"I think it is entirely reasonable that World of Warcraft have restrictions on what can be done while you are leasing the allowance to use their servers to play their game."
Let's just be clear here, what are you saying, that when you lease allowance to use their servers, they have permission to do whatever they want to your local machine and define what software you can and can't run on it? because that's the issue here.
Blizzard use pretty much exactly the same techniques to check processes on your local machine as Glider uses to interfact with the WoW process. Blizzard are saying that this technique should be illegal- in the case of Glider, making the whole piece of software illegal even if you wanted to use it on say, 3rd party custom WoW servers. They're saying it's okay for them to use the technique though to scan your other software.
It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact the technical argument they're using can have massive implications for the software industry, for example, the same technique is used by anti-malware software. Potentially then if Blizzard's argument is held up in court, if someone is stupid enough to click through a EULA on a piece of malware, then the malware vendor could sue for the removal from sale of any anti-malware software by precisely the same argument Blizzard is using. Worse, the technical argument used by blizzard questionably even makes operating systems themselves outright illegal for also using such tecniques.
It's a bad case in general, Blizzard are attempting to create a dangerous precedent for the software industry that has far reaching negative implications whilst also restricting people's rights to do whatever they want on their computer, and to use whatever software they want, even if that software is in itself not illegal.
The issue is that Blizzard is going far too far just to protect their game, they're risking too much collateral damage for too many people just for the sake of stopping a handful of people cheating in their game rather than simply making their game less prone to cheating by making it worth playing rather than just macroing. Their actions are utterly reckless and selfish, their game just isn't important enough to create such a dangerous precedent for the millions of people who don't even play WoW. It's their problem to deal with, yet they feel the rest of us should have to suffer rather than them properly deal with it because the worst thing is, people will still distribute such hacks regardless of the legality of them, just as they always have.
They're using a legal answer, to a technical/gameplay problem.
"it's not like the itunes store is an entity in the void. music labels asked it to be the way it is, with all the limitations and device restrictions and stuff."
Yet they didn't ask Amazon and Play.com to have their stores that way when they opened their DRM free, device neutral stores long before Apple even considered removing DRM?
Sorry but Steve's speech about hating DRM was nothing more than showmanship, he loved it, selling proprietary Apple only DRM tunes in iTunes meant he could force people to keep buying Apple devices when they upgrade their devices. The only reason Apple had to backpedal on DRM is because the DRM free stores were gaining traction rapidly, and he was left with a stark choice of losing customers but keeping lock-in, or losing lock-in and keeping customers.
"you can argue that the iphone is leveraging the app store, but then again debian is leveraging it's repositories. there are no functional differences."
This makes no sense, software from the repositories don't have artificial restrictions that prevent them being used elsewhere, the very fact that it's free, and open source, means that anyone can take and use stuff from the repositories as they want to. Importantly though, Debian has less than 1% share of the OS market, so isn't even close to having a monpoly, whilst Apple very much has a monopoly on portal media devices and arguably just about has a monopoly in terms of content sales for portable devices. It's certainly been leveraging that monopoly to push the iPhone and that's where it enters shady territory- as has been said above, this is absolutely not any different than Microsoft using Windows to push IE. Even the use of the iPod to push iTunes and vice versa is the same.
The problem is you're ignoring important points in your attempt to try an suggest Apple is an entirely innocent company, specifically the percetange stranglehold it has on certain markets, and how it's trying to leverage those strangleholds to force it's way into other markets. The iPad only adds to this- they're now using their monopoly position on media players and content to push into the tablet market, and most blatantly, to force the likes of Amazon out of the eBook market with their price fixing deals.
Apple is very much an illegal monopoly, it's really only a matter of time before it comes to court now, and their market cap overtaking Microsoft's just puts them under the scrutiny required for the likes of the FTC to begin to seriously engage in this.
It used to be true some years ago, in the Windows 95/98 era if the system application interacted with the user's desktop. One prominent example at the time was anti-virus software, that ran on a privileged account, but displayed itself to the user in the system tray.
You're absolutely right nowadays though, this was resolved in Windows 2000 onwards, so hasn't been a problem for over a decade.
No hacker in their right mind is going to go after the banks. Many of these authors live in countries like Russia, and the Russians could barely give a shit about people in their country stealing $1000 dollars from Grandpa Sam's Paypal account in the US and paying it into his Russian account. If he goes after a bank instead then that's going to force an international response by the likes of the FBI and NSA, even if he hacks the bank where does the money go? you can't just sneak a million dollars out the local ATM.
But then there's the other side of it, botnets for hire, DDOS on request- in this case hackers rent out their botnets for use in taking down sites, acting as distributed password cracking networks and so forth, they get paid a fortune for this by criminal gangs, and as the gangs already have plenty of untraceable laundered money hanging around, getting paid without being traceable isn't a problem.
So simply put, you have no idea what you're on about. There's no money in hacking banks, because there's no way to do it without incurring the wrath of the world's finest in the security services and because getting out large lump sums in an untraceable manner is pretty much nigh on impossible. In contrast siphoning out small amounts in large numbers is much easier to get away with, but particularly easy to get away with is just renting out a network of machines.
But finally what's also important is the human element, grandpa Sam may well just connect his machine directly to the internet, and use a stupidly weak password like 'sam', he might actively disable security features through fiddling because he doesn't know what he's actually doing. In contrast, banks have security professionals doing security, they don't do anything so stupid. What it doesn't mean is that Windows is inherently any less secure though, unless of course you make it so.
Say you want to develop an application for the PC, to name a few, you have to deal with:
- Different memory amounts - Different processor speeds - Different operating system features and libraries (different OS versions, different library versions e.g. DirectX) - Different line new line formats - Different text encoding formats - Different graphics card capabilities - Different speed connections - Different screen resolutions - Different DPI - Different processor extensions (i.e. for SIMD technologies) - Different threading models
Many of these things are exactly the same as on Android. Many developers don't notice a lot of them nowadays precisely because they are abstracted away. If you want to write a game in XNA, the different SIMD extensions supported by the processor aren't your concern, because XNA just provides it's own Math library that automatically deals with that for you, but even then you have to deal with different processor speeds, graphics card speeds, memory availability and so forth.
