President Chavez of Venezuela is not your normal world leader. In fact he is easily in the top 10 for causing, consistently, the most controversy. This former paratrooper is seen by some as the next Fidel Castro, he presides over the largest oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere and he doesn’t like video games.
He recently said: “Those games they call ‘PlayStation’ are poison. Some games teach you to kill. They once put my face on a game, ‘you’ve got to find Chavez to kill him’.” that games “promote the need for cigarettes, drugs and alcohol” and much more.
Of course they are all wrong, as I have explained many times before on here. And it is interesting that the political leaders in some other countries such as France, Canada and South Korea actually understand video games and encourage them because of the wealth that this industry can bring to a nation.
Titan Rain was the U.S. government‘s designation given to a series of coordinated attacks on American computer systems since 2003. The attacks were labeled as Chinese in origin, although their precise nature (i.e., state-sponsored espionage, corporate espionage, or random hacker attacks) and their real identities (i.e., masked by proxy, zombie computer, spyware/virus infected) remain unknown. The designation ‘Titan Rain’ has been changed, but the new name for the attacks is itself classified if connected with this set of attacks.
In early December 2005 the director of the SANS Institute, a security institute in the U.S., said that the attacks were “most likely the result of Chinese military hackers attempting to gather information on U.S. systems.”
This is very serious stuff. And if they can get into heavily defended top secret computer systems just imagine how easily they could get into yours or into the systems of your place of work. Against this background we have this amazing announcement from Google:
Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.
First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.
Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.
Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers……….….more
So there you have it, official. The Chinese put malware on people’s computers which they then use to their own ends. What better way to achieve this than by using a browser video game? The client software for browser video game is on literally tens of millions of Western computers. The operators of these games even encourage you to put it on your work computers. And there is nothing to stop them then extracting all the information they want. Passwords, credit card numbers, email addresses etc. And your virus software will not show this up, because it is not a known virus. And your firewall will not protect you because you installed the client. I wrote an article on here “Is Evony Malware?”. Here is one of the comments that a reader called Lee added to this article:
I am a student studying computer games design at uni and decided to investigate Evony.com.
Just to see what some of these games are like etc. etc.
The game is actually kind of cool (found myself addicted and even spent a little money on it).
But I started to notice HUGE bandwidth use by the site as I played.
I am not the only one either, there are comments on the evony forums about this.
This is odd because all of the client info, the animations etc. are all downloaded in one big download at the start.
There is no streaming media so I began to wonder what was going on.
To cut a long story short I decided to break the law and reverse engineer Evony’s client.
Not to cheat. Not to rip them off or even to use even a scrap of the code.
But just to poke about a bit and find out what was going on, maybe even offer them some ways to improve things.
Aside from the fact that the whole thing is very poorly constructed (it is really very beginner coder level stuff. Reminds me of a lot of
what the first year students produce for assignments) it contained some very interesting information.
Included with the client are 2 peices of tracking software that monitor your web use and which applications you have open while the client is running.
These do not install independently on the machine though due to the limitations of flash and do not actually damage anything.
But they harvest massive volumes of information. My firewall was blocking a lot of outgoing transmissions and it turns out that these
were the data trying to be sent out. So they know nothing about me. lol.
However there is a LOT of data coming IN over the ports the client uses. In otherwords it is downloading something into my cache for use later.
I have bandiwdth restriction which slows these types of tricks down and I completely clear my cache every couple of hours if I am heavily using the net.
I also noticed that all the varanbles etc. are named Civony still and that there are multiple references to UMGE.
Even a couple of folders are simply called UMGE, one of these folders contains one of the spyware programs.
So I can only guess at where the data would end up if I didnt have a good firewall.
There are also commented out sections in the code which contain references to UMGE and Lam himself, though low on details.
Thank you for reading this.
Lee
Please note that I am not saying that Evony is malware or is associated with malware in any way. I am just repeating what other people have said. But personally I would not install it on my computer.
So take care out there. Only play browser games from reputable companies that you know the provenance of. Who owns them, where they are based, their phone number etc. To let just any browser game put their client on your computer is very dangerous, they can do anything they want once it is loaded and you won’t know anything about it and can’t prevent it.
