Terminally Incoherent

Hey teminalists, where do you get your tech news (or news in general) these days. Just curious where do you guys spend your time online other than here. There are many communities and geek news aggregators out there but the biggest and most popular ones are probably these four:

• Reddit
• Digg
• Slashdot
• Boingboing

Do you visit any of them? Or all of them? Personally, I spend most of my time on Reddit because it tends to have the best signal to noise ratio without actually employing all powerful editors that hand pick best submissions. Of course there is a downside to this. On some days the front page of Reddit looks like this:

Yes, I posted a FUUUU joke. Se me

Then again sometimes Reddit is incredibly awesome. For example, some time ago I submitted a theoretical question involving special relativity and use of ansibles to the science subreddit and actually got some serious and thoughtful responses. The question received 17 upvotes and 6 downvotes but still generated a rather interesting theoretical discussion in the comments. The only other place on the interwebs where I could ask such a question and actually get replies is… Well, here. So that’s why I like Reddit. Like minded folks and good content.

I also visit Slashdot and Boingboing from time to time as well. Especially on the days when Reddit turns into 4chan meme recycling mill. I hardly ever go to Digg though… Which is probably a side effect of hinging out at Reddit so much. How about you guys? Where do you spend your time? Feel free to pimp out your favorite geek news and trivia sources in the comments.

Btw, as a rule I do not subscribe to RSS feed from any of these sites. I subscribe to blogs and online comic strips but not news aggregators. I access those the old fashioned way by going to the website and/or clicking refresh. Why? Because these sites have astonishing output rates. I tried subscribing to them once, and I could never keep up with their pace. After just a few days I would have 1000+ unread articles in each of the feeds (half of them probably dupes). Whenever I managed to clear one of these piles, new articles would start piling up within hours. It just doesn’t work.

If you have been following the gaming news (or any tech news for that matter) you doubtlessly already know about the crazy new DRM scheme Ubisoft adopted for Assasin’s Creed 2 (also known as the game I will not be playing, ever). In case you have been living under a rock (and I don’t mind, rocks are awesome man) let me explain it to you. The game will basically continuously ping their server while you play. If at any time it finds itself unable to reach the server, it will immediately kick you out to the main menu without saving your progress. It is not only crazy, but also incredibly inconsiderate. It goes above and beyond any other DRM scheme I have ever seen to make the life of legitimate customer more difficult.

I am painfully aware that most gamers (present company excluded) does not give a shit about DRM. They just don’t care. As long as they can play their game they are not really bothered by stuff like online activation, hidden rootkits and all kinds of other interesting surprises. But this scheme might just be stupid enough to actually annoy even them. Let’s try to think about just a few scenarios in which you wouldn’t be able to play AC2:

1. While on a plane or a train
2. Whenever your internet connection goes down at the house
3. While on a flaky WiFi connection that fades in and out
4. While someone is using a microwave oven in the other room/apartment and you are on a low powered Wifi connection
5. While on a metered internet connection (and yes, some places still have those)
6. While in the armed forces (not guaranteed a constant internet connection where you are deployed)
7. While someone in your house is downloading a torrent which sucks the bandwidth dry
8. While your network suffers from a random hiccup

That last point is especially interesting, because it does happen. The internet is what it is, and strange anomalous hiccups happen all the time due to net congestion, routers going down and etc. That’s just part of how this internet thing works. And you usually won’t notice, because most internet technologies are built to deal with this crap. But every once in a while you run into something that does require constant, uninterrupted communication – for example VoIP telephony. It depends on how robust and fault tolerant your phones are, but sometimes when the hiccups are big enough, the calls just drop for no reason or the reception is garbled/stuttered. I don’t know how sensitive the AC2 DRM is, but since they are using is as a security feature, you can probably expect it to be a bit trigger happy. So on your average residential (ie. shitty) internet connection, you can probably expect it to be tripped off at least every once in a while for no reason whatsoever.

It is ha huge inconvenience to us, legitimate customers. The game puts limits on when and how we can play, and punishes us every time we lose a network signal. What I fail to see however is how this protects the game from pirates any better than a regular online activation. I really don’t see the benefit here.

I mean, if I was to pirate AC2 I would just go to my favorite torrent website and download a cracked version that has the “calling home” feature removed. It doesn’t seem like this particular DRM feature would be much more difficult to crack than anything else we have seen before. If it’s just a simple ping, or connection check then removal should be trivial. If on the other hand they are doing something more complex – for example exchanging time sensitive cryptographic keys every few seconds it might actually prove to be s bit more challenging and fun to crack.

Yes, I said fun because that’s what DRM is. It is a fun project hundreds of people around the world will be working on the second your game hits the shelves. And eventually they will get it, because DRM is fundamentally flawed concept. Encryption simply does not work that way.

Assassins Creed DRM will get cracked. It is inevitable.

