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September 17th, 2009
05:35 pm - Gaming meme
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sheeplass posted this gaming meme, so I thought I'd give it a shot, too.
( Read more... )
Now, what's funny is that it turns out that she got this meme from my journal, in 2003. My original answers were here. It's amusing to me how little they have changed. I had merely forgotten Day of the Tenatacle this time; it really should be under favorite adventure game. Most of the changed answers are due to games that didn't exist in 2003. What most surprises me is how many answers are almost word-for-word the same; that and that I've apparently been carrying a torch for Imoen for six years. :)
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September 13th, 2009
06:42 pm - An eventful day
I haven't posted in a while, but then I figure there's no better way to get back to it than to just start doing it.
This morning sheeplass and I went for a short hike (about a mile) in the Redmond Watershed Preserve. It's a nice little 800-acre park just a few minutes outside of Redmond, and after today we've explored only about 10% of it, so I'm sure we'll be back (there are trails as long as five miles there.) While we were walking, along with some more mundane animals (an adorable and very curious little grey squirrel, and a snake) we saw an owl. It was enormous, a mostly-uniform blue-grey color, and looking straight at us despite being oriented facing the other way (I knew owls could do that, but I don't know if I've ever seen one do it.) We're not sure what kind of owl it was, but we're guessing either a western screech owl or a banded owl. It was probably 20" tall and only a couple dozen feet from us, though, and was quite a cool thing to see.
After the standard taco lunch, we went out house shopping, which is pretty much our standard Sunday afternoon activity these days. Our condo is almost ready to sell; we'll probably be putting it on the market this week. It looks better than it ever has, of course; after we move we're going to make a concerted effort to remodel and improve the house when we move in instead of waiting until we're moving out. How well that will work is mostly a function of how expensive the place we buy is (we have a $100,000-wide price range, and we can afford a lot of renovation at the bottom of it and very little at the top.) We've been very happy with our real estate agents we have handling our condo; while they're nearly full-price (5% commission) in a day when discount brokers exist that charge half that, we've essentially had the services of a general contractor for free in terms of upgrading our condo to get it ready to sell. So the savings in contractor costs pays for half the commission, and the savings in headache & work I don't have to do easily makes the rest very well worth it.
We then went to a taiko drumming performance at Bellevue college, came home and made steak for dinner (with a Washington syrah from Page Cellars), and have overall had a pretty great day. I only wish weekends were followed by, you know, additional weekends.
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March 21st, 2009
12:36 am - Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse
Spoileriffic comments below.
( Read more... )
Where I get TV at all: Since I don't have cable or an antenna, I have to download TV. And let me recommend http://etzv.it. Extremely high-quality commercial-free encodings of a vast list of shows posted within a couple hours of when the show first airs (usually ahead of their appearance on The Pirate Bay and such.) And posted in a downloadable way, too -- both BSG and Dollhouse tonight had 10 seeders & over 100 peers within 30 seconds of appearing on the site, and were downloaded in less than 25 minutes (for 350 megs.)
Yes, it's all pirated. Yet the shows' producers -- who actually have the source material and could put out higher-quality versions ahead of the pirates -- instead put out only lower-quality versions, and only long-after the pirates. Ah, media companies, how good you are at failure.
With some (not terribly simple) setup in Azureus or uTorrent, you can even set up your computer to automatically download any shows on eztv's list the moment they're posted. Maybe in a few years the actual TV stations will have something half this slick.
While we're on the topic of how far ahead the pirates are compared to Hollywood, there's an app for Android phones where if you snap a photo of the barcode from a DVD case, it sends a message to your home PC to automatically BitTorrent the movie so you have it when you get home.
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February 18th, 2009
08:23 pm - Review: Leverage
I've recently been watching the TV show Leverage, which I was introduced to by sheeplass. It's about a former insurance investigator and a bunch of criminals who come together to use their various illicit skills for good... or, perhaps more accurately, against evil. Essentially, their self-imposed mission is to steal from bad guys, striking a blow for justice while simultaneously getting rich.
At first, it was a pretty enjoyable show -- I like caper movies in general, since they play well with my security mindset, and this show is essentially a series of one-episode caper movies. And there have been some clever plots that have been fun to watch. They also wrap them up pretty well... out of 11 episodes, there have only been a couple where it was pretty obvious to me that they left way too much of a trail and would have been caught had they pulled that in reality.
However, I find my interest in the show waning for a couple of reasons:
- The main character is an alcoholic and quite thoroughly in denial about the condition, which makes him not a terribly sympathetic character. He spends a lot of time alienating his friends.
- The specific heists they pull are in many ways a sort of liberal fantasy -- they're often based on the conceit that social ills are all caused by self-aware bad guys doing evil for personal gain. Thus, when bad things happen to people, there's always someone to blame, and that someone always has a bunch of money to steal. This gets increasingly annoying because it's simplistic -- in the real world, sometimes bad things happen and it's not anybody's fault, and even when it is, it's not usually someone cackling evilly and stroking his Persian cat.
So, it's been a reasonably fun show, but probably not something I'll keep downloading.
