Blackmoor Vituperative

As you may recall, e360 Insight wasn’t exactly pleased when Spamhaus labeled it a spammer last year; in fact, e360 Insight’s owner sued the UK-based company. Now, in an ironic taste-of-your-own-medicine twist, e360 Insight is being sued for (allegedly) spamming an individual in California.

(from WebProNews, e360 Pulls 180 On Spam?)

I covered the Spamhaus suit in this blog back when it happened. The short version is that notorious spammer David Lindhardt sued Spamhaus for adding Lindhardt’s company to their list of spammers, and a judge was incompetent enough to rule in the spammer’s favor even though Lindhardt was and is violating Federal and state law.

Well, now people are finally suing David Lindhardt. It’s about time. Spamming scumbag.

Don’t expect a reversal of the ruling against Spamhaus, though.

Incidentally, the article to which I am linking is misnamed. e360 has always been a source of spam. There’s no “180” involved in this. I think the author just thought it was clever to have “360” and “180” in the same title. I guess it didn’t bother him that it makes no sense.

This is an update on my evaluation of World Of Warcraft.

Well, I have used up my free trial period with World Of Warcraft. I really can’t see myself paying to continue. It’s just too much of a chore to target and attack things.

Star Wars Galaxies is even worse, at least by default. I have found a number of settings to ameliorate SWG’s worst problems, but it still requires several taps on a keyboard and a mouse click just to attack someone, and periodically the mouse will abruptly change “modes” or the attack will stop working and you have to hit Escape and then try again.

On the upside, SWG is smart enough to pivot the character when the target moves — WOW doesn’t. Instead, you get an idiotic “you must face your target” message.

You can’t see it, but I am shaking my head.

I swear, I wish the developers for these games would go play Guild Wars for ten minutes and see how a user interface ought to be designed.

Oh, well. I have some more free time with Star Wars Galaxies. Maybe something will come up that makes the game’s UI less freaking frustrating. I don’t have high hopes, but I haven’t given up yet. It’s Star Wars, for crying out loud.

This is an update on my evaluation of Star Wars Galaxies.

I have discovered some tricks to make the user interface for Star Wars Galaxies a little better. There is an auto-aim function that makes it less of a click-fest, you just have to enable it. Every. Time. You. Attack. Something. Yeah, well, at least it’s there.

http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/players/guides.vm?id=80115

There are also a whole lot of guides available, which is pretty cool.

http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/en_US/players/guides.vm
http://swg.allakhazam.com/db/guides.html?guide=538

And there is a radar, it’s just not available during the entire first portion of the game. So from levels 1 to around 8 or so: no radar. That’s just stupid.

However, there is a crazy level of detail in this game, for everything from trading to smuggling to bounty hunting and god knows what else. There are so many slash commands, it’s almost like a MUD. I used to really like MUDs.

So I am still playing. It’s growing on me.

Well, I played Star Wars Galaxies for an hour or so this afternoon, and I have to say, the UI for Galaxies looks really dated. Like, mid-1990s dated. By default, there are no targeting hotkeys at all, and there is no radar/minimap, making it even worse in those respects than World Of Warcraft.

I am pretty baffled. How hard is it to look at how other games do things and implement them? I’m not talking about curing cancer, here.

Also, the animation is really crude. Very clunky. World Of Warcraft and Guild Wars are both much better.

Still, it’s Star Wars, so I am inclined to give it more of a chance than I gave Warcraft (and I still may try Warcraft again, especially after comparing it to Star Wars Galaxies). But my initial impression of the game is that if it were anything other than Star Wars, I’d be uninstalling it now.

A federal judge in Philadelphia yesterday ruled against a 1998 U.S. law that makes it a crime for operators of Internet sites to let anyone under 17 have access to sexual material, rebuffing the government’s argument that software filters are ineffective and upholding earlier rulings that the law infringed on free-speech rights.

In a detailed decision, Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. found that the Child Online Protection Act would not be effective in protecting children from online pornography, and that parents could shield their children by using software filters and other, less restrictive means that do not curtail adults’ rights to free speech.

(from WashingtonPost.com, Judge Rejects Law Aimed at Internet Porn)

I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later: a judge who has a clue about the Internet.

Check out this giant crystal cave in Mexico.

Last summer, when I wrote “Vicious orchestrated assault on MacBook wireless researchers,” it set off a long chain of heated debates and blogs. I had hoped to release the information on who orchestrated the vicious assault, but threats of lawsuits and a spineless company that refused to defend itself meant I couldn’t disclose the details. A lot has changed since then: Researcher David Maynor is no longer working for SecureWorks, and he’s finally given me permission to publish the details.