I always explain it to my students this way: encryption is all about securing the communication between Bob and Alice in such a way that Even cannot intercept it. It always assumes there are 3 distinct parties involved – the sender (Bob), the recipient (Alice) and a bad guy who wants to spy on the other two (Eve). We usually do this by relying on some secret decryption keys that Bob and Alice have, but Eve does not. These key may be something akin to a password that Bob and Alice exchange when Eve is not around, or public/private key pairs. But it only works as long as Eve does not have the secret/private key. If the encryption algorithm was designed properly, the only thing Eve can hope for is to guess the right key. But if your key is complex enough there are usually billions of combinations she would have to try. In most cases, even a fastest super computer in existence testing dozens of keys per second wouldn’t be able to find the right one within Eve’s life time.

Unfortunately it so happens, that DRM covers a special class of encryption problems in which Alice and Eve are the same person. The legitimate recipient of the encrypted message is the same person who you are trying to protect the message from. So basically you can encrypt the message you are sending to Eve, but you also have to give her the decryption key. You can hide that key under another level of encryption, and make sure she can access it only in special circumstances. But if Eve is clever, she can snatch up the key as soon as the conditions are met for the first time and it becomes available, and then use it whenever she wants. So DRM is basically about splitting keys in parts, hiding it in clever ways, and requiring Eve to jump through hoops in order to get it. But ultimately there must be a chain of events that can be initiated by eve that will expose the key and decrypt the game so that she can play it. The security of the DRM therefore boils down to making this process so convoluted that Eve can’t follow it. Unfortunately Eve tends to be a very clever, and very determined person when she wants to be.

This is why DRM doesn’t work – because it can’t. Because every DRM scheme can be figured out by a clever cracker like a puzzle. They don’t have to brute force the decryption, or or try to break it. All they have to do is to find the hidden key. And they have been doing this for years now, so they have lots of practice. This is why self respecting cryptography experts stay away from DRM projects and leave them to be developed by either talentless hacks, or people who don’t know enough about cryptography to realize how futile their work is (actually, we can probably file these folks under talentless hacks as well).

AC2 DRM will be cracked – I am sure of that. I am willing to bed money on that. I have yet to see a game of this caliber to remain uncrackable for more than two weeks. It is inevitable.

I am just curious as to why they chose such a highly annoying method of authentication. If it’s just a simple “check in” procedure, then this whole system is almost criminally stupid because it does absolutely nothing. A legitimate game will continuously check in, unless the customer loses the internet connection at which point you assume he is a pirate and kick him off. A pirate copy will never check in, and work just fine. It makes no sense. If on the other hand they are doing something much more complex… Well, then they are just throwing money and man-hours out the window, because it will be cracked anyway.

I know why game companies use DRM – I get it. They do it so that they can pretend like they take steps to protect their intellectual property from pirates while the investors are looking. But you’d think that they would want to pick the most cost effective, least intrusive technology out there instead of all kinds of inventing new ways to inconvenience their paying customers. Valve knows this – and they actually made their DRM fun for customers by turning it into a social platform. Steam is like a gilded cage – it keeps you from doing what you want with the games you bought. But in exchange it gives you some fun features like achievements, ability to easily connect with your friends and etc.. Ubisoft however seems to take the opposite stance making their DRM as annoying, buggy and customer hostile as possible. I don’t know if you recall but not so long ago they created a DRM so thorough that no one was able to play their game at all – and they had to use an illegal scene crack to unlock people’s games.

I really don’t know why do people in game design keep failing so hard on the DRM front. It’s so fucking simple:

1. No one likes DRM
2. Everyone seems to love Steam
3. Steam is a DRM
4. Why the fuck are you trying to use something that is the anti-thesis of Steam?

I mean, there is a working model of a DRM that works. Use it. And if you don’t want to use it because you didn’t make it then at least try to learn from it. Saying that Steam or Steam like DRM is not strong enough is just silly. Steam doesn’t protect anything just like SecuROM doesn’t protect anything. The AC2 DRM will not protect anything either. DRM does not work, period. It doesn’t matter which system you use, because none of them can possibly work. So just pick the one that people don’t hate.

What do you think about the AC2 DRM?

Update: Few days after release, Ubisoft DRM servers go down. I sort of forgot about this in the post above – to support thousands of people playing the game at the same time you need a massive server power. That’s a tricky thing though, because servers and bandwidth cost money. If you buy lots of servers and the game is a dud, you are losing money. If you low ball it, something like this happens. People can’t play your game at all. But that’s ok, right. We are going to blame pirates for this, aren’t we?

Let’s face it, most of us here are children of the information age. Unlike our parents we grew up using computers, game consoles are similar devices. Our grandparents’ childhoods were mostly shaped by books they read. Our parents were products of both literature, cinema and TV industry. We on the other hand grew up immersed in all of the above plus video games. Some of you who are few years younger than me also grew up with the Internet – I did not have it when I was a kid though.

As much as we may deny this, the video games that we have played in our formative years have affected us in some ways. No, they didn’t make us into violent killers – that’s silly. But just like literature, TV and cinema they have made their mark. They allowed us to experience something new and unique and imprinted themselves upon our memory. I can honestly say that I no longer remember 90% of the games that I have played as a kid but there are few that still stand fresh in my mind. I remember them quite fondly, and reminisce about playing them every once in a while. This is what I want to talk about today.