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11:08 am - Inflation
With the current trillion-dollar "stimulus package" in the news, a lot of people have been worried about inflation, or even hyperinflation. The concern is at least warranted -- after all, when you create a trillion dollars out of thin air, you increase the supply of money, but the supply of goods & services has not changed, so each dollar is worth less. However, I'm not convinced it'll be a problem this time.
It's been impossible not to notice the massive inflation of the last few years. Not only did housing go through a bubble, but the price of most everything went up. The government only managed to mask this and show a relatively-normal rate of inflation in their figures by excluding food and energy costs from their indexes (on one hand, those things really are volatile price-wise, but on the other hand, food and energy are a major part of most people's expenses, so excluding them gives a false impression of the state of the economy.)
I think what people forecasting inflation are missing is that the fiat currency is not the only source of monetary base inflation -- not just the government creates money out of thin air. Banks do it, too, thanks to fractional-reserve banking: when you put $1000 in your savings account, the bank turns around and loans $1000 to five different people, thus effectively creating $4000 just as much as if the Federal Reserve had printed new bills. The real financial system is even more complicated, with as many as five different layers each creating money based on the previous one.
So the government's creating a trillion dollars out of thin air. But how much imaginary money has been destroyed in the last three months? People have asked, as their investment portfolios drop 40%, where the money went -- who gained all that wealth that they lost. Well, the unfortunate answer to that is "no one did; it just ceased to exist because it was never real to begin with." When you take into account the real estate crash, the drop in the stock market, etc., far more than a trillion dollars of paper wealth has disappeared. And while the argument can be made that that money was never circulating in the economy (as it was locked into houses -- large assets with slow turnover), I don't think that rings true. Due to wealth effect (the tendency of people who feel wealthy to spend more, regardless of their actual financial circumstances) and the massive use of home equity loans (the so-called "Housing ATM"), people have been behaving as if all that extra money really existed -- and we've seen the inflation to prove it.
So, in other words, I'm not expecting massive inflation from the stimulus plan not because I don't think creating a trillion dollars is inflationary, but because I think we've already had the inflation from this creation of money. For the most part, this will be replacing just-vanished paper wealth with newly-created paper wealth, merely moving money around rather than adding it. Now, in the long run, there are certainly still negative economic effects -- after all, we're all going to have to repay that trillion dollars in taxes over the next 10 years, which will be a lasting drain on growth and productivity. But the inflationary threat itself I think is relatively small.
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January 24th, 2009
08:17 pm - Review: The Culture novels by Iain M. Banks
I always delay posting things like book reviews on my LJ, because I post so seldom I figure that people want to hear about my own life and not just media I'm consuming. But then I get out of the habit of posting at all, so I figure this delaying is silly and if I feel like talking about something, I might as well.
I've recently (as of 3 months ago) been reading the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. A series starting with 1988's Consider Phlebas and continuing until 2008's Matter, the Culture novels are utopian science fiction about a galactic civilization that's a sort of libertarian commune of humans (well, humanoids), drones (autonomous robots; the word's used as a rough equivalent of Star Wars's "droid"), and Minds (hyperintelligent artificial intelligences.)
( Read more... )
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October 12th, 2008
04:43 pm - Review: Mass Effect
I just finished the computer game Mass Effect. It was actually very good; if you like sci-fi RPGs, I strongly recommend it -- it's the best one since Knights of the Old Republic, which was also excellent.
One thing I really liked about the game was that this was the most fully-realized hard-SF world I've ever seen in a game that wasn't just taken from some other source (e.g. a franchise like Star Wars.) There was a large, detailed galaxy with a rich history in which humans had a significant but not paramount role -- it struck a balance between the "everyone is vastly more powerful than us" world of transhumanist sci-fi and the "humans, inexplicably, have far better technology than all the other alien races" world of Star Trek. Humanity had a role to play, but was not in control, either. It did trot out the usual sci-fi trope of "and there is this ancient, forgotten race called the Protheans who had vastly greater technology than all of us, but they mysteriously died out," which I've only seen a thousand times (Privateer, Star Control II, etc.), but it went somewhere very different with it that turned out to be quite interesting, contrary to my early expectation. There are a dozen alien races with interesting histories, and the game is fond of throwing moral dilemmas your way because of them: in several cases, the solution to a problem has gone on to create an even worse problem, and doing the "right thing" may have negative consequences. Also, there is a constant conflict between whether, as a human who works for the (non-human) Galactic Council you should do the right thing for humanity -- or the right thing for everyone, even if that harms humanity.
All the game's technology is predicated on the discovery of a new particle they nickname "element zero." When exposed to various radiation, this substance generates a field called "mass effect," which can raise or lower the mass of objects while they conserve velocity (not momentum.) This has a host of uses -- the Mako battle tank can drive up nearly-sheer surfaces and fall hundreds of feet without damage, since it's a tank with the mass of a beach ball. The problem of carrying enough fuel for maneuvering in space is nullified by reducing the mass of the ship whenever you want to accelerate. Kinetic barriers (force fields) work by nullifying the mass of incoming projectiles so they just bounce off you. Railguns can achieve phenomenal projectile speeds by reducing the mass of the projectile until it leaves the railgun. And FTL travel is made possible by this effect as well, though really fast travel requires flying your ship up to a huge concentration of the element (like a sphere a few hundred meters in diameter), so it tends to be point-to-point from established stations.
