Well, it was not totally zero-day, since it took slightly more than 24 hours, apparently. Still, indeed it is now the case that the only ones suffering from the whole “you have to be online all the time or we’ll kick you out of your offline game” thing are the legit customers, while pirates gladly ignore such silly limitations.

The source (on InfoAddict, via PlayNoEvil) states:

Now that the news has spread like wildfire, Ubisoft is finally issuing a response and it is predictably vague. So vague that I am inclined to believe their statement doesn’t hold much water or truth.  Is it possible some aspect of the game is missing? Sure. Is it likely? No, not given how Ubisoft designed Silent Hunter V, meaning it’s not an MMO and it’s world doesn’t exist on a 3rd-party server. If Ubisoft really wants to defeat piracy, may I suggest that your next game be called Silent Hunter Online? Problem solved.

Indeed. Yes, for online games, it makes sense that you need an online connection. For offline games, absolutely not so much. Worst case is that some encrypted content needs to be streamed from the online servers in order for the offline game to work, but even that can be emulated by a dedicated cracker as well (and it requires faster internet connections than mere keep-alive pings that are a more probable implementation of such a feature).

Anyway. Ubisoft of course claims the games won’t work at all anyway. We’ll see what the next days hold, I might update this post or even write a new one if fundamentally new things show up.

Most recent example: Ubisoft. There is a good article on Rock Paper Shotgun about this. What they have announced to do is the following: With every future Ubisoft game, whether it’s single player or multiplayer, online or offline, boxed with a CD or delivered via download, you will constantly need an online connection in order to keep playing the game.

Ubisoft's DRM in action

In other words: Even if it’s a pure single player offline experience, you will constantly need to be online. If for some reason (shaky WiFi, ISP hickups, flatmate downloads too much stuff, Ubisoft’s servers have problems) you lose your connection for a moment, you are also dropped out of your game and (at least in some games) lose all the unsaved data. (Image source)

Ubisoft also does talk around the issue that in five or ten years, their licensing servers for a game might be offline. As a sidenote, in the case of EA, servers shutdowns happen nearly every year. Ubisoft do not fully commit to promising a patch that will remove the online shackles (Source):

PCG: So you can commit to saying that those systems will be patched out?
Ubisoft: That’s the plan.
PCG: It’s the plan, or it’s definitely going to happen?
Ubisoft: That’s written into the goal of the overall plan of the thing. But we don’t plan on shutting down the servers, we really don’t.

I trust the developers that they don’t want to shut these things down. But I don’t trust the management that they won’t. After all, they get nothing out of second-hand sales, and they can stiffle those if only more recent titles actually work at all.

Cogs, great indy game on Steam

Now, a common argument appears to be “but Steam does the same”. And I love Steam. But it has a few fundamental differences to this incoming Ubisoft system:

• You’re only kicked out of actual online games if you lose the connection to the game server (and not the Steam server – the latter doesn’t have any serious impact whatsoever) – so Steam does not affect your capability to play games.
• There is an offline mode, which always worked a treat for me in the rare occasions where I’m offline.
• Steam uses the fact that it’s online for great benefit: automatic background updates, digital content delivery, online save data (well, Ubisoft plans that as well), community features across games (with text and voice chat), all with a very easy-to-use interface.
• Steam is open for games from other developers, and notably, indie developers who gain a way bigger exposure to an interested audience through the system. Without Steam, I would have missed out on Cogs, Bob Came in Pieces, Defense Grid, or Braid.

Vote with your Wallet

Ubisoft’s feature only does one thing: It makes it harder for legitimate customers to play the game. As i wrote elsewhere: Since no server connection is required at all, it’s just another small hoop crackers have to go through, and no change at all for pirates. On the other hand, it is a big change for legitimate customers. Yet again, legitimate customers are punished for piracy.

Piracy is merely a strawman argument. It shouldn’t convince anyone.

If it would actually make game piracy harder, I might understand it a slight bit. But it doesn’t: Cracks and patches will be out within a week tops, patching out the online requirement for pirates. Essentially making the game a better product for non-legitimate customers. They even have an internal schedule for about when the game will be cracked (Source):

Do Ubi believe this DRM is unhackable?
They accept that it’s all DRM’s fate to be eventually hacked, explaining that internally, they’ve already talked of a timescale for how long their games will be protected by it. But, they believe that it’s secure enough for them. “We wouldn’t do it if we didn’t believe in it. The guys who designed it believe in it. Do we think that it’s the one system that God has sent onto earth that will never be cracked by anybody ever? We can’t guarantee that, but we believe in it.

”

Well, I really looked forward to the new, back-to-the-roots, Prince of Persia games. Looks like I won’t buy them, completely unlike all but two (1999, 2008) of the previous ones.

I have one thing to say really: Vote with your wallet. If you run into this post after having bought a broken product like that, return the game. Ubisoft will only stop hurting you if you don’t encourage them to.

Disclaimer: Even though some of the contents of this post make it reasonable to believe that I advocate piracy: I don’t. I also do not play pirated games, or use pirated software – it’s a matter of ethics for me, being both a developer and an aspiring philosopher myself.