What video games have really made an impact on you when you were a kid? Which games have you played over and over again? What game completely blew you away?

I remember several such games. One of them must probably be Another World by Delphine Software. At the time it had a revolutionary game play mechanics and game engine (it was one of the first video games in history that used real-time rendered polygons instead of sprites). What really blew me away was the unique story of a red haired scientist who accidentally finds himself in a strange parallel dimension. A story which was conveyed to the player with picture and sound alone (no actual words are spoken in the game). I have spent countless hours trying to beat that game, which in retrospect is quite impressive seeing how short it really was. You can actually see it in its entirety below.

Amiga Longplay [098] Another World by cubex55

I also loved Another World’s spiritual successor Flashback which featured similar game play but a different (equally compelling) SF universe and interesting story. Here is a sample of gameplay (I’m not going to post a speed run here because the game is much longer than Another World).

Flashback: The Quest for Identity, Level 1 (1/2) by djoldgames

Both these games were cinematic, action packed and incredibly difficult. So I used every cheat-code I could find to actually beat them. Both also had better stories than many modern games, and that is saying something considering neither one had voice acting, dialog trees and etc…

My first introduction to the RPG genre was Ishar – The Legend of the Fortress and I completely lost my shit for it. It was an massive, open ended world populated by orcs, monsters, villages where you could recruit party members, dungeons full of loot and NPC’s that would sometimes join you. Seriously, it was pretty much a sandbox game before sandbox was even a gaming concept. It had beautiful watercolor backgrounds, interesting character designs and a cool fantasy world seeped in mystery. Here is a short game play video:

Ishar – The Legend of the Fortress by madzionyu

The funniest part was that my copy was all in French. It was a pirate copy of a pirate copy that got to me via friend of a friend’s brother or something like that. But I didn’t care – I played it for hours on end anyway. I don’t believe I actually learned any French because of it – it was more of a trial and error type thing. I’d press buttons and dialog options at random to figure out what they do. Sadly, the language barrier made parts of the game inaccessible to me. For example, most hints given by NPC’s were incomprehensible. The game also had a complex alchemy system (you could make potions out of ingredients) but most of the in game instructions on how to do it were in French so I missed out. Since I could not really figure out what was the main quest I have never beat it – but I spent days just wandering around, getting lost, finding interesting recruitable NPC’s and dying in spectacular ways. It was a blast.

Another game that I will probably remember till I die was Syndicate by Bullfrog. Being quite an interesting mix between a RPG and RTS game, it had you controlling up to 4 cyber-enhanced agents on various missions that ranged from assassination and sabotage or recruiting new members for your organization. What really made me fall in love with it was the fact that the game featured realistic “living” cities. In some of the missions you would have to make your way through busy streets full of pedestrians. You could get hit by a passing car or hijack it and drive it to your destination. It had working train/tram lines that you could use and buildings you could enter (though there was usually nothing interesting inside). It was mind blowing at the time.

Here is a short vid:

Amiga 500: Syndicate by qettyz

Heimdall 2 was another one of my favorites. It mixed action, adventure and RPG elements with a really good story. The game introduced me to the Norse mythology which turned out to be a long term fascination of mine. I also remember that it had interesting magic system based on rune stones. Each rune had some magical properties but be useless on its own. You had to put several of them together in order to make spells. So for example a fire bolt spell would require a fire rune and another rune that would be related to magical projectiles. There were dozens of combinations and discovering them was part of the fun. One summer I made myself a whole set of these runic stones out of those flat washed out pebbles you can find on the beach.

Amiga – Heimdall 2: Into the Hall of Worlds by mingo870

A lot of people start their point-and-click adventure gaming carer with one of the Lucas Arts SCUMM games like The Secret of the Monkey Island. I started with Simon the Sorcerer which was not only incredibly funny but also massive. Unlike most adventure games that kept you confined to a small area until you figured out a puzzle, most of the world in Simon was open to you from the get go. The game was just as much about exploration as it was about puzzles. If you got stuck somewhere you just went roaming around. Eventually you would find new items and you would go “oh, I wonder if I can use it in the XYZ location”.

Simon the Sorcerer part 1/14 by russell19831983

I have played the original game without voice acting – hearing Simon’s voice actually ruins my nostalgia here because this is definitely not how he sounded in my head. Fun fact: I replayed this game as an adult and realized that it was way funnier than I remembered it. I assume that about a half (if not more) of the jokes flew over my head due to my limited grasp of English and inability to pick up on many of the innuendos, pop culture references and wink-wink-nude-nudge moments.

Oh, and before I forget, Moonstone – a game that me and my brother used to play a lot due to it’s competitive nature and incredible amount of gore it featured.

Amiga Misc [006] Moonstone – Best Parts by cubex55

My brother actually made the set of dice featured in the game – as in chiseled the dice out of wood and painted on the symbols. We used to always take that set on long trips in addition to playing cards.

How about you? Which games affected you the most when you were a kid? Which games you still remember with astonishing clarity? Post them in the comments. If you can find cool youtube vids like the ones above, that would be even better!