I read it on the Internet..
..so it must be true!
Worse yet, the increasingly break-neck pace of internet news reporting – and the feedback loop it often turns into – has turned even some of the more wacky conspiracies into an odd kind of accepted wisdom. Monday’s left-of-field interpretation of an event becomes Tuesday’s “well, obviously!” comment on a thousand blogs (each just parroting the last, but none willing to admit it), and by Wednesday it’s enshrined on Wikipedia as historical fact.
A moment of clarity provided by GamesIndustry.biz in an article covering the Resident Evil: Mercenaries single-save ‘fiasco’.
What’s pink and long..?
I’ve just enjoyed playing the excellent Kirby’s Epic Yarn on my Wii. The game’s tone is set around the same level as Play School or Teletubbies.
Or is it?
iCat
That’s one way to clean the fingermarks off the screen!
Hacked off
The headlines both on and offline seem to be increasingly littered with the doings of hackers. These digital rapscallions dashing to and fro, performing acts of daring like some cyberpunk Zorro. It’s all so gosh darn romantic.
Certain readers may have spotted that koffdrop.com itself was hacked recently. Apparently the site was targetted and labelled as an enemy of Pakistan. Now, there’s a good reason why I’ve not declared my views on Pakistan very prominently on my site. That would be because I don’t have any. Since the incident, however, I’m of the opinion that Pakistan has some pretty shoddy and misguided hackers.
Elsewhere, various databases are hacked by more proficient (though equally misguided) hackers and wodges of private data and spilled onto torrent sites. Here and there various hacking groups claim responsibility for such acts. I think that’s a behaviour worth making a mental note of. Can you think of other types of activists who claim responsibility for their incendiary activities? I can.
In gaming circles there is much emotive talk about Geohot and PlayStation 3. The media, fawning buffoons that they are, simply can’t resist the salicious David-versus-Goliath spin on all of this and adding more melodrama to a topic that too many folk are using personal feelings rather than concrete data to draw conclusions from.
Now, amongst the feedback of all of this there are a few principles being hammered out:
- I bought the PS3. It’s mine. I can do what I like with it
- The PS3 was targetted due to the removal of the “Other OS” functionality
- Hackers, GeoHot specifically, do not endorse piracy
- Hacking does not equal piracy
Let’s review these in a little more detail
I bought the PS3. It’s mine. I can do what I like with it
No, that’s incorrect. Like nearly every single argument where someone starts by saying “I bought X so…” the understanding of ownership is flawed. Arguments based on that flawed understanding are going to be increasingly flawed.
What you bought is a device that provides access to a manufacturer’s technology and services. You own the device, you do not own the technology or service. Furthermore, that access is given to you under specific terms and conditions that you agree to before the device allows you to use it and, further to that, usage of the device typically declares your consent to the terms.
It’s crucial to appreciate the distinction between the device and the technology inside it and the service(s) it provides.
Similar principles are true of software. When you buy a game you have not purchased the software. You have purchased a copy of someone else’s software and a licence to use that copy under specific terms. The software is still owned by the software publisher. The shiny disc is yours, the data on it is not.
Back to hardware. As far as the device is concerned, you can do what you like. Smash it with a hammer and put a video of it on YouTube. Paint it bright pink. The hardware people don’t care. Start fucking about with the technology though, well, that’s a different story. Modifying the technology to work in a way that is not sanctioned by the terms under which you agreed to use it – you’d be the one in the wrong buster, not the guys who own the technology and who sold you the device.
On top of this, consumers get bent out of shape really quickly the moment a company doesn’t maintain their side of an agreement. When consumers decide to break that agreement? Well shee-it, that’s their God-given right dammit! And just because they don’t keep their word doesn’t mean they should lose any perks or benefits. Convenient double-standards at play in that mentality, don’t you think?
The PS3 was targeted due to the removal of the “Other OS” functionality
There’s a number of fallacies at play in this statement. Let’s start with the most glaring by asking what prompted the removal of that functionality in the first place?
