We solved this problem 20 years ago. It's called "plausible deniability". There are various ways to get it. The easiest one is this:
Use an encryption tool that can hide encrypted volumes, like TrueCrypt. Encrypt your porn collection on the outer shell, your private data on the inner. If someone asks for your decryption key, stall a bit, then blush and hand them the porn key.
Obviously, you didn't want your wife to find out about your porn collection, which is why you encrypted it. No, officer, there's nothing else there.
Modify for your particular case. If you have serious sensible material, you need more serious stuff to hide it behind, e.g. the e-mails from your mistress or whatever.
There's no need whatsoever for any complicated solution. On the contrary, it makes you more vulnerable, not less.
Taiwan has recently been hit with a devastating typhoon. Some of the pictures show devastation similar to New Orleans after Katrina.
So, yeah, I'm glad I live here where I can worry about some schmuck in his basement spending his allowance on Eve Online and not over there where landslides are causing whole towns to disappear.
There was a supernova in NGC 1559 just a few days ago. Whole towns disappear? Try whole planets.
It's a big world, you know? Worrying about things that happen a thousand miles or a million light years away is just as much a luxury as spending your time playing some game.
These pages are helpful for the typical web surfer.
Do you work in marketing?
Clue: DNS stands for "Domain Name Service", not "Targeted Advertisement Injection". The "typical web surfer" already has a tool that is responsible for handling unresolvable addresses, it's built into the browser. If you want more help, suggestions for typo fixing, etc. then the browser is the proper location.
There are client programs out there that rely on getting proper DNS responses, including correct "domain not found" replies when the domain does not exist.
Yes, it breaks some scripts and runs contrary to published standards, but it presents a new (actually pretty old) conception of how the web should work.
No, it doesn't. And running contrary to published standards isn't a minor offense. They're called standards for a reason, and client-side programs expect a certain behaviour. Breaking that means breaking customers' software. And no, the web should not work this way. If you want to get a search page on DNS error, a Firefox plugin would be the proper approach, not DNS manipulation.
What this is is the equivalent of your phone company hijacking every call with a mistyped phone number to a toll line with a "helpful" operator that helps you guess the correct number. The only difference is the payment method.
If you're just doing the plain-text writing, you almost certainly don't need and (until recently) very probably didn't use Word.
Writers I know (which is not a huge sample, I'll grant that), either use specialized tools like Scrivener (mentioned in the article, and coincidentally also my tool of choice) or something a lot simpler than Word. All the complexity of Word is not needed and in the way.
Why someone discovering 14 year old internet technology made the front page of/. is beyond me...
Because 14 years ago, you couldn't have deployed that technology in an office and moved everyone including the secretary to use it. Today you can, and that's the news.
Actually, it's still a bit of early adopter thing, strange as that may sound. The combination will become really popular when IBM (or some other big name) picks it up, calls it something buzzwordy, and sells it to the clueless execs for a ridiculous amount of money.
Not really. It was targeted at amateur writers and professionals who had to write stuff as a side-aspect of their real work.
Word, even today, lacks a lot of what professional printing needs, and most publishers started accepting Word documents only because it had become so obiquitous everywhere else. Put the same text into Word and into a LaTeX template and print out both on a good printer, and even a novice can instantly spot the difference.
DTP (when layout matters) or TeX (when it doesn't) is what professional writers used until Word started corrupting things.
Or, to summarize; this law, though probably poorly-written, is conceived with good intentions, though we all know how that goes.
Err, no.
I've never seen a law that was conceived with fewer good intentions, and I've been following this one closely. The whole "child porn" nonsense was sand-in-the-eyes from the get go. There's a reason that several organisations of actual child abuse victims are amongst the most vocal opponents of this law.
The intent was never to fight child porn. Everyone with even three working brain cells can see that it will achieve nothing in that regard. The intent was and always has been cheap publicity for Zensursula. Read up on her background and what she's done since in office and you'll realize that she's done almost nothing to help families, and a lot to get her name into the media. If her intentions are even partially honest and good, then she's the dumbest human being alive, and yes including GWB.
