I've paid for two copies. I don't want WGA on either of them. What right does MS have to disable my legally purchased software because I refused to install an addon which I felt provided no benefit to me when it was not part of the software I purchased, the license I agreed to, or even hinted at being a possibility in the future?
True, people shouldn't stop developing the software if that's what they want to do. Someone will find it useful and in the case of this software, is certainly a neat idea. I just don't think this is the end of phishing problems, or even the beginning of the end of phishing problems, for the common user and shouldn't be touted as such. Anyone who thinks it is needs sent back to their local helpdesk/phone support for 6 months to get back in touch with the public.
And then do you think that friend/family member is going to make use of it after it's installed? Do you think that if they even notice the website did not load with their skin, it will stop them from continuing? You have a good bit more faith in the general population than I do if you think they will. These are the same people that open random attachments after having been told not to thousands of times, don't look at the url in websites after being told to or possibly don't even know to, and run XP with an administrator account. I don't see any reason to think that one more tool available to them, which they probably don't understand how it works to start with, is going to make a difference.
While this may sound like a good idea at first, why would it work? The majority of people who would know about such a feature, especially if it's a third party downloadable plugin, and then make use of it, are not generally going to be the type of people to be fooled by phishing attempts and unable to recognize the basic things tested for in this study. On top of that, given most people's understanding of computers and the internet and web, I feel pretty safe saying that if your average person was using such a tool and then loaded a phishing site, their thought would not be "oh, this must be a phishing site" it would be "oh, my skin didn't load for some reason." and then probably continue on.
The problem is not a lack of tools out there. The problem is a lack of understanding. We've got millions of people who don't understand the basics of computers on a public, anonymous, worldwide network who are essentially network/server administrators, as far their home pc is concerned. To make it worse, most people not only don't understand, but don't want to understand.
There's also a problem in your logic that WSJ necessarily has a point. Some things are just done for fun, entertainment, as a hobby. I would classify things like SETI@home in this category. There's almost always something else you could be doing that benefits the world as a whole more. Whether you're wasting cpu cycles searching for ET or on loading Slashdot when they could be used for global warming research or playing video games at home or even working a job in the private sector, say, developing commercial software as many of us around bere do, rather than spending that time searching for a cure for cancer or even holding a job as a public servant of some sort such as a police officer or fireman. There's always some way you could be better spend your time/money/cpu cycles to benefit the world and be more "useful", but that does that mean anything else you do, whether it's just lesser or less likely benefit or purely fun is a waste and should be done away with?
Anyway, it's nothing new. The software pirates certainly didn't start it, they just found a niche where it's easier to convince someone that since a copy of the original was made, nothing had really been lost. But, as you can see, it doesn't prevent people from claiming the exact same when some demonstrable harm _did_ get done. (E.g., money from someone's account aren't duplicated, they actually disappear from person A to enter the possession of person B.)
And honestly seeing some of the arguments made, I can't help notice a common theme of handwaving someone else's loss, time, suffering, even pain, as unimportant and not enough to make anyone a victim or to make the act a crime. In effect, the gross disregard for other people. It's beyond individualism, and outright in the realm of sociopathy.
There's also the far less often thought about or mentioned harm to the retailers. Even if the vicitim who has their card number stolen or whatnot reports it and manages to not have to pay for any of it, the retailer who accidentally lets the purchase through gets screwed. Victim reports that charge and does a chargeback? Retailer loses the money (although the product or service has probably already been rendered) plus gets charged an additional $10.
In the case of straight credit cards, it's fairly easy for the fraud to be detected beforehand, but to be certain, requires an actual human to go over every order by hand and probably make phone calls, which gets quite time consuming. In the case of paypal, it's worse. When I used to use them to take online payments, they didn't actually provide enough information to the retailer to verify fraud or lack thereof to protect the privacy of the purchaser, you just had to trust in paypal's non-existant fraud detection. Usually what would happen is that 2-4 months AFTER the fraudulent purchase, when that money is long spent, they remove it from your account and then charge the chargeback.
I read the article more like a "You know, the industry is doing ok, but there's room for improvement" than a "We want to assume power over games!"
While that does seem to be the case, I don't see why the FTC is involved at all or doing any monitoring of this sort of thing if they have no intention of intervening if they decide the ESRB isn't doing a good enough job. Maybe I'm just a little too paranoid and untrusting... I don't know.
All over the ESRB website there is also a searchable database, as you suggested, which tells the rating and content type. Like I said, the problem isn't lack of tools or information, it's lack of making use of it. The only thing I might agree that the ESRB could do better is make it clearer that these things exist. Their new campaign with penny arcade is a step in the right direction in that matter.
