it's called glider in WOW and it was called decal in asheron's call. i forget what it was called in ultima online, and i'll bet you money there are macro/bot tools for every other MMO in the world. MMO's are systems like any other and will be exploited just like every other system.
whether you use macros to farm, to grind, to craft, the results are the same once the bots come in to play (buff bots, trade bots, craft bots, farm bots, you name it) your game has jumped the shark and it's time to move on. the real game play is over, the decent players will move on, and only the griefers and ebayers will remain. everything will cost billions at the market place and there is nothing that can be done about it.
so what if they sue that one guy. his work will end up in the hands of others and the cycle will repeat, under new names and taking advantage of new exploits.
as a matter of fact, it's better that this gets done by bots, otherwise it will get done by children in third world sweatshops in places like china and mexico. that business is alive and well, just check ebay. sure, it's a better alternative than child prostitution, but it's still slavery.
wheny ou get busted for something that the government can't prevent or even understand, you should be sentenced to work for the government at minimum wage. the fbi did it with an identity thief and i think it had some real effect.
if a government pays to publish lies it's called propaganda.
if a corporation pays to publish lies it's called advertising.
so what? who cares? they know they lie. we know they lie. they know that we know they lie.
there are shills in every popular forum on the internet. some are paid and some volunteer. some shills work for american corporations and some shills work for the american government. some of them work for foreign corporations or governments. shilling is just part of the marketing landscape, like tv commercials and appearing on a talkshow.
the tactic that i'm waiting for is paying people to go to trendy bars and clubs to talk about your product, service, or political cause.
most of the so-called evidence for this claim involves simply pointing a finger at the music and movie industry.
the ebook as a salable commodity is much like the legal music download as a salable commodity: technically feasible but too encumbered to be viable in the market. i have read a few books on a screen, namely just about everything cory doctorow has written. the convenience is nice, reading them in the browser on my phone, but i am not sure i would want to do all of my reading that way.
the ebook reader is not and will probably never be comparable to the ipod. the ipod and other mp3 players took off because people already had vast collections of music in the mp3 format, and getting your remaining cd collection into mp3 was not incredibly labor intensive.
getting your book collection into an ebook format is labor intensive (unless you have a machine to flip pages for you and scan for you), and not many of us have large collections of existing ebooks that we are waiting for a portable device to use.
so, unlike CD's and movies where the purely digital form is a superior good, it is my opinion that the ebook is an inferior good when compared to the analog book.
computers don't have souls, but could a human program a computer to fake one? the turing test isn't a measure of how well developed an AI is, but how good it is at fooling humans. that's why it's called "artificial" intelligence, not "actual" intelligence, it's based on the ability to fool you.
the relationships that humans have with computers are based on the explicit understanding that the computer, or rather its software (an analog for the machine's soul), is not "real". its intelligence is considered to be an imitation of the human equivalent and certainly not the real thing. we use terms like "simulated" or "virtual" when talking about computers to underscore that fact.
teaching a computer to fake not only intelligence, but a soul would be a great accomplishment, but that kind of work would also be quite dangerous. it would point out that we humans are not so unique and special after all. if you can design software that is indistinguishable from a human in some capacity, i.e. the turing test, what would that do to the already diminishing value of human life?
the problem with viral marketing is that most of the promoting is done by people, not the media. people are unpredictable.
it's really quite risky when you think about it: you have to create something that will be entertaining, which probably means a fair amount of expense. then you have to not explicitly promote it, and trust that people on the internet will pick up on it and run with it. that seems pretty counter intuitive for a marketing campaign.
the two latest books by william gibson (pattern recognition and spook country) feature an uber sleazy marketing firm that specializes in viral marketing. the firm pretty much spends tons of its clients money on frivolous research projects into strange internet phenomena.
there are a number of TV shows that are surprisingly addictive. i think it's called the idiot box because it hypnotizes people into being stupid.
vh1 has all of these time period shows that i am completely unable to turn away from.
