dumb them down for us "simpleton audiences" on this side of the big pond. Hopefully not; we'll have to wait and see.
I'm thinking TFA means web applications, and not web services. Even though "web service" is a stupid name, since web services have nothing to do with the world wide web, the two are very different things. I have a hard time seeing web service integration being all that useful in Firefox.
"[The] problem is so vast as to discourage investment in the carrots, positive solutions like Hulu."
And who's fault is that, exactly? Who sat on their heels, clinging desperately to their sinking and outdated business model while new distribution systems were built? Who refused to license content to the new distribution systems? Who, after years of being thrashed by modern technology, finally tried to counter the problem by building DRM encumbered systems that gave the customer far less value than the "pirate" option, while charging much more?
Content owners have, in effect, "trained" the public to be pirates. If a DRM-free system for downloading TV shows and music had existed 10 years ago, most people would probably never have bothered with Napster, and this whole problem would have never existed. If 6 years ago, the content owners had responded to Napster and other P2P technologies with innovation instead of lawsuits, likely software like Napster would have remained a niche product, used by the technically competent (as opposed to, say, my mother). All this senseless talk of "ISP level filtering" only tells us that the content owners have not yet learned the lesson. They are doomed to failure.
I can just envision the police phone call:
"Ma'am, do you have any idea who might have kidnapped your daughter? Has she been talking to anyone new lately? Has she had any new friends come by the house?"
"*sob* I don't know! She uses blowfish!"
You're legally responsible for your children until they reach the age of majority, and the only way you can possibly do that is to have some clue what your children are doing.
you'll be lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness
Obviously you haven't seen the Wikipedia article on light pollution.
My Vx is still ticking, but the digitizer is hosed. Almost every time I turn it on I need to realign the digitizer.
One day I'm sure I'll have a fiber optic cable coming into my house, but am I going to connect every machine in the house to its own fiber optic cable? What's going to distribute that high speed connection to all the machines in my house? The blogosphere?
I suppose you can make an argument that every machine will be addressable from the public network with its own IPv6 address, and thus they're all part of one big happy network. You're still going to have a firewall in between your machines and the rest of the network, though.
That was my initial reaction too. But, he lost his legs just above the knee, so the routing of the wire would either have to cross empty space somewhere, or else route up one leg, into the crotch of his trousers, and down the other leg. On the one hand, I can see either of those routings having issues, practical or comfort related. But still, seems like it would be worth it considering the advantages the wired version would give you in terms of reliability and battery longevity.
I wholly agree. I think the music industry has dug this hole for themselves.
If music had been available as MP3s from an online store pre-Napster, then a lot of people would probably never have bothered with Napster. Then Napster came along and it was just so convenient. People learned to use it.
The music industry went after Napster, and then started offering their own "online store" where you could buy music you could only play on your computer, and could only transfer to certain digital players, and every now and then your license to play it might get revoked and you might loose all the music you'd paid for. In short, they built a system that was far less convenient than driving to the store and buying a CD. "Piracy" continued to prevail, not because people are bad or don't want to pay for music and support their favorite bands, but because the piracy was still way more convenient than driving to the store.
Events like the Sony rootkit fiasco made it clear that the industry was going to do their best to make even the tried and true act of buying CDs far more complicated. You can steal the music, where there's a slim possibility you'll pick up a virus, or you can buy it, where you definitely will.
Now the music industry is finally starting to see the light, but I fear it's likely too little, too late. Consumers have already been trained to steal the music, and to distrust the offerings from the music industry. The less-than-tech-savvy were fooled by the labels when they didn't understand what DRM was, but now they know, and convincing the masses that "It's OK to buy from iTunes now! Really, our music works with your non-iPod player," is going to be a big challenge.
Since many Adobe products now require product activation (not sure about After Effects specifically), you may not be able to do an OS reinstall without a phone call to Adobe to plead with them to let you reinstall your software.
DRM, if by DRM you mean a method to stop files from being copied, is based on security through obscurity. It has to be.
In cryptography, Alice wants to send a message to Bob without it being intercepted by Charlie. With DRM, Alice wants to send a message to Bob without it being intercepted by... Bob. This makes no sense. You have to send Bob both the document, and the key to the document, otherwise Bob won't be able to read the document. But, if you send Bob the key, then Bob can also strip the encryption from the document, destroying your DRM. Typically, DRM systems try to make the algorithm used and the location of the key difficult to find, by hiding it with convoluted code. This is why these systems always fail.
In an open source world, though, you have to give away the location of the key and the algorithm used; it's open source, and anyone can look at the source code. Open source and security-through-obscurity are fundamentally incompatible.
I played the demo, and I would've bought the game for PC if not for the activation system. But, really, it was a linear first person shooter with a cool art-deco style, and from what I hear a nice story line. I suppose if there are awards for art direction and best story, (which, I'm sure there are) then sure.
But "Outstanding Innovation in Gaming"? Not so much. (Portal takes it there, without a doubt).
So, in security, we have this notion called an "attack tree". Let's suppose you want to stop someone from stealing your family jewels. You put the in a safe, and all is well, right? Well... maybe not. We create this tree, where the root is "steal the jewels", and the children under the root are various ways you might accomplish this ("Use a key to open the safe", "Drill out the hinges on the safe", "Create hole in safe"). And each of these nodes can be divided out further into more children, so to use a key for example, you either need to steal a key, or be one of the people who has a legitimate use for the key, or be the locksmith who installed the lock.