The scandal broke when Jim Dalrymple put out a hit piece on security researchers David Maynor and Jon “Johnny Cache” Ellch, saying that their research was a “misrepresentation.” Dalrymple based his conclusion solely on the word of Apple PR director Lynn Fox. David Chartier went even further and said that, “SecureWorks admits to falsifying MacBook wireless hack” based solely on a SecureWorks disclaimer (it’s no longer there) that merely reaffirmed what the original video was saying all along — that the hack demonstrated in the video was based on third-party wireless hardware. I had personally interviewed the two researchers before this whole scandal broke out, and I specifically asked Maynor and Ellch if they were using Apple’s Wi-Fi hardware in their official Black Hat demonstration. They clearly said that no Apple Wi-Fi product was used for the exploit. That’s why I was shocked to see the researchers blamed for changing their story and “admitting” they made the whole thing up when no one changed the story and no one admitted to anything. Yet the headline from Chartier, along with Dalrymple’s story, was blasted all over the Web after it made Digg and Slashdot. Everyone simply assumed Maynor and Ellch were frauds because they supposedly “admitted it.”

[…]

So what was the end result of all this? Apple continued to claim that there were no vulnerabilities in Mac OS X, but came a month later and patched its wireless drivers (presumably for vulnerabilities that didn’t actually exist). Apple patched these “nonexistent vulnerabilities” but then refused to give any credit to David Maynor and Jon Ellch. Since Apple was going to take research, not give proper attribution, and smear security researchers, the security research community responded to Apple’s behavior with the MoAB (Month of Apple Bugs) and released a flood of zero-day exploits without giving Apple any notification. The result was that Apple was forced to patch 62 vulnerabilities in just the first three months of 2007, including last week’s megapatch of 45 vulnerabilities.

Apple is a mega corporation that nearly smashed the reputation of two individuals with bogus claims of fraud. It didn’t matter that they weren’t the ones pulling the trigger because they were pulling all the strings. David Chartier should be ashamed of himself and his blog. Jim Dalrymple of Macworld and his colleagues who jumped on the bandwagon should be ashamed of their reporting. Frank Hayes was the only one of Dalrymple’s colleagues who had the decency and honor to apologize. Most of all, shame on Apple.

(from TechRepublic, How Apple orchestrated web attack on researchers)

This supports two things I have been saying ever since I had the misfortune of using a Mac PowerBook for a while and being exposed to the whole “cult of Mac” back in 2005:

1) Macs are not secure. The only reason that Mac users think Macs are secure is because the Apple marketing machine tells them so (as in the recent Mac vs. PC television advertisements) and because Mac users are willfully ignorant.

2) Apple is every bit as ruthless, monopolistic, and anti-consumer as Microsoft is, if not more so. The only real difference between the two companies is that Microsoft is better at it.

Almost two years ago, the FSF (Free Software Foundation) started work on the first update of the GNU GPL (General Public License) in over a decade. A last-minute hitch, though, is keeping the license from appearing.

The FSF announced at the May 2005 LinuxWorld Expo that the GPLv3 would be out soon . The project has taken a little longer than expected. At last report, the GPLv3 (GNU General Public License 3) was to be out by early 2007.

According to Peter Brown, the FSF’s executive director, “We continue to work on the details of the GPLv3 as it relates to the situation presented by the Novell and Microsoft deal. We are researching issues related to potential unintended consequences of the language we plan to adopt. As soon as we are satisfied with the results of our research we plan to bring forward the next draft.”

As written, the patent clauses in the Novell/Microsoft agreement do not violate the current terms of the GPLv2. The leader of the FSF and chief author of the GPL, Richard Stallman, explained at a GPL meeting in Tokyo in November 2006: “What has happened is, Microsoft has not given Novell a patent license, and thus, section 7 of GPL version 2 does not come into play. Instead, Microsoft offered a patent license that is rather limited to Novell’s customers alone.”

Stallman went on to say that “perhaps it’s a good thing that Microsoft did this now, because we discovered that the text we had written for GPL version 3 would not have blocked this, but it’s not too late and we’re going to make sure that when GPL version 3 really comes out it will block such deals.”

Sources close to the creation of the new version of the GPL believed that correcting this language wouldn’t take long to craft. If so, the GPLv3 would still have appeared by its last scheduled delivery date of January 15, 2007. That did not prove to be the case.

It now appears that there may be one more draft of the GPLv3 before the final version is released. [Sources believe] that the next draft should appear on or immediately before its annual associate member and activist meeting March 27 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

(from eWeek, Where, Oh Where, Is the GPLv3?)

This is crazy. It’s like an arms race: companies like Microsoft keep trying to find new ways to screw people over, and the FSF keeps having to come up with new defenses against them. Well, I’m glad at least the FSF is in my corner.

Adobe Systems has announced the first public alpha release of Apollo, its cross-operating system run-time for Web developers.

The technology is available on the Adobe Labs site.