the same is true for a lot of stuff on discovery or the history channel. it sounds stupid, but shows about how stuff is made, or the history of things we use everyday is fascinating for some strange reason.
the strangest phenomenon of all has to be animal planet. i swear they use subliminal messages to hypnotize you into watching their shows. almost every show on animal planet is a copy of a reality show on another network, only with animals instead of people. "animal cops" is cops, only with animals... the show about groomers is a fashion design show, only with dogs... why is that entertaining? i don't like reality shows with people, but for some reason reality tv with dogs is watchable. how is it that i can't stand survivor, but i can inadvertently kill most of an evening watching rodents fight over a hole in the dirt?
downloading music is stealing, so not paying for something is the same as stealing it.
downloading music causes the industry to lose money, therefore not making money is the same as losing money.
er go, not paying for the rights to music is the same as stealing them, so gitmo is stealing money from artists, which i am sure we will all agree is terrorism plain and simple.
the point of all of this is that there is no more right of first sale. you can play the trademark card to intimidate anyone smaller than you into closing up shop.
if you sell something without paying off enough people then your ass is as good as sued. you either need to pay the manufacturer for the right to sell, pay a team of lawyers to protect you from the manufacturer, pay a judge to rule in your favor when the manufacturer sues you, or pay the manufacturer to settle damages.
sure, some people jumped to conclusions, but the tragedy isn't that the poor folks at dell and the RIAA were falsely accused by a cynical and disillusioned populace. the tragedy is that companies like dell and organizations like the RIAA have disillusioned the populace and made them so cynical.
the idea that the RIAA would collude with a PC manufacturer to disable a working feature on new PC's doesn't surprise me in the slightest. the idea that dell would sell its customers out to the RIAA for a few bucks is only slightly more surprising.
Techdirt has devolved into a circle jerk of people who seem to think the the Internet in unlike the real world -- a great place often ruined by the few awful people that chose to exploit it.
no, the internet is exactly like the real world: packed to the brim with people that cry about being either too lazy or too stupid to protect themselves from the criminals that prey on them. the internet is a dark and sinister place full of mean spirited people, just like the real world... if you don't keep your wits about you someone will take advantage of you.
when governments and corporations try to stop something, they create these markets for circumvention services so that not only do the activities continue unabated, but help providers of circumvention services to profit.
the more risk involved in the activity, the greater the opportunity for profit. there probably isn't much money to be made in facilitating file sharing, but i am sure there is plenty of money to be made facilitating crime:
prohibition helped put organized crime on the map in the US by creating a market for bootleggers and speakeasies. internet prohibition will also help to put the internet equivalent of organized crime on the map as well. more services will pop up to facilitate activities that careless governments summarily declare illegal.
you can see it in services like windizupdate, peer guardian, the pirate bay, giganews, leafdrink, tor, you name it. as governments and corporations do more to restrict the internet, the community will respond with more circumvention. it's hard to say if many are profiting, but it's easy to see that they are at least being subsidized by ad revenue or donations, or are being promoted for free by providing these circumvention services.
What about the "ex post facto" argument? Congress can't make laws that put people in jeopardy after the fact, why can't the same be said for "retroactive immunity"?
you can only claim ex post facto if it was legal at the time the act was committed.
these lawsuits by the EFF and the ACLU are because it WAS illegal at the time the act was committed. before this bill, you couldn't wiretap without a warrant, that was illegal.
if it was legal at the time, why do they now need retroactive immunity?
I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT COMPUTERS AND I FEEL STUPID AND INFERIOR WHEN SOMEONE REMINDS ME OF THAT. I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE INTERNET OR SECURITY AND I DON'T THINK I SHOULD HAVE TO LEARN BECAUSE I ONLY READ AT THE FOURTH GRADE LEVEL.
I DON'T HAVE TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT TELEVISION TO WATCH AMERICAN IDOL. MY TV PROTECTS ME AGAINST BOOBS AND LIBERALS AND VIDEO GAMES AND THE INTERNET SHOULD TOO.