I don't think you understand what fragmentation is, because you seem to believe that a commodity item can't suffer from it which makes little sense. Just look at all the old video standards, look at all the old audio standards, the different processor capabilities and architectures we've had through the years. Fragmentation is only harder to notice on the PC than it could be precisely because developers have long known how to handle it, but it's there, more than on any other platform.
Yep, I'm trying to figure out what exactly the point of this demonstration is.
It's like the guy in question has just figured out that you can write software that does bad things, not just good things, and so has written a piece to demonstrate this.
What can be done is irrelevant, we already know what can be done, the problem is doing it, and that needs an attack vector, ideally a remotely exploitable one for the "best" hacks, and this guy hasn't found any.
I'm not even sure it serves as an example of the future of malware, it's hardly even imaginative. I suspect future malware threats will more likely involve things like P2P networks setup by the malware itself that is used to distribute updates that provide the malware with new exploits to try infecting other machines with or that receives anti-anti-virus updates to kill off any AV software even if attempts are made to update it. In general, I suspect malware will get a whole lot more intelligent in terms of mining data on infected systems, making users believe there's nothing wrong, and in spreading itself.
The example in TFA demonstrates none of this sort of thing, just stuff that's long already been done. Hell, even my examples are hardly that far fetched, I'm sure some malware out there already does a lot of this sort of thing right now.
Let's be honest, Steve is more likely to disable internet access on his devices, telling us it's for our own good and that it makes the experience far better than he is to accept an official Flash implementation.
The worst part is, the fanboys would probably even buy into it too and pay extra for it as a feature if he used words like "magical", "innovative", and "groundbreaking" alongside his advertising blurb for such a move.
Thankful I'd never encountered the term before, but in your complaint to get rid of the term I've now encountered it twice, and that's already too much!
"It's funny, I saw this article on my RSS and knew that the first post would be this. You don't give any reason as to why the fragmentation stories are FUD."
It's actually been explained, and I have to question the motive for your posting, because it takes a certain selective ignorance to not see the given reasons. All the same, to give you the benefit of the doubt, here are the reasons they are FUD:
1) There's a choice between fragmentation and stagnation, if a set of devices does not change over time to avoid fragmentation, they rapidly become outdated.
2) Fragmentation has been fundamental to the most successful computing platform of all time- the PC. Without fragmentation there would've not been such rapid development or adoption.
3) Because of the above, fragmentation has allowed the likes of PC to be extremely versatile, and software developers have coped with it for decades without any real problems.
4) Because fragmentation has been so fundamental to the development of the PC, and dealing with it is so well understood, Android has been able to be designed with the issue of fragmentation in mind, and hence handles it in an extremely graceful manner- more so than most other platforms.
5) Because of point 4, the supposed issue of fragmentation hasn't actually really caused any problems, hence why the Android marketplace has some of the most innovative apps on the market (particularly those from Google such as Skymap, Translate, as well as the likes of Layar) which work perfectly fine even on my old HTC Magic running Android 1.6.
So in other words, despite all the fragmentation FUD being talked about, there's no actual evidence being produced of it causing any real life problems. The only whines seem to be from those who simply don't have the first clue about software development because professional developers understand concepts like abstraction layers and how they help you deal with differences in platforms.
I hope this answers it for you once and for all, but judging by your tone it sounds like your mind is made up, to you it sounds like Android has a fragmentation problem because a few blog posts told you so, even though they provided no evidence at all to back up that theory, let alone any "evidence" that can't easily and demonstrably be refuted as being FUD in itself.
"I've seen this a lot with friends who have different android phones. Friend A with HTC: "Hey try this really cool app". Friend B with Motorola: "What App? I can't find it anywhere in the market place." My understanding is that the app doesn't even show up if their phone is not compatible, it's invisible. I guess they don't want a bunch of apps that when you bring up the page says, "Sorry your phone is not compatible"."
How does your beloved Apple handle this when someone builds an app for the iPad or 3GS that depends on features the original iPhone didn't have? The choices seem pretty stark:
1) Let people see the app, tell them it's not compatible so that they have to increasingly rummage through apps they can't use to find what they want the older their handset gets
2) Prevent people releasing apps in the first place that don't work on all handsets, meaning no one gets to use apps which could be groundbreaking on newer handsets
3) Let people access any app even those that are incompatible with their handset and have them fail miserably when they try and use them
4) Hide apps people can't use, displaying them to people they can use, as you mention is the case with the Android marketplace
At the end of the day, it's a problem even Apple must surely deal with too, if not now, then eventually (else face stagnation as their hardware is left years out of date as is the case with all current iPhone screen resolutions), as far as I can see, option 4 seems the most sensible choice out the lot, and I'd be more dissapointed if the Android marketplace took any of the other approaches.
Personally if I can't use an app, I don't care. It's something I've kinda had to deal with all my life. You know, I'd really like to play Metal Gear Solid 4, but unfortunately it wont run on my XBox, I'm sure I'll live though, maybe next gen I'll get a Playstation and miss out on Halo 10 or whatever. Fortunately, the world still wont end though, and I like many other users apart from perhaps the most rampant of fanboys will continue to simply not care because that's really just the way the world works- you can't have everything, ever. As long as the best or at least a perfectly acceptable option is taken though, that's enough to make me happy.
"People managed to check email, schedule tasks and appointments, manage contacts and keep notes before Outlook came on the scene."
Yeah, people used to travel overseas before planes were invented too, but it took about 50 times as long.
"Outlook is a bloated monster that, if running on its own, uses a horrible flat file database"
So let me get this straight, you're complaining it's a bloated monster and then complaining it uses a flat file database, what would you recommend, switching to a database server on the desktop? Yeah that'll really make it less bloated.
"if running on a network, uses Exchange, which, when it works is great, but as anyone who has to debug it when it goes nuts knows, can be an absolute nightmare."
That really just depends on your level of competence, anyone incapable of administering and resolving issues with Windows networks and things like Exchange, Active Directory, IIS, TFS and that sort of thing should not be in the IT profession period.
"But there are some web-based apps like Zimbra and Gmail"
Yes, but as has been said to you already, these don't provide the features people need which the likes of Exchange/Outlook and Domino/Notes offer.
"Outlook-Exchange is absurdly expensive"
For your average consumer certainly, but for all but the absolute smallest and most unprofitable of businesses it's really just pocket change. The benefits it provides in getting things done and organising meetings etc. pays for itself in no time at all.
