Time to rant a bit about a "new technological advantage" I saw the other day.

I just got my BluRay player hooked up to the internet, so I can marvel at the genius of all the technologies now available for me.
Sure it is fun to watch YouTube videos on the BluRay/TV without having to hook up a computer - but well, this isn't about that....

I popped in some disc I just bought and there was a notice for some kind of "chat" system.
Interested to see what benefits I could take advantage off now that my player was finally hooked up, I navigated over with my remote.

Well - in essence it was just a basic chat system, which would place a big chat box in the side of the screen and I could then invite my friends to "watch the movie" with me and "chat with them" while doing it ..... all from the comfort of each our own couch.
Now that is stupid enough to begin with - if I want to watch movies with friends, I - you know - visit them, and if we watch movies, I sure as heck would not want a chat box taking up the screen.

But that was not what struck me .... one method of chatting was using the remote and the keys like on phones, but the alternative was using a computer to type on, which of course also needs to be online.
But if you have a computer, hooked up to the internet, and you can use to chat on - why on earth would you then chat via a BluRay movie system?

Isn't that what you would use a - you know - chat software on your computer for? Wouldn't it be much better to just use your usual IM client and chat on the computer, if you have a computer anyway? Seriously - How irrelevant can one technology be.....

(And yes, I understand the irony in me complaining about such technology after hooking my BluRay player up to the net)

 

I noticed this blog: thenextweb.com: Google Blocking Negative Search Recommendations On Islam – Why? today (a bit late possible).
It tells about how Google possible is censoring search suggestions which could be controversial - in this case towards Islam.

Most everybody knows about Google in China so we know Google does … lets call it fiddle to be neutral ... with the search results in various situations.
However this begs the question - how do we actually know that Google is acting fairly and doesn’t censor or cheat with the search results in ways we cannot know?

Their revenue comes from advertisement and being able to provide a clear picture of what people search for to provide targeted advertisement.
So it would stand to argue that they can’t really afford to suffer doubt about their objectivity and whether or not they alter or effect or even censor search results.
However how would anybody know?

Is Google now so big that it doesn’t matter if they do questionable things? Can … would … people even stop using Google if it was confirmed that they are actively censoring? Is it even possible? Or are Google now so big that they can do what they want, when they want?

One can only speculate but my trust in Google is diminishing as they keep growing bigger and spand more and more features of the web, and with situations like this and China.
I still use their services, however …for now.

Do no evil.

 

I experienced the following rather unhelpful exception at work today.
Padding is invalid and cannot be removed

With a stacktrace something along the following:

System.Security.Cryptography.RijndaelManagedTransform.DecryptData(Byte[] inputBuffer, Int32 inputOffset, Int32 inputCount, Byte[]& outputBuffer, Int32 outputOffset, PaddingMode paddingMode, Boolean fLast) +7596702
System.Security.Cryptography.RijndaelManagedTransform.TransformFinalBlock(Byte[] inputBuffer, Int32 inputOffset, Int32 inputCount) +208
System.Security.Cryptography.CryptoStream.FlushFinalBlock() +33
System.Web.Configuration.MachineKeySection.EncryptOrDecryptData(Boolean fEncrypt, Byte[] buf, Byte[] modifier, Int32 start, Int32 length, IVType ivType, Boolean useValidationSymAlgo) +225
System.Web.Security.FormsAuthentication.Decrypt(String encryptedTicket) +246

After doing some searching and more or less complex debugging, and resetting the application pool and what not, I find the simple solution.

I had two projects running on my localhost which both used the default cookie name for forms authentication, which then apparently conflicted with each other. Do’h.
But well, problem solved.

Some days ago a YouTube video appeared of a Danish women looking for the father of her child - which she supposedly met some evening and didn’t remember the name or nationality of.
The video can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xEiMpPKjFo
Now, many people thought it was real and it sort of vent “viral” which can be seen in the comments.

It has now been revealed that the video is a fake (oh the horrors - welcome to the Internet)  and is an advertisement from a Danish ad agency to promote “Denmark”, called “VisitDenmark“.
Well - that’s that to begin with, and I didn’t really care …. until I saw a representative for the agency in the news on a Danish TV station talking about he trick, which prompted my reaction.

