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Cory Doctorow, “Video-game shoppers surrender their immortal souls”, BoingBoing, 2010-04-16
April 16, 2010
QotD: Blog Post EULA
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April 15, 2010
Properly defining what are “public goods”
Milena Popova, guest-blogging while Charles Stross is out experiencing Japan, has a long discussion up about public goods and why content (digitally speaking) is a classic example:
There’s a theory in economics about things called “public goods”. To understand the distinction between private goods, public goods and the couple of shades of grey in between, you first need to get your head around two concepts: rival and excludable.
Rival: (Wikipedia seems to call this “rivalrous”, but when I were a young economist lass we used to call it rival so I’ll stick with that.) A good is rival if my consumption of it diminishes the amount of the good that you can consume. Say we had 10 apples, and I ate one. There would now be 9 apples left which you could eat. If we had one apple and I ate all of it, tough luck, no apples for you. Knowing whether a good is rival or not tells you whether you want to use the market (if I were a good economist that would possibly be capital-M Market đ to allocate access to that good. If it’s rival, then the market is an efficient way of allocating the good; if it’s not, then you might want to think about other ways of getting your good to people. Remember that scary anti-piracy clip at the start of your DVDs which says “You wouldn’t steal a handbag”? Hold that thought for a minute.
Excludable: A good is excludable if you physically have a way of stopping people from consuming it. Back to the apples: if they’re in my fridge, inside my locked house and you don’t have a key, you can’t have my apples. (Yes, yes, you could break in. The law provides additional protection here, but ultimately there’s probably a better way for you to obtain an apple than breaking into my house, right?) Knowing whether a good is excludable tells you whether you can use the market to distribute the good. If your good is excludable, go ahead and sell it on the open market; if it’s not — you might struggle because you can’t stop people from just taking it for free.
So. Most of the goods you deal with in your day-to-day life are both rival and excludable. We call them pure private goods. But there’s a few things here and there that aren’t as clear-cut, and this is where it gets a little messy.
March 15, 2010
Minor irritations
I realize it’s a positive sign that all I’ve got to complain about is a trivial thing, but damn it’s annoying.
“It”, specifically, is the latest update to Firefox (now at version 3.6). There’s now a problem with my mouse scrolling wheel in Firefox, but only in my Rogers/Yahoo webmail client. You don’t realize how often you use a feature until it stops working unexpectedly. I noticed it on my desktop last week, but didn’t directly attribute it to Firefox until this morning when I updated the browser on my laptop and it started displaying the same symptoms (also, YouTube videos lose their sound, but that’s only on the laptop).
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March 10, 2010
Some things never change
I was looking though some old postings and found this little gem, which is as true as ever:
It is a sad real-world fact that most legislators, when presented with something they do not understand, almost always attempt to ban it. This probably started with the first neolithic fire-tamer . . . who was probably beaten to death with sticks when the tribal shaman saw it. Senator Hatch is showing all the finely nuanced reactions of Ug the caveman here.
This was in reaction to Senator Orrin Hatch introducing a bill to make peer-to-peer file sharing illegal back in 2004.
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There goes another slice of office productivity
Matt Peckham looks at a new “office productivity suite” which is sure to be popular in certain work-averse environments:
Pilot a spaceship, paddle a ball, even play horizontal Tetris, all while crafting reports, cutting costs, and scanning monthly performance charts…or at least appearing to. It’s the latest way to avoid work while looking like you’re furiously engaged in it.
The brainchild of four developers from the Netherlands, CantYouSeeImBusy.com teases a collection of free Flash-based mini games that let you slack off, chameleon-like, by adopting the form of an office productivity suite. Each one opens like a full-screen pop-up and offers a panic button that’s smarter than the average escape hatch: Tap the space bar and the “game” elements vanish, leaving just the “productivity” features in place.
“Let’s face it, we all want to relax every now and then, but still want to appear professional or busy!” reads the site intro. “That’s why all the games at CantYouSeeImBusy.com are designed in a way that nobody can see that you’re gaming. In fact, your boss and colleagues will think that you’re working harder than ever before.”