Oh, hang about, that would be because it was abused by hackers. It’s funny how they keep that side of things rather quiet when justifying their crusade isn’t it? You hacked it and so it got removed. Now you’re acting like the removal was unfair so you’re hacking things even more. The concepts of cause and effect appear to be lost on these people. Which is a bit odd because hackers are, broadly speaking, pretty smart guys.
OtherOS, as its name suggests, allowed the installation of other operating systems onto the PS3. Notably linux. Now, if you’re looking for a platform to run linux on and you feel that your only choice is a $600 videogames console as opposed to, say, a $500 computer then you’re not going to get very far handling an operating system like linux. For a start, you won’t have a keyboard, let alone the appreciation of using the right tool for the right job. So let’s dispense with the notion that OtherOS provided a crucial service that simply could not be replicated to an equal standard in any other form.
Let’s also dispense with the idea that anybody gave a shit about OtherOS until it was revealed as means to exploit the PS3′s security and tempt greedy gamers with the prospect of pirating games instead of paying for them.
So, in response to the actions of hackers, Sony removed OtherOS with a firmware update. Internet crybabies screamed that their most beloved of PS3 features (that one that they never used but had recently become very interested in) was going to be taken away from them. Of course they did – because people bitch about having something taken away from them, even if they never intended to use it. “But it’s the principle!” they cry. Well, gee, if there’s one thing we know about gamers it’s that they’re people of principle. So long as that principle serves them, that is. Otherwise the rest of the world can fuck off for all they care. But, you know, principles. Principles!
Hackers, GeoHot specifically, do not endorse piracy
That’s so true. Hackers are digital freedom-fighters. Enabling free speech from the evil corrupt closed-nature of the cyber-confines that these monolithic and brooding corporations impose upon helpless citizens.
This is a hacker:
"FOR LINUX!!!!"
Now, if I were a pacifist I might be against guns. So to prove my point, I’d hack guns so that ammunition of any sort can be made freely available to any gun-owner and I’d broadcast my methods to the world. No, I’m not endorsing unlicensed use of firearms, sir! I’m a pacifist! See, I wrote it on my blog so it must be true. What do you mean by saying my actions contradict my words. I wrote it down on the internet. The internet doesn’t lie!
Sarcasm aside, saying you don’t endorse piracy whilst indirectly yet knowingly enabling a tidal wave of piracy is what is commonly referred to as bullshit.
Once again, let’s remember that hackers are smart geezers. They understand things that would leave most of us baffled. So shrugging their shoulders and acting like they don’t know what they’re not aware of the impact of their actions is spectacularly unconvincing.
Hacking does not equal piracy
Preach on brother!
Yes, lets overlook a huge wave of historical evidence that sets the template for cause and effect and say that hacking doesn’t equal piracy. Of course it doesn’t. Why doesn’t it? Because hackers don’t endorse piracy, didn’t you hear?!
So, OtherOS was around for a few years. The PS3 was unhacked. Folk had the oppurtunity to use a powerful, open console to develop homebrew applications for the benefit of others. Did they? Not really, no.
PS3 gets hacked. Hacking doesn’t equal piracy though, does it? How long did it take for people to start using the hacks to enable pirate copies of software to run on the system? Days.
But that most be coincidence because, you know, hacking brings oppurtunity for betterment, not piracy. There’s no evidence to suggest that piracy follows a hacked system like the papparazzi follow Paris Hilton. Well, nothing aside from every hacked console there’s ever been in the last 25 years. But, you know, that’s not really relevant I guess. Real world facts have no place when you’re preaching a sermon, do they?
And the PS3 has been hacked. So what wondrous benefits to people has it brought other than piracy? Well, there’s been.. erm.. lots of cheating. Yes! See, cheaters can enjoy their games using less skill and ruin the experience for all the people that still play by the rules. Remember folks, gamers are all about principles! What else has hacking enabled other than mass cheating and piracy? Well… some emulators I guess. Whoop dee doo. What about PS2 backwards compatibility – lots of people are asking for that!.. er nah. I guess the hackers aren’t really into that.