Combat is real-time and 3D shooter style, but based on an RPG stats system in the background, and with the ability to pause at any time to give orders to your squad, so it requires some dexterity without being "twitchy." Some people have complained about the learning curve, but I didn't think it was bad at all. The game has a lot of variety -- combat sequences, a lot of exploring & talking to people, and vehicle sections (your ship can airdrop a small tank called the Mako which you can use to explore planets.) The variety keeps anything from getting boring. There's a pretty big world to explore and a lot of side quests -- if you just did the main plot, straight through, the game would be very short. However, I did every side quest available, and while the game wasn't Morrowind-sized or anything, I was satisfied with it. Though doing it that way meant my party was absurdly overpowered by the end of the game, and defeated the end boss with barely an injury. You play with a party of 3 -- yourself and 2 others chosen from 7 people you accumulate through the game. At first it's tempting to bring combat-oriented characters all the time, to make battle easier, but as the game progresses, if your main character is very combat-oriented you get to the point where you can practically handle that yourself, and you need others for hacking computers and picking locks and such. Also, the biotic characters (a kind of psionic powers) start out weak but can become insanely powerful by the end -- in the late game, Liara could walk into a room full of enemies and have some stapled to the ceiling, others juggling around in psychokinetic winds, some smashed into the walls, etc., all at once. I didn't need help in combat anymore, because with Liara around combat was basically shooting fish in a barrel.
Overall, if you like sci-fi RPGs, especially KotOR, it's well worth picking up. It's a good 20-30 hours of fun.
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August 4th, 2008
12:46 am - BlackHat 2008, Day 2
The second day of BlackHat was much the same as the first. I got up at 8:00, and went downstairs to a little restaurant that serves quiche and espresso drinks, and had quiche and an espresso drink (they also, of course, serve other things, which I did not have.)
( Course details... )
After class, I took a shuttle bus over to the Rio where I had a light dinner and went to Penn & Teller, who were funny and pretty good. They reveal how they do several of their tricks (often that's part of the trick), and they were actually more impressive when you could see how it was done, due to the seemingly-effortless sleight of hand it involved. After that it was back over to Caesars for banana cheesecake, and now I think it's time for sleep.
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August 2nd, 2008
11:20 pm - BlackHat 2008, Day 1
So, I arrived in Vegas last night, albeit too late to get to conference registration. However, it was early enough to get some chicken taquitos. Mmm, taco. Since missing registration meant needing to be at the conference at 8am the next day, I wanted to get to sleep early, so after dinner I went back to the room to read (The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin) and chat with sheeplass via videophone. I went to sleep around midnight, and woke up about 5 times -- only sleeping alone about one week a year will do that, I suppose.
( Course details... )
After the class, I went for a walk outside. Yes, it's 105 outside, but I like the heat. Specifically, I like the way it's not cold. I spent about 3 hours out, walking down to Planet Hollywood, up to Fashion Show Mall (past Treasure Island), and back to Caesar's. I ate at a cantina in Planet Hollywood, where there were Baja-style mahi-mahi tacos that were quite excellent, and a margarita that was quite average. And now, I am back to my room, writing LJ posts and video-phoning my wife again.
I have found that I don't really know what to do in Vegas by myself. No one I know gets here until Tuesday night, so I'm pretty much entirely on my own. I'm enjoying myself a lot, but I may run out of activities. I do still plan to see Penn & Teller sometime, though (one of the few shows I want to see that sheeplass does not, so a good prospect.)
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July 28th, 2008
11:37 pm - Book Reviews: The Merchant Princes and Saturn's Children
I've recently read a small pile of Charles Stross books (the four existing books in the Merchant Princes series, plus Saturn's Children) and thought I'd write up some reviews and observations. Though I talk very little about the main plot thread of either book, it is the nature of a Stross novel that to talk about its setting and world and themes necessarily gives away much of the plot and what's most interesting about the book, so if you plan on reading them, you should probably not read this. (In short: I really liked them all, but then, I usually do with Stross, and Saturn's Children is much more than it at first appears.)
( Read more... )
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June 25th, 2008
08:26 pm - Bad news for the music industry
I was passing some time at the mall today, and stopped into a CD store for the first time in probably well over a year. I looked over a bunch of CDs, and found quite a few albums by artists I used to like but haven't listened to in quite a while. I briefly considered buying quite a few of them. However, I was stopped by the following thought process:
"If I buy the CD, I'll have to rip and encode it before I can use it, and then I'll have all these physical discs that I'll need to put into the CD binders, which will necessitate rearranging them, and then find somewhere to put the CD cases if I want to keep them. I'd like to support these artists, but it would be so much easier to just write down what I want and download it when I get home."
