So you've never heard of the innocent people whose lives anonymous has ruined, "for the lulz?"
List names and dates of incidents, now. I'm calling you out on your vague bullshit. Provide hard facts about "ruined lives."
I guess Chris Forcand sort of got his life ruined some by Anonymous. Then again, he was a pedophile that Anonymous turned in after pulling off a crowdsourced version of To Catch a Predator, minus the film crew.
Hi, I think you're confused. This is Slashdot. GameFAQs is way over that way. Maybe along the way you can learn some maturity, or at least get over your obsession with the Xbox 360 and homosexuality.
While you're at it, please put your balls in a vise, clamp it tight, and then do a few spins. The 21st century doesn't need you breeding.
Imma call [citation needed] on your (in my opinion bullshit) statement that 99.9% of modded consoles are strictly used for piracy.
Is piracy common? Yes. Is it 99.9% of ALL modified console use? Uhhhh.
FYI, I have a Wii with homebrew and a USB HDD attached to it. There's some cool stuff (including emulators) available for homebrew, and I have all my games on the HDD so I don't have to drag out the discs, potentially scratch them, and so on. And it improves load times. I've committed what is arguably piracy once with the HDD setup by downloading the ISO to a Japanese game that I really wanted to play when there was no indication it was going to get localized into English (there is a ton of voicework and texture work that needed to be translated). Then, it turns out, it was licensed and eventually released, and so I bought the English version, which has been much more enjoyable to play since I can't keep up with the voiceovers and walls of text. Stick that data point in your pipe and smoke it.
I'm not going to advocate this sort of action, but GSB is DRM-free. In addition to more nefarious purposes, certain websites hosting peer-based downloads enable you to take a try-before-you-buy approach should you be man enough to follow up and pay for the full product if you find you like it. THAT is how you find out if the pricing is worth it (also, if you already own GSB, you likely own the first three DLC packs before this one, and this is more of the same, basically).
BitTorrent, the lending library of the 21st century.
/* Seriously, don't pirate indie games. If you like them, support them. If you don't like them, then just move on with your life. */
As a former subscriber who has disabled adverts on this site, I'm more pissed off with Slashdot for posting this "event" than I am the developer trying to get some free press for his game, even if I don't like his game.
And yet, here you are, spending your valuable time nitpicking and fact-checking every letter in my comment when the overall gist of what I was saying is that as a small company, he doesn't have the mountains of cash to just give away content for free in order to build community. I never stated he was a purely one-man shop, mainly because I didn't actually know for sure, but he's definitely not fucking Epic or Gearbox or any one of dozens of other studios under the wings of cornerstone game publishers.
I also specifically stated that it's an entirely subjective argument as to whether or not you consider the content patch to be worth charging for. You didn't like the game? Fine. Don't give him any more money. Let the invisible hand either pat him on the back or bitch-slap him until he can't see straight.
It's a content pack with a new race and 10 new ships for that new race, and the ships apparently have a different loadout configuration compared to the existing ships. Whether this is worth paying anything for is subjective. However, consider: This is an indie developer, not a major game studio with a multi-million-dollar budget. He doesn't just have a vault of cash sitting around to lay on after he's done tweaking the textures and packing them up for a free release.
I think the idea of giving the choice of paying normal price or on-sale price allows him to collect right away instead of getting the (potentially minimal) normal-price sales now and then getting a bigger volume of sales five or six months down the road when it goes on sale on Steam.
Disclosure: I'm buying the full $5.99 because I like this game and want to support the dev. I also didn't even know that the new content was released before this story was posted, so... it sure might be a slashvertisement, but it's at least for what I would consider one of the "good guys" (no, not you, Ubisoft).
Well, he's basically tesseracting the gap in time between when the DLC is released and the point where it goes on sale on Steam for half price (which is where it sells the most, according to him) by offering the DLC at the sale price, while also offering people who are willing to pay full price the option of paying what he feels his work on the content is actually worth.
The fact that he expects to make money on his work should be no surprise. He's experimenting with different ways of doing it instead of trying the tried-and-tested-to-be-shit method of throwing your loyal paying fans under the DRM bus.
Garry's Mod for Half Life 2 allowed you to build your own surveillance station and place/move the cameras where you wanted. You could also change the texture of an object to show the view from the camera.
Granted. I said the last game I played. Not the last game. I'm sure Call of Honor Arena 2009 or whatever the kids are playing these days. (My old geezer imitation isn't that good.)
What will this do for Lal Bihari and the many other people declared legally dead (while still possessing for all intents and purposes all characteristics of a living person if not legal identification)? If the answer is "nothing," then I don't see that this is much of an improvement or advancement in the task of maintaining records on your population.