Is saying that the devs should provide more info bad in itself? Nope. Is suggesting that maybe retailers shouldn't sell M games to minors bad in itself? Nope. Is making those things law bad? Yep. The second is most definitely censorship. The first, well, I'm not sure there's anything illegal going on there but it is setting games apart from books, movies, magazines, etc as if they are more dangerous somehow, which is bad and incorrect whatever the legality.
Also, keep in mind that the FTC doesn't appear to actually comprehend how video games or digital content works, based on their decisions to force games to an M rating (which is highly questionable imo) based on content that, while coded somewhere in the game, was not coded to actually be shown or viewed and required a third party modification to do so. This is akin to me drawing boobs on the newspaper and then claiming it's pornographic because the woman had boobs under shirt and the newspaper did not remove them. Do you really want those people determining what is and isn't appropriate content?
As it currently is, though, all the 'T' or the 'M' is, is just a distinction. It doesn't go into any level of detail about what the game contains, and if you want this info you have to have one of the sales crew pull the game out for you. Certainly making it easier and allowing parents (or kids) to go ahead and set up a list of ratings preferences is a good start.
Of course, I feel games should only be regulated as much as books (i.e. personal media), and I never heard anyone claim that Harry Potter created any serial killers yet...
Ah, but they do provide some insight as to what earned the software that rating. It's on the back of the packaging as it causes the label to take up more space than just the bare rating label.
http://www.esrb.org/ratings/ratings_guide.jsp
Apparently we need to make it clear to parents how to tell when certain games are 'good' and certain ones are 'bad'. My idea for a solution to this is to have a database that catalogs ALL games based on their rating, and what they're rated for (y'know, 'cartoon violence', 'mild violence', etc.), so Parents can pre-select a series of things they don't want, and then recieve a 'whitelist' of games they know are good. Of course, there's no real way to tell the vendors at stores "Don't buy this game for my kid", but at minimum, parents buying these games should have to hear that the game contains such-and-such and KNOW WHAT THEY'RE BUYING. The problem is education, and the solution ain't government intervention.
The problem with this idea is that if a parent can't be bothered to look at little label on the front of the game while at the store to buy it anyway, I don't foresee that same parent going to the effort of going to a third party website or such to get a list of "ok" games and then check the list for the game. All the information in the world made available to someone doesn't do any good if they don't want to look at it and use it.
This is true only for an emotionally/developmentally mature mind.
Kids who have abusive fathers (even adopted kids, eliminating genetics as a factor) have a significantly higher than average incidence of continuing this abusive behavior when they become fathers. (See here [wikipedia.org], though there's plenty of other sources on this)
There is no reason to suspect that this same characteristic will not manifest in children who are exposed to, and permitted to roleplay violence at a young age.I quoted properly this time;)
But is it up to the government to determine this? Should that decision on how to raise their children not be left up to the parents and ONLY the parents? Yes, it is still up to the parents in that they can go and purchase the game for their child, of course, but what gives the government the right to say "These games are so dangerous that we have to make it law that the parents must purchase them"?
Beyond that, do you not think it sets a dangerous precident? It is in effect saying that games are more dangerous than books, movies, etc and potentially gives a stronger argument to the old "but the games made me do it" argument if we go about creating a law that in fact does says "the games make them do it so often that we need to protect the children from them".
Is it just me or does that blood look like it's been very amateurly Photoshopped in with the default brush? Eternal Forces has a reasonable 3D engine, so I can't imagine why they'd render blood in 2D.
Amazingly, there's another picture on the same website with exactly the same pose, zoomed out to show the controls, and not a drop of blood. As Ricky Ricardo would say, you've got some 'splainin' to do.
While I don't know why the blood photoshop may have been done, does it really matter? Is shooting people because they're not of your preferred religion ok as long as they don't bleed? It's still pretty clear to me that it's supposed to be fairly realistic violence, shooting what are pretty realistic people with what are clearly supposed to be standard, modern, real life guns.
[quoteblock]You're probably right, since we can't protect kids from everything that might be harmful, we might as well not protect them from anything.