And I am not the only one to think this. Las Vegas from January 7 to 10 saw the 2010 Consumer Electronic Show (CES) and it was one massive 3Dfest with all the world’s major consumer electronics manufacturers lining up to shout about where they are going with 3D and what products they will be offering to the consumers. This is the step change of the title.
I have said many times that the current LCD televisions are just an interim technology. They aren’t very good in most ways. This makes the TV manufacturers very happy indeed because soon tens of millions of consumers will be forced to throw their TVs away. Yet again. Apple are the masters of planned obsolescence with the iPod, it looks like the rest of the consumer electronic industry has been taking lessons. OLED and 3D will be the must have features for all the world’s living rooms just as soon as the factories can crank them out.
And remember that the futurologists are predicting that we are heading for a world where there are several televisions per person. You can see why, we become steadily wealthier and the cost of a television becomes less and less of a significant factor in buying one. This will become more marked with the ultimately cheap to make OLED technology. At the same time what a television does functionally in our lives has been increasing steadily. Originally they just showed real time broadcast material, now they are the key component of the entertainment hub, connected to all manner of other electronics and having considerable processing power of their own. I cannot see all screens going to 3D, but it will be essential for the main static viewing televisions.
Then there is content. This year the Western movie industry will produce about 170 feature films. Of these at least 20 are planned to be available in 3D. Partly this is the Avatar effect, partly it is the technology and customer awareness reaching critical mass. Soon nearly all movies will be filmed in 3D. Then there is broadcast television content, this is already happening, with sport being the obvious initial beneficiary. Watching soccer, darts, snooker, cricket etc with a stereoscopic 3D perspective will make 2D history very quickly. Which brings us to video games. From what I have seen the enhancement 3D brings is remarkable. Every developer and publisher should already have their 3D strategy mapped out.
Perhaps the biggest industry mover for 3D is Sony. It is almost as if they have bet the future of the company on it. Howard Stringer says: “We intend to take the lead in 3D. We are the only company fully immersed in every part of the 3D value chain”. This means their Bravia televisions, their Blu-ray players, their movie studios, their video cameras. And their game consoles. Sony have a strong and powerful strategy in place for the Playstation PS3 as a 3D gaming device. If they are quick and decisive they can at long last give themselves a competitive advantage over the Xbox 360.
Of course, like any electronic innovation, we need standards. It will be no good if every hardware manufacturer and every publisher implements 3D in a different way. The standards for gaming 3D are organised by Khronos and I suggest that everyone involved in the game industry takes a regular look at their website. Here is what they have to say about themselves: “The Khronos Group is a member-funded consortium focused on the creation of royalty-free open standards for parallel computing, graphics and dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos API specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge 3D platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests.”
Overall 3D is going to be of massive benefit to the gaming industry. Not only will our content be more immersive, suspending disbelief yet further, we will also have a flowering of creativity. And it will be a massive boost to the market as hundreds of millions of consumers seek out new experiences. We will rise the the challenges this presents, it is another big step in the development and growth of gaming as the premier entertainment media.
This is why new game consoles are so expensive and become so cheap after a few years. It is why we have a flood of ever more powerful and ever cheaper consumer gadgets. And it is why Bill Gates said that people overestimate technology change in the short term but underestimate it in the long term.
Moore’s Law also means that it is now very cheap and easy to put processing power in just about every electronic and electrical device, even the humble toaster! And one device in every home that has plenty of processing power is the television. This processing power could (and is) very easily used to play games. In fact I have written on here before that the increased processing power of televisions could be such that you won’t need a game console, that games will just become a service freed up from hardware constraints.
Which brings us to PlayJam, the leader in television games. They started in 1999. As it is now 2010 Moore’s law tells us that televisions already have 32 times the processing power than they did back then. In four years time it will be 128 times the power. As I said Exponential is powerful.
And so PlayJam can also grow exponentially. Currently they are in 30 million homes with 550 casual games and have generated 8 billion downloads in the last five years. Impressive. But it is going to get a lot more impressive still. With deals announced with Sony, Samsung and others announced at CES PlayJam are going to ramp up to 450 million devices.
So interactive television is going to be a more numerous gaming platform than all the game consoles put together. But it will still be miniscule compared with smart phones. These are also the recipient of the Moore’s Law bounty and will soon be churned out at over a billion units a year.
Just over a year ago I was talking on here about netbooks and how big they would be. And so it happened, in 2009 their market share in portable computing went from 5% to 25%. And quite right too. Offering just the power you need and outstanding portability, netbooks are a very effective tool for a huge array of tasks.