"For us its pure economics. With limited budgets and the need to expand, we're between a rock and a hard place"
It sounds like your business has problems, effectively you're looking at the relatively small costs of Exchange and thinking "ooh savings", whilst simultaneously saying who cares about Outlook for organising meetings because people did it before, completely missing the inefficiencies you're going to introduce into your business which in itself will cost you more. You call it simple economics, but it's not that simple, there are a lot of factors beyond the outright price, there are the costs savings it brings to your business in return.
Putting your confidential highly sensitive business e-mails and other data in the hands of a 3rd party where it has to travel to and from via the internet is probably not the smartest move either. I'm sure it'll do your bandwidth bills wonders also.
It sounds like your company is struggling, I'd suggest looking elsewhere than the Exchange server for the problems it's facing.
It seems a bit hypocritical saying "Oh we don't feel good about Windows, but we feel good about Apple" when Apple is generally much more evil than Microsoft nowadays. Maybe they're trying to repair ties with Apple or something after all the fallouts they've had with them lately.
Importantly though, Google's security issues with Windows arose on Windows XP, the Windows security model changed drastically in Vista, and has improved again in Windows 7. Is there really any evidence that Linux will make them more secure against the kind of internal attacks they suffered? It's really just as trivial to access and root any machine if you have physical access, I think they'd be better served looking at their security and recruiting policies in terms of who has access to what and who can be trusted with what. Changing OS isn't going to protect them against high end attacks, especially not by a government entity with all it's resources like China. It really seems like they just want to blame everyone but themselves for their lapse in security.
I love Google, I'm very pro-Android, and the move to Linux is great, but we don't need the blatant hypocrisy and ignorance over it. It's just childish fanboyism.
Indeed, DRM doesn't work against piracy, and the industry knows it.
DRM is really about introducing incompatibility to force people to buy multiple copies of the same content if they wish to use it across multiple devices and that's really it.
The content industries complain about pirates taking from them, whilst being hypocritical enough to try and rip people off with artificial software restrictions in an attempt to charge them multiple times for the same thing.
"They removed LAN play, if that is important to you today, don't buy the product. I'll have no problem playing my friends online or at a LAN. This is largely a bunch of crying before anyone has even seen how it will be implemented."
The issue is it sets a precedent, will it mean LAN parties become a thing of the past even though they were a massive part of Starcraft culture? That gone simply because Blizzard are paranoid about piracy?
"Yeah, they sued the cheat company. You know why? Because their customers want them to do that. People who play MMOs hate cheaters, it ruins their experience. You would rather them not sue a company that allowed people to bot? As far as Warden goes, if they didn't have that, then they wouldn't be able to detect who was cheating and who wasn't and there would be a lot more cheaters today. As someone who used to play WoW, I have no problem with this."
The issue is again precedent, the argument Blizzard used effectively applies to the likes of anti-virus software too such that someone could now sue AV software vendors for hooking into their app. The issue with warden is the way it snoops on and send data back about such a wide range of software, a shotgun effect in the hope it finds a cheat, but that in the meantime farms data about your innocent system usage. It's not the fact they have anti-cheat software, it's their abysmal, authoritarian implementation that is the problem. Other games like Dark Age of Camelot handled the problem eventually simply by checking for specific cheats rather than every single app on your system, and then banning people who did it. They did it with such ruthless efficiency that people stopped cheating because cheaters got sick of losing characters they'd spent months on every few months.
"Do you think a company is going to hand over their key generation algorithm to a random third party? No doubt, corporations can be evil. But this isn't BP, this is a company trying to get people to pay for a product they have supported longer than any other game that I know of."
Yeah, except there's a major flaw in your theory. If this was the case, if it was really about piracy, then why would they even engage with Blizzard? Further, what does it matter for Blizzard if their key checking algorithm is out there or not when people are bypassing it anyway? If it was out there it'd mean that bnetd checked people had legit keys and stopped those using pirated versions from using it, if it's not out there, then everyone including the pirates would use it. I'm sorry that blatant obviousness got lost in your fanboy rage, but between your spoutings of "moron" and "stupid" your argument doesn't make any sense. Generally, if you're going to call other people names, it's best to actually make sense, but your argument doesn't follow logically.
"But somewhere you bought in to this idea that companies can't do anything to protect their products other than "make great games". Sorry, you aren't being reasonable."
But again, the fundamental problem is that anti-piracy approaches don't work and only serve to screw over the paying customer. It means it is the paying customer who doesn't use cracks that ultimately suffers, and as above, in the case of the Glider trial it has potential repercussions far beyond protecting WoW from cheats, it's a ticking time bomb they've created in the software industry where legitimate software could be deemed in breach of IP. The argument surrounded hooking in to external applications, and making copies of them in memory being copyright infringement, yet that's exactly how things like operating systems work, it's exactly what a lot of security software does, but in WoW's court case was deemed illegal. I'm all for stopping cheating, but setting a time bomb that's bound to come back and bite the software industry hard is completely the wrong way to go about it. The irony is regarding Warden that it could well be them it bites- if some software developer complains about Warden making a copy of his software in memory, just as
It's no suprise Hunt said that to be honest. He was the Tories biggest support of the DEB, in fact, when asked about the Conservatives thoughts on it, his view was that Labour were taking too long about it and should in fact have brought in 3 strikes and punishment without trial even quicker.
He's the biggest music industry stooge in the coalition government, so it's quite sad he's still got a position of power. The only upside is the DEA is split now between BIS and Jeremy's department- Vince Cable is in charge of BIS, and BIS is the department that created it under Mandelson, so there is some hope at least that it's not entirely up to Jeremy Cunt.
The average age of computer gamers is now 31, in the US it's supposedly higher- around 33 - 35. Any company that sets 13 - 24 as the target audience for games might be considered an epic fail for this reason.
What is this mystical casual copying you speak of? Last I checked every man and his dog knew how to grab the latest game off of BitTorrent, eMule, Limewire or whatever, or failing that, knew someone who could do it for them.
There's no such thing as protecting against casual copying, because what you presumably call non-casual copying is casual copying these days.
"I really think people like you that complain about battle.net and steam haven't bothered to use either of them. When I upgrade computers or just start using one I don't normally use, I spend zero time worrying about my blizzard and steam games. Because all I have to do is login, download another copy, and I'm good to go. If it isn't blizzard or on steam then I don't buy it."