Completely unrelated, I'd also see some legislation allowing the Federal Constitutional Courts to hand out savage beatings with the clue stick to everyone involved in drafting and passing unconstitutional laws. And they should broadcast it on TV, too.
True. Like most problems with politics, the core reason is the lack of accountability. If you or me break a law, or violate the constitution, we will be imprisoned. If the lawmakers draft a clearly unconstitutional law then - nothing at all happens to them. And that's just wrong. They're trying to implement "three strikes" laws everywhere, how about a three strikes law for politicians? Vote "yes" for three laws that are found to be unconstitutional, and you are removed from politics and may not hold a political office for five years.
If you don't like grinding, then MMOs aren't something you really should be playing.
Largely true, which is why I have carefully selected those that I do, and avoid the pure grinding parts in them. I don't need the super-special rare items that you need 20 hours of grinding to get, and that give you a 0.5% advantage over some item you can buy from the weapon trader.
Other people derive fun out of the competition. Achievements are a big thing now. Someone feels much more accomplished if they spent the time to get the achievement rather than someone who bought it.
And I never said achievements should be buyable. If you like competition, you should compete based on skill, not based on how many hours you can put into the game, wouldn't you agree?
People want to escape the real world where the rich have all the advantages. You allow everything to be purchasable and you just pissed off the majority of your customers.
That's a good argument, yes.
I would argue for two things in response. One, setting prices so they're mass-market prices. It should be affordable not only for the rich. Two, no problem at all making it visible in-game whether I bought my stuff or not. If you want to boast with having grinded all your gear, be my guest.
But there's no actual challenge in getting to level 60 or whatever. It's only a matter of time. The fact that there's no penalty for dying in most MMORPGs makes sure of that. No matter how bad you play, eventually you'll get there.
I'd be the first to sign up to a MMO where actual skill determines your level, not just accumulated experience points.
It devalues the work other people have put into their characters
Good. I'm all for devalueing pointless, repetitive work. We have machines for that. Us humans should engage in challenging work that requires skill.
Your degree example doesn't hold. A degree is a paper that says "xyz has these and these skills". Almost no item or level in an MMO is equivalent to that, all they say is "xyz somehow killed the end boss abc", which in most cases essentially translates to "put x ours of time into it".
Funny. Most of the times, difference in equipment or level is the reason why I can't play with people who I'd like to play with.
You assume that everyone who would buy stuff is there to show it off. I claim the opposite. The people I know who'd buy stuff are those who are more interested in playing than in showing off or grinding.
But heck, as some other poster suggested, make every item in two different variants, one that can only be bought and one that can only be gained in-game. Then you could still be showing off your "hard earned" stuff and laught at the people who have the yellow (or whatever) version from the shop.
But those of us who couldn't care how you got your stuff could continue playing.
It diminishes the value of what the other players have EARNED.
If i spent days working on an item or questing for some special item, and your mom just goes and buys it for you... what the hell was the point of me earning it the hard way? It makes honest players feel like suckers.
One, for people who work for their money, paying for something is just as much "earning it the hard way". Two, the "work" you refer to is the exact kind of work that humans have built machines for ever since they were able to - stupid, repetitive, non-challenging work. We call it "grinding" for a reason. Three, there is absolutely nothing dishonest about buying an item if the game so allows. We can argue about honesty in regards to games where buying stuff is expressively forbidden, but that's not what this topic is about. Four, if your enjoyment of having the item suffers because others got it in a different way, maybe you need to check your own values instead of forcing them on others?
The most important part is that the model can not simply be added to an existing MMO that was designed with the assumption of grinding built-in, for example. If the entire reward concept is built on micro-rewards given for repetitive actions, then buying your way around that will frustrate you quickly because you bypass the addictive part of the game.
What kind of mind would a brain with artificial input, or a different body, produce? I'm really looking forward to finding that out, I figure it will be one of the most interesting experiments in human history.
Until we've run a series of peer-reviewed experiments on that, I doubt it.
Moreover, if you had a way to create a simulation that's good enough, which means it would have to be able to fool actual humans, then I'd have several more profitable ways of using it than to breed artificial personas.
