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Gear News Archive: January 2005
January 31st STEAM Complaints Get Legalish As the STEAM stoppage story gets legs on the Internet, some have begun to wonder if STEAM is even legal the way that Valve implemented it. Don't forget, right before Half Life 2 was released, the distributor, Vivendi, brought legal action against Valve for bypassing Vivendi by distributing the game through STEAM over the internet. Some agreement was reached, but it was clear right from the start that STEAM was on shaky ground legally. Now Wil Harris over at The Inquirer is suggesting that Valve may be in some trouble for not disclosing the mandatory nature of the STEAM client software when installing or playing Half Life 2. The list of complaints leveled at Valve are fairly numerous, including that people who have bought retail games have found that someone had already hacked their CD key, and it could take up to 2 weeks to get the mess straightened out. Also, if you try to sell the retail game to a friend after you're done with it, you'll have to cough up another $10 to transfer the STEAM account. It also appears that STEAM account hacking is rampant, and that if your account is commandeered, you're SOL. All in all not a pretty picture, and one that might be headed for a class-action suit if enough people don't just get mad, but get organized. January 30th STEAM Valve Shut Off The Folks at Valve somehow turned the valve off on the STEAM client servers yesterday, and the HL2/counterstrike community got really steamed as a result. It looks like the problem is fixed, as I was just able to log on very quickly. Nonetheless, this incident points out the obvious glaring flaw in the entire STEAM concept; if you have to log onto an authentication server just to play a game, you are at the mercy of the server, and the administrators keeping it running 24/7. One little problem, ranging from a power outage somewhere, to a server going down, to a bad router could potentially bring everything to a halt. Designing games, especially single player games that should have nothing to do with the internet, as though they required internet access, just to keep tabs on who is playing, and who has what game codes, is a very disturbing development. Sometimes I feel like I'm logging onto a brokerage account, rather than just playing a first person shooter. Valve hasn't made many STEAM fans out of their loyal customers, and has instead thoroughly irritated many of those customers, including me. Let's hope this is a failed experiment, rather than a developing trend in the gaming industry. January 29th What's Up With NVidia Driver Updates? Folks are starting to grumble on the Internet about NVidia's recent slowdown in driver updates. NVidia hasn't released a new graphics driver since early November of last year, and they haven't put out an updated NForce chipset driver release for Windows 2000 since July (September for Windows XP). This would be fine if the current drivers were bugless, but the sad fact is that there are significant problems with the current video and motherboard drivers. Vacation's over NVidia, time to get back to work. January 24th Windows 64 and Intel 64 to be Ready at Same Time Well over 2 years after AMD announced 64-bit desktop computing, and well over a year after they delivered the goods, Microsoft is still delaying the release of WinXP 64. Linux has had 64-bit support for ages. What's holding up the release? Wintel. Yes, Intel can still pull some big strings in Redmond, and the current "coincidence" is an appalling example of just how big. Microsoft could have been working much closer with AMD, and could have had the 64-bit version ready many months ago. But we will all have to wait until at least April before the release of WinXP 64, which is when Intel's 64-bit AMD-imitation chips will be ready to go. Intel is becoming a big drag on the IT industry because they can't respond and innovate quickly anymore. As long as people rely on Intel to come up with new stuff, the wait times will get longer and longer. If it were up to Intel, the only 64-bit processor they would be making would be the Itanium. What a sad state of affairs. Stop dragging your feet Microsoft, WinXP-64 will be a good money maker, even if you release it before poor old Intel is ready. January 20th Bill Gates: the Great Spam Enabler Bill says he wants to eliminate spam by 2006. Considering Bill has a 90% monopoly on computer operating systems, he might be the guy to do it, right? Wrong. Bill is a major cause of the sea of spam we all swim through every day in our inboxes, because his 90% share of the desktop operating system market is what has made 90% of home computers so vulnerable to hackers, who turn them into spamming zombie computers. Virtually all illegal spam; for example, spam about drugs, fake watches, body part enlargement ointments, and phishing schemes to name just a few, comes through commandeered zombie computers running some version of Windows. To the clueless owners, their systems just seem "a little slow recently". Well, if they would just check their internet connection's traffic with a simple right-click on the network icon, they'd notice megabyte after megabyte of outgoing traffic. Bill's pitiful attempt to lock down Windows XP with service pack 2 shows just how far from ready this operating system is when it comes to security. Even with Bill's 2 year, all-out effort at a full security update, Windows XP is still easy to