Ah, so you're one of those people who it has fortunately just worked for then?
Don't worry, eventually you'll be one of the growing number of people who tries to play a game they've paid for one day and is told they can't, then you'll actually realise how stupid the whole system is.
There's no such thing as DRM done right, because when it inevitably fails, and it will eventually, you'll hate it too.
This is really the problem with DRM, it's the same with Apple's old iTunes DRM, people thought it was fine when they just plugged in their iPod and sync'd it, but then when they got their new non-Apple phone that'd replace their old iPod just fine they find suddenly they can't actually use half their media any more without technically breaking the law, and needing a decent amount of technical knowledge to even do so.
I agree DRM seems fine when it "just works", but it doesn't always "just work", you'll find that out one day, the feeling of not being able to use something you've paid for will hit you too.
I'll be impressed if even two or three of those things happen.
As the ID cards, national identity register and biometric passports are the first things on the new governments schedule such that the vote on it now even has it's date set for parliamentary proceedings over that, and a large majority of MPs support their cancellation I think there's good reason to be optimistic over at least a bit of it right now.
That's still the first step to improving, rather than further destroying civil liberties in the UK in 13 years- it's hard not to be a bit excited about it.
I only really mentioned Clegg because he was the one who did the official coalition government speech on civil liberties last week.
That said, not all of this was in the Tory manifesto, a fair bit of it, and some of the most important parts in fact are there at the behest of the Lib Dems, the Tories for example wanted to ditch ID cards, but maintain the National Identity Register.
I believe the libel law rework plans are a Lib Dem policy too that the Tories weren't planning for.
One of my concerns so far has been their push for bringing back fox hunting with packs of dogs- it's not that I have a problem with hunting foxes per se, I do however when it's done in a way that can only appeal to people with a disturbing blood lust that in any other walk of life would be seen as a sure sign of a pretty sick individual. Primarily though, it's the fact that it's something that benefits such a tiny elite of the population yet wastes so much legislative time that it seems that they are still very much focussing on simply looking after the elite at the expense of grossly more important things that benefit pretty much everyone or at least large swathes of the population. There's just so much more important stuff to deal with it just shouldn't even be on the agenda anymore.
I find it sad that we're only getting a referendum for alternative vote which is really no better than the current system, and can't figure out how the Tories have managed to convince themselves that if you're going to have a referendum on electoral change then you shouldn't just go all the way and let the population decide which one is best instead of just lumping them with a shitty option.
I am a little concerned that the Digital Economy Act has gone entirely unmentioned too, despite Clegg's opposition to it pre-election stating he wanted to see it repealed and restarted.
So like you, there are a few things that bug me for sure. But again, regarding civil liberties? I just wasn't expecting that, and right now, their civil liberties stance alone puts them absolutely miles ahead of Labour, regardless of their other current plans I dislike.
Blizzard is the same company that removed LAN play forcing an internet connection to play with friends from Starcraft II.
The same company that sued a producer of a cheat application on the basis that it hooks on their application, all the while including an application with World of Warcraft that does exactly that to all the other processes on your computer.
The same company that sued a group of people who produced a 3rd party solution for playing their games online so that you weren't restricted from playing when Blizzard had problems or deemed a game end of life, or otherwise restricted you playing the game you bought.
If you think Blizzard is a good company then it's a rather fucking sad reflection of how much a company can get away with nowadays without being chastised.
I remember a time when a good company was a company like id Software that released it's game to you, handed you a fuck load of mod tools, included no copy protection whatsoever, let you play it wherever and however you want, and eventually even released the full source code too.
It's like when Gabe Newell at Valve goes on about how he hates DRM and thinks it's useless, all the time whilst peddling the most restrictive gaming DRM on the planet via Steam until Ubisoft managed to outdo them for that title.
Just because someone at a company says they don't like DRM, doesn't unfortunately mean that their corporate strategy is to not use DRM, or to generally just not treat their customers like shit I'm afraid.
For those unaware, Britain has had a new coalition government for the past 3 weeks, and it's been active in stating it's goals of rolling back many of the civil liberties infringements in the UK that came about under Labour.
There have been countless stories on Firehose, but positive stories about a final change of state of British politics that has massive meaningful benefits for improving the state of civil liberties here in the UK are apparently not newsworthy, it's better to stick to negative stories about how the world is going to end. Apparently.
It's a shame because Slashdot could use some positive news on the civil liberties front, and there has been a lot from the UK this last few weeks. To sum most of them up, the stated intentions of the new coalition government are:
- The removal of the DNA database - The removal of the national identity register - Cancelling the go ahead of enhanced biometric passports - Cancellation of the contact point database - Removal of restrictions on right to peaceful protest - Stronger restrictions on the use of CCTV cameras - Ban fingerprinting of children in school without parental permission - Increase the scope of the freedom of information act - Remove innocent people from the DNA database - Restore trial by jury as a right in all criminal cases - Review and hopefully rework libel laws to prevent stifling of freedom of speech - Introduce more legislation to prevent abuse of anti-terror laws - Ban interception and storage of e-mail and other digital communications without good reason (i.e. a specific warrant)
Now, you wouldn't realise any of this if you simply read Slashdot of course, but there you go. Hopefully the UK is seeing a bit of a turnaround now that totalitarian Labour have been kicked out, and for the first time in about a hundred years, the Liberals are part of government again.
It's not all perfect of course, no one can like everything their government does. The new coalition has also said that they will allow citizens to put forward bills for repeal, whether the digital economy act can be included is yet to be seen, but right now, the things there are cold hard plans for are extremely promising and look set to get the go ahead.
It's just a shame Slashdot didn't post the full list of changes when Nick Clegg the new deputy PM did a speech on restoring civil liberties in the UK last week when there were like 20 firehose submissions on it, but oh well, I suppose we should be glad now that at least the fact a tiny miniscule portion of the goings on over here has been posted, albeit a week late.
It's not even about testing, anyone developing this sort of system will know full well that such a security hole exists. You just can't have the knowledge to develop the system, and not realise the implications of your design.
I suspect it's more a typical case of deadlines being more important than a thoroughly secure implementation.
Slashdot Mirror
"I think it is entirely reasonable that World of Warcraft have restrictions on what can be done while you are leasing the allowance to use their servers to play their game."