Hey, what about reinstating OtherOS functionality? Tellingly.. no.
But, hey, principles!
So when you strip away all the worthless pantomime drama and the greed and the general ignorance at play in all of this you have a fairly transparent behaviour being dressed up as something more than it is. It’s just a script kiddie having a tantrum and wanting attention.
The hackers we have been reading so much about recently are not doing anyone any favours. They are not crusading for the greater good they are merely digital terrorists. When their particular beliefs are not being met they do not communicate like civil people, they hide behind $TuP1D NAME$ and exploit those that aren’t doing things in the manner they want, happily letting innocents get caught up in the crossfire of their narrow-minded antics.
What will happen as a result of this? Systems will become more closed and more secure as a response to this behaviour. Hackers will insist that things should be more open and free, persistently refusing to take their own actions into account and just giving everyone they lash out against good reason to make things more secure and more closed.
Hackers need to drop the pretence and learn how to resolve their issues like civil, mature human beings.
In the good old days..
..the internet was filled with racists and bigots that would spew their idiocy behind a cowardly wall of anonymity.
Today, a lot of them boldly do it on Facebook.
Click the pic for the full-sized insult.
An Open Letter to Those That Write Open letters on Websites
Dear Self Important Idiot,
If I’ve learned one thing over the years, it’s the importance of good communication. Discussing your concerns with people that have no means to address them is nothing more than moaning. Dressing up a rant as an open letter is merely an effort to legitimise your verbiage as something more than it is.
Posing as a concerned consumer wishing for something better is made worthless by the fact you’re refusing to speak to the people you claim to be addressing. In fact, presenting an open letter on your own website suggests that you feel that whoever it is you’re addressing should be coming to you rather than you going to them. That’s big of you, I must say.
Really, an open letter presented in such a way is little more than a manipulative rant presented not to those you should be addressing but to an audience of regular readers that you know will back you up. After all, that’s why you’re putting it on your own site in front of your regular audience instead of, say, the people who can do anything about whatever it is you’re moaning about.
This all fits very neatly into the popular internet pursuit of having your opinions validated by others. If you feel you need more of that, you go for it. Just be more honest with yourself and admit what you’re doing rather than charade as someone doing something for the benefit of others.
If you genuinely wanted to raise the issue and get feedback on what can be done to improve things, you’d take your concerns to the people you’re addressing. You’re not doing that. You’ve failed to communicate effectively. What a shame. Nothing will change. Then you can write another open letter later on the topic of why the people you addressed in your earlier open letter are evil because they ignore the people that write open letters about them.
Ironically yours,
Koffdrop
Did I miss new year?
Apparently so!
Well, as far as koffdrop.com is concerned, I’ve never been known for my punctuality.
I hope 2011 finds you healthy and happy and that you hangover has cleared up by now. I’ve been consuming a chunk of media this year and it goes a little like this:
Movies
Tron: Legacy
This is everything you’d expect of a commercial sequel. Cue folks on the internet talking of their childhood memories being raped (presumably these folks weren’t raped during their childhood otherwise that’d leading to quite the conundrum in comprehension).
I was invited to see this at an IMAX cinema with some friends and family. I’d never been to an IMAX screen before and was looking forward to the experience. I don’t know what I should have expected but went away feeling that it was nothing more than a really big screen. Is that it or did I miss something?
The movie itself was quite forgettable but looked very pretty (assuming black and neon is your thing). Young Jeff Bridges almost made it out of the uncanny valley but there was still something a little off with him. I guess there’s an artistic excuse in that it can be argued that the representation is of a character that isn’t strictly human anyway. Still, we’ve come a long way since the original Tron – as indicated by Bruce Boxleitner’s silver hair and improved eyewear.
One for the fans.
