So the issue here comes down to the fact that Apple do not think games should be art. They do not want games to say anything, they want games to be time wasting fluff that will never cause their consumers to have to worry.
They didn't take this game down because they are afraid it makes them look bad, they took it down because they are afraid it makes the world look bad.
Who would buy music, video, books and software that would cease to work on the whim of a content provider company?
Oh... :P
Now I guess what you are saying is that screens are big ticket items but is that really true? You can easily get a kinda ok PC monitor for £50-150... that's 3 or 4 games and frankly I've brought way more than that in the last year that does have some form of DRM in it (steam being the main example).
As prices fall and company lobbies attempt to mandate that all monitors must come with these lock downs (which is less contentious than having it on hard drives which is something they have talked about) is it really going to be seen as that much of a big deal by most people? Sadly I think not.
This is taking place on a local version of the map, the one you load up when you view some one else's city. A bug where you could place parks while viewing some one else's city has been in since launch.
This changes are not and currently cannot be synced with the server, the modder was only talking about being worried that some one would be able to spoof other player ID's down the road and cause trouble. We don't know if that can be done and we don't know if there are server side checks that would prevent it if you could.
In short I'm on the hate EA train as much as every one else but there is plenty of real issues that we don't have to start making crap up.
What's happened here is some messing with the debug mode has allowed some one to mess around with the local data uses to allow viewing of other peoples cities in a region. This has nothing to do with the DRM and currently, and is frankly unlikely too, lead to being able to damage other peoples saves.
I'd expect Tech Dirt to do better than this, even reading the youtube description rather than the sensationalist blog should make all the above perfectly clear.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I have NOT enabled syncing of data for this. All cities you see in this video remain UNHARMED - nothing got synced to server. I would not condone any action which could actually harm another player's city without permission!
So, this was done by editing the SimCity packages, tweaking some code, and getting the game to think that, when I visited a random person's city in a random region, I WASN'T in observer mode, and force enabling of edit mode so that I had full access to the city as if it was my own. There is still no city syncing at this most basic level, so you can wreak havoc on a friend's city, quit out, log back in, and it's back the way it was - great fun! I am worried about people that go deeper into the code and start spoofing the owner ID's of cities and start doing this maliciously though. Hopefully there are server side safeties on this... hmmm.
Re: Statistcally, you're bound to find someone....
The thing is liking the multiplayer is not mutually exclusive with not like it always being on or not wanting a single player. She's assigning people liking that aspect to people liking it always having to be on. Which is remarkable really as I'd be utterly stunned if a single person, when asked, would say no to having an offline mode even if they felt they'd never want to use it.
It honestly sounds like an episode of Suits. I thought that show was hugely over the top made up entertaining crap but apparently it may as well have been based on real life events if this is anything to go by.
The thing about this is that simulating regions and keeping saves online for multiplayer makes sense but by requiring every one to do so they;
1) Get DRM.
2) Can squeeze performance out of lower end machines lowering the min specs.
3) Don't have to spend time and money having a local version of region simulation in the client.
The whole thing stinks of saving money and gaining advantage at expense of the consumer. Any one who thinks EA is actually running a serious amount of simulation on their servers just needs to think about the costs involved in that. The game is not subscription and they clearly couldn't be assed buying enough server space to actually cope with a launch, hoping instead to ride out the wave based on pre sales.
Region simulation is handled server side which means nothing in the local client to replace it (unless they where utterly moronic). So it won't be fully featured until some one simulates the servers and just like we've seen with Diablo 3 it's unlikely that simulation will be full featured or the same when it does come.
The problem with this style of DRM is that it's largely effective. An important cog is missing from the local machine and you need to replace it before it can run in a local manner. It takes a lot of time and effort to get around it.
Now don't get me wrong, people will get around it, there are pirated WoW servers for example but all EA sees is a very substantial gap between the point the game is on sale and when that is a viable piracy tool.