Let's just be clear here, what are you saying, that when you lease allowance to use their servers, they have permission to do whatever they want to your local machine and define what software you can and can't run on it? because that's the issue here.
Blizzard use pretty much exactly the same techniques to check processes on your local machine as Glider uses to interfact with the WoW process. Blizzard are saying that this technique should be illegal- in the case of Glider, making the whole piece of software illegal even if you wanted to use it on say, 3rd party custom WoW servers. They're saying it's okay for them to use the technique though to scan your other software.
It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact the technical argument they're using can have massive implications for the software industry, for example, the same technique is used by anti-malware software. Potentially then if Blizzard's argument is held up in court, if someone is stupid enough to click through a EULA on a piece of malware, then the malware vendor could sue for the removal from sale of any anti-malware software by precisely the same argument Blizzard is using. Worse, the technical argument used by blizzard questionably even makes operating systems themselves outright illegal for also using such tecniques.
It's a bad case in general, Blizzard are attempting to create a dangerous precedent for the software industry that has far reaching negative implications whilst also restricting people's rights to do whatever they want on their computer, and to use whatever software they want, even if that software is in itself not illegal.
The issue is that Blizzard is going far too far just to protect their game, they're risking too much collateral damage for too many people just for the sake of stopping a handful of people cheating in their game rather than simply making their game less prone to cheating by making it worth playing rather than just macroing. Their actions are utterly reckless and selfish, their game just isn't important enough to create such a dangerous precedent for the millions of people who don't even play WoW. It's their problem to deal with, yet they feel the rest of us should have to suffer rather than them properly deal with it because the worst thing is, people will still distribute such hacks regardless of the legality of them, just as they always have.
They're using a legal answer, to a technical/gameplay problem.
"it's not like the itunes store is an entity in the void. music labels asked it to be the way it is, with all the limitations and device restrictions and stuff."
Yet they didn't ask Amazon and Play.com to have their stores that way when they opened their DRM free, device neutral stores long before Apple even considered removing DRM?
Sorry but Steve's speech about hating DRM was nothing more than showmanship, he loved it, selling proprietary Apple only DRM tunes in iTunes meant he could force people to keep buying Apple devices when they upgrade their devices. The only reason Apple had to backpedal on DRM is because the DRM free stores were gaining traction rapidly, and he was left with a stark choice of losing customers but keeping lock-in, or losing lock-in and keeping customers.
"you can argue that the iphone is leveraging the app store, but then again debian is leveraging it's repositories. there are no functional differences."
This makes no sense, software from the repositories don't have artificial restrictions that prevent them being used elsewhere, the very fact that it's free, and open source, means that anyone can take and use stuff from the repositories as they want to. Importantly though, Debian has less than 1% share of the OS market, so isn't even close to having a monpoly, whilst Apple very much has a monopoly on portal media devices and arguably just about has a monopoly in terms of content sales for portable devices. It's certainly been leveraging that monopoly to push the iPhone and that's where it enters shady territory- as has been said above, this is absolutely not any different than Microsoft using Windows to push IE. Even the use of the iPod to push iTunes and vice versa is the same.
The problem is you're ignoring important points in your attempt to try an suggest Apple is an entirely innocent company, specifically the percetange stranglehold it has on certain markets, and how it's trying to leverage those strangleholds to force it's way into other markets. The iPad only adds to this- they're now using their monopoly position on media players and content to push into the tablet market, and most blatantly, to force the likes of Amazon out of the eBook market with their price fixing deals.
Apple is very much an illegal monopoly, it's really only a matter of time before it comes to court now, and their market cap overtaking Microsoft's just puts them under the scrutiny required for the likes of the FTC to begin to seriously engage in this.
It used to be true some years ago, in the Windows 95/98 era if the system application interacted with the user's desktop. One prominent example at the time was anti-virus software, that ran on a privileged account, but displayed itself to the user in the system tray.
You're absolutely right nowadays though, this was resolved in Windows 2000 onwards, so hasn't been a problem for over a decade.
No hacker in their right mind is going to go after the banks. Many of these authors live in countries like Russia, and the Russians could barely give a shit about people in their country stealing $1000 dollars from Grandpa Sam's Paypal account in the US and paying it into his Russian account. If he goes after a bank instead then that's going to force an international response by the likes of the FBI and NSA, even if he hacks the bank where does the money go? you can't just sneak a million dollars out the local ATM.
But then there's the other side of it, botnets for hire, DDOS on request- in this case hackers rent out their botnets for use in taking down sites, acting as distributed password cracking networks and so forth, they get paid a fortune for this by criminal gangs, and as the gangs already have plenty of untraceable laundered money hanging around, getting paid without being traceable isn't a problem.
So simply put, you have no idea what you're on about. There's no money in hacking banks, because there's no way to do it without incurring the wrath of the world's finest in the security services and because getting out large lump sums in an untraceable manner is pretty much nigh on impossible. In contrast siphoning out small amounts in large numbers is much easier to get away with, but particularly easy to get away with is just renting out a network of machines.
But finally what's also important is the human element, grandpa Sam may well just connect his machine directly to the internet, and use a stupidly weak password like 'sam', he might actively disable security features through fiddling because he doesn't know what he's actually doing. In contrast, banks have security professionals doing security, they don't do anything so stupid. What it doesn't mean is that Windows is inherently any less secure though, unless of course you make it so.
Say you want to develop an application for the PC, to name a few, you have to deal with:
- Different memory amounts
- Different processor speeds
- Different operating system features and libraries (different OS versions, different library versions e.g. DirectX)
- Different line new line formats
- Different text encoding formats
- Different graphics card capabilities
- Different speed connections
- Different screen resolutions
- Different DPI
- Different processor extensions (i.e. for SIMD technologies)
- Different threading models
Many of these things are exactly the same as on Android. Many developers don't notice a lot of them nowadays precisely because they are abstracted away. If you want to write a game in XNA, the different SIMD extensions supported by the processor aren't your concern, because XNA just provides it's own Math library that automatically deals with that for you, but even then you have to deal with different processor speeds, graphics card speeds, memory availability and so forth.
I don't think you understand what fragmentation is, because you seem to believe that a commodity item can't suffer from it which makes little sense. Just look at all the old video standards, look at all the old audio standards, the different processor capabilities and architectures we've had through the years. Fragmentation is only harder to notice on the PC than it could be precisely because developers have long known how to handle it, but it's there, more than on any other platform.