While we're at it, we might as well not have any laws since people are only going to break them. Might as well not put airbags or seatbelts in our cars either since some people will die in car accidents anyhow.[/quoteblock]
The parent poster wasn't suggesting anything like your little slipper slope-ish comment. His point, which many others have also made, is this. Games do not cause violence, games do not tell you it's ok to be violent, games do not suggest that you go out and be violent in real life. Games offer you an imaginary place to do violent things that you wouldn't do in real life because it's not necessarily right to do to real people. If a child cannot tell the difference and goes and does something violent because he saw it in a game, that kid most certainly has a problem, but it is not that he played a video game. The problem is that their parents did not teach them properly or that they have an actual medical/mental condition, which should have been known about by their parents and their gaming choices highly monitored by their parents (along with any other form of media and their peers they are hanging out with), rather than putting the blame on the video game and then indirectly punishing millions of others who have done nothing wrong by making it harder for us to get the games we want and imposing on freedom of speech.
Also, as to your other comment, I think seatbelt laws are stupid, too. While cars should be required to come with them, if I don't want to wear my seatbelt and die because of it, that was my choice and affected only myself and my family.
So, not even worrying about the whole freedom of speech bit, how does one know that the game is going to be deemed inappropriate and should not be sold BEFORE they are taken to court over it, seeing as how it appears to be based wholy on opinion and no hard standards such as the clearly marked ESRB ratings? How does one determine what the average person 18 years or older considers ok/not ok? Are they going to call everyone up and do a phone survey for each case? I hardly think the prosecution, or even probably the judge and/or jury, are going to be representative of the overall average opinion.
Sony would also like us to only sleep with virgins too, right?
Who wouldn't like to only sleep with virgins. I fully support Sony's plan for me to only sleep with women who have no way of judging that I'm terrible in bed.
Mind you, this may not be the case with this new system of theirs, but why kill the second hand market like this? I can't remember the last time I bought a game brand new. Game Boy Advance and Game Cube both, nearly all my games are second hand copies. Why? Because not only are they cheaper, but because it's sometimes harder to find games new after they're released. Especially the rare gems.
And that right there is exactly why sony would like to be able to do such a thing. When you buy a used copy, Sony makes no money off of that. Probably more importantly to Sony, when you buy a used copy there are still the same total number of games sold. More total games sold means more people wanting to make games for them, happier investors, etc.
I'm not saying it's a good idea on their part as I think it's only looking at a small part of the big picture, in that more consoles total sold also means happier investors, more people wanting to make games for your console, etc and forcing people to spend more on the games will likely reduce console sold, but eh, I'm preaching to the choir now.
They can and do. The user agent is sent and can be used to determine what the device/platform/etc is. The problem is every device has a different user-agent, meaning you have to try to keep track of all of the user agents you want to support, and since mobile carriers like to screw with the phones to lock stuff down, sometimes two phones with the same user agent don't support the same things.
I never claimed that Microsoft's default setup options were intelligent or consistent with their security model.
Perhaps it was just how I read it, but I read your comment as if suggesting that the majority of people out there would not be running as an administrator account.
SELECT content.reference FROM device,content,device_group,device_device_group WHERE device.model='A900' AND device_group.content_reference=content.reference AND device_device_group.device_reference=device.refere nce LIMIT 5;
Yep, sure can. The difference is there are far fewer non-technical people who have no interest in safely/securely using their computer running linux than there are running windows. Sure, there are some jackasses out there running linux, just like every other OS, but due to the various difficulties and/or inconviences involved with running linux, the majority of people who are too stupid or lazy to not run as root/administrator are also too lazy to bother running linux in the first place.
If it's the latter, then it's a serious flaw, but one that will only really adversely affect people stupid enough to run as Administrator all the time, despite Microsoft's own warning against such idiotic practices
You mean how pretty much every pc I've seen that comes with windows on it is by default and how XP home installs and sets up the first (and usually only) user by default, meaning that pretty much every windows user with no technical knowledge or concern will be really adversely affected?
You haven't done any computer support for non-technical people in a long time, have you? It's only been a couple years since I broke free from the shackles of technical support, so believe me when I say way too many people will open this without thinking twice.
Not that this is actually going to be able to be upheld in court anyway, but your comment hints at what worries me most. At least in the article, there was no mention of basing this on the ratings system of the game, only on the feelings of the judge, which means that the game has to be sold and then the store taken to court, so the "illegal" deed already done, before it can be determined if it was illegal or not.
But, as has been said and proven time and again now, this is going to be taken to court, deemed unconstitutional, and thrown out anyway. It's just that now it's going to cost tax payers and several innocent (at least in terms of this law/case directly) companies a ton of money.
Ok, got it to load. Is the rating on the packaging going to be taken into account in the same way other similar laws that have been attempted were or is this based purely on the judges discretion of if the game is violent or not, meaning that (careful, slippery slope, watch your step) potentially a store could be fined, people thrown in jail, etc for selling an E game to a minor if the judge felt it was violent (obviously not likely)?