The representative, sad there and kept repeating a memorized mantra that it was to promote awareness of the place called Denmark (duh)  and when asked if they had thought of the consequences and image they’d project of the Danish women, she repeated another memorized line of keywords - that they believed it promoted an image of “independent” women, taking “choices” in a “society” which allows them to take their own choice…….and other such keywords.
If I were a specialist in body language however, I’d also say she was lying about that - as she spoke those memorized keywords with erratic movements of upper body and head, and the attempts at emphasizing the keywords compared to the rest of the words, but I’m not a specialist - so..... It just looked like it wasn’t a reaction they had anticipated and needed to come up with excuses fast.

Funny though - my, and many others, impression of the messaged conveyed, was instead that they promoted Danish women as easy, willing to sleep with random tourists without knowing their names or nationality.
Visit Demark and try our easy women…. That’s the message they convey in my opinion.
The general reaction so far from people and politicians alike are also that it is distasteful attempt of promoting Denmark, and many remarks on both YouTube and elsewhere are the same interpretation as mine.

I guess we’ll see if this plan creates publicity and works or not…. Because I’m not a subscriber of the “any publicity is good publicity” theory - many people deliberate avoid products when displayed in stupid adverts or when companies lies to the public. This is no difference whether it is milk bought in the supermarket or awareness of a nation.

I can’t wait to see the consequences for VisitDenmark - because I’m sure we’ll see some and this case isn’t over yet.

So, finally got my VGA to DVI adapter only to find out that my monitor already supported VGA connection (d’oh), and then I got my old computer booted up.
Seems it contained a 700 MHz CPU and 256 RAM with a couple of gigs of hard drive. Plenty of power for my needs – perhaps a little too much for some of my old games, but we’ll see.

However it was extremely unstable, chrasing and locking up left and right and booting up very slowly – time to dig out a Win98 disc and reformat I think. Phew – can’t remember last time I reformatted a computer instead of just buying a new harddrive :D

Some other problems I noticed right off the bat was that even though there is a soundcard installed, it didn’t seem to produce any sound. So I will have to check whether it is installed properly, and if it even works.
The CPU fan made quite a lot of noise (dust problem I hope), so will have to look at that as well.
I’ll need to identify the graphics card, so I can install a proper version of direct X (5 or 6 most likely) which I’ll have to pull from an old disc, as I do not intend the computer to connect to the internet.
The running of a CD yielded a BSOD, which I hope will be fixed with a reformat – otherwise I might have to look into a new CD drive (properly around 4-16x speed) or burn my original CDs to new discs so I can test if it is scratches which cause the problem. Some of these CDs are old – back to mid 90s.
I’ll need to find drivers online for various things and get them burned down and installed. For example – drivers for my old Joystick (which is a Wingman Interceptor - best joystick ever), the soundcard (if it works), the graphic card and what else I find.

So there are still plenty of things to do to get it working properly – but with a bit of luck – I have the entire machine already build and only software problems remain and I don’t have to worry about hardware.

Here in Denmark we received a new tax structure just recently, and one of the items was that people could cash in a sort of “forced tax savings”, which had been 1% over a number of years when the economy was moving very fast. The economical aspect of this isn’t terrible interesting (for this discussion).

But apparently the interest for doing this have been so large that it has crashed the website of the organization which controls this forced saving, because people were interested in seeing how much money they had in their forced savings.
That is the true problem of the internet in its given form. Anything extraordinary happens – and websites can’t handle the traffic.  This has been seen multiple times throughout the years, and it is basically a distributed denial of service attack. Sites can’t handle traffic and shuts down. I tried this morning and could still not access the web site, and I tried yesterday around noon. It is a good thing it isn’t a critical service.

I remember back in 2001 when the twin towers were hit. Every news site I knew was down and where impossible to reach. Suddenly the television news channels received a significant boost, because people couldn’t get their news online and we were forced back to early 90s instead.

Imagine something important happens and you have to get access to your home bank, but the bank is down because everybody else is trying to access it as well. Not a comforting thought.

As more and more of our services and daily life starts to be accessible mainly (only) via the internet – this is a problem which will escalate.
Question is if the companies who aren’t ready will want to pay for being proactive with such things, or they’ll just ignore the problem because it is “extraordinary” events which cause it ….. well, extraordinary or just people wanting to get some money.

 

In a nostalgic spur of the moment – I’ve decided to try and build up a gaming computer to run games from the late 90s.

I’m especially interested in the Wing Commander/privateer series and other of these "interactive movie" games, Masters of Magic and a number of adventure games, I have stored.

Because I like many of the old games, I follow initiatives such as Good Old Games and support it by buying some of the games. But because I have a number of the games still laying around on CD’s – unfortunately I seem to have lost/misplaced my floppy – I thought I might as well try and boot them up properly.