Yep, I'm trying to figure out what exactly the point of this demonstration is.
It's like the guy in question has just figured out that you can write software that does bad things, not just good things, and so has written a piece to demonstrate this.
What can be done is irrelevant, we already know what can be done, the problem is doing it, and that needs an attack vector, ideally a remotely exploitable one for the "best" hacks, and this guy hasn't found any.
I'm not even sure it serves as an example of the future of malware, it's hardly even imaginative. I suspect future malware threats will more likely involve things like P2P networks setup by the malware itself that is used to distribute updates that provide the malware with new exploits to try infecting other machines with or that receives anti-anti-virus updates to kill off any AV software even if attempts are made to update it. In general, I suspect malware will get a whole lot more intelligent in terms of mining data on infected systems, making users believe there's nothing wrong, and in spreading itself.
The example in TFA demonstrates none of this sort of thing, just stuff that's long already been done. Hell, even my examples are hardly that far fetched, I'm sure some malware out there already does a lot of this sort of thing right now.
Let's be honest, Steve is more likely to disable internet access on his devices, telling us it's for our own good and that it makes the experience far better than he is to accept an official Flash implementation.
The worst part is, the fanboys would probably even buy into it too and pay extra for it as a feature if he used words like "magical", "innovative", and "groundbreaking" alongside his advertising blurb for such a move.
Thankful I'd never encountered the term before, but in your complaint to get rid of the term I've now encountered it twice, and that's already too much!
"It's funny, I saw this article on my RSS and knew that the first post would be this. You don't give any reason as to why the fragmentation stories are FUD."
It's actually been explained, and I have to question the motive for your posting, because it takes a certain selective ignorance to not see the given reasons. All the same, to give you the benefit of the doubt, here are the reasons they are FUD:
1) There's a choice between fragmentation and stagnation, if a set of devices does not change over time to avoid fragmentation, they rapidly become outdated.
2) Fragmentation has been fundamental to the most successful computing platform of all time- the PC. Without fragmentation there would've not been such rapid development or adoption.
3) Because of the above, fragmentation has allowed the likes of PC to be extremely versatile, and software developers have coped with it for decades without any real problems.
4) Because fragmentation has been so fundamental to the development of the PC, and dealing with it is so well understood, Android has been able to be designed with the issue of fragmentation in mind, and hence handles it in an extremely graceful manner- more so than most other platforms.
5) Because of point 4, the supposed issue of fragmentation hasn't actually really caused any problems, hence why the Android marketplace has some of the most innovative apps on the market (particularly those from Google such as Skymap, Translate, as well as the likes of Layar) which work perfectly fine even on my old HTC Magic running Android 1.6.
So in other words, despite all the fragmentation FUD being talked about, there's no actual evidence being produced of it causing any real life problems. The only whines seem to be from those who simply don't have the first clue about software development because professional developers understand concepts like abstraction layers and how they help you deal with differences in platforms.
I hope this answers it for you once and for all, but judging by your tone it sounds like your mind is made up, to you it sounds like Android has a fragmentation problem because a few blog posts told you so, even though they provided no evidence at all to back up that theory, let alone any "evidence" that can't easily and demonstrably be refuted as being FUD in itself.
"I've seen this a lot with friends who have different android phones. Friend A with HTC: "Hey try this really cool app". Friend B with Motorola: "What App? I can't find it anywhere in the market place." My understanding is that the app doesn't even show up if their phone is not compatible, it's invisible. I guess they don't want a bunch of apps that when you bring up the page says, "Sorry your phone is not compatible"."
How does your beloved Apple handle this when someone builds an app for the iPad or 3GS that depends on features the original iPhone didn't have? The choices seem pretty stark:
1) Let people see the app, tell them it's not compatible so that they have to increasingly rummage through apps they can't use to find what they want the older their handset gets
2) Prevent people releasing apps in the first place that don't work on all handsets, meaning no one gets to use apps which could be groundbreaking on newer handsets
3) Let people access any app even those that are incompatible with their handset and have them fail miserably when they try and use them
4) Hide apps people can't use, displaying them to people they can use, as you mention is the case with the Android marketplace
At the end of the day, it's a problem even Apple must surely deal with too, if not now, then eventually (else face stagnation as their hardware is left years out of date as is the case with all current iPhone screen resolutions), as far as I can see, option 4 seems the most sensible choice out the lot, and I'd be more dissapointed if the Android marketplace took any of the other approaches.
Personally if I can't use an app, I don't care. It's something I've kinda had to deal with all my life. You know, I'd really like to play Metal Gear Solid 4, but unfortunately it wont run on my XBox, I'm sure I'll live though, maybe next gen I'll get a Playstation and miss out on Halo 10 or whatever. Fortunately, the world still wont end though, and I like many other users apart from perhaps the most rampant of fanboys will continue to simply not care because that's really just the way the world works- you can't have everything, ever. As long as the best or at least a perfectly acceptable option is taken though, that's enough to make me happy.
"People managed to check email, schedule tasks and appointments, manage contacts and keep notes before Outlook came on the scene."
Yeah, people used to travel overseas before planes were invented too, but it took about 50 times as long.
"Outlook is a bloated monster that, if running on its own, uses a horrible flat file database"
So let me get this straight, you're complaining it's a bloated monster and then complaining it uses a flat file database, what would you recommend, switching to a database server on the desktop? Yeah that'll really make it less bloated.
"if running on a network, uses Exchange, which, when it works is great, but as anyone who has to debug it when it goes nuts knows, can be an absolute nightmare."
That really just depends on your level of competence, anyone incapable of administering and resolving issues with Windows networks and things like Exchange, Active Directory, IIS, TFS and that sort of thing should not be in the IT profession period.
"But there are some web-based apps like Zimbra and Gmail"
Yes, but as has been said to you already, these don't provide the features people need which the likes of Exchange/Outlook and Domino/Notes offer.
"Outlook-Exchange is absurdly expensive"
For your average consumer certainly, but for all but the absolute smallest and most unprofitable of businesses it's really just pocket change. The benefits it provides in getting things done and organising meetings etc. pays for itself in no time at all.