Note that I'm too picky for MP3 files or DRM, so my downloads have to be FLAC or other lossless files. And this means I can't use the paid download services; it has to be the Pirate Bay.
After thinking about the above, I realized two things:
1.) For me, at least, physical CD music has actually become an anti-feature. Getting the CD and box and booklet actually decreases the value of the music purchase. This is not good for the RIAA -- their "value-add" to the music production process is subtracting value from what the musicians have originally created. Anything they add to the base product (the music itself) lowers its value. I am not necessarily yet the typical consumer, but already I have no need and no use for recording companies. And eventually I will be the typical consumer.
2.) The above thought process is completely crazy. There is no good reason why, if I really don't want the physical CD around, I couldn't buy it, rip it to digital, and throw it away. But I won't. It's well established in psychology that people do this (any given thing is worth more to you when it's already yours -- the amount you'd be willing to pay for item x is less than the amount you'd charge for someone to buy that x from you) but that doesn't make it any less crazy. It's only when I do not yet own the physical CD that I intuitively recognize that it has negative value to me.
All this said, I discovered more music that I want but didn't know existed from browsing that store for a few minutes than I've discovered in years on the Internet. There needs to be an online way to replicate the music store browsing experience. The problem is that that's hard; it's like duplicating newspapers online. Both the newspaper and the music store give you vast amounts of data in a fashion where you can both rapidly scan it in aggregate and peruse it in detail, moving very quickly between levels of precision. Browsing music on Amazon or iTunes or reading the news on MSNBC is nothing like that.
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November 29th, 2007
10:13 pm - Perimeter Grid
I write a blog about information security at http://perimetergrid.com. I wanted to get a bit of content up before announcing it over here.
My target audience is technical people (IT staff, software developers) but not security professionals, so my hope is that it will be comprehensible to a general audience. Also, many of the posts are about current issues in security (DRM, defending against terrorism) and thus not technical at all.
In any case, just thought I'd let everyone here know in case you were interested. There is supposedly an OpenID-based comment system on the site, too, though I have not actually tested this yet.
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August 4th, 2007
01:15 am - Month in Review
I haven't posted in quite some time, but it's been an interesting few weeks, so I thought I'd present some of my traditional walls of text for your perusal.
Three weeks back, sheeplass and I went up to Mt. Rainier again, for the first time this year. Ever since our trip to New Zealand a couple years back, we've been interested in exploring more of the natural beauty around the Seattle area -- it's very nice up here, with a lot of mountains, forests, etc. And we've both gotten in vastly better physical condition in the last several months, and realized that at this point we're in shape to actually do something about it.
It turns out that Mt. Rainier National Park suffered serious damage last autumn, when a massive rainstorm flooded the park. A lot of bridges were destroyed, including the major road through the park, making our usual drive-around-the-park impossible. However, the southwestern portion of the park was open and repaired, and that's a beautiful area, so we gave it a visit.
We drove up near Sunrise, and then took a short trail (very short, 0.1 miles, but severely sloped) down to a waterfall, and from there got onto a Wonderland Trail segment that lead to some reflection lakes. We only traveled around 3 miles from there (I think 1.8 each way, if I recall correctly), but it involved ascending and descending some 1700', so it was strenuous. A good time was had by both of us, with the only negative being that we discovered that while the Seattle area seems very free of annoying and biting insects, the woods of Mt. Rainier is not. It was, however, cool being far enough into the woods that there was literally no sign of civilization -- not the slightest human sight or sound. Well, other than each other. We'll have to do it again this summer.
Two weeks back, my parents and sister came to visit us in Redmond. It was good to see them again; last time was Christmas for me. Like visits from my parents always are, it featured a whole lot of eating out, which was pleasant (hey, expensive seafood for free!) but also involved eating a lot more than usual. sheeplass and I have been eating smaller, healthier portions for so long now that restaurant meals every day is just way too much food. We (by which I mean my parents & sister now) also went to downtown Seattle for the usual tourist spots, like the Pike Place Market and the waterfront, and went shopping a decent amount (it seems to be my sister's favorite activity.) Their next-to-last day in town was also my sister's birthday, so we celebrated with ice cream cake, and played some Apples to Apples -- as much as that game is ubiquitious in gamer-geek circles, it seems to be unknown to people like my family. :) I also introduced them to Chipotle Mexican Grill, because how can people survive without tacos? I think we ate a bit too much Southwestern food for my mom and sister, but then, such are the perils of visiting my wife and I.
After my parents left, sheeplass finished up her first job contract, so she took me out to Daniel's Broiler to celebrate. Daniel's is a stakehouse reputed to be the best on the Eastside, and after eating there I have to say that the reputation is well-deserved. The steak there tied for Best Steak I've Ever Had (the other being one from The Steakhouse At Camelot, a restaurant in the Excalibur hotel in Vegas.) I also had a very nice red wine whose name escapes me. In any case, it was a great meal.