It's not really about someone (like you) who purchases one or two items needed to do something fun. Its the people who drop $500 to max out their character so they can strut their stuff without having earned it.
Yes, but compare to what? It's not as if I couldn't put down $500 today to have my character power-leveled and equipped with the best gear, is it? It's just a black market, that's all. What they're doing is making it a legit market. We should all know from the drug market experience over the past 30 or so years that pushing things to a black market does nothing to reduce demand, it only drives up the profits of the dealers and creates expenses to keep the black market in check.
What, exactly, is "unfair" about buying stuff instead of grinding for it?
Note: I'm not talking about anything that would require skill. I agree that if you want to get, say, a title "great marksmen", you should actually play and get a certain hit percentage.
But what, exactly, is unfair about investing $10 to get 100 monster skulls compared to investing 2 hours of time to get 100 monster skulls?
A huge part about MMOs is not about skill at all. Every idiot can complete 90% of the quests. The only skills they require is walking towards where the arrow points to and clicking on monsters to activate auto-attack.
You assume everyone is equal right now, and that's simply not true. There are enough people in MMOs that have multiple accounts and pass money from one to the other. There are people with nothing else to do, who can grind all day, and there are people with job, friends, family, who can't.
If you want an "everyone is equal" game, play chess or go. MMOs aren't equal as they are now. Adding micro-transactions simply allows people who have a job to offset their time disadvantage compared to people without a job with something else that they have that the others don't.
That is only true if you think of the game as a competition.
I don't. The rest of my life is competitive enough as it is, thank you. I play games to relax and to challenge myself. Grinding isn't a challenge, so if I can bypass it, I will. If you call it cheating, I'll call you dumb. Also, arrogant because you are trying to put rules on my play.
Everything I know about the subject points to the opposite. We need our senses and input from the external world to build our model of the world in the internal. Without sensory input, you would never have become yourself, nor anything even close. The body is a lot more than a biological car. There's a lot of feedback between the body and the brain.
An artificial brain of that complexity would be, in effect, a moral person.
You are assuming that a brain alone makes a person. I think that's a very dangerous assumption, very much like the one that an "intangible" mind alone makes a person (which leads to stupid ideas like afterlife, ghosts, etc.)
A brain without senses and a body isn't much of a person. Now IANABS (I Am Not A Brain Scientist), but I've listened to a couple and read a good part of what books you can get describing the current state of science on the subject. It is highly unlikely that a brain grown in a tube will even have any brain activity that would resemble human thinking. It would almost certainly not have any intelligence, or emotions. That's because the brain is part of a complicated system that we call the body. A lot of its most interesting functions depends on input - either electrical or chemical - from other parts of the body.
Attributing persona to the brain is, IMHO, just as stupid as attributing emotions to the heart.
That's mostly because the media isn't reporting science stuff very well.
AI researcher says: "We're working on a pattern-matching system based on the way the human brain functions, and we think we will have a working prototype within five to ten years."
Mainstream media headline: "Intelligent robots will conquer the world five years from now."
We did make a huge progress in AI, for example. The people who really thought a computer would have human intelligence within their life were always in the minority. But of course, someone saying "in a few years, your computer will be smarter than you" will get a lot more headlines and interviews than someone saying "in a few years, pattern-matching in neural networks will be advanced enough to allow object recognition with a margin of error less than 10% on a known set."
I'm quite sure that this guy will do what he claims to be able to. I'm also sure the end-result will not be spectacular enough to make it to the frontpage. It'll be a human brain. That doesn't make it have a human mind. We're still not very sure what exactly the mind is made of, but among other things we're fairly sure that you need a human body to have a human mind. A brain alone lacks senses, for example, and when you stop to think about it, you begin to realize that how much of our internal model is built upon metaphors of the external world.
Slashdot Mirror
So you put your porn collection in the 1st volume, proof of your extra-marital affairs in the 2nd volume, and the real secrets in the 3rd.
I did say: Modify for your requirements.
What a long piece of nonsense.
We solved this problem 20 years ago. It's called "plausible deniability". There are various ways to get it. The easiest one is this:
Use an encryption tool that can hide encrypted volumes, like TrueCrypt.