So… is this good, or evil? I hate to say it, but it sounds to me that Adobe wants to do what Macromedia wanted to do and nearly succeeded in doing: subverting the Internet and turning it into their proprietary product. But I will have to do more research before I make up my mind.

I spent about 5 hours today playing World Of Warcraft for the first time, using a 10-day free trial. I played EverQuest years and years ago, but I have forgotten most of how that game worked, so my main basis for comparison will be Guild Wars, which I have been playing reasonably regularly for about four months.

The look and feel of World Of Warcraft is much more “cartoony” than Guild Wars, and I personally like the landscapes in Guild Wars a lot better. They’re just beautiful, particularly Cantha (the Asian-style continent). I have been to two continents in World Of Warcraft. One is a sort of cartoon forest with lots of graveyards, which is neat in a sort of “Nightmare Before Christmas” way. The other is a large desert, which looks like a cross between the the Flintstones and the desert where Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote had their battles of wits. So far, Guild Wars wins for look and feel.

The interface in Guild Wars is very similar to the one on World Of Warcraft, which is probably to be expected: buttons across the bottom, radar map in the upper right, character status in the upper left. Pretty typical. There are a few things that Guild Wars’s user interface provides that World Of Warcraft doesn’t, and I really missed them. The main thing I miss is being able to see at a glance where friends and foes are on the radar map. If there is a simple way to see who’s around you in World Of Warcraft, I haven’t found it yet. That’s a huge drawback. I do not see the point of having radar at all if enemies don’t show up on it.

The other user interface difference is the keyboard commands for targeting. In Guild Wars, it’s a simple matter to target the closest enemy, or closest friend, and then cycle through them in either direction (from closest to farthest, or farthest to closest). No tedious mousing around and clicking is required. In World Of Warcraft, I initially thought that it didn’t have a targeting key at all, because even though the online guide I found said that you could target the nearest enemy by pressing TAB, nothing happened when I pressed TAB. I eventually figured out that you can only use TAB to target an enemy when you are basically right on top of them. This is another huge drawback, probably even bigger than the lack of a useful radar. It makes fighting an exercise in mousing and clicking and mousing and clicking. Some folks may like that. I find it annoying and primitive.

So far, Guild Wars wins for the user interface.

World Of Warcraft has a much wider variety of available characters than Guild Wars. Guild Wars has three races of humans, and ten classes. World Of Warcraft has ten races and nine classes, although all nine classes are not available to any given race. This gives World Of Warcraft roughly twice as many race+class combinations as Guild Wars. So for character options, World Of Warcraft wins.

I have done a number of quests in World Of Warcraft, and so far they seem on par with the quests one performs in Guild Wars. For quest quality, it’s a tie. However, Guild Wars makes it much easier to track quests than World Of Warcraft does. This ties back into the radar screen: in Guild Wars, you can click the quest and a pointer shows up on the radar screen leading you to it. World Of Warcraft doesn’t do anything like that, as far as I can tell. If it weren’t for internet sites like World Of Warcraft Cartography, I would still be wandering around trying to figure out where to go. So for quest tracking, the clear advantage goes to Guild Wars.

I can’t claim to have fought a statistically significant number of monsters in World Of Warcraft in just five hours, but based on what I have seen so far, I would say that monster variety and the animation quality is roughly on par with Guild Wars. For monster variety and animation quality, it’s a tie.

Both Guild Wars and World Of Warcraft have a penalty for dying, but they each handle it slightly differently. In Guild Wars, the character can either be resurrected on the spot by a teammate or henchman, or the character will appear at the closest shrine. All of the character’s equipment is intact, but her effective level is reduced by a percentage (the character’s actual level and experience gained is unaffected). That “death penalty” is removed either by killing more creatures or by returning to a town, which resets everything. In World Of Warcraft, the player has a choice of either being resurrected at the closest shrine or of running for a while back to her corpse and being resurrected there. Unlike Guild Wars, there is no “death penalty”. Instead, the character’s equipment is damaged (10% if the character runs back to her corpse, 25% if she doesn’t). There may be wrinkles to this in World Of Warcraft that I don’t see yet, but so far, I would say that both games handle death in a reasonable fashion. Tied for handling of character death.

So, for most game-play issues, I would say that the games are about tied. However, due to the user interface issues, World Of Warcraft is a much, much more difficult game to play. I do not mean “difficult” in the sense of being challenging. I mean “difficult” in the sense of one game simply making the task of moving and fighting more tedious and awkward than it needs to be.

So far, I would say that Guild Wars has the clear advantage.

However, I have only played a few hours, up to level 8. It remains to be seen how the game play will change once I get access to more abilities and begin to explore more of the world. By all accounts, World Of Warcraft really shines in this area. I am looking forward to finding out.