Microsoft Seeks Patent On Shaming Fat Gamers

The idea is that Microsoft wants to create a system whereby it will gather physical statistics on a user and alter the game play around those characteristics. For example, as the article mentioned, an obese player may be cut off from playing. I suppose the idea could have benefits – such as helping players get into shape if they can’t wait to get back on their consoles. But this raises some serious ethical issues. What, for example, about those players who are unable to lose weight for genetic reasons? Or what ever happened to those who play video games to escape from the real world? Hell, that’s half the fun in my opinion.

Microsoft also proposes shaping gaming experiences by using ‘psychological and demographic information such as education level, geographic location, age, sex, intelligence quotient, socioeconomic class, occupation, marital/relationship status, religious belief, political affiliation, etc.’

This to me raises some serious privacy issues. I would never wish a video game or vendor to have that much personal information on myself. In fact, I feel the name on a credit card is too much information for the vendor or any party to have. But the traits listed above? Look, placing yourself in a video game is a pretty cool idea if you consent to it. For those who do want to give up all of that personal information, good for them. But basing game play off of factors like physical appearance, sex, religion, politically affiliation, etc could turn into a discriminatory battle.

Furthermore, you know that corporations will use this information for other statistical purposes, or to sell to other companies. Would you want a company like Microsoft to know more about you than you probably do? The only way I would subscribe to such a system is if it (a) used an open protocol, (b) was subject to very strict privacy standards and policies that are heavily enforced and investigated, (c) we were able to strictly state what information we wanted to give to the vendor, (d) we were able to choose what remote server to upload such statistical data to (i.e. one we may be able to trust) and (e) if the video game provided this is an option rather than a requirement. The patent does use the word “nonvolitionally” when referencing information gathered from the user, but we’ll see how that goes. Vendors can still state, “oh, uh, you can only play this game if you give us this, this, this and this.”

…surprise, the girl you’ve been lusting over in your video game is actually a guy, and this will prove it.

The patent states:

[0009]In yet a further aspect, an apparatus is provided for interacting with a virtual gaming environment. An information source is accessed for receiving a health information nonvolitionally obtained from a user. These sources are at least two of a a physiological sensor, a networked healthcare information repository, and a healthcare smart card.

I would be highly against anyone having access to information on that type of level – as everyone else should be. This is just one example of how vendors like Microsoft may try to steal information from you. If they were able to have access to heathcare records, you wouldn’t be able to say “I only want you to see this”. No, they’d probably be able to see it all.

Again, I’m not saying it’s a horrible idea. I’ve often fantasized about placing yourself in a virtual reality, where the game actually rendered you in the virtual environment. But considering Microsoft’s track record, they are not the company to implement or control this.

I haven’t the time to figure out what Grub is trying to do in that amount of time, but I did notice a solution. I have three HDDs. In the BIOS, it was set as the third boot device. By moving it to the top, Grub quickly moved along to boot Ubuntu.

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ssh-copy-id -p XXXX -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub username@host

However, that didn’t do anything but output an error:

Bad port 'umask 077; test -d .ssh || mkdir .ssh ; cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'

The solution was to enclose it in quotes as follows:

ssh-copy-id ‘-p XXXX -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub username@host’

Hope that helps.

(The above error probably doesn’t make any sense. ssh-copy-id is a shell script. The command that appears in the error message is a command sent to the server via SSH. Feel free to take a look at the file: cat `locate ssh-copy-id | head -n1`)

The problem is, there are times (however few) that I’d enter my password, and it’d just sit there. Everything would be disabled and it’d act like it was simply pausing due to an incorrect password.

But it’d never unlock.

As long as you know what the application is that’s running, you can kill it. Going off of a hunch, I hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 to go to TTY1. I logged in under the same user, then typed the following command:

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  killall gnome-screensaver

This successfully gets rid of the login screen. Simply hit Ctrl+Alt+F8 (or whatever TTY your X session was running on), and tada!

Of course, you’ll have to run gnome-screen saver again or you won’t be able to lock your computer. Hit Alt+F2 and type “gnome-screensaver” to have it run in the background as it was before. It may also be a good idea to go back to TTY1 and log out, since you never want to leave a terminal wide open unprotected.

If you’re worried that someone might use this to bypass your login, don’t worry. They’d have to either log in as you in order to kill gnome-screensaver on your session, or they’d have to log in as root. And if they’re root, you have nowhere to hide anyway.

Where "/my/dir" would vary depending on what you're tab-completing. I suspected the problem might be with permissions, but that came up short.

I finally came across the solution here:

http://serverfault.com/questions/47554/ubuntu-tab-completon-and-mc-problems

Since I had trouble finding much information on Google, hopefully this post will help. It turned out to be a shell issue. When I created the user, I never specified the default shell to use (BASH), and I apparently never went back and changed it. Which explains why it worked on some of my users' accounts but not others.

“ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is a proposed enforcement treaty between United States, the European Community, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand and Mexico, with Canada set to join any day now.” – More information here

The name of the treaty sounds innocent enough, but what are they not telling you? This is just another addition to the huge string of laws recently forced upon us by corrupt governments and corporations to take away our liberties. For what? Money, as always.

What makes this law so bad? I just want to highlight a few points. I quote ars technica with the following details with what the treaty may cause:

• Require Internet Service Providers to monitor all consumers’ Internet communications, terminate their customers’ Internet connections based on rights-holders’ repeated allegation of copyright infringement, and divulge the identity of alleged copyright infringers possibly without judicial process
• Interfere with fair use of copyrighted materials
• Criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing
• Interfere with legitimate parallel trade in goods, including the resale of brand-name pharmaceutical products
• Impose liability on manufacturers of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), if those APIs are used to make counterfeits
• Improperly criminalize acts not done for commercial purpose and with no public health consequences
• Improperly divert public resources into enforcement of private rights

What does this mean for the average computer user? Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing will become unlawful, knocking out a huge chunk of collaborative file sharing, including Bittorrent. Some may consider this a good thing – after all, files are often unlawfully distributed using these services. But not always. Venues like bittorrent help reduce costs by allowing for the legal distribution of files, such as free software or your own personal files. Corporations also use it to cut costs of file distribution (let’s take the popular example of Blizzard’s use of bittorrent to distribute World of Warcraft files to their users).

File sharing itself is not illegal! It is how some use it is that is. You should not criminalize an entire right for the sake of hindering pirates, which will simply find another venue. Crackers use computers to steal account information and steal identities – why not make computers illegal? The internet’s being used to download all these illegal files, why not abolish the internet? How soon before they begin taking away additional rights simply so corporations will stop fussing because their multi-billion profits are not enough?

Think of this like prohibition. The law was repealed because you cannot force people to behave. You cannot take away the right to free will – people will do what they want despite the laws. It’s the same with drugs – they’re illegal, yet still used. And what do we do? Waste countless tax dollars putting druggies in prison while that space and money could be put to much better use to catch actual criminals! (I highly recommend reading the lyrics to Prison Song by System of a Down for an excellent demonstration of this point.)

If this law passes – what will happen? The “good guys” will get screwed. We will be down a major, cheap venue for distributing our software when we may not have the money or resources to use other services. Businesses and corporations will also be forced to pay higher distribution costs. What about the pirates? What about those who are actually breaking the law? That won’t stop them. Hell, it may not even hinder them. They’ll come up with another method before the law is even passed. There already are plenty of other methods that are not P2P. You are loosing your right because others do not know how to behave and it’s not even going to stop them!

If you don’t know what DRM is yet (which may be surprising considering how often it is seen all over this website), I encourage you to take a look. Digital Right Management, more appropriately called Digital Restrictions Management, is seen all over, and is growing. With DRM, your computer, your devices, your software tells you what to do. It says, “oh, I don’t want you to do that” or “oh, you can only play this song this many times”. It restricts you. You should tell your computer what to do, not the other way around. It’s just another ploy to further remove our rights – to control our lives.

This treaty would enforce the use of DRM. You would not be able to buy any music that is not encrypted with DRM – meaning you cannot share it with your friends, you can’t transfer it to another device without your computer’s permission, and sometimes if you upgrade your computer you will be denied the right to listen to your own music! You will also only be able to play the music on DRM-compatible devices. Free software cannot play DRM-encrypted music. You will be eating out of the palms of the corporations.

I’m sure many recognize the recent release of the game Spore by EA Games. It was a very controversial release because it incorporated DRM to a ridiculous degree, needing to “call home” every once in a while (it may have been 10 days) to re-activate. This means that in the future, once the activation server was taken down, Spore would no longer be playable. It was as if you were renting the game, not purchasing it. Because EA tried to control its users, they ended up making Spore the most pirated game of 2008 – exactly the opposite effect they had intended. The point – you cannot control people. They will rebel. You need to focus on the problem under the peoples’ own terms or you’ll just make things worse. Now imagine what something like the ACTA will do. Probably make things worse.

Let’s not forget about the mention of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) monitoring their customers’ connections for illegal material. Such plans are already attempting to be forced upon the users of other countries, such as the UK and Australia. What does this mean? Well, putting aside the fact that you are being spied on without a warrant, the software used to track your connection will slow down your connection speeds. This affects everyone – regardless of whether or not you are doing anything illegal. As if the connection monitoring wasn’t bad enough.

The world’s governments need to prioritize and stop taking from us our liberties! Before you know it, they’ll all be gone. You have to help put a stop to it before it’s too late – before you wake up one morning and realize you have nothing left and are powerless to do anything about it. Stop letting your government and your corporations boss you around. Some may not think technology right are such a big deal – but keep in mind. Technology already rules society, and it’s only going to continue to take more control. We’re becoming increasingly dependant on technology and we cannot allow it to enslave us.