YOU HAVE TO CHANGE EVERYTHING AND PASS A BUNCH OF LAWS SO I DON'T HAVE TO ADMIT TO BEING STUPID AND NAIVE. I WANT TO REAP THE BENEFITS OF THE INTERNET WITHOUT LEARNING ANYTHING OR TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR MYSELF OR MY ACTIONS.
AND DON'T SAY THIS IS UNREASONABLE OR I WILL CRY. INTERNET PEOPLE ARE MEAN.
basically you use a key to hide a message in a digital file like a song or picture. you encrypt your message using public and private keys. then you stash the message in a digital file or whatever using another key. you then upload the "message" to the net somewhere, or email it, or whatever. the "enemy" can intercept all of your messages and unless they have they are aware that you are using stego AND have your keys, they won't even see your encrypted message, let alone decrypt it.
domestic surveillance won't stop the actual terrorists because they will use steganography and crypto to guarantee that no one intercepts their communications. all it does is hassle innocent people.
i guess you can watch for crypto and investigate the people that use it, but what do you do if regular people start using it? ban crypto?
banning crypto will make security for online commerce and remote access impossible (no ssl, no ssh, no vpn, no wep/wpa, no blackberry).
what will companies do about HIPPA regulations that state that patient information needs to be encrypted?
you guys all sound like the old timers that freaked out when windows and dos stopped being separate entities.
the gui is not the OS, but today the difference between them is largely academic. you need an OS to run the UI, and for most people without a computer science degree the UI is what they interact with, so to 90% of the computer using population, the UI is the OS.
lets take this to the next logical step. the browser is not the UI, which is not the OS, but since the browser is what most people interact with, the browser will soon be synonymous with the OS.
this situation isn't helped by certain browsers being used primarily on and/or popularized by a specific OS: konqueror on linux, safari on mac os, internet explorer on windows. sure, you can use IE and safari on both windows and mac OS and mozilla pretty much anything, but they are most popular on their native platforms.
so, while anyone with an ounce of technical ability can tell you that the browser is not the OS, as the web matures into the target platform for most applications, the difference between them will also become largely academic.
i love anti-piracy measures, they are expensive, intrusive, and they don't work, just like DRM and anything else that tries to limit what you can do in a PC. the more software companies waste resources on these counter[productive]measures the more people will seek out and support open source alternatives.
here is a doomsday scenario that happened to me just yesterday:
i have a whitebox PC from a small vendor. said vendor preloads an oem version of windows xp pro. the machine is installed in an office at the university i work for and some deviant who molests farm animals peeled the certification sticker off the back of the machine.
the machine bluescreens one time too many and i reload windows, but i don't have the key for it since i don't realize the magic sticker is gone until AFTER i've formatted the hard drive. this are two very easy mistakes to make. so i use the key i have on file.
turns out i have the wrong key on file. how do i know this? i am able to install windows, but the activation screen comes up tigh after the first i can't activate online since the activation comes up at the first login (no network card set up yet), i can't register by phone because the registration app doesn't give me the magically generated number i have to give the customer service rep. i try to get MS to escalate the issue, but it's easier and faster to just use the university's volume licensed version instead. if i were a small company with no purchasing power for VLK's, i'd be up the proverbial creek.
this would be sad, if i didn't know of 5 different versions of XP floating around BT with no such key problems and all the device drivers and secrity update slipstreamed in. some of them even have office and a ton of software (like office) folded in as well.
good job guys, not only did you stiff arm a paid customer, but you failed to stop any actual piracy. good thing there is no competition in your space, or you would get eaten alive.
anti-piracy software is the chief cause of software piracy.
so go ahead and change the law. put in all the anti-circumvention nonsense you want, spy on us and log our keystrokes. make sure you report our activities to the government too. the sooner you have pushed yourselves out of the market, the better off we will all be.