Encrypt your porn collection on the outer shell, your private data on the inner.
If someone asks for your decryption key, stall a bit, then blush and hand them the porn key.
Obviously, you didn't want your wife to find out about your porn collection, which is why you encrypted it. No, officer, there's nothing else there.
Modify for your particular case. If you have serious sensible material, you need more serious stuff to hide it behind, e.g. the e-mails from your mistress or whatever.
There's no need whatsoever for any complicated solution. On the contrary, it makes you more vulnerable, not less.
Taiwan has recently been hit with a devastating typhoon. Some of the pictures show devastation similar to New Orleans after Katrina.
So, yeah, I'm glad I live here where I can worry about some schmuck in his basement spending his allowance on Eve Online and not over there where landslides are causing whole towns to disappear.
There was a supernova in NGC 1559 just a few days ago. Whole towns disappear? Try whole planets.
It's a big world, you know? Worrying about things that happen a thousand miles or a million light years away is just as much a luxury as spending your time playing some game.
These pages are helpful for the typical web surfer.
Do you work in marketing?
Clue: DNS stands for "Domain Name Service", not "Targeted Advertisement Injection". The "typical web surfer" already has a tool that is responsible for handling unresolvable addresses, it's built into the browser. If you want more help, suggestions for typo fixing, etc. then the browser is the proper location.
There are client programs out there that rely on getting proper DNS responses, including correct "domain not found" replies when the domain does not exist.
Yes, it breaks some scripts and runs contrary to published standards, but it presents a new (actually pretty old) conception of how the web should work.
No, it doesn't. And running contrary to published standards isn't a minor offense. They're called standards for a reason, and client-side programs expect a certain behaviour. Breaking that means breaking customers' software. And no, the web should not work this way. If you want to get a search page on DNS error, a Firefox plugin would be the proper approach, not DNS manipulation.
What this is is the equivalent of your phone company hijacking every call with a mistyped phone number to a toll line with a "helpful" operator that helps you guess the correct number. The only difference is the payment method.
Alice (HanseNet) does it too, and the opt-out process is ridiculous.
If you're just doing the plain-text writing, you almost certainly don't need and (until recently) very probably didn't use Word.
Writers I know (which is not a huge sample, I'll grant that), either use specialized tools like Scrivener (mentioned in the article, and coincidentally also my tool of choice) or something a lot simpler than Word. All the complexity of Word is not needed and in the way.
Why someone discovering 14 year old internet technology made the front page of /. is beyond me...
Because 14 years ago, you couldn't have deployed that technology in an office and moved everyone including the secretary to use it. Today you can, and that's the news.
Actually, it's still a bit of early adopter thing, strange as that may sound. The combination will become really popular when IBM (or some other big name) picks it up, calls it something buzzwordy, and sells it to the clueless execs for a ridiculous amount of money.
Word was targeted at professional writers...
Not really. It was targeted at amateur writers and professionals who had to write stuff as a side-aspect of their real work.
Word, even today, lacks a lot of what professional printing needs, and most publishers started accepting Word documents only because it had become so obiquitous everywhere else. Put the same text into Word and into a LaTeX template and print out both on a good printer, and even a novice can instantly spot the difference.
DTP (when layout matters) or TeX (when it doesn't) is what professional writers used until Word started corrupting things.
Or, to summarize; this law, though probably poorly-written, is conceived with good intentions, though we all know how that goes.
Err, no.
I've never seen a law that was conceived with fewer good intentions, and I've been following this one closely. The whole "child porn" nonsense was sand-in-the-eyes from the get go. There's a reason that several organisations of actual child abuse victims are amongst the most vocal opponents of this law.
The intent was never to fight child porn. Everyone with even three working brain cells can see that it will achieve nothing in that regard. The intent was and always has been cheap publicity for Zensursula. Read up on her background and what she's done since in office and you'll realize that she's done almost nothing to help families, and a lot to get her name into the media. If her intentions are even partially honest and good, then she's the dumbest human being alive, and yes including GWB.