Please read more information about this treaty here.

For settings up RaLink drivers for your wireless device, please see a previous entry: RT61 / RT2×00 RaLink Linux Driver Installation

In many previous kernel versions, including 2.6.27, my wireless would randomly go down. I checked dmesg | tail and found that I received the following error:

[41884.647257] wlan0: authenticate with AP 00:15:e9:76:1a:ee
[41884.658208] wlan0: authenticated
[41884.658208] wlan0: associate with AP 00:15:e9:76:1a:ee
[41884.668257] wlan0: RX ReassocResp from 00:15:e9:76:1a:ee (capab=0x431 status=0 aid=5)
[41884.668257] wlan0: associated
[41892.844239] wlan0: no IPv6 routers present
[68822.729255] wlan0: No ProbeResp from current AP 00:15:e9:76:1a:ee - assume out of range

For more information, please see my posts in the following bug report:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/200500
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/200500/comments/35

Within the bug report, a link was referenced to modify the kernel, increasing the amount of time to wait for a response, so it doesn’t assume it’s out of range and disconnect. The problem is – the file to edit didn’t exist anymore in 2.6.27:

http://rt2×00.serialmonkey.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=2081&p=30312&hilit=No+ProbeResp+from+current+AP#p30312

First, you must obtain your kernel source. In gentoo, emerge the vanilla or gentoo sources. In Ubuntu, run the following commands (taken and modified from https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Kernel/Compile):

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$ su
# (Enter root password - if it's not set, run "sudo su" instead)
$ apt-get install linux-source
$ cd /usr/src
$ tar xjvf /usr/src/linux-source-*.tar.bz2
$ cd linux-source-*
$ vi ./net/mac80211/mlme.c #or use your favorite text editor

In the file mlme.c, find the following line:

#define IEEE80211_MONITORING_INTERVAL (2 * HZ)

Modify it so it looks like this (we’re changing the “2″ to “100″):

#define IEEE80211_MONITORING_INTERVAL (100 * HZ)

Save and close the file. Let’s get to building it. With Gentoo, you would simply run “make && make modules_install”, navigate to “arch/your_arch/boot”, find the image, and copy it to /boot. Then modify GRUB/Lilo accordingly. Since Gentoo users probably know what they’re doing, I’ll focus on Ubuntu, which I recently figured out how to do via the above wiki. Ubuntu does it oddly.

Using the commands in the wiki, I had some trouble. It was trying to build using the “xen” archeticture – definatly not what I have. I wanted amd64 (which is x86_64 in the eyes of the kernel). So, I added the –arch option to the below commands. Be sure to specify YOUR architecture (such as i386). Also note the –apend-to-version line. This will append text to the kernel version (which’ll show up in uname -r). Remove it if you don’t want anything. If you do, modify the text in the command.

Multi-core/multiple processors: If you have multiple processors or cores (such as dual-core), type the following command before continuing, replacing the number with 1 + number of processors/cores. This will increase the compiling speed (trust me, you want that) by utilizing all available processors/cores. If you’re busy doing something else, you may wish not to set it, so your computer doesn’t slow down too much.

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# Do this only if you have multiple processors (see above paragraph)
$ export CONCURRENCY_LEVEL=3

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$ cp -vi /boot/config-`uname -r` .config #copy current configuration to use when building kernel
$ make-kpkg --arch=amd64 clean
$ fakeroot make-kpkg --arch=amd64 --initrd --append-to-version=-some-string-here kernel-image kernel-headers

Go grab something to eat, watch TV, throw pebbles at young children – something to pass the time. It’ll take a while.

After it is complete, in Ubuntu, this will have created *.deb files and placed them in the parent directory (in this case, /usr/src). Let’s install them!

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$ echo vesafb | sudo tee -a /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
$ echo fbcon | sudo tee -a /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
$ dpkg -i linux-*.deb

After that, check out the following link for building the restricted modules:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CustomRestrictedModules

Then, of course, modify GRUB to boot the new image. Good luck!

A few days ago, I received my FSF membership goodies in the mail. Among these things were a bootable GNU/Linux membership card / CD-ROM, utility flash drive, a CD containing the source code for the files contained on the membership card, a small collection of articles and a very generous amount of creative stickers which I could not help but show everyone. Click on the image above to enlarge.

With that said, GNU GPLv3 has been released and has some impressive improvements over version two. All my open source projects, most notably MyCustomBB, will adopt this new license.

I have also made my final decision not to return to developing for Microsoft Windows. All my open source projects will be cross-os / cross-browser, however I will no longer be developing projects exclusively for Windows. After getting Internet Explorer working on Linux (for developing websites to conform to its absence of standards), I have abandoned it completely and now exclusively use Linux (Ubuntu) and open source software.

Finally, on a lesser note, I’ve modified this blog’s theme to be a bit more fitting. Hopefully everyone likes it.