So my first order of business will be to identify what kind of hardware I actually have laying around the place. I basically have one full computer, but I have no idea what specs it contains, so I need to get it booted up somehow – meaning I have to invest in a VGA to DVI adapter so I (hopefully) can run it on my LCD monitor at home. Have to get a hold of a PS/2 mouse and keyboard, well the keyboard I have, unsure about the mouse. But to judge the hardware I don’t really need the mouse.

I also have an old Wingman Extreme joystick lying around – really curious if it still works as it was a wonderful joystick.

But time will tell – but I do hope to manage to boot up some of my old games again without having to rely on DOSBox or similar.

I saw the editorial in Time Magazine by Walter Isaacson about how to save newspapers.
Basically the premise is that newspapers are going under, or cancelling out “good journalism” to save money because fewer and fewer are buying the physical papers but reading the content online for free.
His solution is to get people to pay “micropayments” for reading news-material on the web, a small cost per article or something like that.
Now granted, I agree with him on a number of situations, but I question the methods.
Yes, journalists must be paid to do journalistic work. Naturally.
Yes, newspapers are currently too depending on advertisement companies then their reader because their revenue comes from advertisement. This can create a conflict of interests.
But that’s about as much in agreement as I can be.

I see many problems with starting to charge for online reading of news.
1) It only takes one of two companies to shoot down everybody else. If a few companies doesn’t charge for their content, then people will just go to the free alternatives and leave behind the ones you have to pay for. This is how most online services have worked.

2) Legality. If everybody starts charging, then I’m all but sure that several “gray” providers will pop up. It happens with everything online and it is a problem, but it is also a reality. Gaming, Music and Movie industry suffers from this. Some people spend their free time ripping off content providers and posting it up for free. That would open up for a whole can of “allofmp3” or “piratebay” problems. Charging for content opens up for those doors and the cost of keeping your content yours might prove way to high to be cost-effective.

3) By charging (more) for content, people will likely stop reading a multitude of different providers.
Personally- when I bought newspapers I read perhaps two at the most. Now when I read news online, I read about 8 different news sites. This provides me with a better chance of getting an unbiased picture of events and forming my own opinion. If I were to be charged for the content, I doubt I’d read more than a couple again.
And anybody who’ve seen Fox News for example, knows how unbiased “news” providers can be. I think it’ll hurt.
Now granted, this is also a risk under the current model cause if many providers go bankrupt, you are faced with fewer avenues through the physical medias, but that still mean there are free alternatives online.

4) By charging, you start implying that only those who can afford it, are allowed to read the news coverage. It can quickly create a divided segment where those who can’t afford to go through multiple sites either as in item 3) sticks with 1 or 2 or none at all.

5) Journalism will be much more entertainment then news. One of the arguments was to make journalists dependant on the readers and not the advertiser. Well nice and idealistic goal, but what do we usually see when a content provider becomes depending on its subscribers. Much more populism and sensationalism. It becomes content for entertainment and not enlightenment. These companies will want to attract most people, and well – unfortunately that usually means catering to the lowest common denominator. That will counter the “good journalistic principles” it was meant to promote.

6) Country barriers. If providers start charging online, then they must remember that it is global. I read occasionally US and UK news sites. If I were to pay, would I be allowed to? Or will it be like iTunes where I can only buy from my local store and not from the US or UK store?
The web is global, and the world is as well. But payments aren’t always.

7) Nationally subsidized alternatives. In this country – and many others – we have national supported, public service, channels we already pay for – either via taxes or license fee. Payment we can’t avoid. If we also were to start paying, or pay more, for other content providers, we’re back in item 4. People will leave them behind because they can get their news coverage from the public service channels. It will be a problem for competition.

Now, I do not have the answers – but I would think the way forward would be to offer a split plan. Subscription and free. Subscribe if you want to know more, more in depth articles, forums to talk to the editors and journalists and so on – but keep some content free, if nothing else to lure people into it.
Otherwise it’ll start to spell doom for the majority of content providers in a state we haven’t seen yet. Look at the music industry and how well it fares because they have problems adjusting to a global and intangible reality of the internet – and that is a more physical product which you can keep and take with you. News is much more intangible and fleeting.
Micro transactions on its own? I think it’ll be a big step in bring the industry all the way down, or weed out so we have one or two mega-corporations.