Which means if the game sales well they will chalk it up as a success even if there would be no way of telling what those salse would had been other wise. Still at lest if the game fails they can't blame piracy... but it's Sim City, it won't fail or they simply won't call it a failure as a result of them wanting to confirm their bias.
If you check out /r/simcity you'll find a lot of reports where players have lost hours of play because EA servers failed to "integrate" their last save. Your options when that happens? Roll back or abandon the city. One player lost nearly 2 million he'd been sending to another city he was that was hit by this problem. There's a chance this will happen when ever you move about from city to city and in a game where city sizes are so limited this is a common feature.
Now to be fair I think it should also be pointed out that EA and Maxis have stated that you have to play on their severs because the region simulation is handled on their end. I'm not sure if they've ever outright said it would be imposable for a machine to run regions locally but they've made a big deal about wanting the game to run on a wide range of specs.
To me it seems like a co-op out along the lines of Blizzards Diablo 3 reasoning. It's no doubt true that region play is handled on the servers, and that makes sense for muiltplayer but I find it incredibly hard to believe such simulation is to grate for mid range gaming PC these days let alone high end. Pushing that narrative is just an easy out.
Having the saves on servers, having the regions simulated for online play, that all makes sense for the muiltplayer. But if you want to play the game solo not only do you still have to put up with all those problems, you lose the ability to control your saves and mod the game. While this game clearly has a multiplayer focus the only reason I can really think that they don't allow the option for single player is purely because doing things this way puts them in control of everything.
The cynic in me also thinks that it's much harder to sell the kind of DLC they are already peddling to people who can mod the game and that it's much easier to sell to people who have pressure to "keep up with the Jones'" so to speak. There are DLC building that give active benefits (like a super hero who will help fight crime) and when the game is pushing scores and leader boards as such a big deal can they be sure they won't end up realising DLC that ends up being a must have?
All in all I actually would like to play the game, it's not the Sim City I was hoping for but for the game it is it's interesting buuuuut the server play is something I think is bullshit and there in a large part due to it use as DRM. A lot of what the game does is the kind of anti consumer bull crap I can't get behind. There are other people more deserving of my time and my money.
First, a clarification. I am not an abolitionist. I am a radical reformer, and the copyright I envision doesn't resemble anything suggested so far on this thread.
Can I ask what the copyright you envision is? I'm interested because you've made one of the most incredibly clear argument for abolition as a bench mark for reform I've read. As such I'd like to hear some more details of the reforms you'd like to see in answer to the bench mark you've set.
And they now have a "piracy tax" on the internet in all but name in France. No one would accept an flat out tax on the net in the way the industry so desperately wants but they can now skim money from any one they feel like with out any kind of due process. All while trying to look like the good guys for "scaling back" from disconnecting people from net.
All they care about is making money, they do no care where this money comes from. They thought that disconnecting people would stop the drop in sales, it didn't, so they've found a way to make up the short fall while not actually having to change any just but bleeding people who may never have given them money or do anything wrong in the first place. It's honestly obscene.
It's an interesting story about an important company and important people in the new business model space for music. My current band has just recorded our first EP and we are currently talking about what services we want to use to distribute it, tunecore was a name that came up and it's a service which a few bands I know use.
I was already weary of working with tunecore even for my tiny project and I know for a fact that if I explain to those other bands what has been going on with the company that they will look to switch services.
There is a great article somewhere about these parts about this use of langue. Copyright is an exception to your natural rights but the industry insists on calling fair use "exceptions to copyright". This is called framing and it's an attempt to have the wording used in the debate about fair use promote a view of copyright that benefits them.
If they can have legislators talking about fair use as exceptions to copyright the impaction is that copyright is a much broader and more "natural" right that in actually the case and that then effects the decisions being made.
It's the same reason they call copyright theft and try and make an equivalence between some one plagiarizing your work and some one sharing it. By having the debate in those terms they automatically win.
