Seeing as I was chuckling to myself the other night that some guy on XBox live gave out his home address so that the guy who kicked his ass could come round and fight him in real life because the guy who got beaten, could, I quote "fucking destroy your ass in real life you little bitch" I thought the "suck my balls" quote was actually quite tame;)
Really, people who take games seriously enough to get so worked up provide great comedy, and yes it's quite frequent that you would hear such things, but certainly the sex offenders register isn't the place for them as much as that might add to the comedy value of the circus that is online gaming.
I can see it now, people being put on the sex offenders register for saying things like "suck my balls" to their opponents in a Call of Duty multiplayer match only to find out they're underage, even though the kids shouldn't legally be playing the game in the first place.
I'd wager that's not what they think they'll prevent by this.
What they're hoping to prevent are higher bandwidth activities like video uploads of the dying moments of innocent young girls shot dead by the government sponsored Basij militia.
This is more an attempt at preventing visual media getting out I would imagine.
Part of the issue is that we don't actually have a definition of what intelligence actually is- try defining it and see how far you get before certain cases break your definition. One man's intelligence is another man's dumb. The example I've used before is that we might call a kid that fails a maths test stupid, whilst calling a dog that can bring you it's bowl when it runs out of water intelligent, even though the dog couldn't have even began to comprehend the maths test. The term intelligence is just too wide ranging and varied to be much use a lot of the time.
"Being intelligent is different than acting intelligently."
I have a female friend who I used to work with some time ago when I worked in IT support and she was great at her job, she was a really really problem solver, could learn new stuff easily and only needed to be told something once to take it in and learn it. She has now gone back to University and is getting A's in maths and computing no problem. In this respect she's a smart girl no question.
But at the same time, there's the other side of her, the girl that managed to clip someone's car with hers and drove off eventually getting caught and ending up with a hit and run criminal charge. There's the dodgy weight loss pills she ordered off the internet because she wanted to lose weight and rather than exercise thought that ordering pills off the internet was somehow a good idea. There's the fact she's one of those girls that goes out with complete wankers even though they treat her like shit and she knows it. The girl that turned down a damn good job simply because she could not be bothered to go through the internet view process which was really just a formality for her.
I think she's a good example of your point, but certainly not all women are like this. My girlfriend is smart in all respects thankfully.
If they really are receiving threats or are concerned they are being watched, why not report it to the FBI or whoever? I'm sure the FBI/CIA/NSA/etc. would love nothing more than to be able to track down Iranian agents in the US over something relatively trivial like threats or harassment rather than have to later trace them down over espionage or worse.
If your friends are really concerned that they are in danger, then your nation's security services really are the people to contact. You'll be doing your country a massive favour providing evidence that could lead to the capture of foreign intelligence agents in your country too.
Certainly posting on Slashdot about it will do nothing whatsoever to help your friends or your country though.
I don't think this is true. It's in the declaration of human rights that in a signatory nation of which Britain is you cannot be rectroactively tried for a crime as a result of a change in law. I'm pretty sure that the dates on magazines like The Sun or if you could produce evidence that these images were created before that date that they are in fact legal. The illegality I believe exists in creating or owning materials created since that date.
"Funny, when I go to forums or sites frequented by military or ex-military guys, they are often frustrated at the rules prohibiting arming of civilian ships with even light machine guns. To them, arming ships transiting hostile waters is not a 'macho Rambo' thing, it's a 'no shit, Sherlock' thing."...and trained military guys have what in common with civilian sailors exactly? Nothing. Of course people trained in weapons and combat would support such an idea, because it'd work for them. Their opinion and idea is still useless for civilians though.
"It's called keeping watch, sailors have been doing it on ships since the 18th century at least. Honestly, if you can't keep a overnight watch over your vessel in hostile waters, you shouldn't be sailing there in the first place."