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I've paid for two copies. I don't want WGA on either of them. What right does MS have to disable my legally purchased software because I refused to install an addon which I felt provided no benefit to me when it was not part of the software I purchased, the license I agreed to, or even hinted at being a possibility in the future?
True, people shouldn't stop developing the software if that's what they want to do. Someone will find it useful and in the case of this software, is certainly a neat idea. I just don't think this is the end of phishing problems, or even the beginning of the end of phishing problems, for the common user and shouldn't be touted as such. Anyone who thinks it is needs sent back to their local helpdesk/phone support for 6 months to get back in touch with the public.
And then do you think that friend/family member is going to make use of it after it's installed? Do you think that if they even notice the website did not load with their skin, it will stop them from continuing? You have a good bit more faith in the general population than I do if you think they will. These are the same people that open random attachments after having been told not to thousands of times, don't look at the url in websites after being told to or possibly don't even know to, and run XP with an administrator account. I don't see any reason to think that one more tool available to them, which they probably don't understand how it works to start with, is going to make a difference.
While this may sound like a good idea at first, why would it work? The majority of people who would know about such a feature, especially if it's a third party downloadable plugin, and then make use of it, are not generally going to be the type of people to be fooled by phishing attempts and unable to recognize the basic things tested for in this study. On top of that, given most people's understanding of computers and the internet and web, I feel pretty safe saying that if your average person was using such a tool and then loaded a phishing site, their thought would not be "oh, this must be a phishing site" it would be "oh, my skin didn't load for some reason." and then probably continue on.
The problem is not a lack of tools out there. The problem is a lack of understanding. We've got millions of people who don't understand the basics of computers on a public, anonymous, worldwide network who are essentially network/server administrators, as far their home pc is concerned. To make it worse, most people not only don't understand, but don't want to understand.
There's also a problem in your logic that WSJ necessarily has a point. Some things are just done for fun, entertainment, as a hobby. I would classify things like SETI@home in this category. There's almost always something else you could be doing that benefits the world as a whole more. Whether you're wasting cpu cycles searching for ET or on loading Slashdot when they could be used for global warming research or playing video games at home or even working a job in the private sector, say, developing commercial software as many of us around bere do, rather than spending that time searching for a cure for cancer or even holding a job as a public servant of some sort such as a police officer or fireman. There's always some way you could be better spend your time/money/cpu cycles to benefit the world and be more "useful", but that does that mean anything else you do, whether it's just lesser or less likely benefit or purely fun is a waste and should be done away with?
There's also the far less often thought about or mentioned harm to the retailers. Even if the vicitim who has their card number stolen or whatnot reports it and manages to not have to pay for any of it, the retailer who accidentally lets the purchase through gets screwed. Victim reports that charge and does a chargeback? Retailer loses the money (although the product or service has probably already been rendered) plus gets charged an additional $10.
In the case of straight credit cards, it's fairly easy for the fraud to be detected beforehand, but to be certain, requires an actual human to go over every order by hand and probably make phone calls, which gets quite time consuming. In the case of paypal, it's worse. When I used to use them to take online payments, they didn't actually provide enough information to the retailer to verify fraud or lack thereof to protect the privacy of the purchaser, you just had to trust in paypal's non-existant fraud detection. Usually what would happen is that 2-4 months AFTER the fraudulent purchase, when that money is long spent, they remove it from your account and then charge the chargeback.
All over the ESRB website there is also a searchable database, as you suggested, which tells the rating and content type. Like I said, the problem isn't lack of tools or information, it's lack of making use of it. The only thing I might agree that the ESRB could do better is make it clearer that these things exist. Their new campaign with penny arcade is a step in the right direction in that matter.
Is saying that the devs should provide more info bad in itself? Nope. Is suggesting that maybe retailers shouldn't sell M games to minors bad in itself? Nope. Is making those things law bad? Yep. The second is most definitely censorship. The first, well, I'm not sure there's anything illegal going on there but it is setting games apart from books, movies, magazines, etc as if they are more dangerous somehow, which is bad and incorrect whatever the legality. Also, keep in mind that the FTC doesn't appear to actually comprehend how video games or digital content works, based on their decisions to force games to an M rating (which is highly questionable imo) based on content that, while coded somewhere in the game, was not coded to actually be shown or viewed and required a third party modification to do so. This is akin to me drawing boobs on the newspaper and then claiming it's pornographic because the woman had boobs under shirt and the newspaper did not remove them. Do you really want those people determining what is and isn't appropriate content?