Speaking of Vegas, this week, I'm attending two major security conferences, BlackHat Briefings and DefCon. Because of this, I was going to be in Vegas from last Monday until this coming Sunday. Since sheeplass and I love an annual trip to Vegas, she came out with me for the weekend before the conference started. We had a lovely weekend together, as we always do. We stayed in Caesars Palace, as that was where the first of my conferences was, and thus we had a heavily discounted conference rate. We ate a lot of good food, walked along most of the Strip (including picking up some souveneirs from all the hotels we've previously stayed at), and went to a show (Stomp Out Loud, which was fantastic.) One of the meals was at Nero's, the steakhouse in Caesars Palace, and while it was probably the 3rd best steak I've had, it didn't really come close to Daniel's the week before. On Monday, I bid my wonderful wife farewell and went off to my conferences.
And as this seems a good stopping point, I will put the conferences in separate posts.
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June 16th, 2007
11:09 pm - Michael Milken
I just finished reading Den of Thieves, a book by a Wall Street Journal reporter about the insider trading scandals of the 1980's. Quite a bit of it was about Michael Milken, the financier best known as the "Junk Bond King," who remains a somewhat controversial figure.
( Read more... )
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June 5th, 2007
10:14 am - No Subject
I recommend reading Fareed Zakaria's latest article in Newsweek. It's about restoring America's international reputation after the Bush administration. In short, it takes turning away from playing up fear and hysteria and turning toward confidence and optimism -- believing ourselves to be at war, when that war is inherently without end, results in a hostile posture toward the world. Talking about an "Axis of Evil" and such drives our enemies together, when we should be trying to divide them apart.
Most importantly, though, he points out that our response to terrorism cannot be one of prevention (which is impossible, due to the unfortunate fact that terrorism is easy and can always be carried out by a handful of determined & suicidal individuals) but one of resilience. While we should of course take reasonable measures to reduce terrorism, we also need to be able to, as a nation, recover from attacks when they occur. There's some evidence that bin Laden and company actually thought that blowing up the World Trade Center would cause the collpase of Western civilization. Of course, anyone who actually lives in Western civilization knows that's absurd -- our civilization has a distributed depth to it, such that it can survive a tremendous degree of damage. That is a great strength, but it must be used -- and it's not used by giving up fundamental civil liberties in response to any terrorist action. It's used by accepting that sometimes there are risks, sometimes bad things happen, and not everything can be prevented -- and that sometimes prevention comes at a very high cost.
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In totally unrelated news, I also highly recommend seeing Hot Fuzz if it's still in a theater near you. From the makers of Shaun of the Dead, it's a parody of buddy-cop action movies (albeit one that obviously comes from people who really like those movies.) And unlike many of the current parody-of-a-genre movies, it actually has a plot (albeit a somewhat ridiculous one.) It does have some somewhat excessive gore (I mean, really, it's from the makers of Shaun of the Dead) used for comic effect... but it's used so well. In any case, it's the funniest movie I've seen in quite a while.
I also saw Pirates of the Caribbean 3 recently, and was actually pretty pleased with it (it was certainly better than 2.) They did not go the direction I expected with the Pirates movies after the first one -- the plot was surprisingly epic, and the movie extremely long. But while they seemed to have half a dozen storylines all running at once, all of them did fit together and they did resolve them all by the end. The result was enjoyable, though a very different sort of movie than the first. Also, I find it interesting how the first movie was all about... um... Will Turner, yeah, that was his name, while by the end of the series it is very obviously the Captain Jack Sparrow movie. I'm guessing this decision was made after the first movie's success.
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May 15th, 2007
03:28 pm - General Update
I've gotten out of the habit of posting for the last few months, and now I find I don't post because I've got so much I know I haven't posted about I don't know where to start. So I'm going to give a sort of general update here... which, considering my habits on the occasions wherein I do post, will probably end up rather long.
It's been a very good few months. I've got a new job that I'm enjoying about as much as I can enjoy a job. sheeplass has started working, too, so that's been somewhat of a change in our lives, though obviously a much greater change in hers than mine, since the time she's at work I am, too.
I'm playing a lot less World of Warcraft lately... after over 1,500 hours (70 days!), most every activity becomes boring, and while I still play occasionally, it's no longer very frequent. I've dropped out of my scheduled raids to do other things, thus returning the game to what I enjoyed about it to begin with -- it's an MMO that you can log on, play for an hour or two, and log off, without having to organize your life around it. I've no intention of leaving the game entirely any time soon, as I still enjoy it, it just no longer makes it to the top of the "things I want to do" queue as often.
Hmm... other hobbies. I've been planning out the end of my D&D campaign, which has run for years and taken characters from level 1 to their current level of 18. They've been following a specific plot since around level 10, and I'm looking to wrap it up around 20-22, so they're close to the finale now.