But I also warned that netbooks were an interim technology. They are held back by the need to adhere to the old Intel/Windows hegemony. Mainly because there were no viable alternatives. Also they arrived just as we were on a cusp of display technology. LCDs are not very good for displays, whatever way you look at it. Power hungry, fragile, over complicated, expensive to make and giving a poor image quality they are only used because of the lack of alternatives. Now OLED is making its presence felt all those disadvantages are being swept away.
OLED displays bring a massive power saving, but so does dumping Intel processors for the far more elegant ARM based computing. The big problem here is that the Intel processors have the heritage of over 30 years of software and ARM has a lot of catching up to do. This is especially felt in the areas of operating systems, browsers and all those utilities you take for granted like Flash, media players, email, pdfs and so on. No matter how good the machine you have to be able to use it.
This brings us to the ongoing war between Google and Microsoft that we are all benefiting from. Microsoft rescued Windows XP from the ashes to become the OS of choice for netbooks, but it is still bloatware. Google saw the opportunity and with amazing overkill decided to give us two new operating systems. Android is intended for smartphones and is rocketing in popularity, however it is already working very happily on far larger devices and runs on Intel, ARM and other processors. The Chrome operating system is a development of the Chrome browser and is available for both Intel and ARM processors.
So now, increasingly, manufacturers of portable devices can choose between processors without putting users at a software advantage. And increasingly they are choosing ARM. These ARM processors are made by a variety of chip manufacturers competing against each other so there is a huge pressure to get them into devices. Their biggest advantage is their immensely energy efficienty as their heritage includes a lot of mobile phone applications, this makes them ideal for Slate computing.
With all the above information you can see where we are going, there will be a whole new generation of devices (over 30 product launches in the next three months) that are some way between a laptop computer and a mobile phone. They will use OLED displays and mainly ARM processors, this will give them such low power consumption that they will always be switched on, like a mobile phone. Some will use keyboards, some touch screens, again just like mobile phones. These devices are so new that they don’t even have a name, some are calling them tablets, some smartbooks and some slates. And prices will start at below $200.
And the highest profile launch will be from Apple. On January 27 Steve Jobs will announce the iSlate at the Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts in San Francisco. The air is thick with rumours. That there will be two models with a 7 inch and a 10 inch display. That it will incorporate some elements of 3D. That its inbuild camera will be supported with powerful image recognition software. And that it will be a strong media player and that deals with major content providers such as TV companies have already been signed up. We are all sitting on the edges of our seats for this one.
But we need to put this whole market into context. Smartphones will very soon become the most common computing devices on earth. Over a billion a year will go into use. These slates/tablets/smartbooks will just be a subset of this market for people who need bigger screens and enhanced capabilities.
Which brings us to gaming. As the iPhone has already proven this will be one of the main uses for all these devices. We are entering a stage where the dedicated gaming machine is being abandoned in favour of general purpose devices that also happen to play games.
It is well established that the Daily Mail does not understand video games, which puts them at some distance from their readers who mostly do. The Daily Mail and it’s sibling the Sunday Mail relentlessly attack video games, but in doing so they only serve to display their ignorance.
All that video games are is another form of entertainment medium. Just like books, television, film, radio, opera, ballet etc. Games have several technological advantages in that they are interactive, non linear and connected, which gives them capabilities that are beyond the other media. But they are still just another form of media.
So when anyone is being critical of games it should be in comparison with other media. So issues such as sex, violence and addictiveness should not be taken in isolation in gaming. We should be looking at books, film etc and see how the same issues apply. And when it comes to sex and violence video games are tame. Film and books are far worse and books don’t even have an age rating. I read Karma Sutra, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Portnoy’s Complaint, The Perfumed Garden etc in my early teens.
Another thing that the Mail do not understand is that video games is a thriving business that adds to the economy. Worldwide it is worth somewhere between $50 and $100 billion a year. And the British share of this massive cake has been going down under the current, labour, government. For many years we were third in the world behind America and Japan. Now we are definitely behind Canada and almost certainly behind Korea and China as well. Which puts us sixth and going down rapidly.