I don't think you understand how hard it is for a crew of maybe 15 to cover all angles of ships of the size that are getting hijacked when they all at some point have to take it in turns to get sleep. I don't think you understand what use keep watch is when you have people in faster boats than you armed with RPGs and AK-47s. I don't think you understand how hard it can be to see small boats travelling between the waves. There was a story earlier this year or last year about Iranian boats managing to sneak up on and get close to a US warship- if trained navy lookouts can't spot them until they're on top of them then why would you expect civilian sailors to be any better?
"This is not even counting the times people have successfully fought back against the pirates after they've boarded, such as the time they hit a North Korean freighter."...whilst ignoring the times people have fought back and got themselves killed of course.
"I'd rather have an M-2 or even an AK in that situation than not, that's for sure."
That's why you'd be one of those people who gets himself shot for nothing.
"The pirates have been stopped from boarding vessels before, when they mistakenly attack supply(freighter) ships from various navies. Do you think the navy vessels run up a flag that says "We are navy, and therefore immune from piracy"? No, they man their guns (usually.50 caliber machine guns) and fire back, as well as maneuver as much as a old freighter can."
Again, you're assuming civilians = trained military. This is a false assumption, and hence the rest of your argument falls based on this flawed premise.
"I do not understand why people think "military training" is some magic held in some sacred grimore that must be kept away from the masses."
No one suggests it's scared and should be kept away from the masses, it's just that the masses aren't interested in becoming soldiers, if they were they'd have joined the military already.
"Many merchant sailors are former military from 3rd world nations"
[citation needed]
"the operation and maintenance of a ship is far more complicated than that of a machine gun, or manning it. If they can run a ship without setting it on fire or running into Antarctica, they can work a machine gun."
What? A chisel is much more simple than a computer but I couldn't come close to carving some of the amazing wooden carvings experts do. Being able to use a tool in a basic manner does not equal being proficient and skilled in your use of that tool. Being able to pull the trigger does not mean you can aim, does not mean you can aim on a moving boat, does not mean you can aim on a moving boat at a fast moving target, does not mean you can keep your cool and continue to aim when being fired back at and so on.
"You underestimate how PC the world's major nations have become."
Denmark is hardly "the world's major nations", do you really believe China and Russia have any qualms about arming crews if it was a solution for example?
"For example, going all "Pol Pot" on western civilization might make the next ice age come a few years, decades, maybe centuries earlier, or maybe later, who knows, who cares."
You're missing the point. If humans make the change occur faster, than you're not giving countless species or systems in the world chance to change with it because many systems that make the world work require time to change.
Should it happen over the course of tens of thousands of years, species like polar bears may have time to adapt, the coral reefs may also be able to adapt. Hell, even us humans need time to do something about the areas that will be effected by it- low lying coastal areas for example. Should it happen over the course of hundreds of years, there will however be no such chance.
I don't disagree with you that in the grand scheme of the earth's history and future what we do is small scale, I do however completely disagree that it's no big deal, partly because we depend on these ecosystems that may well be destroyed for food, medicines and other resources.
You might similarly argue there's no point planning for a major meteor strike on earth because it's happened plenty of times before, but obviously that ignores the destruction it would cause to any people living on the planet at the time.
Yes these things happen, but that doesn't mean we want them to happen or that the negligible effect on the planet in the long term is negligible for us as a species. Humanity has to decide if it wants a future, if it wants a future it needs to be responsible, if it doesn't want a future we may as well have a global thermonuclear war now just to see what it looks like because I bet it's damn impressive in the instant before you die, and, well, live for the moment, who cares what the earth is like in the future, right?
Googling "somali pirates fought back" yields quite a few articles about N Korean, S Korean, Egyptian, and Spanish ships that fought back successfully. These are untrained men with improvised weapons - not trained men with rifles.
Yes, and then there's the stories about what happens the other times when people try to resist. Putting your life on the line by resisting is hardly an easy choice, if it works great, but that's one hell of a gamble and the fact most crews don't do it is the primary reason there have been less casualties than there otherwise would be. Again, if it was really so simple do you not think more ships would do it? Do you not think the international recommendations would be to fight back, rather than to not fight back? Or do you believe yourself and other commenters like yourself have more knowledge of the situation than the combined knowledge of the world's naval intelligence and maritime advisory services?