I've also been digging out some other games now that WoW isn't occupying much time. I have the Oblivion expansion to play through, as well as Neverwinter Nights 2 to finish. Both are games that I started a while ago during previous non-WoW-playing periods, but that I want to finish. I've also gotten my chemistry textbook back out; I've been teaching myself a college course in general chemistry, and am more than halfway through that. I don't see how people do scientific math without a stack-logic RPN calculator... my beloved HP 48GX broke, so I had to procure an HP 50g to replace it. (Actually, I can see just fine how people do scientific math without one -- they take longer and write a lot of intermediate steps down -- I just don't like the answer.) Really, though, I'm looking forward to getting a good enough grasp of chemistry to move on to the really interesting stuff in organic and biochemistry.
Microsoft gives me a free membership to an absurdly large gym and fitness facility (it has 4 pools, a spa, a medical clinic, 3 restaurants...) so I've gone back to working out there three times a week. It's not as convenient as when I worked downtown (and had a gym in the building I worked in), but it is just across the street from where I work now, so it's pretty easy to get over there. I still wouldn't say I enjoy it, but it's a necessary evil for living a long and healthy life. In any case, I'm in better shape now than I had ever been, which is nice, so I like the results even if I don't much care for the effort.
It's been a pretty eventful few weeks... faecat and ironman4do got married a few weeks ago, and I was a groomsman in the wedding, so there was a weekend of wedding-related activities. They're very cute and it's good to see them so happy together, as we've known them since they first met. We (sheeplass and I) went to see Rent with them last week, which was an enjoyable evening out.
Mainly, though, I spend a lot of time with my wife. We went and played pool in downtown Bellevue last week... we are both appallingly bad at pool, and of ten games only one did not end with some automatic-loss condition (scratching on the 8-ball or the break, inadvertently sinking the 8, etc.) However, I'm sure we'll get better with some practice. We've also just picked up the LEGO Star Wars video games, which are cute, fun, and made for cooperative two-player play. We always look for games with a two-player co-op mode; we're both nerds and like video gaming, but it's not usually an activity designed for playing together like that. (Though now that I think about it, that's what we turned World of Warcraft into -- we almost always played our characters together and chose complementary character classes. Though the game has many things geared for 3-5 people, you can accomplish a whole lot with two if they're two characters whose skills complement each other's well.) We're also planning to take tango lessons next month.
So, for those who have asked me to update my journal, there's the brief update. Overall, life is good, I have the best wife on Earth, and I haven't been bored in years (unless you count time spent at work.)
And now that I've got all of that posted, I can return to my regularly scheduled commentary on science and complaining about politics. :-)
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May 7th, 2007
08:30 am - Interesting news
I ran across some news stories today I had to comment on, despite not having posted in about four months.
Somebody wrote a virus that commandeers the Windows Activation copy-protection mechanism, and locks the user out of the computer (you can't run any software -- including virus scanners) until they "reactivate." Only instead of the normal activation dialog, it displays one asking for your credit card number to send to the hackers. Essentially, it takes your computer hostage. It's not terribly hard to get rid of if you know what you're doing (you have to bring up an alternate OS, say by using a bootable CD, and clean it from there), but for normal end users it's insurmountable.
What I find interesting about this is that in Windows Vista this could be so much worse. Vista has strong support for HDCP, High Definition Content Protection, a DRM system for preventing Vista computers from being used to pirate high-definition music and video. This support puts HDCP content in an elevated context, where even the system administrator (or, say, his virus-scanning software) can't touch it -- thus, virus writers can get system-high context & encryption to protect themselves with. It's like a rootkit-making toolkit built into the system. Luckily, to carry out this attack, you would need to have an HDCP signing authority key, which currently only the AACS has. On the not-so-bright side, recall that 512-bit number people were passing around last week that brought down Digg? (If you don't, just take my word for it that it was the big thing in nerd news.) That was an HDCP secret vector, which cracks every HD DVD and Blu-Ray disc produced so far (it won't work on future ones, though.) There is a known attack on the signing authority key which requires 40 of these vectors. One down, 39 to go, and then the wheels come off of DRM and all hell breaks loose.
In other news, giving kids laptops doesn't help their education. You know, I could have told you that without even having to spend $7 million on it. Computers are useful at the college level, but in elementary through high school what people really need to learn is how to do things themselves. Automation tools are great once you know the manual process, but if you don't, you create a lot of "black boxes" and people are unable to deal with any ambiguity in the process.
Of course, I think kids spend a ridiculously long time learning to do these basic things themselves, and there's no excuse for how little most people learn in twelve years of government schooling -- there's a phenomenal waste there. But solving the problems of the educational system is a lot harder than throwing money at the problem -- giving people computers ("After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement -- none.") is expensive but easy, as it has no losers (except taxpayers, but they don't count when you're the government.) The fact that they mainly use them to surf for porn and play video games can be a "surprising" discovery after the fact, while in the meantime politicians are "doing something" about "modernizing" education. Real change would involve introducing choice into the system -- the ability to choose schools (so that poor schools would fail and die) and the ability to choose education more broadly as well (not having the same mandatory curriculum for everyone, but rather having people learn what they believe they will need to know.) However, letting people choose things means some people will make bad choices and suffer for it, and this is politically intolerable right now.
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January 1st, 2007
07:42 pm - Disasters of Commerce: HDCP
So, while the console wars look good for Microsoft, not everything does, and the source of the troubles is the same as Sony's -- high-definition DVD formats.