The Social Network
Whilst I may have been blogging since before it was trendy I really am happy to let Facebook and Twitter pass me by. I realise I’ve advanced from convincing the older generation to get excited about this cool new things you can do with a computer and have now become that disinterested older generation that just doesn’t get what the fascination is with all this new jiggery pokery and don’t see how it will benefit me.
As such, a movie about Facebook held little interest to me. That was until I heard that it was directed by David Fincher, who was responsible for one of my favourite films. The overwhelmingly positive reviews of the movie didn’t hurt either.
The movie was captivating from the outset and the character of Mark Zuckerberg was compelling stuff. The story arc was predictable enough though whether this was creative licence or actual events was unclear – something that doesn’t bother me too greatly. Without question, many things were played up for the entertainment factor. The hacking-drinking game, watching grads hack a system, downing shots in order to earn their right to work for Facebook whilst being cheered on by a crowd of youths seemed a little too social to be real.
With a Fincher movie you can be certain of a solid, well put together piece of work. There is always the easter egg to look out for – that understated but original and eyecatching moment where the ordinary is filmed to look extraordinary. Look out for the Taxi scene in Zodiac, the break-in scene in The Panic Room or nearly any scene in Fight Club. It’s here in The Social Network too, giving moments of a boat race the feeling of being little more than toys in water.
Overall, the movie was enjoyable but lacking much meaning. Few of the characters, to me, had any appeal and the product that made them famous has no more appeal to me than it did a couple of hours earlier. If there’s a moral to it all it is: don’t go into business with your mates.
Anvil: The Story of Anvil
Perhaps a subtitle of This is not Spinal Tap would be more appropriate as you can’t help asking yourself if this is a documentary or a mockumentary throughout the running time of this movie.
I’m still undecided. With a drummer called Robb Reiner, a visit to Stonehenge and a shot of an amp that, yes, goes to eleven it’s a tough call.
Anvil, a metal band that have repeatedly managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, are still thrashing and moshing at 50 and refuse to give up the search for their big break. This movie follows the principle members of the band as they tour europe on public transport (assuming they can get a ticket for their next train) and record their thirteenth album.
Utterly watchable and equally heartbreaking and hilarious.
Games
Barely a week into the year and a few games crumble before my awesome gaming might! (The easy ones, that is)
Dead Nation (PSN / PS3)
A twin-stick shooter from the makers of one of my favourite PS3 games (Super Stardust HD). I was looking forward to this based on the developer’s pedigree despite it being zombie-based. Zombies seem to do it for a lot of people. I’m not one of those people.
What do you need to know? Besides the premise, not much. The game is split into large scrolling levels with checkpoints in each. Each checkpoint houses a weapon shop where you can spend the money that felled zombies inexplicably reward you with on buying and upgrading new guns and secondary weapons. Armour upgrades are found in the level and have different qualities – allowing you to forsake speed for durability, for example.
The core of the game, like Super Stardust before it, is the score multiplier. Every zombie you kill (besides the skinless peon types) releases a pair of dots that float towards you. The yellow is cash, the red is multiplier. As you stack up your multiplier, your score inflate accordingly. For the first third of the game I hovered around a 500x multiplier value. As the challenge ramped up and I took damage, both my character’s energy and multiplier suffered. It’s tough to say which hurts more. Multiplier carries over between levels. Should you die or quit mid-level then you forfeit your multiplier.
Visually, the game looks great. Being zombie-based, it all happens at night and exploits a number of good scenes such as a trainyard, hospital grounds and, of course, a graveyard. Hordes and hordes of the undead flood towards the player at various times, often lit up only by the muzzle-flare of the weapon you’re firing at them and the torchlight that serves to light up some of the environment near to you and act as I direction indicator.
The environments are littered with, er, litter and distractions as you find yourself constantly scanning for incoming threats. This small pieces of debris often do their job of convincing you something is coming when it’s not – only to take a few steps and find something is coming, but from a direction you’re not prepared for.
The lighting in the game is great, as is the music – gearing up during those moments of intensity to add more pressure onto the player. Slain zombies don’t fade away so, before long, you’ll find the screen piled with bloody pools of zombie-flesh as yet more of the undead rush towards you, hungry for your brains and your multiplier.