As an aside, you'll probably want to actually read the 3rd article you linked too before citing it as an example of "untrained men with improvised weapons - not trained men with rifles" fighting back in future too.
These pirates aren't "multiple decade battle hardened militants". Most have NO organized military training whatsoever. The process of recruiting for Armies in Somali wars consists of driving around in pickup trucks yanking young men off the street. Somali "veterans" are veterans of little more than the usual random violence that plagues the country.
No organised military training is irrelevant, no one pretends they're the SAS, but if you believe that living and surviving in a country rife with war for 15 or more years doesn't give you a massive combat edge over people who have perhaps never even fired a rifle then it suggests you have the same view of reality as those who take their combat knowledge and experience from playing Call of Duty and watching The Unit. These people have been in constant training, they've had to be to survive.
"How many of the 50+ pirates would need to be offed to prevent the return fire vs finding a weaker target?"
Too many, you're not talking about Westerners with cushy lives and a lot to live for, you're talking about Somalis who have spent the last 15 or more years shooting each other or having their friends and family shot.
This is a commonly noted reason, but another major reason is that contrary to the Call of Duty playing internet crowd's belief, engaging in a firefight with multiple decade battle hardened militants isn't actually that safe or easy an idea.
People sailing the boats are civilians, they do not have military training, they have never been in combat, by putting them up there against the pirates you're risking far more people getting shot, whilst being hijacked sucks, it's better than having the crew killed.
I'd imagine many people have this vision of the crews being able to see the pirates coming and just gunning them down with a chaingun, but the reality is the pirates often manage to sneak up on vessels either using bad weather, blind spots or the cover of night, so many firefights would involve close quarter combat on the decks of the ship itself. That's really not something you want civilians to be doing against people who have been in a country where they have been shooting at each other for near 20 years now. This is especially important to note also when you realise that against crews of 15 you're sometimes seeing as many as 80 pirates- even if you catch them before they board the ship do you really want to put yourself in the line of fire of even 50+ pirates and start trying to pick them off under fire of 80 or so AK-47s and the odd RPG being returned at you?
The mentality of many people online of "just shoot them" as a solution to many problems is rather ignorant to the difficulties of the reality of the situation. If it was as simple as many online commenters seem to believe, then they would have simply done it by now. The legal barriers are the least of problems, because if it was a real solution to just arm crews then as this is a problem that basically has unilateral agreement from the world's major nations including the 5 permanent security council members then an exception for ships passing through Somali waters would be no big deal. Perhaps the closest solution to arming the crew that would not be as likely to involve the death of half the crew of each ship that encounters pirates would be for security companies like Blackwater (now Xe services) to keep a supply of trained security professionals both north and south of the troubled areas such that ships could pick up a squad of security personnel at one end and drop them off when safely at the other, but of course, whether shipping companies would be willing to foot the bill is a different story and it's questionable how much use even trained personnel would be when outnumbered, and even they're still not immune to hails of gun and RPG fire in return either.
"With DRM you're trying to prevent the user from viewing the content under certain conditions but allowing them to view it under others"
This is really what you're doing in the anti-cheating scenario, just on a more abstract level. You still have to pass raw data to the graphics API or graphics card eventually as raw data. You cannot both render it with standard hardware and keep it in an encrypted format. Realistically though it's in a plain format before this because performing client side logic on encrypted data would be a nightmare, if even possible at all.
"Anti-cheating can allow the user to look at the content all they want, you're preventing the user from altering it or faking certain inputs and outputs, which is entirely possible with proper cryptography"
What sort of cryptography is "proper" cryptography in this case? The client has to know the keys and the algorithm to encrypt and decrypt and so the cheat program must surely always know it too.
"lots of client-side verification and a little server-side verification"
What's stopping client-side verification being faked? If it does a CRC check then why can't the cheat program just branch the code here to use the hacked content and forward the expected CRC? Even more complex checks involving keys sent from the server still end up in the hands of the cheat program.