In short, again, the reasons why I think biometric passports as per the current proposal are not reasonable:

• Too open access to the collected data, private institutions and foreign governments can access it without notice
• Privacy goes out the window when you can be tracked everywhere
• RFID is readable from meters away without line of sight
• Current RFID encryption is not secure, your passport can be read by crooks
• The only reason why the Swiss government wants those passports is because the USA told us so

I expanded upon all of those points in my earlier post.

Please, do something while you still can! Sign the referendum now. You will have to have your signatures verified already, meanwhile, as they write:

Senden Sie uns jetzt keine UNBEGLAUBIGTEN Bögen mehr. Gehen Sie mit den Bögen die Sie bis am Montag, 29.9. noch ausfüllen können direkt auf die zuständige Gemeindeverwaltung um die Unterschriften beglaubigen zu lassen. Oder senden Sie die Unterschriftenbögen DIREKT an die zuständige Gemeindeverwaltung.

You will then need to send this cover letter along.

Update: We’re there, voting will be May next year or so.

Yes, that just was my meager tribute to today’s Talk like a Pirate Day

Ingame Map

Washington Map

It’s a fact that there’s 10 million WoW players (by official count), and that not all ingame chat is about the game itself. It’s also a fact however that some CIA folks have seen too many conspiracy movies. You might have heard about it: A Pentagon researcher gave a presentation early this month (via Wired, heise), where he alerted the world to the inherent dangers in such online worlds: Jargon! Coded messages! To the left, you see an ingame map, to the right the overlaid secret attack plan. Boo!

Now … yes. Of course, this is theoretically possible. Of course terrorists could forfeit encrypted mails, a private Ventrillo server, or some other secure means of communication, in favour of in-WoW chat. But it’s a prime example of a movie plot threat, a term coined by security expert Bruce Schneier. He clearly illustrates why defending against those is a very bad idea:

The problem with movie plot security is that it only works if we guess right. If we spend billions defending our subways, and the terrorists bomb a bus, we’ve wasted our money. To be sure, defending the subways makes commuting safer. But focusing on subways also has the effect of shifting attacks toward less-defended targets, and the result is that we’re no safer overall.

Seems those Pentagon researchers haven’t read that, though. Nor have they heard about his later movie plot threat contest (which made it to the NY Times), just you wait until they expand on more of those possible dangers – here’s a long inspirational list.

Terror in Lineage

I particularly like this broken toys post, where the blogger draws parallels in other popular MMOs.

Indeed, the point can be made that they only use the above WoW picture as a clever way to make even politicians realize that “emerging media” are something that has to be watched for potential terrorist attacks. But the main issue remains: However many movie plot threats you watch, however many communication channels you supervise, we’re gladly living in a not-quite-yet-1984 world, which has the downside that terrorists have plenty of communication alternatives.

And once again I’m quoting Schneier, in his brilliant analysis of the subject matter:

My guess is still that some clever Pentagon researchers have figured out how to play World of Warcraft on the job, and they’re not giving that perk up anytime soon.

I guess that’s the best explanation for all this.

RFID - How It Works

The Swiss government has decided that our passports, like a few before ours, should store data on RFID chips. Meaning, the following data would be stored in that chip:

• fingerprints
• a digital photograph
• all the data that’s also available in printed form (name, gender, date of birth, eye color, and so on)

All this data could then be read out via electrical readers (as pictured in the diagram to the right, labels German).

That in and of itself isn’t necessarily evil! The current proposal concerning regulations and technology lets it be implemented in ways that make it evil though. Let me lay out why that is.

About RFID

If you haven’t heard of RFID before, it’s high time you read up at Wikipedia – and even if you did, there’s quite intriguing things I haven’t read before in there too. Short version:

An RFID tag is an object that can be applied to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification and tracking using radio waves. Some tags can be read from several meters away and beyond the line of sight of the reader.

Additionally, the RFID chip can be passive – meaning, it has no energy source of its own and thus potentially lives forever. And as I’ll explain later more in-depth, you can’t track who obtains information from it. There are also active RFID chips, but since the ones used in passports are passive and there are no other fundamental differences beyond range between active and passive types, I’ll neglect active RFID chips for the rest of this post.

There are places where RFID chips make sense and most privacy concerns don’t apply (like race tracking, inventory systems, some kinds of animal tracking). But passports definitely aren’t one of them.

The Referendum

The referendum (a federal facultative referendum, that is) is carried from a surprisingly (in a very positive way) large number of independent political forces.

The referendum was launched because there is a vast number of unresolved issues that are introduced with biometric RFID passes (details see below).

Here is the RFID referendum website

If you’re Swiss, I strongly urge you to sign it within the next 10 days, if you haven’t already, and spread it among your friends and coworkers. Time is running out, the referendum only runs until September 22th, and apparently, over 30′000 more signatures are needed. Signature sheets are available on their site.

Privacy

It is not a coincidence that the RFID chip started out, originally, as an espionage device. Its passive nature and long life make it perfect for stealth placement and readout.