On the post: Blizzard Bot Ruling Sets A Dangerous Precedent On Copyright
Re: James
whether you use macros to farm, to grind, to craft, the results are the same once the bots come in to play (buff bots, trade bots, craft bots, farm bots, you name it) your game has jumped the shark and it's time to move on. the real game play is over, the decent players will move on, and only the griefers and ebayers will remain. everything will cost billions at the market place and there is nothing that can be done about it.
so what if they sue that one guy. his work will end up in the hands of others and the cycle will repeat, under new names and taking advantage of new exploits.
as a matter of fact, it's better that this gets done by bots, otherwise it will get done by children in third world sweatshops in places like china and mexico. that business is alive and well, just check ebay. sure, it's a better alternative than child prostitution, but it's still slavery.
On the post: How Would You Sentence A Convicted Spammer?
make them work for the goodguys
On the post: Newest Industry To Be Crowdsourced? Internet Censorship
lies are lies no matter who tells them...
if a government pays to publish lies it's called propaganda.
if a corporation pays to publish lies it's called advertising.
so what? who cares? they know they lie. we know they lie. they know that we know they lie.
there are shills in every popular forum on the internet. some are paid and some volunteer. some shills work for american corporations and some shills work for the american government. some of them work for foreign corporations or governments. shilling is just part of the marketing landscape, like tv commercials and appearing on a talkshow.
the tactic that i'm waiting for is paying people to go to trendy bars and clubs to talk about your product, service, or political cause.
On the post: Yet Again, Giving Away Free eBook Increased Sales Of Author's Books
Re: ebook revolution...or not
the ebook as a salable commodity is much like the legal music download as a salable commodity: technically feasible but too encumbered to be viable in the market. i have read a few books on a screen, namely just about everything cory doctorow has written. the convenience is nice, reading them in the browser on my phone, but i am not sure i would want to do all of my reading that way.
the ebook reader is not and will probably never be comparable to the ipod. the ipod and other mp3 players took off because people already had vast collections of music in the mp3 format, and getting your remaining cd collection into mp3 was not incredibly labor intensive.
getting your book collection into an ebook format is labor intensive (unless you have a machine to flip pages for you and scan for you), and not many of us have large collections of existing ebooks that we are waiting for a portable device to use.
so, unlike CD's and movies where the purely digital form is a superior good, it is my opinion that the ebook is an inferior good when compared to the analog book.
On the post: Musicians Play Music Better Than Computers
if you hum a few bars i can fake it
the relationships that humans have with computers are based on the explicit understanding that the computer, or rather its software (an analog for the machine's soul), is not "real". its intelligence is considered to be an imitation of the human equivalent and certainly not the real thing. we use terms like "simulated" or "virtual" when talking about computers to underscore that fact.
teaching a computer to fake not only intelligence, but a soul would be a great accomplishment, but that kind of work would also be quite dangerous. it would point out that we humans are not so unique and special after all. if you can design software that is indistinguishable from a human in some capacity, i.e. the turing test, what would that do to the already diminishing value of human life?
On the post: Turns Out Just Saying A Marketing Campaign Is Viral Doesn't Make It So
viral is the peoples' decision, not yours
it's really quite risky when you think about it: you have to create something that will be entertaining, which probably means a fair amount of expense. then you have to not explicitly promote it, and trust that people on the internet will pick up on it and run with it. that seems pretty counter intuitive for a marketing campaign.
the two latest books by william gibson (pattern recognition and spook country) feature an uber sleazy marketing firm that specializes in viral marketing. the firm pretty much spends tons of its clients money on frivolous research projects into strange internet phenomena.
On the post: Turns Out Americans Are Watching More TV Than Ever
not surprising
vh1 has all of these time period shows that i am completely unable to turn away from.
the same is true for a lot of stuff on discovery or the history channel. it sounds stupid, but shows about how stuff is made, or the history of things we use everyday is fascinating for some strange reason.
the strangest phenomenon of all has to be animal planet. i swear they use subliminal messages to hypnotize you into watching their shows. almost every show on animal planet is a copy of a reality show on another network, only with animals instead of people. "animal cops" is cops, only with animals... the show about groomers is a fashion design show, only with dogs... why is that entertaining? i don't like reality shows with people, but for some reason reality tv with dogs is watchable. how is it that i can't stand survivor, but i can inadvertently kill most of an evening watching rodents fight over a hole in the dirt?