Because it's both the truth and a lie. While copyright was thought up as a replacement to the Stationers' Company monopoly the debate around such a measure came up with this idea. You provide limited term rights to profit from work to the creator of that work (which can be transferred of course) and that would give creators a reason to create and keep on creating.
This was later codified in the US Constitution (which given the prevalence of American influence in these laws is one of the key ideas) in giving the power to congress to create copyright but only for a limited time to "promote progress".
So all in all copyright is intend to encourage creativity. It's just that everything about copyright that was intended to do that has been undermined by extensions and the reasons for the laws, to promote public good, forgotten.
Yet the point remains that "copyright encourages creativity" is not exactly a lie... you just have to be care about what form of copyright we are talking about.
The best lies have a seed of truth and the entertainment industry has become adept at twisting the truth of the debate to fit their framing. It's the same game they play when calling infringement theft and talks about fair use as exceptions to copyright rather than the other way around.
Google has terms of service, these apps do not break those terms and as such I'd have a problem with google removing them due to pressure from a 3rd party no matter how much I may agree with why that 3rd party find those apps offensive.
The makes of the app has no right to sell those apps on play but they do have a right to express the ideas in those apps. My distaste for those ideas does not over come my feeling that speech is best countered with more speech. I simply have a fear of where censorship of any of that speech leads.
Sadly I'm based in the UK where people can be arrested for making an offensive joke on twitter. When you can be arrested for being offensive you are handing out huge powers to the people who decided what is offensive.
If that's the case just take a second to think about what you are saying. You are saying that American rates of gun violence are uniquely higher than the rest of the western world. If that's the case then you can't use the effect of gun control in other countries are a reliable indicator of the effect it may have on the USA.
Gun control is a cover bet, a lot of US states already have relatively strict laws and it was only in 2008 with a Supreme Court ruling that you actually got individual ownership of guns as a right. The Second Amendment for most of it's life has only ever provided the right for arms for an organised militia.
"Throughout, the party and I have been open to dialogue. Contrary to reports I offered to meet Geoff Taylor for discussion, but this has been rebuffed..."
On the post: Apple Disapproves Sweatshop Game That, Perhaps, Hits A Little Too Close To Home
Games and art
They didn't take this game down because they are afraid it makes them look bad, they took it down because they are afraid it makes the world look bad.
On the post: Apple's Patent For Creating A Leak-Proof Data Pipe, And Why It's Doomed To Fail
Re: Re: Re:
Oh... :P
Now I guess what you are saying is that screens are big ticket items but is that really true? You can easily get a kinda ok PC monitor for £50-150... that's 3 or 4 games and frankly I've brought way more than that in the last year that does have some form of DRM in it (steam being the main example).
As prices fall and company lobbies attempt to mandate that all monitors must come with these lock downs (which is less contentious than having it on hard drives which is something they have talked about) is it really going to be seen as that much of a big deal by most people? Sadly I think not.
On the post: SimCity Always-Online DRM Lets Hackers Play Godzilla With Anyone's Cities
This is somewhat misleading
This changes are not and currently cannot be synced with the server, the modder was only talking about being worried that some one would be able to spoof other player ID's down the road and cause trouble. We don't know if that can be done and we don't know if there are server side checks that would prevent it if you could.
In short I'm on the hate EA train as much as every one else but there is plenty of real issues that we don't have to start making crap up.
What's happened here is some messing with the debug mode has allowed some one to mess around with the local data uses to allow viewing of other peoples cities in a region. This has nothing to do with the DRM and currently, and is frankly unlikely too, lead to being able to damage other peoples saves.
I'd expect Tech Dirt to do better than this, even reading the youtube description rather than the sensationalist blog should make all the above perfectly clear.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I have NOT enabled syncing of data for this. All cities you see in this video remain UNHARMED - nothing got synced to server. I would not condone any action which could actually harm another player's city without permission!