commandeer, as long as the users don't know what they are doing. One wrong click on a nefarious pop up ad is all it takes to start the process of turning your computer into a spam zombie. One wrong visit to a Bulgarian free porn site, or one simple double-click on an unknown email attachment, and you're sunk. So it doesn't matter if you know what you are doing, and run a clean, secure Windows system, because there are millions of people on the net who are clueless, who's zombie computers are going to spam you all day and night long. With anti-spam campaigns like Bill's, it won't be long before email is too much trouble to be useful anymore. Bill bought a nice little anti-spam program recently (Spam Inspector), but rather than make it better so that it could be useful in stopping spam, he is giving it away free, and unchanged, for one reason only. Before you can download the free antispam software, you have to let Bill upload a program to your computer that checks if you have a legal or illegal copy of Windows running. Obviously, Bill isn't taking this seriously at all. I've said it before, but it's worth repeating. Windows is too big and complex to lock down completely in it's current form. I doubt highly that Longhorn will be any better, because it's even bigger. A simpler, more secure kernel is needed, but that's not where Bill is going. He's going for the massive, insecure bundle of jumbled modules and add-ons. Thanks Bill. January 19th Rambus Still Kicking? The sleazy intellectual property company known as Rambus is still chugging along, primarily on their unscrupulous royalty collection for standard DDR DRAM sales from actual memory manufacturers. But unfortunately for Rambus, the European Patent Office has invalidated Rambus' patent claims, and has cleared Hynix of wrongdoing. Let's hope this stands, and provides some level of precedent for upcoming trials in the US. Rambus memory stinks, and permitting this company bleed the struggling DRAM industry is a corporate crime in progress. January 14th What's So Funny About Internet Jokes? Internet jokes are no laughing matter. I'm not talking about the fact that most of them are not funny, but the fact that clogging the internet with forwarded "jokes" takes up tons of bandwidth, and provides a simple way for viruses and Trojans to spread around the internet. I know some people who almost never actually write an email to their friends or family. They just endlessly receive and forward really awful internet jokes. Recently, some of these forwarded jokes are coming as executable movie files, further increasing the possibility that they contain malicious code. The opposite is also happening, where the "joke" is that your computer has been infected with a virus, when in fact it hasn't. Very funny. I find it a little sad that the internet provides so many useful possibilities, but all that many people can think of to do with it is to forward bad jokes. Who sends these things out in the first place? It's almost as bad as spam at this point. In any case, if any of you were thinking of forwarding me a bad joke you received in your inbox recently, do me a favor, send it to your trashcan instead. January 13th Mammals Ate Dinosaurs! I love it when old wives tales about dinosaurs are utterly destroyed. A new fossil found in China clearly shows that a cat-sized carnivorous mammal that lived 130 million years ago ate baby dinosaurs. How do they know? The fossilized bones and teeth of a baby dinosaur were found inside the stomach area of a fossilized mammal. A related, dog-sized version of the same mammal lived at the same time, and probably ate even bigger dinosaurs. Why is this a fairly big deal? Because many paleontologists have been saying for a long time that for most of the dinosaur's reign on earth, mammals were tiny, shrew-sized pipsqueaks, which couldn't eat much more than a fly. Now we have some confirmation of what many other paleontologist have suggested was the real downfall of dinosaurs; smarter, faster, meaner mammals eating dinosaur eggs and babies, rather than a big meteor or comet hitting the earth. January 11th Microsoft Using Spam Inspector to Inspect Your Copy of Windows I've been using a great little anti-spyware program called Spam Inspector for almost a year now. It was made by a little software company, amusingly named "Giant software". You may have heard that Microsoft, the giant vacuum cleaner of software companies, has sucked up Giant's Spam Inspector, and turned it into "Microsoft Antispyware". On closer inspection though, you find that MS Antispyware, which is available as a free download, actually IS Spam Inspector, virtually unchanged. Hmmm. Why would they do this? Pay good money for a good product, and then give it out for free without changing anything but the name? Is Bill going bonkers? Actually, no. It's another one of Bill's schemes to keep tabs on Windows users, and to search and destroy unlicensed copies of Windows. That's right, you need to download and run a program called "genuinecheck.exe" first, and it will check to see if you are running one of the many pirated versions of Windows or not. You'll all be glad to know that my computer passed the genuine-check test, and I was able to download the software. But once I found out that MS hadn't done anything to the original Spam Inspector except put their name on it, I didn't bother uninstalling the Giant version, and installing Bill's version. If Bill would spend as much time and effort on fixing Windows and Internet