"For us its pure economics. With limited budgets and the need to expand, we're between a rock and a hard place"
It sounds like your business has problems, effectively you're looking at the relatively small costs of Exchange and thinking "ooh savings", whilst simultaneously saying who cares about Outlook for organising meetings because people did it before, completely missing the inefficiencies you're going to introduce into your business which in itself will cost you more. You call it simple economics, but it's not that simple, there are a lot of factors beyond the outright price, there are the costs savings it brings to your business in return.
Putting your confidential highly sensitive business e-mails and other data in the hands of a 3rd party where it has to travel to and from via the internet is probably not the smartest move either. I'm sure it'll do your bandwidth bills wonders also.
It sounds like your company is struggling, I'd suggest looking elsewhere than the Exchange server for the problems it's facing.
Yeah it's generally a bit unfair.
It seems a bit hypocritical saying "Oh we don't feel good about Windows, but we feel good about Apple" when Apple is generally much more evil than Microsoft nowadays. Maybe they're trying to repair ties with Apple or something after all the fallouts they've had with them lately.
Importantly though, Google's security issues with Windows arose on Windows XP, the Windows security model changed drastically in Vista, and has improved again in Windows 7. Is there really any evidence that Linux will make them more secure against the kind of internal attacks they suffered? It's really just as trivial to access and root any machine if you have physical access, I think they'd be better served looking at their security and recruiting policies in terms of who has access to what and who can be trusted with what. Changing OS isn't going to protect them against high end attacks, especially not by a government entity with all it's resources like China. It really seems like they just want to blame everyone but themselves for their lapse in security.
I love Google, I'm very pro-Android, and the move to Linux is great, but we don't need the blatant hypocrisy and ignorance over it. It's just childish fanboyism.
Indeed, DRM doesn't work against piracy, and the industry knows it.
DRM is really about introducing incompatibility to force people to buy multiple copies of the same content if they wish to use it across multiple devices and that's really it.
The content industries complain about pirates taking from them, whilst being hypocritical enough to try and rip people off with artificial software restrictions in an attempt to charge them multiple times for the same thing.
"You might want to check on how those tactics worked out for them."
Quite well, they're running Northern Ireland nowadays.
Hint: Many of the top names in the devolved Northern Irish parliament are ex-terrorists.
"They removed LAN play, if that is important to you today, don't buy the product. I'll have no problem playing my friends online or at a LAN. This is largely a bunch of crying before anyone has even seen how it will be implemented."
The issue is it sets a precedent, will it mean LAN parties become a thing of the past even though they were a massive part of Starcraft culture? That gone simply because Blizzard are paranoid about piracy?
"Yeah, they sued the cheat company. You know why? Because their customers want them to do that. People who play MMOs hate cheaters, it ruins their experience. You would rather them not sue a company that allowed people to bot? As far as Warden goes, if they didn't have that, then they wouldn't be able to detect who was cheating and who wasn't and there would be a lot more cheaters today. As someone who used to play WoW, I have no problem with this."
The issue is again precedent, the argument Blizzard used effectively applies to the likes of anti-virus software too such that someone could now sue AV software vendors for hooking into their app. The issue with warden is the way it snoops on and send data back about such a wide range of software, a shotgun effect in the hope it finds a cheat, but that in the meantime farms data about your innocent system usage. It's not the fact they have anti-cheat software, it's their abysmal, authoritarian implementation that is the problem. Other games like Dark Age of Camelot handled the problem eventually simply by checking for specific cheats rather than every single app on your system, and then banning people who did it. They did it with such ruthless efficiency that people stopped cheating because cheaters got sick of losing characters they'd spent months on every few months.
"Do you think a company is going to hand over their key generation algorithm to a random third party? No doubt, corporations can be evil. But this isn't BP, this is a company trying to get people to pay for a product they have supported longer than any other game that I know of."
Yeah, except there's a major flaw in your theory. If this was the case, if it was really about piracy, then why would they even engage with Blizzard? Further, what does it matter for Blizzard if their key checking algorithm is out there or not when people are bypassing it anyway? If it was out there it'd mean that bnetd checked people had legit keys and stopped those using pirated versions from using it, if it's not out there, then everyone including the pirates would use it. I'm sorry that blatant obviousness got lost in your fanboy rage, but between your spoutings of "moron" and "stupid" your argument doesn't make any sense. Generally, if you're going to call other people names, it's best to actually make sense, but your argument doesn't follow logically.
"But somewhere you bought in to this idea that companies can't do anything to protect their products other than "make great games". Sorry, you aren't being reasonable."
But again, the fundamental problem is that anti-piracy approaches don't work and only serve to screw over the paying customer. It means it is the paying customer who doesn't use cracks that ultimately suffers, and as above, in the case of the Glider trial it has potential repercussions far beyond protecting WoW from cheats, it's a ticking time bomb they've created in the software industry where legitimate software could be deemed in breach of IP. The argument surrounded hooking in to external applications, and making copies of them in memory being copyright infringement, yet that's exactly how things like operating systems work, it's exactly what a lot of security software does, but in WoW's court case was deemed illegal. I'm all for stopping cheating, but setting a time bomb that's bound to come back and bite the software industry hard is completely the wrong way to go about it. The irony is regarding Warden that it could well be them it bites- if some software developer complains about Warden making a copy of his software in memory, just as
It's no suprise Hunt said that to be honest. He was the Tories biggest support of the DEB, in fact, when asked about the Conservatives thoughts on it, his view was that Labour were taking too long about it and should in fact have brought in 3 strikes and punishment without trial even quicker.
He's the biggest music industry stooge in the coalition government, so it's quite sad he's still got a position of power. The only upside is the DEA is split now between BIS and Jeremy's department- Vince Cable is in charge of BIS, and BIS is the department that created it under Mandelson, so there is some hope at least that it's not entirely up to Jeremy Cunt.
The average age of computer gamers is now 31, in the US it's supposedly higher- around 33 - 35. Any company that sets 13 - 24 as the target audience for games might be considered an epic fail for this reason.
What is this mystical casual copying you speak of? Last I checked every man and his dog knew how to grab the latest game off of BitTorrent, eMule, Limewire or whatever, or failing that, knew someone who could do it for them.
There's no such thing as protecting against casual copying, because what you presumably call non-casual copying is casual copying these days.
"I really think people like you that complain about battle.net and steam haven't bothered to use either of them. When I upgrade computers or just start using one I don't normally use, I spend zero time worrying about my blizzard and steam games. Because all I have to do is login, download another copy, and I'm good to go. If it isn't blizzard or on steam then I don't buy it."