So, this was done by editing the SimCity packages, tweaking some code, and getting the game to think that, when I visited a random person's city in a random region, I WASN'T in observer mode, and force enabling of edit mode so that I had full access to the city as if it was my own. There is still no city syncing at this most basic level, so you can wreak havoc on a friend's city, quit out, log back in, and it's back the way it was - great fun! I am worried about people that go deeper into the code and start spoofing the owner ID's of cities and start doing this maliciously though. Hopefully there are server side safeties on this... hmmm.
On the post: Maxis GM: Our Vision Is More Important Than Our Customers & Lots Of People Love Our Crappy DRM
Re: Statistcally, you're bound to find someone....
On the post: Deep Dive Analysis: Brett Gibbs Gets His Day In Court -- But Prenda Law Is The Star
Re: Re: Surprise Witness
On the post: SimCity: The Backlash
Re:
1) Get DRM.
2) Can squeeze performance out of lower end machines lowering the min specs.
3) Don't have to spend time and money having a local version of region simulation in the client.
The whole thing stinks of saving money and gaining advantage at expense of the consumer. Any one who thinks EA is actually running a serious amount of simulation on their servers just needs to think about the costs involved in that. The game is not subscription and they clearly couldn't be assed buying enough server space to actually cope with a launch, hoping instead to ride out the wave based on pre sales.
On the post: Launch Day Punishment: SimCity's Online-Only DRM Locking Purchasers Out Of Servers, Purchases
Re: Re: Piracy delayed?
The problem with this style of DRM is that it's largely effective. An important cog is missing from the local machine and you need to replace it before it can run in a local manner. It takes a lot of time and effort to get around it.
Now don't get me wrong, people will get around it, there are pirated WoW servers for example but all EA sees is a very substantial gap between the point the game is on sale and when that is a viable piracy tool.
Which means if the game sales well they will chalk it up as a success even if there would be no way of telling what those salse would had been other wise. Still at lest if the game fails they can't blame piracy... but it's Sim City, it won't fail or they simply won't call it a failure as a result of them wanting to confirm their bias.
On the post: Launch Day Punishment: SimCity's Online-Only DRM Locking Purchasers Out Of Servers, Purchases
This is not all
Now to be fair I think it should also be pointed out that EA and Maxis have stated that you have to play on their severs because the region simulation is handled on their end. I'm not sure if they've ever outright said it would be imposable for a machine to run regions locally but they've made a big deal about wanting the game to run on a wide range of specs.
To me it seems like a co-op out along the lines of Blizzards Diablo 3 reasoning. It's no doubt true that region play is handled on the servers, and that makes sense for muiltplayer but I find it incredibly hard to believe such simulation is to grate for mid range gaming PC these days let alone high end. Pushing that narrative is just an easy out.
Having the saves on servers, having the regions simulated for online play, that all makes sense for the muiltplayer. But if you want to play the game solo not only do you still have to put up with all those problems, you lose the ability to control your saves and mod the game. While this game clearly has a multiplayer focus the only reason I can really think that they don't allow the option for single player is purely because doing things this way puts them in control of everything.
The cynic in me also thinks that it's much harder to sell the kind of DLC they are already peddling to people who can mod the game and that it's much easier to sell to people who have pressure to "keep up with the Jones'" so to speak. There are DLC building that give active benefits (like a super hero who will help fight crime) and when the game is pushing scores and leader boards as such a big deal can they be sure they won't end up realising DLC that ends up being a must have?
All in all I actually would like to play the game, it's not the Sim City I was hoping for but for the game it is it's interesting buuuuut the server play is something I think is bullshit and there in a large part due to it use as DRM. A lot of what the game does is the kind of anti consumer bull crap I can't get behind. There are other people more deserving of my time and my money.
On the post: Chris Dodd Sounding Like A Broken Recording Industry
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Radical Mike
Can I ask what the copyright you envision is? I'm interested because you've made one of the most incredibly clear argument for abolition as a bench mark for reform I've read. As such I'd like to hear some more details of the reforms you'd like to see in answer to the bench mark you've set.