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March 9, 2010
Another anti-piracy scheme that hurts legitimate users
French games developer Ubisoft was the target of a DDoS attack over the weekend, which took out their license verification servers. This left thousands of gamers unable to play their games . . . but not all gamers. Only the ones who bought the game legitimately, because the “real” version requires online validation every time you play . . . the cracked versions do not:
PC users started reporting problems accessing some of the French company’s most popular games, including best-seller Assassin’s Creed 2, on Sunday afternoon. It later emerged that attackers had targeted the company’s controversial anti-piracy system, causing it to break down — which in turn left thousands of people unable to play.
The chaos was so widespread because of the way that Ubisoft’s copy protection system — which requires players who have bought the game to log in online and verify that they are not playing a pirated version — is designed. By flooding the anti-piracy servers with web traffic, the unknown attackers forced it to collapse and therefore locked out those players who tried to sign in.
This angered many gamers, who felt that they had been punished for buying legal copies of the company’s games — which cost as much as ÂŁ50.
“We’ve had to agree to their draconian rules in order to play their game, however Ubisoft haven’t given a single thought to what happens when their servers screw up,” said one disgruntled user on the company’s web forums.
This is far from the only example of companies trying to protect their intellectual property by imposing DRM “solutions” which punish their customers. In the long term, no matter how nice the product may be, it can’t be a good practice to place barriers in the way of the people who’ve paid to use the product.
February 18, 2010
Civilization V? In development, apparently
I was a huge fan of the Civilization series of games, starting with the original game and running through the series, although as I mentioned back in 2005, I wasn’t enjoying the later releases as much as I had the earlier ones. To my surprise, there will be a follow-on Civilization V available later this year:
Funny story, I was musing about a Civilization sequel just yesterday while out for a run, and lo and behold, 2K Games says it’s in development as I’m typing this. What’s more — and I have to admit, somewhat unexpectedly — it’s still being developed for PC.
What’s Civilization? Surely you jest . . . but in case you’re serious, it’s pretty simple: One of the most important turn-based strategy video game in the history of the medium. Also: A pretty spot-on history simulator (in terms of history’s broad strokes and ideological angles, anyway). The general goal — to conquer the world by diplomatic or less-than-diplomatic means — hasn’t changed much since the original debuted in 1991, but as they say, the journey is all, and that journey’s generally improved by leaps and bounds with each installment.
Calling Civilization V‘s new engine “astonishing,” 2K says the game has been rebuilt “from the ground-up” with a brand new combat engine, more sophisticated diplomacy, and expansions all around to existing features.
Here’s the web site for the upcoming game. Yeah, I’ll almost certainly buy it, even though it may be coming out around the same time as my current gaming addiction’s next release (Guild Wars 2).
January 24, 2010
Canadian infantry to get new personal equipment
Strategy Page reports that the Canadian Forces will be introducing new equipment for infantry soldiers next year:
Canada is joining its NATO allies in providing its infantry with new basic equipment, including electronic gear that, until quite recently, no one saw the troops getting for a decade or more. The Canadian gear set is called ISSP (Integrated Soldier System Project). The first components of ISSP will be issued next year. ISSP contains the usual elements of improved infantry gear. New uniforms, that incorporate improvements the troops have been demanding for years, plus new helmets and protective vests, that are lighter and provide improved shielding from bullets and fragments. New communications gear gives each soldier a link with everyone in his unit, while individual GPS is something troops have already provided for themselves. As other armies have discovered, the troops have already bought a lot of the new gear that is now proposed for the new standard issue.
A lot of this new stuff is commercial, with the military taking the best and most appropriate gear designed for outdoor living. This is particularly true of stuff marketed to the demanding mountain climbing and winter sports enthusiasts. Canada isn’t plunging into unknown territory here. The U.S., France, Germany and most other major NATO countries have already gone this route, and left a lot of practical experience in their wake. Thus the major goal is to get all the most useful gear, and reduce the weight of stuff the infantry have to carry into combat. It’s much easier to find new gear that works better, than it is to find stuff that’s lighter, and still gets the job done.
This is very good news, although there’s always a trade-off between “useful stuff to have” and “weight to be carried”. Modern computer gear is far lighter than it used to be, except for batteries, but there’s always the temptation on the part of the planners to add “just one more” neat bit of kit to the burden already being humped across the field by the infantry.