I got a call from one of our clients today that the design of the website we had made for them, was being ripped off almost entirely by a Chinese based company.
And sure enough; entering the url of the offending website into my browser, it was all but an exact copy of the site I had made for the client. 
Strangely enough, in the footer the rip-off artists had entered “copyright” and “all rights reserved” and nonsense like that, but had been so lazy that the HTML header which stated our company as developers was still present .... I mean, how obvious can you get?

This caused much amusement in-house and apparently our client wasn’t terrible worried as well, despite the site selling copied versions of some of their products.

The most fun part for us was however, when we afterwards discovered that the offending website was utilizing resources still located on the original site, such as the CSS files and stuff like that, and also the JavaScript file.
They had been so lazy they didn’t even move those files to their own site.
That meant we suddenly had a measure of control on that site via those resources.

There were many suggestions on which course of action to take. There were suggestions to redirect them to “Free Tibet” sites (it being a Chinese site it would likely have been blocked anyway), to interjecting various forms of scripts to bog down clients, or just redirecting to something plain disgusting or pornographic … or simply change the CSS to display all sorts of things on the website.
But common sense prevailed (it was work related after all, so I didn’t’ want to be too offensive) and I choose to redirect incoming traffic to http://bsa.org as it was the only anti-piracy organization I could think off at the moment.

I wonder how long it’ll take them to fix that, given how lazy they were to begin with. Guess I’ll have to check tomorrow to see. And if they haven’t changed tomorrow, it might be time to interject some snowflakes on the website instead.

Stardock have published a “Bill of Rights” for gamers which is an interesting read and an interesting initative . Could bring some integrity back into the industry as seen from the view of a consumer like me. (Yes, I like to play computer games; it is a good relaxing tool for me)

The list looks like this:
The Gamer’s Bill of Rights:
 1.  Gamers shall have the right to return games that don’t work with their computers for a full refund.
 2.  Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state.
 3.  Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game’s release.
 4.  Gamers shall have the right to demand that download managers and updaters not force themselves to run or be forced to load in order to play a game.
 5.  Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will play adequately on that computer.
 6.  Gamers shall have the right to expect that games won’t install hidden drivers or other potentially harmful software without their consent.
 7.  Gamers shall have the right to re-download the latest versions of the games they own at any time.
 8.  Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers.
 9.  Gamers shall have the right to demand that a single-player game not force them to be connected to the Internet every time they wish to play.
10.  Gamers shall have the right that games which are installed to the hard drive shall not require a CD/DVD to remain in the drive to play.

I do, however, have some response to their list (of course hehe)

1) This should already be covered by consumer laws. Sure some stores try to weasel out of it with "products have been open" and all that - but it is consumer law.

2) In theory I would agree, if it weren't for 2 things.
Gamers themself.
Software is never "done".

Gamers are inherently impatient and want their game now and not later. Just watch game forums when an anticipated game gets delayed. People are ranting up and down demanding release dates.
Secondly - they buy all these unfinished products, so why should developers change their way willingly when the consumers seems to be indeffierent.
Yes, I know we are many who complains about the bugs, but we are also many who still buy the products (although I do avoid some because of bugs myself, I'm speaking generally).

Software is "never" done. Sure it can be more or less finished, but due to the complexity of the software and the machines they run on. Bugs are impossible to weed out. Some players will get hit by more bugs then others which is quite visible. Sure more testing can be done, more quality control etc - but ultimately it comes down to an economical call "can we sell this and will people buy".
And the sorry state is that people buy them :)

3) Depends on the game and the "meaningful" content. If a game was completed fully (as per item 2) then demanding additional content for free is perhaps a bit ..... naive and greedy.

4) Completely agree. I should be the one to decide what runs and when on my computer.

5) Very much agree. And the same goes for recommended. It is an annoying thing when companies understate the specs requiered simply to sell more copies. There isn't much worse then playing a game with frames per minute simply because the specs were understated.

6) Agreed. See point 4.

7) Agreed. Would be nice. Would also mean the need for less discs in this day and age of broadband.

8) Agreed to an extend. The problem is much more complex then this, but I do agree that customers - legal, legit customers - shouldn't be penalized because a large segment of people can't figure out how to behave. This does not mean I do not understand and sympathize with anti-piracy protection. Is should just not be so invasive it causes problems for legit customers.

9) Well - connection to the web could be a means of copy protection, in which case I find the procedure less invasive then many others. A matter of taste, which I see no issue with personally, but then again - I'm on broadband and am always connected anyway :o

10) Oh yes yes yes. The most important point on the entire list in my book. I so hate having to have the discs in the drive.

But all in all, I think it is a good initiative and more power to them for it. Lets hope the industry could start living up to some of it again.