Completely unrelated, I'd also see some legislation allowing the Federal Constitutional Courts to hand out savage beatings with the clue stick to everyone involved in drafting and passing unconstitutional laws. And they should broadcast it on TV, too.
True. Like most problems with politics, the core reason is the lack of accountability. If you or me break a law, or violate the constitution, we will be imprisoned. If the lawmakers draft a clearly unconstitutional law then - nothing at all happens to them. And that's just wrong. They're trying to implement "three strikes" laws everywhere, how about a three strikes law for politicians? Vote "yes" for three laws that are found to be unconstitutional, and you are removed from politics and may not hold a political office for five years.
If you don't like grinding, then MMOs aren't something you really should be playing.
Largely true, which is why I have carefully selected those that I do, and avoid the pure grinding parts in them. I don't need the super-special rare items that you need 20 hours of grinding to get, and that give you a 0.5% advantage over some item you can buy from the weapon trader.
Other people derive fun out of the competition. Achievements are a big thing now. Someone feels much more accomplished if they spent the time to get the achievement rather than someone who bought it.
And I never said achievements should be buyable. If you like competition, you should compete based on skill, not based on how many hours you can put into the game, wouldn't you agree?
People want to escape the real world where the rich have all the advantages. You allow everything to be purchasable and you just pissed off the majority of your customers.
That's a good argument, yes.
I would argue for two things in response. One, setting prices so they're mass-market prices. It should be affordable not only for the rich. Two, no problem at all making it visible in-game whether I bought my stuff or not. If you want to boast with having grinded all your gear, be my guest.
But there's no actual challenge in getting to level 60 or whatever. It's only a matter of time. The fact that there's no penalty for dying in most MMORPGs makes sure of that. No matter how bad you play, eventually you'll get there.
I'd be the first to sign up to a MMO where actual skill determines your level, not just accumulated experience points.
It devalues the work other people have put into their characters
Good. I'm all for devalueing pointless, repetitive work. We have machines for that. Us humans should engage in challenging work that requires skill.
Your degree example doesn't hold. A degree is a paper that says "xyz has these and these skills". Almost no item or level in an MMO is equivalent to that, all they say is "xyz somehow killed the end boss abc", which in most cases essentially translates to "put x ours of time into it".
Time has no value. What you do with the time has.
Funny. Most of the times, difference in equipment or level is the reason why I can't play with people who I'd like to play with.
You assume that everyone who would buy stuff is there to show it off. I claim the opposite. The people I know who'd buy stuff are those who are more interested in playing than in showing off or grinding.
But heck, as some other poster suggested, make every item in two different variants, one that can only be bought and one that can only be gained in-game. Then you could still be showing off your "hard earned" stuff and laught at the people who have the yellow (or whatever) version from the shop.
But those of us who couldn't care how you got your stuff could continue playing.
It diminishes the value of what the other players have EARNED.
If i spent days working on an item or questing for some special item, and your mom just goes and buys it for you... what the hell was the point of me earning it the hard way? It makes honest players feel like suckers.
One, for people who work for their money, paying for something is just as much "earning it the hard way".
Two, the "work" you refer to is the exact kind of work that humans have built machines for ever since they were able to - stupid, repetitive, non-challenging work. We call it "grinding" for a reason.
Three, there is absolutely nothing dishonest about buying an item if the game so allows. We can argue about honesty in regards to games where buying stuff is expressively forbidden, but that's not what this topic is about.
Four, if your enjoyment of having the item suffers because others got it in a different way, maybe you need to check your own values instead of forcing them on others?
Yes, some of that is true.
The most important part is that the model can not simply be added to an existing MMO that was designed with the assumption of grinding built-in, for example. If the entire reward concept is built on micro-rewards given for repetitive actions, then buying your way around that will frustrate you quickly because you bypass the addictive part of the game.
Yes, and that's the interesting part.
What kind of mind would a brain with artificial input, or a different body, produce? I'm really looking forward to finding that out, I figure it will be one of the most interesting experiments in human history.
Wrong assumption.
Yes, when I take away almost everything from someone who already has a mind, he won't lose it in the process.