There’s also the challenge of making the technology both useful and as non-distracting as possible. As Robert Heinlein wrote back in the late 1950’s, “If you load a mudfoot down with a lot of gadgets he has to watch somebody a lot more simply equipped — say with a stone axe — will sneak up and bash his head in while he is trying to read a Vernier.”
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January 21, 2010
And yet more on passwords
This is becoming a quarterly topic around here. Imperva has done some statistical analysis of the 32 million passwords which were exposed in the Rockyou.com security breach:
Key findings of the study include:
* The shortness and simplicity of passwords means many users select credentials that will make them susceptible to basic forms of cyber attacks known as âbrute force attacks.â
* Nearly 50% of users used names, slang words, dictionary words or trivial passwords (consecutive digits, adjacent keyboard keys, and so on). The most common password is â123456â.
* Recommendations for users and administrators for choosing strong passwords.
âEveryone needs to understand what the combination of poor passwords means in todayâs world of automated cyber attacks: with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every secondâor 1000 accounts every 17 minutes,â explained Impervaâs CTO Amichai Shulman.
The report identifies the most commonly used passwords:
1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123
So there you go — all the tools you need to be a world-class password cracker.
January 15, 2010
Why China won’t be able to corner the rare earth market
Tim Worstall looks at the importance of rare earth to the modern electronics industry, and why China’s ongoing attempt to corner the market won’t work in the long run:
The Chinese government is trying to corner the rare earths market and that isn’t good news for the tech business. Those with good memories of Chemistry O Level will know what the rare earths are: the funny little line of elements from Lanthanum to Lutetium at the bottom of the periodic table, along with Yttrium and Scandium, which we usually add to the list.
The reason we like them in the tech business is because they’re what enables us to make a lot of this tech stuff that is the business. You can’t run fibre optic cables without your Erbium repeaters, Europium, Terbium and Yttrium are all used to make the coloured dots in CRTs, the lens on your camera phone is 25 per cent Lanthanum oxide (yes, really, glass is made of metal oxides) and without Neodimium and Dysprosium we’d not have permanent magnets: no hard drives nor iPod headphones.
[. . .] it is still true that we get all of them – apart from Scandium, which is a rather different little beastie – from the same ore. In fact, we tend to get them not just from the same ore, but from the same mine: Bautou in Inner Mongolia (that’s the Chinese part, not the independent country).
And that’s where our problems really start. Over the past couple of decades China has been cracking down on small mines, usually in the name of environmental policy. That even may have been the real reason, as rare earth mines can be messy things. The outcome is that now 95 per cent of the earth’s supply comes from this one mining complex and the Chinese Government has just announced export restrictions.
So, if they have a monopoly on 95% of the world supply, why won’t it hold up? Because in spite of the name, they’re not as rare as all that . . . and there are substitutions that can be made for some or all of the current application needs. By restricting the supply and/or driving up the price, China will spur new competitors to enter the field and new sources of rare earths to be developed. In the short term, it will definitely create price increases (which, of course, will be passed on to the consumer), but in the medium-to-long term they will create a vibrant competitive marketplace which will almost inevitably drive the prices down below current levels.
Isn’t economics fascinating?
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January 4, 2010
Sony’s latest consumer mis-step
Dark Water Muse treated himself to a new bit of electronic kit over the holidays, a Sony Reader Touch. He wasn’t best pleased by the purchase:
The Sony Reader is an all but useless device, certainly at its current price point. Especially if you already happen to own a portable electronic device capable of rendering common document and media file formats — got a smart phone? Got a netbook or laptop? Then youâre already living the dream that is merely Sonyâs Reader Touch nightmare.
DWM gives the Sony Reader Touch negative 1 out of 10. Truly impressively bad, particularly when measured on a scale of +1 to +10.
How does DWM compute negative one? Read on.
Only the newly arrived on H. G. Wellsâ Time Machine could find utility in a Sony Reader. Or if youâre too proud to admit you fucked up by buying one in the first place and prefer to go to your grave, Sony Reader over your heart (trust DWM when he says, any friends you might still have after becoming a Sony Reader Touch owner, or surviving relatives, want to see it buried with you too), rather than get your money back.
DWM returned his Sony Reader Touch after making extra special efforts to try and modify his relationship to reading text with it. He wanted the Sony Reader to work. He was willing to tolerate âa littleâ deficit in the reading experience, if only to avoid having to slaughter one more tree to feed his hunger for crime novels. But, feeling disappointed and defeated, DWM sent his Sony Reader Touch back to from whence it had come (extruded from that great product anus behind so many retail consumer products).