Explorer, rather than trying to figure out how to corral Windows pirates, he might actually have a decent operating system. January 10th The Dumbing of America Do you trust smart people? Do you believe in evolution? If so, you are in a minority in America. Conservative religious fundamentalists are making a big push to take political control in America, and intelligent liberals and science are threats to their dreams of dumbing down America. In school districts all over America, religious fundamentalists have taken control, and are stripping the teaching of evolution from science textbooks. They are replacing evolution with creationism, and calling it "intelligent design" to disguise it's real purpose from an uninformed public. To give you an idea of how far gone the reasoning process has become in religious fundamentalists, listen to this quote from a State Representative in Missouri, Cynthia Davis, regarding the teaching of evolution: "It's like when the hijackers took over those four planes on Sept. 11 and took people to a place where they didn't want to go," she said. "I think a lot of people feel that liberals have taken our country somewhere we don't want to go. I think a lot more people realize this is our country and we're going to take it back." Excuse me... "their country"? When did they buy the US? To these people, scientists like myself are akin to "Al Qaeda terrorists", wanting to kill innocent people and destroy the true American way of life. Science and math scores for kids in the US are some of the lowest of any developed country, and that's not good enough for the religious right, they want our kids to be even dumber. Feed them full of religion at church on Sunday, and then send them to "intelligent design class" for the rest of the week at school, that ought to boost their test scores in science. Pretty soon it won't just be cool to be dumb and uninformed, it will be mandated by religious fundamentalists running our country. The ironic part is that the religious right is taking the country where it doesn't want to go, but they will never see it that way. Why? Because they are very comfortable with a simple, religious view of life and the world, and anything complicated, and uncertain scares the hell out of them. Nothing is more frightening to a right-wing religious fundamentalist than evolution, and intelligent liberals teaching it to their kids in school. Up for another round of Inquisitions, anyone?
January 9th Internet Explorer ist Kaput! Three more absolutely critical flaws have been found in Internet Explorer 6 running under Windows XP with service pack 2. This is Microsoft's "most secure" browser option, and it's still not even close to being secure. In fact, it's a mess. Security firm Secunia says that the flaws allow remote system access and control. As of now, there are no patches for the patches for the patched browser. Further patches will be needed after the patched patches are patched. So keep a patchin' folks, and don't forget to duck while your surfing. January 8th Phony Terrorism Claims Used to Justify Indymedia Raid Federal agents confiscated servers for the independent news site "Indymedia" back in October. Indymedia has since gotten their servers back, but federal authorities refuse to unseal the secret court order explaining the rationale for the seizures, as requested by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The United States Attorney's Office in San Antonio Texas filed an opposition brief urging the federal court to refuse EFF's request to unseal. The reason given for requesting the refusal to unseal was that it would jeopardize an "ongoing criminal terrorist investigation". This is not the first time that federal authorities have harassed news outlets that don't tow the Bush Administration's line, and not the first time that fake claims of "terrorism" have been used to keep the federal activities secret. The Patriot Act and democracy are at direct odds with one another, and all Americans should be concerned. January 3rd More Internet Explorer Woes Still haven't switched from Internet Explorer to a secure browser? Think you're safe because XP Service Pack 2 is so great? Think again. Users of XP SP2 and Internet Explorer are completely vulnerable to a Trojan called Trojan.Phel.A, and all you have to do is open an infected window with IE to execute the malicious HTML code. Microsoft has known about this since October, but still doesn't have a fix ready. But I do... download Firefox for free, and use it instead of Internet Explorer. January 1st Deadline for Free Microsoft Cash Looms Microsoft lost a big legal battle in California, and agreed to "reimburse" California consumers and businesses with up to $1.1 billion in free money. But hardly anyone is taking MS up on the free money offer, and most of the $1.1 billion sits idle in a bank. The deadline for filing your claim is January 8th, and anyone who bought Windows, Word or Excel between February 18, 1995 and December 15 2001 is eligible to claim a reimbursement for being overcharged for the software. Home consumers of MS products can get up to $100 by just filling out a form. Microsoft insists that the lack of response to this free money offer means that Californians don't feel that MS overcharged them. I say it's because they haven't heard the offer exists. In case you live in California, and you bought MS products in the covered time frame, you can fill out a form here to get your money. But hurry! Copyright 2005, KickAss Gear |