There are two competing high-definition content formats, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Both, however, are controlled by the content industry (i.e. the MPAA and the movie studios, and their friends in the RIAA.) And both specify a copy-protection scheme called HDCP in order to play high-definition content.
HDCP is basically "when copy-protection attacks." The scheme is ludicrously aggressive; it is to technological copy protection what the DMCA was to legal copyright (i.e. it takes it far beyond a reasonable level and treads on everyone else's rights.)
HDCP requires that there be a secure path from the content to an analog output (i.e. the screen.) So to play a disc in high-definition, you need an HDCP-encrypted disc, an HDCP-compliant disc player, an HDCP-compliant cable connecting it to the screen, and an HDCP-compliant screen (TV or monitor.) So no existing technology from more than about a year ago will work (nor will most of what you can buy now.) Each of these devices has to present encryption keys to decrypt a title key on the disc; if any of them fail, the other HDCP-compliant devices will refuse to provide data at high resolution. So your $1000 Blu-Ray/HD-DVD player becomes a $60 standard-definition DVD player instead if any device doesn't play by the rules.
What's more, every disc has a certificate revocation list that can tell compliant devices to self-destruct, or to tell compliant devices about formerly-compliant devices that can no longer be trusted. Essentially, all HDCP compliant devices are not under your control as the owner -- they are totally under the control of every HDCP-compliant disc you put under them. If some hacker in Russia figures out how to make the brand of TV you bought send an unencrypted digital output, then the movie studios have the option of pressing a revocation onto all future movie discs that, when played on your DVD player, will tell your DVD player that your TV is no longer trusted and the player can never play an HDCP-compliant disc on that TV ever again. There is nothing you can do about this as the user.
This is merely bad for consumer electronics devices. It can, however, be pretty bad -- as HDCP chips will likely be manufactured by only a few companies and bought by a host of others. Thus, if the movie industry decides to revoke a chip because some Chinese piracy company made a "DVI amplifier" (i.e. a box that coverts the HDCP-compliant HDMI cable into an unencrypted digital DVI cable) using the same chip as your perfectly-legitimate DVD player or TV, you're screwed.
However, this is abominable for makers of general-purpose devices like computers. Microsoft, with Windows Vista, has capitulated to the content providers almost entirely, for reasons I do not understand. (The movie industry is not their customers -- so why are they so willing to do whatever the movie industry says? It seems daft, but they must have a reason.) Windows Vista is an HDCP-compliant operating system, which makes your computer under the control of any HDCP-compliant disc you put into it. Or any HDCP-compliant file you download and play.
Complying with the super-agressive HDCP specification means that whenever protected content is playing anywhere on the system, Vista:
- will disable all non-HDCP digital audio or video outputs (so much for S/PDIF, DVI, and component video) if requested by the HDCP-compliant disc or file
- will disable the ability of the computer to monitor its own audio and video output (there goes echo cancellation on microphones and antialiasing on video)
- will degrade the quality of all audio and video output to non-HDCP outputs to ensure that they are not up to high-definition quality
- will require all drivers to be signed by Microsoft (so hackers can't put together open-source drivers to support old hardware)
- will break unified drivers as are used by all current video cards (every model of card will need to be signed separately; otherwise, a revocation of one device will kill a video card maker's entire product line, a risk none would be willing to take)
- will have intentional lack of fault-tolerance on all audio-visual playback subsystems (if the system detects any sort of warning or other possible anomaly, it's required to kill off the entire high-def playback system because it could possibly be a hacker trying to watch a movie unencrypted.)
- will require all drivers to be approved by "at least three major Hollywood studios" if they affect the audio/visual output path
- will require hardware not to have missing or socketed components. Basically, this breaks hardware versioning -- right now, a low-end video card is just a high-end card with some parts removed. Hardware manufacturers will not be able to do this with Vista devices, and thus will need to spend money designing separate cards
- will incur heavy encryption overhead on practically everything it does
The really scary thing, though, is that all of these parts of the system obey not the user, but the HDCP-compliant content. Essentially, many parts of Vista are constructed with "degrade functionality" and "self-destruct" code that can be triggered by the movie studios. As a security professional, I find this really scary. Sure, it's all protected by strong cryptography normally, and nobody's going to break that. But what happens when either a.) someone at a movie studio leaks a legitimate HDCP content private key, allowing hackers to create their own "official" HDCP-compliant content that has absolute control over people's computers, or b.) some hacker figures out how to invoke the degrade APIs manually? Chances are, the "don't work" button is not nearly as well protected as the "work" button. This could make for some really nasty viruses and worms.
You know what's really sad, though? For all this, the system won't work. It won't actually stop piracy, or even seriously impede it. It will be broken as fast as movies are released (right now, nobody cares about HDCP because nobody actually wants a high-definition DVD player; Blu-Ray and HD-DVD both have a market penetration of effectively zero.) The problem is twofold: that copy protection is subject to "break once, break everywhere," and that it's attempting to do something that is truly, provably impossible.