/* Yes, corruption can override anything. I know. */
The one sad, sad thing is that this is called "PS3 jailbreak". Jailbreak is a very specific term that describes breaking out of a filesystem jail (e.g. on the iPhone), and it's being used on the PS3 purely for "brand recognition". This will just make people associate jailbreaks with piracy.
The pirates probably don't care; sure, they might not be able to update when Sony releases a fix (memories of System Menu 4.2 before Bannerbomb v2), but the PS3 library up to this point and the near future just became available to them. That'll keep them busy while someone reverse-engineers or finds a new exploit around whatever Sony does about this, I guess.
Also, thank you and the rest of Team Twiizers for your hard work, marcan.
Re:What has this to do with sony yanking linux?
on
PS3 Hacked via USB Dongle
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Except that the only reason that people by these mod chips is to play burned games. To claim this has anything to do with homebrew or being able to install Linux is naïveté to the highest degree.
Because there's no way someone would modchip a Wii (before software homebrew was refined to its current pretty-damn-easy standard) in order to plug a mass-storage USB device in and use their console as both a home media center and a game machine. That could never, ever happen. It's inconceivable.
Oh, wait. A simple Google search returns a bunch of sites that want to sell you the (free) homebrew software (in violation of copyright--yes, Team Twiizers' homebrew software is original, not stolen from Nintendo, so they technically hold copyright), and they tout being able to use your Wii to play back pretty much any type of video or sound file VLC can understand. You lose. Player 1 insert coin.
Worst case, you borrowed it from a friend which puts you back on par with a guy who borrows a DVD from his friend and rips it to the hard drive in his house instead of yours.
I'm on the side of legal homebrew, but FTFY. Your metaphor did not balance both sides of the equation.
Re:What has this to do with sony yanking linux?
on
PS3 Hacked via USB Dongle
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The initial heavy lifting to hack the original XBox, 360 and Wii were done by people trying to put Linux on them.
I'm going to back up AC on this one, at least with respect to the Wii. Team Twiizers, the team of hackers (as in, tinkering, not cheaters) have released multiple tools to not only allow and facilitate non-pirate homebrew software to run, they also actually have made efforts to fix critical flaws in Nintendo's design of the Wii. This includes ways to recover a bricked console, which came into play when Nintendo's own official system updates (designed to block homebrew and piracy indiscriminately) were sloppy to the point of being capable of bricking unmodified Wiis.
Team Twiizers also go out of their way to specifically discourage and hamper piracy, including making their software run upside-down on-screen if you've hacked your Wii so much that you must be using it for piracy. They really want to avoid large-scale piracy, because it'll just give Nintendo the incentive to try and lock the Wii back down, depriving everyone of the non-piracy uses for homebrew. They'll happily help with installing Linux on your Wii, and there are guides for using it as a media center, a ScummVM host, and even a VNC client. You can also emulate pretty much every game console in history up to the PS1, as well as MAME, but finding roms (and whatever trouble that might cause) is up to you. However, they make it clear that discussions of piracy are unwelcome.
Any exploit that allows you to do something not ordinarily allowed under a game console's security model is a potential avenue to performance hacks like aimbots and speed hacks. Note: Potential. It's possible to code games to have the server reject malformed or abnormal input from the client to freeze out such hacks, but I know literally nothing about the PS3's local security and sandboxing model, nor anything about how the server code is implemented on Sony's side, so I'll defer to people actually in the scene for a specific answer to your question.
Regarding dealing with hackers, I only play FPSs that allow dedicated player-owned servers, and then find community/clan servers with strict anti-hacking policies (including, where available, server modules and such). The server I play the most on in my FPS of choice fosters a strong community, and part of that includes harsh penalties (i.e., permabans) for hacking if a demo can prove it as well as bigoted language (calling someone a faggot or the n-word is a good way to find yourself back at the game's main menu with a friendly dialog box informing you that you've been shown the door). It isn't perfect, but such a community wouldn't be possible in the Modern Warfare 2 style of matchmaking-only online play.
While you wait, please enjoy generous refreshments of candy and disappointment. Just kidding. The candy is also disappointment.
/* I don't think Portal 2 will be considered a disappointment. I just think that's something GLaDOS would say. I also totally stole it from a site's 404 page ages ago but I can't remember from where. */
Having spent more than half my childhood living on well water with a local aquifer (that would run dry every summer when the dipwad with the pool filled it up, but I digress), I totally know what parent means. I'm not a doctor, however, so I can't speak to how important minerals dissolved in water are to biology.