On the post: Music As Torture: Are Musicians Whose Music Is Blasted At Gitmo Compensated For Public Performance?
Re:
There is your question and answer.
doesn't matter and here's why:
downloading music is stealing, so not paying for something is the same as stealing it.
downloading music causes the industry to lose money, therefore not making money is the same as losing money.
er go, not paying for the rights to music is the same as stealing them, so gitmo is stealing money from artists, which i am sure we will all agree is terrorism plain and simple.
On the post: Yet Another Lawsuit Over Whether A Company Can Ban The Sale Of Its Products Online
you're all missing the point
if you sell something without paying off enough people then your ass is as good as sued. you either need to pay the manufacturer for the right to sell, pay a team of lawyers to protect you from the manufacturer, pay a judge to rule in your favor when the manufacturer sues you, or pay the manufacturer to settle damages.
On the post: Hard To Believe: Computer Makers Giving In To RIAA Pressure, Disabling Sound Recording?
the usual suspects
the idea that the RIAA would collude with a PC manufacturer to disable a working feature on new PC's doesn't surprise me in the slightest. the idea that dell would sell its customers out to the RIAA for a few bucks is only slightly more surprising.
On the post: Everyone Be Afraid! Predators Move To Game Consoles
Re: Parents are at work
no, the internet is exactly like the real world: packed to the brim with people that cry about being either too lazy or too stupid to protect themselves from the criminals that prey on them. the internet is a dark and sinister place full of mean spirited people, just like the real world... if you don't keep your wits about you someone will take advantage of you.
On the post: California To Copy NY's Bad Plan Forcing ISPs To Block Sites
circumvention for fun and profit
the more risk involved in the activity, the greater the opportunity for profit. there probably isn't much money to be made in facilitating file sharing, but i am sure there is plenty of money to be made facilitating crime:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowcrew
prohibition helped put organized crime on the map in the US by creating a market for bootleggers and speakeasies. internet prohibition will also help to put the internet equivalent of organized crime on the map as well. more services will pop up to facilitate activities that careless governments summarily declare illegal.
you can see it in services like windizupdate, peer guardian, the pirate bay, giganews, leafdrink, tor, you name it. as governments and corporations do more to restrict the internet, the community will respond with more circumvention. it's hard to say if many are profiting, but it's easy to see that they are at least being subsidized by ad revenue or donations, or are being promoted for free by providing these circumvention services.
On the post: Our Congress Has Failed Us: Gives In On Telecom Immunity
Re: Re: Re: Re:
you can only claim ex post facto if it was legal at the time the act was committed.
these lawsuits by the EFF and the ACLU are because it WAS illegal at the time the act was committed. before this bill, you couldn't wiretap without a warrant, that was illegal.
if it was legal at the time, why do they now need retroactive immunity?
On the post: Our Congress Has Failed Us: Gives In On Telecom Immunity
Re: Funny
since they are spying for the government's nefarious purposes, it's a different issue. that's the definition of 1984 bad.
also, the telcos are a monopoly in pretty much every market in the country, so there isn't much of a market to be forceful.
On the post: Our Congress Has Failed Us: Gives In On Telecom Immunity
Re:
in the 80's our system of checks and balances was replaced with the system of checks.
you write big checks and you get the laws you want.
On the post: On The Criminality Of WiFi Piggybacking...
BUT IT HURTS MY FEELINGS!!!!
I DON'T HAVE TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT TELEVISION TO WATCH AMERICAN IDOL. MY TV PROTECTS ME AGAINST BOOBS AND LIBERALS AND VIDEO GAMES AND THE INTERNET SHOULD TOO.
YOU HAVE TO CHANGE EVERYTHING AND PASS A BUNCH OF LAWS SO I DON'T HAVE TO ADMIT TO BEING STUPID AND NAIVE. I WANT TO REAP THE BENEFITS OF THE INTERNET WITHOUT LEARNING ANYTHING OR TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR MYSELF OR MY ACTIONS.