Ah, so you're one of those people who it has fortunately just worked for then?
Don't worry, eventually you'll be one of the growing number of people who tries to play a game they've paid for one day and is told they can't, then you'll actually realise how stupid the whole system is.
There's no such thing as DRM done right, because when it inevitably fails, and it will eventually, you'll hate it too.
This is really the problem with DRM, it's the same with Apple's old iTunes DRM, people thought it was fine when they just plugged in their iPod and sync'd it, but then when they got their new non-Apple phone that'd replace their old iPod just fine they find suddenly they can't actually use half their media any more without technically breaking the law, and needing a decent amount of technical knowledge to even do so.
I agree DRM seems fine when it "just works", but it doesn't always "just work", you'll find that out one day, the feeling of not being able to use something you've paid for will hit you too.
I'll be impressed if even two or three of those things happen.
As the ID cards, national identity register and biometric passports are the first things on the new governments schedule such that the vote on it now even has it's date set for parliamentary proceedings over that, and a large majority of MPs support their cancellation I think there's good reason to be optimistic over at least a bit of it right now.
That's still the first step to improving, rather than further destroying civil liberties in the UK in 13 years- it's hard not to be a bit excited about it.
I only really mentioned Clegg because he was the one who did the official coalition government speech on civil liberties last week.
That said, not all of this was in the Tory manifesto, a fair bit of it, and some of the most important parts in fact are there at the behest of the Lib Dems, the Tories for example wanted to ditch ID cards, but maintain the National Identity Register.
I believe the libel law rework plans are a Lib Dem policy too that the Tories weren't planning for.
One of my concerns so far has been their push for bringing back fox hunting with packs of dogs- it's not that I have a problem with hunting foxes per se, I do however when it's done in a way that can only appeal to people with a disturbing blood lust that in any other walk of life would be seen as a sure sign of a pretty sick individual. Primarily though, it's the fact that it's something that benefits such a tiny elite of the population yet wastes so much legislative time that it seems that they are still very much focussing on simply looking after the elite at the expense of grossly more important things that benefit pretty much everyone or at least large swathes of the population. There's just so much more important stuff to deal with it just shouldn't even be on the agenda anymore.
I find it sad that we're only getting a referendum for alternative vote which is really no better than the current system, and can't figure out how the Tories have managed to convince themselves that if you're going to have a referendum on electoral change then you shouldn't just go all the way and let the population decide which one is best instead of just lumping them with a shitty option.
I am a little concerned that the Digital Economy Act has gone entirely unmentioned too, despite Clegg's opposition to it pre-election stating he wanted to see it repealed and restarted.
So like you, there are a few things that bug me for sure. But again, regarding civil liberties? I just wasn't expecting that, and right now, their civil liberties stance alone puts them absolutely miles ahead of Labour, regardless of their other current plans I dislike.
I'd rather just call you ignorant.
Blizzard is the same company that removed LAN play forcing an internet connection to play with friends from Starcraft II.
The same company that sued a producer of a cheat application on the basis that it hooks on their application, all the while including an application with World of Warcraft that does exactly that to all the other processes on your computer.
The same company that sued a group of people who produced a 3rd party solution for playing their games online so that you weren't restricted from playing when Blizzard had problems or deemed a game end of life, or otherwise restricted you playing the game you bought.
If you think Blizzard is a good company then it's a rather fucking sad reflection of how much a company can get away with nowadays without being chastised.
I remember a time when a good company was a company like id Software that released it's game to you, handed you a fuck load of mod tools, included no copy protection whatsoever, let you play it wherever and however you want, and eventually even released the full source code too.
It's like when Gabe Newell at Valve goes on about how he hates DRM and thinks it's useless, all the time whilst peddling the most restrictive gaming DRM on the planet via Steam until Ubisoft managed to outdo them for that title.
Just because someone at a company says they don't like DRM, doesn't unfortunately mean that their corporate strategy is to not use DRM, or to generally just not treat their customers like shit I'm afraid.
You post a story about the new British regime.
For those unaware, Britain has had a new coalition government for the past 3 weeks, and it's been active in stating it's goals of rolling back many of the civil liberties infringements in the UK that came about under Labour.
There have been countless stories on Firehose, but positive stories about a final change of state of British politics that has massive meaningful benefits for improving the state of civil liberties here in the UK are apparently not newsworthy, it's better to stick to negative stories about how the world is going to end. Apparently.
It's a shame because Slashdot could use some positive news on the civil liberties front, and there has been a lot from the UK this last few weeks. To sum most of them up, the stated intentions of the new coalition government are:
- The removal of the DNA database
- The removal of the national identity register
- Cancelling the go ahead of enhanced biometric passports
- Cancellation of the contact point database
- Removal of restrictions on right to peaceful protest
- Stronger restrictions on the use of CCTV cameras
- Ban fingerprinting of children in school without parental permission
- Increase the scope of the freedom of information act
- Remove innocent people from the DNA database
- Restore trial by jury as a right in all criminal cases
- Review and hopefully rework libel laws to prevent stifling of freedom of speech
- Introduce more legislation to prevent abuse of anti-terror laws
- Ban interception and storage of e-mail and other digital communications without good reason (i.e. a specific warrant)
Now, you wouldn't realise any of this if you simply read Slashdot of course, but there you go. Hopefully the UK is seeing a bit of a turnaround now that totalitarian Labour have been kicked out, and for the first time in about a hundred years, the Liberals are part of government again.
It's not all perfect of course, no one can like everything their government does. The new coalition has also said that they will allow citizens to put forward bills for repeal, whether the digital economy act can be included is yet to be seen, but right now, the things there are cold hard plans for are extremely promising and look set to get the go ahead.
It's just a shame Slashdot didn't post the full list of changes when Nick Clegg the new deputy PM did a speech on restoring civil liberties in the UK last week when there were like 20 firehose submissions on it, but oh well, I suppose we should be glad now that at least the fact a tiny miniscule portion of the goings on over here has been posted, albeit a week late.
It's not even about testing, anyone developing this sort of system will know full well that such a security hole exists. You just can't have the knowledge to develop the system, and not realise the implications of your design.
I suspect it's more a typical case of deadlines being more important than a thoroughly secure implementation.