"Some of Windows' copy protection mechanisms work this way and are 100% effective"
Really? How do people keep managing to crack it then?
"copies installed with generated keys can't be updated via Windows Update."
Why can't the user just keep an unhacked copy of the game and update that - which would work because it would be legitimate, and then re-apply the cheat program which must also be updated to point to the relevant changes in memory locations and/or logic too?
It is possible to have human admins on the distributed system too.
Oddly though, whilst I play on the Xbox and never saw the issue with the P2P system because that's how it works on the XBox and because you don't really tend to get cheating as such there anyway (at least not aimbots etc.) I have to say MW2s netcode is fucking awful. It's the first XBox game where I've seen multiple bad hosts picked such that lag is an issue. It was never a problem in MW1 so effectively not only have they moved PC gamers to the P2P networking platform but they've broken the networking platform in the process. I don't know why they didn't just stick with MW1's network code which worked perfectly well in this way.
I actually thought PC players were whining about nothing, because on the 360 their net code always worked fine in this way, what I didn't count on was them fucking it up in the process of moving PC gamers onto it so it's now effectively just broken for everyone.
"Really, any anti-cheat will eventually be defeatable. The bigger issue is that since IW is running all the servers you have to depend on them to remove any cheaters, rather than being able to play on a server with a good team of admins keeping them away. It's possible IW will do an even better job of this, but I think it's that choice that people want."
This is key, really on the PC the best option would've been to include an XBox live style setup so you can select a player as a player you wish to avoid in future. What happens then is when you start matchmaking it wont matchmake you with these players. If people cheat they will soon find a lack of people playing with them. If the feedback is sent to IW, then it'd be a good indicator for who to check for cheating to give account bans too as well, if someone has 500 players blacklisting them then it'd suggest there's probably something there to check out.
Even if you don't give up control of the server you cannot protect against many different cheats. Player locations have to be sent even when they're behind a wall or whatever because otherwise they pop awkwardly into view. Models/art assets can still be hacked on the client to be more visible and similar regardless- even if they're not stored locally and sent every game session they can be modified in memory by a determined cheater.
Aimbots are always going to be possible because you can still alter the executable in asssembly. A guy known as nopcode did this as far back as Quake III writing an aimbot directly into the Quake III executable.
No amount of CRC checks, encryption can protect because the cheater always knows what CRCs are expected, and the encryption keys are always used by the client to decrypt content or commands so that they can be used by the client to render and so forth in the first place.
At best on a logical level you can eliminate cheating by severely limiting your game's design, but that's really not a solution- especially when closed platforms like consoles don't have to. There is no solution to the problem that on an open platform, whatever the client has access to, the cheater has access to and can modify it or use that data outside it's intended purposes to give themselves an advantage too.
It's because, on the PC, you can't, without shifting everything server side.
Even then by the time we have the resources to shift everything server side we'll probably also have the resources client side on the PC to do in game pattern matching and have cheats that just match images sent to the client and respond to automatically aim at them or similar.
The idea of cheat free gaming on the PC is a fantasy, it can't happen, it's not a suitable platform for such endeavours.
Similarly though, I'd never want to see rid of the PC because it's openness is important in other areas. The issue here is that the PC's biggest advantage is also it's biggest disadvantage for things like online gaming.
I'm sure developers understand this, that if you want to deal with cheating then cat and mouse is the only way, at best you can just play whack-a-mole with the worst hacks. Perhaps the biggest improvement for the likes of Blizzard is that people need accounts to play their game, and if they do play whack-a-mole they can at least ban accounts and convince players not to cheat based on them possibly losing hundreds of hours of investment in the game.
That's because the PC is an open platform and just as DRM can't work, anti-cheating software like this can't work. The client is untrusted, anything on it can be worked around.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's the default and they don't realise a need to figure out how to change it.
You're expensive, personally I settle for free pens!
It'll probably count as rape if you let politicians get wind of it.