On the post: Jealous Of Copyright Trolls, Entertainment Industry Looks To Move Three Strikes From 'Disconnect' To 'Fines'
They have a "piracy tax" on blank media
All they care about is making money, they do no care where this money comes from. They thought that disconnecting people would stop the drop in sales, it didn't, so they've found a way to make up the short fall while not actually having to change any just but bleeding people who may never have given them money or do anything wrong in the first place. It's honestly obscene.
On the post: TuneCore Fires Last Remaining Founder, Gets Into Ridiculously Petty Fight With Jeff Price
Re:
I was already weary of working with tunecore even for my tiny project and I know for a fact that if I explain to those other bands what has been going on with the company that they will look to switch services.
On the post: Now That Amazon Is Offering Auto-Rip Of CDs You Bought, Will It Do The Same For Books?
Re: Re: It takes work to create an e-book
On the post: Australia Says 'Let's Update Copyright For The Digital Economy;' Legacy Industries Say 'Let's Pretend It's Still 1968'
Re: Re:
If they can have legislators talking about fair use as exceptions to copyright the impaction is that copyright is a much broader and more "natural" right that in actually the case and that then effects the decisions being made.
It's the same reason they call copyright theft and try and make an equivalence between some one plagiarizing your work and some one sharing it. By having the debate in those terms they automatically win.
On the post: Australia Says 'Let's Update Copyright For The Digital Economy;' Legacy Industries Say 'Let's Pretend It's Still 1968'
Re:
This was later codified in the US Constitution (which given the prevalence of American influence in these laws is one of the key ideas) in giving the power to congress to create copyright but only for a limited time to "promote progress".
So all in all copyright is intend to encourage creativity. It's just that everything about copyright that was intended to do that has been undermined by extensions and the reasons for the laws, to promote public good, forgotten.
Yet the point remains that "copyright encourages creativity" is not exactly a lie... you just have to be care about what form of copyright we are talking about.
The best lies have a seed of truth and the entertainment industry has become adept at twisting the truth of the debate to fit their framing. It's the same game they play when calling infringement theft and talks about fair use as exceptions to copyright rather than the other way around.
On the post: Racist Apps In Google's Play Store Test Just How Free You Want Speech To Be
Re: Re: Defend to the Death App
The makes of the app has no right to sell those apps on play but they do have a right to express the ideas in those apps. My distaste for those ideas does not over come my feeling that speech is best countered with more speech. I simply have a fear of where censorship of any of that speech leads.
Sadly I'm based in the UK where people can be arrested for making an offensive joke on twitter. When you can be arrested for being offensive you are handing out huge powers to the people who decided what is offensive.
On the post: Confusing Value And Price, Choir Demands £3000 Per Download
Well then...
also
A "feminist alternative choir" who espouse "The Power of Flirting" is a thing that exists apparently.
On the post: Quick List Of Successes In Which Copyright Didn't Matter
Re: Just a few exceptions
On the post: Yet More Evidence Shows No Link Between Video Games And Actual Violence
Re:
Idiot confirmed, please ignore.
On the post: NRA's Plan: If We Blame Video Games & Movies For Sandy Hook Massacre, Perhaps People Will Stop Blaming Guns
Re: Re: Re: Re: LOL WOT ?
Gun control is a cover bet, a lot of US states already have relatively strict laws and it was only in 2008 with a Supreme Court ruling that you actually got individual ownership of guns as a right. The Second Amendment for most of it's life has only ever provided the right for arms for an organised militia.
There is simply no reason not to try.
On the post: BPI Threatens To Sue UK Pirate Party Leaders Personally Due To Internet Proxy
Re:
"Throughout, the party and I have been open to dialogue. Contrary to reports I offered to meet Geoff Taylor for discussion, but this has been rebuffed..."
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