One nitpick: How can distilled water be tasteless and bitter? Last I checked, bitter was a taste.;)
Pardon me for being the pedant and only addressing your last sentence, not your overall point that NK has little to do with China's censorship situation, but I need to say: Well, theoretical perfect censorship. If I can see user-generated text of any kind, I can sneak encypted data out of it past anything North Korea can throw at me (assuming that the text was seeded with data encrypted by a pre-agreed cipher). Even if I'm being directly supervised by some grunt with a semi-automatic breathing over my shoulder, if I've agreed that a certain piece of otherwise-arbitrary and innocuous text has a certain meaning, observing whether the text is in the appropriate place of the plaintext will convey information. If I'm only allowed to read it and not take any permanent form of notes, the amount of info that can be conveyed might be limited, but you can train yourself to store a reasonably good bit of info over short periods of time.
Alternatively, imagine a one-time pad for use with a ciphertext that's slow-mosey'd into form by being all of the numbers, in order, in an otherwise-innocent business or weather article, or a span of them? Admittedly, this assumes the ability to insert arbitrary numbers into what's normally the realm of journalism or meteorology and to have the pages be available on an uncensored host, and have the appearances of these articles be agreed upon and prepared long enough in advance (potentially years), but it's not impossible if your reasons for sending a message is important enough.
This does all hinge on the ability to see the ciphertext in the first place. Alternatively, you could just end up shipped to a famine zone for $[THOUGHTCRIME] to sort everything out.
A specific reduction on a company's balance sheet that adjusts the value of a company's goodwill. Due to accounting rules, a company must monitor and test the value of its goodwill, to determine if it is overvalued. If it is, the company must issue an impairment charge on its balance sheet, to take into account the reduced value of the goodwill.
So... I guess... it's an artificial lowering of their balance sheet to reflect the fact that AOL shouldn't be making that much money if their stock is so crappy. I don't know if there's an actual financial penalty involved (i.e., that charge actually gets paid out to someone), or if that number only matters with respect to determining their stock value on Wall Street (and they didn't actually lose 1.4 billion).
Slashdot Mirror
So you've never heard of the innocent people whose lives anonymous has ruined, "for the lulz?"
List names and dates of incidents, now. I'm calling you out on your vague bullshit. Provide hard facts about "ruined lives."
I guess Chris Forcand sort of got his life ruined some by Anonymous. Then again, he was a pedophile that Anonymous turned in after pulling off a crowdsourced version of To Catch a Predator, minus the film crew.
Hey, that's my brain, you insensitive clo');DROP TABLE Users *;--
And shall the re
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Hi, I think you're confused. This is Slashdot. GameFAQs is way over that way. Maybe along the way you can learn some maturity, or at least get over your obsession with the Xbox 360 and homosexuality.
While you're at it, please put your balls in a vise, clamp it tight, and then do a few spins. The 21st century doesn't need you breeding.
Imma call [citation needed] on your (in my opinion bullshit) statement that 99.9% of modded consoles are strictly used for piracy.
Is piracy common? Yes. Is it 99.9% of ALL modified console use? Uhhhh.
FYI, I have a Wii with homebrew and a USB HDD attached to it. There's some cool stuff (including emulators) available for homebrew, and I have all my games on the HDD so I don't have to drag out the discs, potentially scratch them, and so on. And it improves load times. I've committed what is arguably piracy once with the HDD setup by downloading the ISO to a Japanese game that I really wanted to play when there was no indication it was going to get localized into English (there is a ton of voicework and texture work that needed to be translated). Then, it turns out, it was licensed and eventually released, and so I bought the English version, which has been much more enjoyable to play since I can't keep up with the voiceovers and walls of text. Stick that data point in your pipe and smoke it.
I'm not going to advocate this sort of action, but GSB is DRM-free. In addition to more nefarious purposes, certain websites hosting peer-based downloads enable you to take a try-before-you-buy approach should you be man enough to follow up and pay for the full product if you find you like it. THAT is how you find out if the pricing is worth it (also, if you already own GSB, you likely own the first three DLC packs before this one, and this is more of the same, basically).
/* Seriously, don't pirate indie games. If you like them, support them. If you don't like them, then just move on with your life. */
BitTorrent, the lending library of the 21st century.
As a former subscriber who has disabled adverts on this site, I'm more pissed off with Slashdot for posting this "event" than I am the developer trying to get some free press for his game, even if I don't like his game.