Yes, because I'm sure you know exactly what your kids get up to and say when you're not around.
I suppose they're god worshipping virgins too?
Seeing as I was chuckling to myself the other night that some guy on XBox live gave out his home address so that the guy who kicked his ass could come round and fight him in real life because the guy who got beaten, could, I quote "fucking destroy your ass in real life you little bitch" I thought the "suck my balls" quote was actually quite tame ;)
Really, people who take games seriously enough to get so worked up provide great comedy, and yes it's quite frequent that you would hear such things, but certainly the sex offenders register isn't the place for them as much as that might add to the comedy value of the circus that is online gaming.
That depends entirely on which country you're in. I'm not sure about Canada's laws on this, are you sure it's true for Canada?
I can see it now, people being put on the sex offenders register for saying things like "suck my balls" to their opponents in a Call of Duty multiplayer match only to find out they're underage, even though the kids shouldn't legally be playing the game in the first place.
I'd wager that's not what they think they'll prevent by this.
What they're hoping to prevent are higher bandwidth activities like video uploads of the dying moments of innocent young girls shot dead by the government sponsored Basij militia.
This is more an attempt at preventing visual media getting out I would imagine.
Part of the issue is that we don't actually have a definition of what intelligence actually is- try defining it and see how far you get before certain cases break your definition. One man's intelligence is another man's dumb. The example I've used before is that we might call a kid that fails a maths test stupid, whilst calling a dog that can bring you it's bowl when it runs out of water intelligent, even though the dog couldn't have even began to comprehend the maths test. The term intelligence is just too wide ranging and varied to be much use a lot of the time.
"Being intelligent is different than acting intelligently."
I have a female friend who I used to work with some time ago when I worked in IT support and she was great at her job, she was a really really problem solver, could learn new stuff easily and only needed to be told something once to take it in and learn it. She has now gone back to University and is getting A's in maths and computing no problem. In this respect she's a smart girl no question.
But at the same time, there's the other side of her, the girl that managed to clip someone's car with hers and drove off eventually getting caught and ending up with a hit and run criminal charge. There's the dodgy weight loss pills she ordered off the internet because she wanted to lose weight and rather than exercise thought that ordering pills off the internet was somehow a good idea. There's the fact she's one of those girls that goes out with complete wankers even though they treat her like shit and she knows it. The girl that turned down a damn good job simply because she could not be bothered to go through the internet view process which was really just a formality for her.
I think she's a good example of your point, but certainly not all women are like this. My girlfriend is smart in all respects thankfully.
If they really are receiving threats or are concerned they are being watched, why not report it to the FBI or whoever? I'm sure the FBI/CIA/NSA/etc. would love nothing more than to be able to track down Iranian agents in the US over something relatively trivial like threats or harassment rather than have to later trace them down over espionage or worse.
If your friends are really concerned that they are in danger, then your nation's security services really are the people to contact. You'll be doing your country a massive favour providing evidence that could lead to the capture of foreign intelligence agents in your country too.
Certainly posting on Slashdot about it will do nothing whatsoever to help your friends or your country though.
I don't think this is true. It's in the declaration of human rights that in a signatory nation of which Britain is you cannot be rectroactively tried for a crime as a result of a change in law. I'm pretty sure that the dates on magazines like The Sun or if you could produce evidence that these images were created before that date that they are in fact legal. The illegality I believe exists in creating or owning materials created since that date.
Yes, you're welcome to setup your own VPN with your router and play multiplayer via system link.
"Funny, when I go to forums or sites frequented by military or ex-military guys, they are often frustrated at the rules prohibiting arming of civilian ships with even light machine guns. To them, arming ships transiting hostile waters is not a 'macho Rambo' thing, it's a 'no shit, Sherlock' thing." ...and trained military guys have what in common with civilian sailors exactly? Nothing. Of course people trained in weapons and combat would support such an idea, because it'd work for them. Their opinion and idea is still useless for civilians though.