I’ve got a couple of dozen books on my iPhone, but I consider them to be “emergency” reading . . . for those times when I don’t have internet access. It’s great that the iPhone can work as a small ebook display, but the key word here is “small”.
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December 18, 2009
More on passwords
The Economist‘s Tech.view correspondent confesses to password laxity:
He admits to flouting the advice of security experts: his failings include using essentially the same logon and password for many similar sites, relying on easily remembered wordsâand, heaven forbid, writing them down on scraps of paper. So his new yearâs resolution is to set up a proper software vault for the various passwords and ditch the dog-eared list.
Your correspondentâs one consolation is that he is not alone in using easily crackable words for most of his passwords. Indeed, the majority of online users have an understandable aversion to strong, but hard-to-remember, passwords. The most popular passwords in Britain are â123â followed by âpasswordâ. At least people in America have learned to combine letters and numbers. Their most popular ones are âpassword1â followed by âabc123â.
I’ve written some carefully considered advice on passwords, which is still as valid today as it was in those dark, distant days of October.
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December 15, 2009
Women in IT jobs
According to a recent study, the reason there are not more women in the IT sector is that they’re put off by the ubiquitous cans of Coke and science fiction posters:
There’s more research out this week on the vexed question of why there aren’t more women in the field of computing and IT. According to the latest study, such seemingly harmless habits as putting up sci-fi posters or leaving cans of Coke about can be much more offputting than one might think.
“When people think of computer science the image that immediately pops into many of their minds is of the computer geek surrounded by such things as computer games, science fiction memorabilia and junk food,” says Sapna Cheryan, a junior trick-cyclist at the university of Washington, America. “That stereotype doesn’t appeal to many women who don’t like the portrait of masculinity that it evokes.”
Cheryan and her colleagues arranged multiple experiments and surveys among hundreds of non-computing-subjects students at Washington uni. Questionnaires were filled in in different rooms — one previously prepared with a science fiction poster, games kit and Coke cans; one instead with “nature” and “art” wall graphics, books and coffee cups. This stage dressing was ostensibly not part of the tests, but nonetheless it had a powerful effect on decisions by the ladies taking part.
December 9, 2009
“There is no app for that”
Alex Tabarrok looks at the Chilean “Cybersyn” project:
Cybersyn was a project of the socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970-1973) and British cybernetic visionary Stafford Beer; its goal was to control the Chilean economy in real-time using computers and “cybernetic principles.” The military regime that overthrew Allende dropped the project and probably for this reason when the project is periodically rediscovered it is often written about in a romantic tone as a revolutionary “socialist internet,” decades ahead of its time that was “destroyed” by the military because it was “too egalitarian” or because they didn’t understand it.
Although some sources at the time said the Chilean economy was “run by computer,” the project was in reality a bit of a joke, albeit a rather expensive one, and about the only thing about it that worked were the ordinary Western Union telex machines spread around the country. The IBM 360 two computers supposedly used to run the Chilean economy were IBM 360s (or machines on that order). These machines were no doubt very impressive to politicians and visionaries eager to use their technological might to control an economy [. . .] Today, our perspective will perhaps be somewhat different when we realize that these behemoths were far less powerful than an iPhone. Run an economy with an iPhone? Sorry, there is no app for that.
[. . .] The control room is like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise in another respect–both are stage sets. Nothing about the room is real, even the computer displays on the wall are simply hand drawn slides projected from the other side with Kodak carousels.
December 1, 2009
QotD: Nomenclature, 2.0
Paused over lunch to roll through the Deadpool on TechCrunch, reading about expired internet companies. Been a while. Most had to do with âsocial media,â and most got millions of dollars to produce a novel way where X could connect Y with P using Z, and then: profit! The names of these companies makes me weep:
Zopo, Lefora, Meetro, Ning, Sinopio, CapaZoo, Joox, Foonz.
These are not businesses. These are characters in a pre-school TV show. I have a tough time imagining a hard-nosed venture capitalist saying Well, itâs an interesting idea you have, and on behalf of my group, weâre willing to invest $12 million in Shagafumoo.
James Lileks, Bleat, 2009-12-01
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