AND DON'T SAY THIS IS UNREASONABLE OR I WILL CRY. INTERNET PEOPLE ARE MEAN.
On the post: Now Gene Simmons Is Blaming Radiohead For Killing The Recording Industry
Re: Less money, not no money
--beck, "pay no mind"
http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Pay-No-Mind-lyrics-Beck/1F1C2B27AB0568954825686D001D B9D5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC9daMnyq3E
On the post: Sweden Approves Bill To Tap All Forms Of Communication
Re: Tap Dance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
it's a supplement to cryptography.
cryptography secures the content of a message.
steganography hides the existence of the message.
basically you use a key to hide a message in a digital file like a song or picture. you encrypt your message using public and private keys. then you stash the message in a digital file or whatever using another key. you then upload the "message" to the net somewhere, or email it, or whatever. the "enemy" can intercept all of your messages and unless they have they are aware that you are using stego AND have your keys, they won't even see your encrypted message, let alone decrypt it.
domestic surveillance won't stop the actual terrorists because they will use steganography and crypto to guarantee that no one intercepts their communications. all it does is hassle innocent people.
i guess you can watch for crypto and investigate the people that use it, but what do you do if regular people start using it? ban crypto?
banning crypto will make security for online commerce and remote access impossible (no ssl, no ssh, no vpn, no wep/wpa, no blackberry).
what will companies do about HIPPA regulations that state that patient information needs to be encrypted?
On the post: The Browser Is The New Operating System
Re: Nothing is the new anything
the gui is not the OS, but today the difference between them is largely academic. you need an OS to run the UI, and for most people without a computer science degree the UI is what they interact with, so to 90% of the computer using population, the UI is the OS.
lets take this to the next logical step. the browser is not the UI, which is not the OS, but since the browser is what most people interact with, the browser will soon be synonymous with the OS.
this situation isn't helped by certain browsers being used primarily on and/or popularized by a specific OS: konqueror on linux, safari on mac os, internet explorer on windows. sure, you can use IE and safari on both windows and mac OS and mozilla pretty much anything, but they are most popular on their native platforms.
so, while anyone with an ounce of technical ability can tell you that the browser is not the OS, as the web matures into the target platform for most applications, the difference between them will also become largely academic.
On the post: New Anti-Spyware Bill Won't Stop Spyware; But Will Bring Back Questionable Anti-Piracy Measures
go for it, in fact, let me help you.
here is a doomsday scenario that happened to me just yesterday:
i have a whitebox PC from a small vendor. said vendor preloads an oem version of windows xp pro. the machine is installed in an office at the university i work for and some deviant who molests farm animals peeled the certification sticker off the back of the machine.
the machine bluescreens one time too many and i reload windows, but i don't have the key for it since i don't realize the magic sticker is gone until AFTER i've formatted the hard drive. this are two very easy mistakes to make. so i use the key i have on file.
turns out i have the wrong key on file. how do i know this? i am able to install windows, but the activation screen comes up tigh after the first i can't activate online since the activation comes up at the first login (no network card set up yet), i can't register by phone because the registration app doesn't give me the magically generated number i have to give the customer service rep. i try to get MS to escalate the issue, but it's easier and faster to just use the university's volume licensed version instead. if i were a small company with no purchasing power for VLK's, i'd be up the proverbial creek.
this would be sad, if i didn't know of 5 different versions of XP floating around BT with no such key problems and all the device drivers and secrity update slipstreamed in. some of them even have office and a ton of software (like office) folded in as well.
good job guys, not only did you stiff arm a paid customer, but you failed to stop any actual piracy. good thing there is no competition in your space, or you would get eaten alive.
anti-piracy software is the chief cause of software piracy.
so go ahead and change the law. put in all the anti-circumvention nonsense you want, spy on us and log our keystrokes. make sure you report our activities to the government too. the sooner you have pushed yourselves out of the market, the better off we will all be.
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