"It's called keeping watch, sailors have been doing it on ships since the 18th century at least. Honestly, if you can't keep a overnight watch over your vessel in hostile waters, you shouldn't be sailing there in the first place."
I don't think you understand how hard it is for a crew of maybe 15 to cover all angles of ships of the size that are getting hijacked when they all at some point have to take it in turns to get sleep. I don't think you understand what use keep watch is when you have people in faster boats than you armed with RPGs and AK-47s. I don't think you understand how hard it can be to see small boats travelling between the waves. There was a story earlier this year or last year about Iranian boats managing to sneak up on and get close to a US warship- if trained navy lookouts can't spot them until they're on top of them then why would you expect civilian sailors to be any better?
"This is not even counting the times people have successfully fought back against the pirates after they've boarded, such as the time they hit a North Korean freighter." ...whilst ignoring the times people have fought back and got themselves killed of course.
"I'd rather have an M-2 or even an AK in that situation than not, that's for sure."
That's why you'd be one of those people who gets himself shot for nothing.
"The pirates have been stopped from boarding vessels before, when they mistakenly attack supply(freighter) ships from various navies. Do you think the navy vessels run up a flag that says "We are navy, and therefore immune from piracy"? No, they man their guns (usually .50 caliber machine guns) and fire back, as well as maneuver as much as a old freighter can."
Again, you're assuming civilians = trained military. This is a false assumption, and hence the rest of your argument falls based on this flawed premise.
"I do not understand why people think "military training" is some magic held in some sacred grimore that must be kept away from the masses."
No one suggests it's scared and should be kept away from the masses, it's just that the masses aren't interested in becoming soldiers, if they were they'd have joined the military already.
"Many merchant sailors are former military from 3rd world nations"
[citation needed]
"the operation and maintenance of a ship is far more complicated than that of a machine gun, or manning it. If they can run a ship without setting it on fire or running into Antarctica, they can work a machine gun."
What? A chisel is much more simple than a computer but I couldn't come close to carving some of the amazing wooden carvings experts do. Being able to use a tool in a basic manner does not equal being proficient and skilled in your use of that tool. Being able to pull the trigger does not mean you can aim, does not mean you can aim on a moving boat, does not mean you can aim on a moving boat at a fast moving target, does not mean you can keep your cool and continue to aim when being fired back at and so on.
"You underestimate how PC the world's major nations have become."
Denmark is hardly "the world's major nations", do you really believe China and Russia have any qualms about arming crews if it was a solution for example?
"For example, going all "Pol Pot" on western civilization might make the next ice age come a few years, decades, maybe centuries earlier, or maybe later, who knows, who cares."
You're missing the point. If humans make the change occur faster, than you're not giving countless species or systems in the world chance to change with it because many systems that make the world work require time to change.
Should it happen over the course of tens of thousands of years, species like polar bears may have time to adapt, the coral reefs may also be able to adapt. Hell, even us humans need time to do something about the areas that will be effected by it- low lying coastal areas for example. Should it happen over the course of hundreds of years, there will however be no such chance.
I don't disagree with you that in the grand scheme of the earth's history and future what we do is small scale, I do however completely disagree that it's no big deal, partly because we depend on these ecosystems that may well be destroyed for food, medicines and other resources.
You might similarly argue there's no point planning for a major meteor strike on earth because it's happened plenty of times before, but obviously that ignores the destruction it would cause to any people living on the planet at the time.
Yes these things happen, but that doesn't mean we want them to happen or that the negligible effect on the planet in the long term is negligible for us as a species. Humanity has to decide if it wants a future, if it wants a future it needs to be responsible, if it doesn't want a future we may as well have a global thermonuclear war now just to see what it looks like because I bet it's damn impressive in the instant before you die, and, well, live for the moment, who cares what the earth is like in the future, right?
Yes, and then there's the stories about what happens the other times when people try to resist. Putting your life on the line by resisting is hardly an easy choice, if it works great, but that's one hell of a gamble and the fact most crews don't do it is the primary reason there have been less casualties than there otherwise would be. Again, if it was really so simple do you not think more ships would do it? Do you not think the international recommendations would be to fight back, rather than to not fight back? Or do you believe yourself and other commenters like yourself have more knowledge of the situation than the combined knowledge of the world's naval intelligence and maritime advisory services?