And yet, here you are, spending your valuable time nitpicking and fact-checking every letter in my comment when the overall gist of what I was saying is that as a small company, he doesn't have the mountains of cash to just give away content for free in order to build community. I never stated he was a purely one-man shop, mainly because I didn't actually know for sure, but he's definitely not fucking Epic or Gearbox or any one of dozens of other studios under the wings of cornerstone game publishers.
I also specifically stated that it's an entirely subjective argument as to whether or not you consider the content patch to be worth charging for. You didn't like the game? Fine. Don't give him any more money. Let the invisible hand either pat him on the back or bitch-slap him until he can't see straight.
It's a content pack with a new race and 10 new ships for that new race, and the ships apparently have a different loadout configuration compared to the existing ships. Whether this is worth paying anything for is subjective. However, consider: This is an indie developer, not a major game studio with a multi-million-dollar budget. He doesn't just have a vault of cash sitting around to lay on after he's done tweaking the textures and packing them up for a free release.
I think the idea of giving the choice of paying normal price or on-sale price allows him to collect right away instead of getting the (potentially minimal) normal-price sales now and then getting a bigger volume of sales five or six months down the road when it goes on sale on Steam.
Disclosure: I'm buying the full $5.99 because I like this game and want to support the dev. I also didn't even know that the new content was released before this story was posted, so... it sure might be a slashvertisement, but it's at least for what I would consider one of the "good guys" (no, not you, Ubisoft).
Well, he's basically tesseracting the gap in time between when the DLC is released and the point where it goes on sale on Steam for half price (which is where it sells the most, according to him) by offering the DLC at the sale price, while also offering people who are willing to pay full price the option of paying what he feels his work on the content is actually worth.
The fact that he expects to make money on his work should be no surprise. He's experimenting with different ways of doing it instead of trying the tried-and-tested-to-be-shit method of throwing your loyal paying fans under the DRM bus.
Garry's Mod for Half Life 2 allowed you to build your own surveillance station and place/move the cameras where you wanted. You could also change the texture of an object to show the view from the camera.
Granted. I said the last game I played. Not the last game. I'm sure Call of Honor Arena 2009 or whatever the kids are playing these days. (My old geezer imitation isn't that good.)
You wanna know the last game I played that featured this "surveillance camera" business?
Duke Nukem 3D
Ohhhh, snap!
/* OK, it was one monitor at a time, but that's arguably a tactical decision to not let the player see every camera at once */
Duh.
What will this do for Lal Bihari and the many other people declared legally dead (while still possessing for all intents and purposes all characteristics of a living person if not legal identification)? If the answer is "nothing," then I don't see that this is much of an improvement or advancement in the task of maintaining records on your population.
/* Yes, corruption can override anything. I know. */
Mr. Richard Gaywood sends his regards. They've done this sort of thing before.
I don't know how to break it to you, AC, but you're clearly an idiot. Never get elected for public office anywhere.
Mod this AC up, because he's right... and, well, he's right. And GP doesn't understand RIM's security implementation.
The one sad, sad thing is that this is called "PS3 jailbreak". Jailbreak is a very specific term that describes breaking out of a filesystem jail (e.g. on the iPhone), and it's being used on the PS3 purely for "brand recognition". This will just make people associate jailbreaks with piracy.
The pirates probably don't care; sure, they might not be able to update when Sony releases a fix (memories of System Menu 4.2 before Bannerbomb v2), but the PS3 library up to this point and the near future just became available to them. That'll keep them busy while someone reverse-engineers or finds a new exploit around whatever Sony does about this, I guess.
Also, thank you and the rest of Team Twiizers for your hard work, marcan.
Except that the only reason that people by these mod chips is to play burned games. To claim this has anything to do with homebrew or being able to install Linux is naïveté to the highest degree.
Because there's no way someone would modchip a Wii (before software homebrew was refined to its current pretty-damn-easy standard) in order to plug a mass-storage USB device in and use their console as both a home media center and a game machine. That could never, ever happen. It's inconceivable.
Oh, wait. A simple Google search returns a bunch of sites that want to sell you the (free) homebrew software (in violation of copyright--yes, Team Twiizers' homebrew software is original, not stolen from Nintendo, so they technically hold copyright), and they tout being able to use your Wii to play back pretty much any type of video or sound file VLC can understand. You lose. Player 1 insert coin.
Worst case, you borrowed it from a friend which puts you back on par with a guy who borrows a DVD from his friend and rips it to the hard drive in his house instead of yours.
I'm on the side of legal homebrew, but FTFY. Your metaphor did not balance both sides of the equation.
The initial heavy lifting to hack the original XBox, 360 and Wii were done by people trying to put Linux on them.