Similarly, if the attackers goal is "molest my children", then you have an attack tree that might have "hang out by the school", or "give candy full of drugs", and so forth. "Lure children on the internet" is one child of that tree, and "lure children using MySpace" would be a subchild.
For each of these nodes, there's a cost associated with fixing the problem. Ideally, you fix the problem right at the top of the tree, so for example we could make sure our keys are only given to a select group of people whom we trust, that our keys are locked securely in other safes (excepting the obvious recursion problem), and kill the locksmith. OR, we could go up one node in the tree, and eliminate the key altogether, and use an electronic keypad with a user definable code, which neatly solves the entire problems of keys.
Similarly, we can do some sort of bizzare and flawed attempt to do age verification using email addresses to stop pervs on MySpace (How do we stop kids from creating multiple accounts? How do we know the parents are the ones submitting the email address and not a malicious party intent on removing a MySpace page?), and we can implement the same system on all the social networking sites, and all the online games, and all the other online communications systems in the world, effectively black-holing our children and removing them from this filthy online world... Or, we could go up one node in the tree, and tell our kids "Don't go visit weirdos on the internet without telling us first", just like we tell our kids "Don't take candy from strangers", and "Don't get into cars with people you don't know".
Not to say that we can't take steps at multiple levels in the tree; I just think there are steps we could take which are more effective.
If you have the PS3 version of Rock Band, then here's how to mod your drum kit:
Step 1: Plug drum kit into PC.
Done. Your PC will detect the PS3 drum kit as a MIDI device.
Check out this link for details for the Xbox-360 version:
http://news.filefront.com/rock-band-drums-for-pc-xbox-360-vs-ps3-kit/
I'm surprised such a router isn't readily available, especially with the new "evil bit" in RFC 3514: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3514.html :P
I would suspect this largely depends on the kind of application you're developing.
Major problems in "cool blog software", for example, aren't really a huge issue. If it takes them a few weeks to be solved, then poor bloggers will be without some magic-pixie-dust feature for a bit.
In the telecomm world, though, customers expect a root cause for a "critical" defect in less than 24 hours (and there's a definition for critical, although I won't get into that here). My company actually writes that into our support contracts, so we need to root cause in 24 hours in a very real and legally binding way (although we do not contractually need to provide a fix in that time; sometimes we do, sometimes we just give a workaround).
Financial customers are even less forgiving.
A critical problem in, say, the fire control on an assault aircraft, is expected to never exist in the first place.
Yes. As far as I'm concerned, the copy protection renders the game unplayable, since I can't purchase it, and I won't "rent" it. Instead of focusing on "replayability", perhaps they should work on "playability".
An application of what, specifically? Machines that talk to each other and not to the whole group and do something useful? You mean, like Bittorrent? :)
Seriously, though, this is some very cool research; the robots talk to each other via infrared, which is why they can only talk to their neighbors. But, with the infrared setup they're using, they can estimate direction and distance to each of their neighbors. You COULD do this with a bunch of robots talking bluetooth with GPS receivers, but it would be insanely expensive by comparison. These guys would be dirt cheap if mass produced. Dirt cheap means you don't care if you loose a few, which makes them excellent options in harsh environments.
A lot of the research in this area right now is in algorithms. Designing an algorithm to run distributed over a group of small, dumb, physical devices, where individual devices might suddenly disappear (batteries die, fall down a hole, consumed by fire, eaten by ewoks, etc...) is quite difficult.
If you're looking for a practical application; thousands of bug sized robots which scour a collapsed building for survivors, and direct rescue efforts. If you loose a few, who cares? They're cheap! Or how about thousands of small rovers which explore the surface of an alien planet? If you send a single rover to Mars, you're putting all your eggs in one basket; if something goes wrong with that rover, you're whole mission fails. A collection of cheaper robots which can work together dramatically looses your odds of failure, since the failure of 10% or 20% of the swarm would be immaterial.
I saw Mr. McLurkin give his presentation here in Ottawa. Fascinating stuff. Each component of the swarm is very dumb, with very little storage. If you want to store a location for future reference, it's very easy; park a robot there.
All the robots have a sound system, though; the first thing Mr. McLurkin did during his presentation was to have a single robot request that 6 other robots follow it, and the swarm picked and allocated 6 robots, and they all went off in a chain, singing "Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work we go".
Check out James McLurkin's website for some presentations and videos:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/jamesm/
Lots of people who picked up the game when it came out, and ran out of activations because of problems with the game and/or the activation server, would disagree with you that it has "no bearing on the quality of the actual gameplay". Being unable to play at all is quite a stroke against the quality of the gameplay, in my mind.
If your target is buisness users, this sort of "phone-home product activation" scheme is going to cause you and your customers a lot of grief. The install might be "painless" on someone's home computer (assuming the someone isn't ethically opposed to product activation), but it won't be in a corporate environment, where your product may have to traverse a proxy server (or even an authenticating proxy server) to reach the internet.
I'm sorry, but I just can't support a game with product activation with my dollars. I went through these headaches when I received a copy of Flight Simulator X as a gift over the holidays last year, and I'm now running a cracked-but-legal copy of FSX. I refuse to "rent" a game for $75.
Steam doesn't bother me, BTW, since there's no restriction on the number of times you install anything, or the number of times you upgrade your video card. But, if this activation thing gets popular, it won't be long before I think "Should I buy a new video card? No, better not. Too much hassle reactivating and repurchasing all my games."
Ken says the activation will eventually be removed, although refuses to give a time line. I hope that's true, because I really would like to play this thing, but I won't buy it on a promise that it will eventually be unbroken.