As an aside, you'll probably want to actually read the 3rd article you linked too before citing it as an example of "untrained men with improvised weapons - not trained men with rifles" fighting back in future too.
No organised military training is irrelevant, no one pretends they're the SAS, but if you believe that living and surviving in a country rife with war for 15 or more years doesn't give you a massive combat edge over people who have perhaps never even fired a rifle then it suggests you have the same view of reality as those who take their combat knowledge and experience from playing Call of Duty and watching The Unit. These people have been in constant training, they've had to be to survive.
"How many of the 50+ pirates would need to be offed to prevent the return fire vs finding a weaker target?"
Too many, you're not talking about Westerners with cushy lives and a lot to live for, you're talking about Somalis who have spent the last 15 or more years shooting each other or having their friends and family shot.
This is a commonly noted reason, but another major reason is that contrary to the Call of Duty playing internet crowd's belief, engaging in a firefight with multiple decade battle hardened militants isn't actually that safe or easy an idea.
People sailing the boats are civilians, they do not have military training, they have never been in combat, by putting them up there against the pirates you're risking far more people getting shot, whilst being hijacked sucks, it's better than having the crew killed.
I'd imagine many people have this vision of the crews being able to see the pirates coming and just gunning them down with a chaingun, but the reality is the pirates often manage to sneak up on vessels either using bad weather, blind spots or the cover of night, so many firefights would involve close quarter combat on the decks of the ship itself. That's really not something you want civilians to be doing against people who have been in a country where they have been shooting at each other for near 20 years now. This is especially important to note also when you realise that against crews of 15 you're sometimes seeing as many as 80 pirates- even if you catch them before they board the ship do you really want to put yourself in the line of fire of even 50+ pirates and start trying to pick them off under fire of 80 or so AK-47s and the odd RPG being returned at you?
The mentality of many people online of "just shoot them" as a solution to many problems is rather ignorant to the difficulties of the reality of the situation. If it was as simple as many online commenters seem to believe, then they would have simply done it by now. The legal barriers are the least of problems, because if it was a real solution to just arm crews then as this is a problem that basically has unilateral agreement from the world's major nations including the 5 permanent security council members then an exception for ships passing through Somali waters would be no big deal. Perhaps the closest solution to arming the crew that would not be as likely to involve the death of half the crew of each ship that encounters pirates would be for security companies like Blackwater (now Xe services) to keep a supply of trained security professionals both north and south of the troubled areas such that ships could pick up a squad of security personnel at one end and drop them off when safely at the other, but of course, whether shipping companies would be willing to foot the bill is a different story and it's questionable how much use even trained personnel would be when outnumbered, and even they're still not immune to hails of gun and RPG fire in return either.
"With DRM you're trying to prevent the user from viewing the content under certain conditions but allowing them to view it under others"
This is really what you're doing in the anti-cheating scenario, just on a more abstract level. You still have to pass raw data to the graphics API or graphics card eventually as raw data. You cannot both render it with standard hardware and keep it in an encrypted format. Realistically though it's in a plain format before this because performing client side logic on encrypted data would be a nightmare, if even possible at all.
"Anti-cheating can allow the user to look at the content all they want, you're preventing the user from altering it or faking certain inputs and outputs, which is entirely possible with proper cryptography"
What sort of cryptography is "proper" cryptography in this case? The client has to know the keys and the algorithm to encrypt and decrypt and so the cheat program must surely always know it too.
"lots of client-side verification and a little server-side verification"
What's stopping client-side verification being faked? If it does a CRC check then why can't the cheat program just branch the code here to use the hacked content and forward the expected CRC? Even more complex checks involving keys sent from the server still end up in the hands of the cheat program.
"Some of Windows' copy protection mechanisms work this way and are 100% effective"
Really? How do people keep managing to crack it then?