That does not mean that he could have gotten it in the first place if he had started out that way.
Until we've run a series of peer-reviewed experiments on that, I doubt it.
Moreover, if you had a way to create a simulation that's good enough, which means it would have to be able to fool actual humans, then I'd have several more profitable ways of using it than to breed artificial personas.
It's not really about someone (like you) who purchases one or two items needed to do something fun. Its the people who drop $500 to max out their character so they can strut their stuff without having earned it.
Yes, but compare to what? It's not as if I couldn't put down $500 today to have my character power-leveled and equipped with the best gear, is it? It's just a black market, that's all. What they're doing is making it a legit market. We should all know from the drug market experience over the past 30 or so years that pushing things to a black market does nothing to reduce demand, it only drives up the profits of the dealers and creates expenses to keep the black market in check.
What, exactly, is "unfair" about buying stuff instead of grinding for it?
Note: I'm not talking about anything that would require skill. I agree that if you want to get, say, a title "great marksmen", you should actually play and get a certain hit percentage.
But what, exactly, is unfair about investing $10 to get 100 monster skulls compared to investing 2 hours of time to get 100 monster skulls?
A huge part about MMOs is not about skill at all. Every idiot can complete 90% of the quests. The only skills they require is walking towards where the arrow points to and clicking on monsters to activate auto-attack.
That's nonsense right there.
You assume everyone is equal right now, and that's simply not true. There are enough people in MMOs that have multiple accounts and pass money from one to the other. There are people with nothing else to do, who can grind all day, and there are people with job, friends, family, who can't.
If you want an "everyone is equal" game, play chess or go. MMOs aren't equal as they are now. Adding micro-transactions simply allows people who have a job to offset their time disadvantage compared to people without a job with something else that they have that the others don't.
That is only true if you think of the game as a competition.
I don't. The rest of my life is competitive enough as it is, thank you. I play games to relax and to challenge myself. Grinding isn't a challenge, so if I can bypass it, I will. If you call it cheating, I'll call you dumb. Also, arrogant because you are trying to put rules on my play.
Evidence for that claim, please?
Everything I know about the subject points to the opposite. We need our senses and input from the external world to build our model of the world in the internal. Without sensory input, you would never have become yourself, nor anything even close. The body is a lot more than a biological car. There's a lot of feedback between the body and the brain.
An artificial brain of that complexity would be, in effect, a moral person.
You are assuming that a brain alone makes a person. I think that's a very dangerous assumption, very much like the one that an "intangible" mind alone makes a person (which leads to stupid ideas like afterlife, ghosts, etc.)
A brain without senses and a body isn't much of a person. Now IANABS (I Am Not A Brain Scientist), but I've listened to a couple and read a good part of what books you can get describing the current state of science on the subject. It is highly unlikely that a brain grown in a tube will even have any brain activity that would resemble human thinking. It would almost certainly not have any intelligence, or emotions. That's because the brain is part of a complicated system that we call the body. A lot of its most interesting functions depends on input - either electrical or chemical - from other parts of the body.
Attributing persona to the brain is, IMHO, just as stupid as attributing emotions to the heart.
That's mostly because the media isn't reporting science stuff very well.
AI researcher says: "We're working on a pattern-matching system based on the way the human brain functions, and we think we will have a working prototype within five to ten years."
Mainstream media headline: "Intelligent robots will conquer the world five years from now."
We did make a huge progress in AI, for example. The people who really thought a computer would have human intelligence within their life were always in the minority. But of course, someone saying "in a few years, your computer will be smarter than you" will get a lot more headlines and interviews than someone saying "in a few years, pattern-matching in neural networks will be advanced enough to allow object recognition with a margin of error less than 10% on a known set."
I'm quite sure that this guy will do what he claims to be able to. I'm also sure the end-result will not be spectacular enough to make it to the frontpage. It'll be a human brain. That doesn't make it have a human mind. We're still not very sure what exactly the mind is made of, but among other things we're fairly sure that you need a human body to have a human mind. A brain alone lacks senses, for example, and when you stop to think about it, you begin to realize that how much of our internal model is built upon metaphors of the external world.