The demise of the British video game industry is almost all down to government policy. Other countries have seized the opportunity to build for the future whilst British politicians seem mainly to attack that which they don’t understand. It is incredible, for instance, that video game development does not receive the same tax treatment as film making in the UK. These politicians are not in the real world.
‘Culture’ also has a minister of its own operating under the grand panjandrum of the Secretary of State. The Shadow Minister, Ed Vaizey, provides a foretaste of nonsense to come with his declaration that the video games industry – there’s culture for you – has been let down by the Government. It has not grown fast enough.
He proposes a Video Games Council.
Why there should be a government role in this field may well defeat you. It is at least as silly as the role of Hereditary Butler to the Crown etc and no doubt more expensive.
I have some news for Mr Alexander, by any and all definitions video games are culture. They entertain, have creativity, genre, subtlety, a history, engender emotion and have everything else that ballet or the opera have. Except that video games are massively more popular.
Then he completely misses the point that games are a huge industry that provide jobs, profits, wealth, exports etc. Just as heavy manufacturing once did in this country.
And then we come to him disparaging the excellent idea of a Video Games Council. It is a massive shame and a huge detriment to Britain that we don’t already have one. If Mr Alexander wants to criticise the concept he should put it in context. Let’s see him rubbish the Film Council, the Arts Council and the Music Council as well.
In fact Mr Alexander actually provides compelling evidence for the need for a Video Games Council, because if we had one we would not have to suffer so much ignorance from journalists (and politicians).
That’s right, over 300 million dollars stolen just of the one game, Modern Warfare 2, in 2009. Obviously Activision had much more stolen from them with other titles, but MW2 is by far the worst affected. According to TorrentFreak 4,100,000 copies of the PC version of MW2 were stolen and 970,000 copies of the Microsoft Xbox 360 version.
Thieves using bit torrents are indulging in the biggest orgy of theft in the history of humanity. When they can steal with no chance of getting caught then they will. How they justify this appalling lack of moral fibre to themselves is beyond me. I have heard a whole litany of empty excuses from the thieves to try and justify their actions but the fact remains that they are benefiting from other people’s labour that they should have paid for but haven’t. So they are thieves.
And they are stupid because they damage that which they love. Activision are not about to go out of business because of this particular frenzy of stealing. But in the past plenty of other game companies have gone bust because of game theft. And many top creative game developers have left the industry for ever. We have lost a huge number of potentially great games to piracy. It doesn’t even need for the company to go bust, they can just allocate their resources elsewhere. There are nearly as many Nintendo DS consoles in the world as Wiis, PS3s and Xbox 360s combined. So where are all the great DS games? That’s right, piracy stops them even being written.
The fact is that if you want people to work for you creating great games then you have to pay their wages, they have to pay for their food and rent just like everyone else.
There are a number of possible solutions to this massive stealing problem:
Educate the thieves. Explain their low morality to them and the harm they do to the development of games. I think this has no chance of succeeding, they have proven, on a massive scale, that they are perfectly happy to steal.
Technical protection. This is the best solution. A game console’s main purpose in life is to serve as an anti piracy dongle. All three current generation home consoles succeed at this, the PS3 works best, followed by the Wii with the Xbox 360 putting up a distinctly average performance. But open, multi purpose platforms like the PC and the iPhone lack this technical protection and so piracy is rife.
Using the ISPs to stop peer to peer distribution of stolen IP. This is probably the main viable route. Already implemented in France and proposed for the UK and most other civilised countries. The scale of thieving is so enormous that the thieves are not directly punished, instead they get a warning letter. If they continue to steal they get another warning letter. Then if they ignore both these warnings they are disconnected from the internet. A very mild course of action against thieves, many of whom have stolen thousands of dollars worth of stuff they should have paid for.
Publisher activism. The publishers can go after the thieves that are stealing from them directly. However the thieves don’t like this and indulge in massive online activism to stop it. So the publishers, even though they are morally right to protect their property, are loath to take this sort of action for fear of Streisand effect.
Government action. There are millions of thieves out there that the government is turning a blind eye to. In fact government authority is being totally usurped. If I fancied a new Ferrari and went and stole it the police would show a great interest. However is someone steals a game that I publish, using torrents, they aren’t interested. Yet the Ferrari and the game are both the result of people’s labour.
Eventually something will be done, stealing on this scale is unsustainable whatever way you look at it. In the meantime game development suffers and the thieves are too stupid to realise it.
I have 