"copies installed with generated keys can't be updated via Windows Update."
Why can't the user just keep an unhacked copy of the game and update that - which would work because it would be legitimate, and then re-apply the cheat program which must also be updated to point to the relevant changes in memory locations and/or logic too?
Have a look at my post here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1462144&cid=30283336
It is possible to have human admins on the distributed system too.
Oddly though, whilst I play on the Xbox and never saw the issue with the P2P system because that's how it works on the XBox and because you don't really tend to get cheating as such there anyway (at least not aimbots etc.) I have to say MW2s netcode is fucking awful. It's the first XBox game where I've seen multiple bad hosts picked such that lag is an issue. It was never a problem in MW1 so effectively not only have they moved PC gamers to the P2P networking platform but they've broken the networking platform in the process. I don't know why they didn't just stick with MW1's network code which worked perfectly well in this way.
I actually thought PC players were whining about nothing, because on the 360 their net code always worked fine in this way, what I didn't count on was them fucking it up in the process of moving PC gamers onto it so it's now effectively just broken for everyone.
"Really, any anti-cheat will eventually be defeatable. The bigger issue is that since IW is running all the servers you have to depend on them to remove any cheaters, rather than being able to play on a server with a good team of admins keeping them away. It's possible IW will do an even better job of this, but I think it's that choice that people want."
This is key, really on the PC the best option would've been to include an XBox live style setup so you can select a player as a player you wish to avoid in future. What happens then is when you start matchmaking it wont matchmake you with these players. If people cheat they will soon find a lack of people playing with them. If the feedback is sent to IW, then it'd be a good indicator for who to check for cheating to give account bans too as well, if someone has 500 players blacklisting them then it'd suggest there's probably something there to check out.
No, it's not that simple.
Even if you don't give up control of the server you cannot protect against many different cheats. Player locations have to be sent even when they're behind a wall or whatever because otherwise they pop awkwardly into view. Models/art assets can still be hacked on the client to be more visible and similar regardless- even if they're not stored locally and sent every game session they can be modified in memory by a determined cheater.
Aimbots are always going to be possible because you can still alter the executable in asssembly. A guy known as nopcode did this as far back as Quake III writing an aimbot directly into the Quake III executable.
No amount of CRC checks, encryption can protect because the cheater always knows what CRCs are expected, and the encryption keys are always used by the client to decrypt content or commands so that they can be used by the client to render and so forth in the first place.
At best on a logical level you can eliminate cheating by severely limiting your game's design, but that's really not a solution- especially when closed platforms like consoles don't have to. There is no solution to the problem that on an open platform, whatever the client has access to, the cheater has access to and can modify it or use that data outside it's intended purposes to give themselves an advantage too.
I think my thoughts actually go back to this:
http://heroquestbaker.altervista.org/indexenglish.htm
I guess they just collaborated many years ago.
It's because, on the PC, you can't, without shifting everything server side.
Even then by the time we have the resources to shift everything server side we'll probably also have the resources client side on the PC to do in game pattern matching and have cheats that just match images sent to the client and respond to automatically aim at them or similar.
The idea of cheat free gaming on the PC is a fantasy, it can't happen, it's not a suitable platform for such endeavours.
Similarly though, I'd never want to see rid of the PC because it's openness is important in other areas. The issue here is that the PC's biggest advantage is also it's biggest disadvantage for things like online gaming.
I'm sure developers understand this, that if you want to deal with cheating then cat and mouse is the only way, at best you can just play whack-a-mole with the worst hacks. Perhaps the biggest improvement for the likes of Blizzard is that people need accounts to play their game, and if they do play whack-a-mole they can at least ban accounts and convince players not to cheat based on them possibly losing hundreds of hours of investment in the game.
That's because the PC is an open platform and just as DRM can't work, anti-cheating software like this can't work. The client is untrusted, anything on it can be worked around.
Aren't Games Workshop owned by Hasbro anyway? Hasbro being one of the most sue-happy companies on the planet for this sort of thing?