The first problem is that if one device is made that will handshake with HDCP and play unencrypted data, pirate distributors will all buy that device and use it to make unencrypted movies. I don't need to break any encryption on a DVD to download Superman Returns off the Internet -- I just need one guy somewhere in the world to rip it, and then upload it in clear for everyone else in the world. HDCP requires perfection. Now, they try to get around this problem with certificate revocation lists, but this will be a serious political problem, because if an actually popular device is flawed, the movie industry will be forced to either accept the flaw, or issue a disc that breaks that device for everyone, including legitimate buyers. They'll try to get the manufacturer to eat the cost of a recall, of course, but if this happens repeatedly, consumers will get sick of it right quickly.
The second problem is the Church-Turing Thesis. There's no way for a piece of software to know it's running on real hardware. If I want to crack HDCP (seriously, and I have a lot of time and resources to devote to it), I don't do it on a Windows Vista machine using an HDCP-compliant video card. I do it on a simulation of a Vista machine running a simulation of an HDCP-compliant card, where both simulations have access to the real thing and can use it to carry out operations for them. The movie industry can make doing this really hard, but they can't make it impossible, because the real apparatus has to be able to decrypt the movie and play it. Essentially, they have to give all of us the keys to the kingdom, but stuck in boxes that try to keep us from getting them. This wouldn't be so bad for them due to the difficulty of this attack, but with a break-once-break-everywhere problem, the incentive for pirates to attack it will be very strong. No matter how high the gates, enough barbarians will eventually get through.
Depending on how it turns out, in the long run this could be as bad for Microsoft as the PS3 is for Sony.
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07:01 pm - Disasters of Commerce: Sony
Sony has been continuing its official policy of denial -- the PS3 is great, it's meeting their wildest expectations, and we should all buy one so as to be sure to have a Blu-Ray drive for when Blu-Ray conquers the Earth and replaces all technology.
However, the actual situation has not been so good. Everyone except Sony predicted that perhaps a $600 game machine with no actual games available might not sell too well. However, Sony assured investors that at least 5 million stupid customers would buy anything even if they didn't make any games.
So they released it, to much fanfare, this Christmas. There aren't many games for it (due to their botched development process, software makers had only 2 months with actual PS3 hardware before the release date, so almost all of them pulled out of the launch; at least three switched their games from PS3 exclusives to Xbox 360 exclusives.)
However, it doesn't seem to matter if there are games for it, because the conversion ratio for the Christmas sales was 0.98. That means less games were sold than PS3s. What kind of person buys a PS3 and no games? The kind that expects to sell it on eBay for big bucks. Sony was publicly embarrassed when they brought the first buyer of a PS3 in Japan up on a stage to ask him what games he was excited about, only to find that he didn't know about any games... and didn't even speak Japanese. He'd just been hired to buy one for some other guy to sell on eBay.
However, those who chose to buy a PS3 to resell have been sorely disappointed. PS3s had been bid up as high as $2,367 before the system actually came out... once it did, the price plummeted. It was at $1,250 the next day, and below $750 before Christmas (on a system that costs $600 plus tax at the store -- so a <$90 profit for those people who waited hours in the rain for their preorders.)
So these people who bought PS3s started returning them! Faced with the inability to resell them at a profit, they didn't want one at all. The 35 stores the guy in the linked article called all had an average of 2 systems returned. This doesn't sound like much until you consider that only 400,000 PS3s have been sold at all, worldwide! I was at the Northgate Best Buy today and they had nine on the shelf; the Renton Fry's had six yesterday. Only 76,882 have been sold in normally-video-game-manic Japan, where nearly 300,000 Wiis (all Nintendo has been able to make so far) have been sold. This means that some 20,000 PS3s are sitting on the shelf in Japan.
This wouldn't be such a disaster for Sony if they hadn't basically bet the farm on the PS3. It was their ploy to get Blu-Ray into the market to beat HD-DVD; since only 50,000 people own HD-DVD players, the millions of PS3s expected to be sold would ensure their proprietary format wins the war the way Betamax didn't. Only Microsoft counterattacked with a $200 HD-DVD player for Xbox 360, and a 360 + $200 is still cheaper than a PS3. But worst of all for both of them, demand for high-definition DVD formats of any kind remains steady at zero.
Also, Sony loses over $200 on each PS3 sold. They have to sell about 10 games to every console owner to break even. I doubt most PS2 owners have 10 games, and that system's been out for years.
If sales don't pick up, and fast, this could actually destroy the Sony corporation for many years to come. And sales don't look too likely to pick up, because this disaster of a launch is causing most of their top-tier developers to jump ship for Microsoft. The fact that the PS3 is so hard to develop for (it costs 2-3 times as much in programming costs to make a PS3 game as an Xbox 360 game; this said, most of the cost of modern game development is the art, not the programming) means many of these developers are going to Microsoft exclusives, not just ports. The console wars are looking good for Microsoft... and even better for Nintendo, whose profitable Wii is selling like hotcakes.
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October 31st, 2006
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