I'm going to back up AC on this one, at least with respect to the Wii. Team Twiizers, the team of hackers (as in, tinkering, not cheaters) have released multiple tools to not only allow and facilitate non-pirate homebrew software to run, they also actually have made efforts to fix critical flaws in Nintendo's design of the Wii. This includes ways to recover a bricked console, which came into play when Nintendo's own official system updates (designed to block homebrew and piracy indiscriminately) were sloppy to the point of being capable of bricking unmodified Wiis.
Team Twiizers also go out of their way to specifically discourage and hamper piracy, including making their software run upside-down on-screen if you've hacked your Wii so much that you must be using it for piracy. They really want to avoid large-scale piracy, because it'll just give Nintendo the incentive to try and lock the Wii back down, depriving everyone of the non-piracy uses for homebrew. They'll happily help with installing Linux on your Wii, and there are guides for using it as a media center, a ScummVM host, and even a VNC client. You can also emulate pretty much every game console in history up to the PS1, as well as MAME, but finding roms (and whatever trouble that might cause) is up to you. However, they make it clear that discussions of piracy are unwelcome.
Any exploit that allows you to do something not ordinarily allowed under a game console's security model is a potential avenue to performance hacks like aimbots and speed hacks. Note: Potential. It's possible to code games to have the server reject malformed or abnormal input from the client to freeze out such hacks, but I know literally nothing about the PS3's local security and sandboxing model, nor anything about how the server code is implemented on Sony's side, so I'll defer to people actually in the scene for a specific answer to your question.
Regarding dealing with hackers, I only play FPSs that allow dedicated player-owned servers, and then find community/clan servers with strict anti-hacking policies (including, where available, server modules and such). The server I play the most on in my FPS of choice fosters a strong community, and part of that includes harsh penalties (i.e., permabans) for hacking if a demo can prove it as well as bigoted language (calling someone a faggot or the n-word is a good way to find yourself back at the game's main menu with a friendly dialog box informing you that you've been shown the door). It isn't perfect, but such a community wouldn't be possible in the Modern Warfare 2 style of matchmaking-only online play.
While you wait, please enjoy generous refreshments of candy and disappointment. Just kidding. The candy is also disappointment.
/* I don't think Portal 2 will be considered a disappointment. I just think that's something GLaDOS would say. I also totally stole it from a site's 404 page ages ago but I can't remember from where. */
Having spent more than half my childhood living on well water with a local aquifer (that would run dry every summer when the dipwad with the pool filled it up, but I digress), I totally know what parent means. I'm not a doctor, however, so I can't speak to how important minerals dissolved in water are to biology.
;)
One nitpick: How can distilled water be tasteless and bitter? Last I checked, bitter was a taste.
Pardon me for being the pedant and only addressing your last sentence, not your overall point that NK has little to do with China's censorship situation, but I need to say: Well, theoretical perfect censorship. If I can see user-generated text of any kind, I can sneak encypted data out of it past anything North Korea can throw at me (assuming that the text was seeded with data encrypted by a pre-agreed cipher). Even if I'm being directly supervised by some grunt with a semi-automatic breathing over my shoulder, if I've agreed that a certain piece of otherwise-arbitrary and innocuous text has a certain meaning, observing whether the text is in the appropriate place of the plaintext will convey information. If I'm only allowed to read it and not take any permanent form of notes, the amount of info that can be conveyed might be limited, but you can train yourself to store a reasonably good bit of info over short periods of time.
Alternatively, imagine a one-time pad for use with a ciphertext that's slow-mosey'd into form by being all of the numbers, in order, in an otherwise-innocent business or weather article, or a span of them? Admittedly, this assumes the ability to insert arbitrary numbers into what's normally the realm of journalism or meteorology and to have the pages be available on an uncensored host, and have the appearances of these articles be agreed upon and prepared long enough in advance (potentially years), but it's not impossible if your reasons for sending a message is important enough.
This does all hinge on the ability to see the ciphertext in the first place. Alternatively, you could just end up shipped to a famine zone for $[THOUGHTCRIME] to sort everything out.
A specific reduction on a company's balance sheet that adjusts the value of a company's goodwill. Due to accounting rules, a company must monitor and test the value of its goodwill, to determine if it is overvalued. If it is, the company must issue an impairment charge on its balance sheet, to take into account the reduced value of the goodwill.
So... I guess... it's an artificial lowering of their balance sheet to reflect the fact that AOL shouldn't be making that much money if their stock is so crappy. I don't know if there's an actual financial penalty involved (i.e., that charge actually gets paid out to someone), or if that number only matters with respect to determining their stock value on Wall Street (and they didn't actually lose 1.4 billion).