Some environmental elements are available too. Soda dispensers can offer you health or, if you shoot them, spill heaps of soda cans and serve to distract zombies. Likewise, civilian cars have boots you can ransack for money or you can shoot them to set of their alarms and have the baddies rush to the vehicle and attack it. Doing so will ultimately cause the car to explode and rip apart any zombies in its blast radius – their flesh comically flying toward the camera before raining back down onto the bloody floor.
Co-op mode is yet to be explored but, given that this was a key feature of the game, I’m looking forward to trying this out in the near future.
All in all, great trashy fun and another fine release from Housemarque.
Pixeljunk Shooter (PSN / PS3)
This is another PSN game that I nabbed during the Xmas sale.
It’s uncomplicated fun and has you traversing a planet’s cave structure with your twin-stick controlled ship in search of scientists to rescue. Hazard’s are present in the form of indigenous lifeforms and elements.
Whilst the initial appearance my remind people of games like Thrust, the game isn’t intended to be an echo of that genre. Control of your ship is simple and direct. You can shoot with one button and fire a grapple with another. Grappling is used to quickly haul scientists to your ship and also to pick up goodies like diamonds.
The game comes into its own with the introduction of fluids. In the first chapter you typically find yourself facing pools of water and flows of lava. When the two mix, these form a solid but destructible part of landscape. This type of landscape is peppered around the levels anyway so you’ll be familiar with its properties before you find yourself creating it yourself.
In spite of being called a shooter, the game is more of an environmental puzzler. Though, admittedly, most of your interaction is conducted by shooting. You’ll often see a scientist behind a brittle wall with a pool of lava on the other side. You can’t survive lava yourself and shooting the wall will surely result in death the the scientist. Invariably, there’ll be some water nearby and you’ll want to get the two fluids to meet in order to make the lava pool solid, shootable and safe. Then you just need to carve a path to the scientist and.. oh bugger. One fire too many and I zapped the poor bugger.
More fluids and elements come to play later in the game with different properties and threats. The depiction of these substances is great, moving and flowing convincingly. Your ship will also be given the chance to change properties which can have the effect of reversing environmental threats – making water deadly, for example.
I really enjoyed this game and intend to go back to it to replay levels and get my 100% rankings on each.
Righty, that’s it for now. I’m off to play some Nier which is both trashy and fun!
Snippets
Neither game related, both scooped up to me via my RSS feeds:
Tokyo introduces manga restrictions
Tokyo has banned the sale and lease of anime films and manga comics depicting rape, incest and other sex crimes to under-18s.
Call me crazy, but I would have thought that the distribution of sort of material would have such controls already. Perhaps I’m just an old prude.
Torn admits drunken bank break-in
Seventy-nine-year-old US actor Rip Torn admits to breaking into a bank while drunk and carrying a loaded gun.
This definitely rates as one of the best stupid-things-to-do-when-you’re-drunk stories I’ve heard recently. Mel Gibson’s really going to have to pull something out the bag to top that one.
Three months later and..
..and I’m still on pretty much the same topic.
This is one of the most true things I’ve read all year:
The fact of the matter is that even the largest video game journalism outlets are pampered. They are too used to the conveniences of internet publishing: editing after publication, deleting dissenting comments, removing and banning problem users, easily finding (or stealing) image and text content from other similar journalism outlets or PR departments; so much so that they’ve developed the intellectual and critical tolerance of a preschooler. They make a mistake — sometimes small, sometimes egregiously massive — and are called out on it, get angry, pitch a fit, then after suckling from the teat of their overly sympathetic, equally misinformed fans, coworkers and thin-skinned apologists, they forget about it. They move on, ignorant to their actual mistake, and ignorant to what they could have learned from it; all the while assuming they were right and their critic was wrong and that the critic can take their “trolling/bashing/hating” for a long walk off a short cliff for all they care.
I might write something myself one day soon. Maybe.