This is true only for an emotionally/developmentally mature mind. Kids who have abusive fathers (even adopted kids, eliminating genetics as a factor) have a significantly higher than average incidence of continuing this abusive behavior when they become fathers. (See here [wikipedia.org], though there's plenty of other sources on this) There is no reason to suspect that this same characteristic will not manifest in children who are exposed to, and permitted to roleplay violence at a young age.I quoted properly this time ;)
But is it up to the government to determine this? Should that decision on how to raise their children not be left up to the parents and ONLY the parents? Yes, it is still up to the parents in that they can go and purchase the game for their child, of course, but what gives the government the right to say "These games are so dangerous that we have to make it law that the parents must purchase them"?
Beyond that, do you not think it sets a dangerous precident? It is in effect saying that games are more dangerous than books, movies, etc and potentially gives a stronger argument to the old "but the games made me do it" argument if we go about creating a law that in fact does says "the games make them do it so often that we need to protect the children from them".
[quoteblock]You're probably right, since we can't protect kids from everything that might be harmful, we might as well not protect them from anything. While we're at it, we might as well not have any laws since people are only going to break them. Might as well not put airbags or seatbelts in our cars either since some people will die in car accidents anyhow.[/quoteblock] The parent poster wasn't suggesting anything like your little slipper slope-ish comment. His point, which many others have also made, is this. Games do not cause violence, games do not tell you it's ok to be violent, games do not suggest that you go out and be violent in real life. Games offer you an imaginary place to do violent things that you wouldn't do in real life because it's not necessarily right to do to real people. If a child cannot tell the difference and goes and does something violent because he saw it in a game, that kid most certainly has a problem, but it is not that he played a video game. The problem is that their parents did not teach them properly or that they have an actual medical/mental condition, which should have been known about by their parents and their gaming choices highly monitored by their parents (along with any other form of media and their peers they are hanging out with), rather than putting the blame on the video game and then indirectly punishing millions of others who have done nothing wrong by making it harder for us to get the games we want and imposing on freedom of speech. Also, as to your other comment, I think seatbelt laws are stupid, too. While cars should be required to come with them, if I don't want to wear my seatbelt and die because of it, that was my choice and affected only myself and my family.
So, not even worrying about the whole freedom of speech bit, how does one know that the game is going to be deemed inappropriate and should not be sold BEFORE they are taken to court over it, seeing as how it appears to be based wholy on opinion and no hard standards such as the clearly marked ESRB ratings? How does one determine what the average person 18 years or older considers ok/not ok? Are they going to call everyone up and do a phone survey for each case? I hardly think the prosecution, or even probably the judge and/or jury, are going to be representative of the overall average opinion.
Sony would also like us to only sleep with virgins too, right? Who wouldn't like to only sleep with virgins. I fully support Sony's plan for me to only sleep with women who have no way of judging that I'm terrible in bed.
They can and do. The user agent is sent and can be used to determine what the device/platform/etc is. The problem is every device has a different user-agent, meaning you have to try to keep track of all of the user agents you want to support, and since mobile carriers like to screw with the phones to lock stuff down, sometimes two phones with the same user agent don't support the same things.
I never claimed that Microsoft's default setup options were intelligent or consistent with their security model. Perhaps it was just how I read it, but I read your comment as if suggesting that the majority of people out there would not be running as an administrator account.
haha. shit. stupid copy/paste.
You haven't done any computer support for non-technical people in a long time, have you? It's only been a couple years since I broke free from the shackles of technical support, so believe me when I say way too many people will open this without thinking twice.
Not that this is actually going to be able to be upheld in court anyway, but your comment hints at what worries me most. At least in the article, there was no mention of basing this on the ratings system of the game, only on the feelings of the judge, which means that the game has to be sold and then the store taken to court, so the "illegal" deed already done, before it can be determined if it was illegal or not. But, as has been said and proven time and again now, this is going to be taken to court, deemed unconstitutional, and thrown out anyway. It's just that now it's going to cost tax payers and several innocent (at least in terms of this law/case directly) companies a ton of money.
Ok, got it to load. Is the rating on the packaging going to be taken into account in the same way other similar laws that have been attempted were or is this based purely on the judges discretion of if the game is violent or not, meaning that (careful, slippery slope, watch your step) potentially a store could be fined, people thrown in jail, etc for selling an E game to a minor if the judge felt it was violent (obviously not likely)?