Accesses to the chip are not trackable, and while the chips in passports are protected by a metal mesh covering them that shields them against malicious scans, this (just like other things when it comes to RFID) doesn’t work as it should. Uncovered at the Blackhat 2006, a proof of concept showed:

The problem, according to Flexilis, is that the shielding does not fully protect passport against remote scans. Kevin Mahaffey from Flexilis says a medium powered scanner could detect a partially opened passport from four to six inches away. The theoretical maximum detection range is more than 10 feet, but Mahaffey said that would require a “huge amount of power.”

So, when you have such a passport, you’re trackable, identifiable, by anyone who has access to that kind of technology. Which is just about anyone who’s determined enough.

Furthermore, even “legitimate” (as per the legal text) kinds of tracking can go way beyond what we’re comfortable with. Airline companies, other companies with special permissions, your own and foreign governments, can and may track your every move. And once enough companies have your data in their databases, it’s bound to be stolen and out in the open eventually – data leaks do happen.

If you’re in the fortunate position to understand German, the StopRFID pages of the FoeBuD e.V. have way more info.

Security

There is a simple fact about RFID chips that no lobbyist will openly admit:

They are not secure.

You may have heard of MythBusters. It’s a Discovery Channel series that … busts myths. Often funny, like “can you surf on a wave created by a dynamite explosion”, but also stuff like “can you hack security fingerprint systems”. They tried to do an episode on RFID, and they were shut down by the industry. You draw the conclusions. References here: tom’s hardware, cnet news, the consumerist, all via Bruce Schneier.

“But”, I hear you say, “they’re meant to be made secure!” Well … yes. Read for yourself, in the federal Swiss decree:

Der Datenchip ist gegen Fälschungen und unberechtigtes Lesen zu schützen. Der Bundesrat bestimmt die entsprechenden technischen Anforderungen.

More or less, the chip is to be protected against malicious readouts, and details are to be determined by the executive.

But, there’s a problem with this: The same thing was meant to happen with the British passes’ RFID chips. And what happened? They were hacked a couple weeks after they were released. Read the details on The Guardian:

“The reader – I bought one for £250 – has to say hello to the chip and tell it that it is authorised to make contact. The key to that is in the date of birth, etc. Once they communicate, the conversation is encrypted, but I wrote some software in about 48 hours that made sense of it.”

More info on TechNewsWorld. Now, this was a white hat hacker. Who tells us that black hats have problems with what he achieved in 48 hours? We already know that it’s easy to access credit card numbers like that, why should full blown identity theft be made as easy as the (too easy) credit card theft?

Teleology

As we know, the main reason for adding those RFID chips in the first place is that the US wants everybody to do so. In their Enhanced Border Security and Visa Reform Act of 2002, we find:

Additionally, by October 26, 2004, in order for a country to remain eligible for participation in the visa waiver program its government must certify that it has a program to issue to its nationals machine-readable passports that are tamper-resistant and which incorporate biometric and authentication identifiers that satisfy the standards of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

Why is it that the US government wants everybody to use those RFID chips in the first place then? Bruce Schneier has, yet again, brilliant vista:

The Bush administration is deliberately choosing a less secure technology without justification. If there were a good offsetting reason to choose that technology over a contact chip, then the choice might make sense.

Unfortunately, there is only one possible reason: The administration wants surreptitious access themselves. It wants to be able to identify people in crowds. It wants to surreptitiously pick out the Americans, and pick out the foreigners. It wants to do the very thing that it insists, despite demonstrations to the contrary, can’t be done.

This, of course, is speculation. I haven’t seen another reasonable explanation to date yet though.

The fun thing is that the US government keeps pursuing that course, despite even large independent bodies like the Smart Card Alliance (who actually represents RFID vendors, among others, and thus has it in their best economic interest that RFID chips are used) warning them from privacy and security dangers. If you have a long breath, you might want to read this extensive report from May 2006.

The future

Maybe some time in the future, the technology will be where it needs to be in order to make a private, secure chip that makes international travel easy without exposing its users to unnecessary risks. The proposed RFID chips certainly aren’t that technology.

Of course, even when we eventually do have the technology, other things like better tolerance and education would be more effective in preventing terrorism. But that’s an entirely different discussion.

Linear acceleration, circular boosting in 4 packets with pulses, further acceleration in the proton synchotron (a larger ring) and gain of mass, further energy addition in the super proton synchotron, and finally the LHC itself with 2 rings with opposite directions, which then allows the actual collisions. Really neat.

As for the black hole doomsday scenario that cookie mentioned wasn’t upon us just yet: It isn’t due until October 21st (source, via), so long they won’t do any collisions and just test the two individual rings. Also, it’s just one of many such scenarios, every one just as improbable as the next.

Random related tidbit, an Indian girl commited suicide because she was afraid of dying (via Arathor.net). Tragic, which doesn’t quite mean that I understand it -- as Ramuel in that thread put it so eloquently:

I really don’t get it. I mean if you were thinking about killing yourself and believed the end of the world was nigh, why not just save yourself the hassle and wait until you get sucked into oblivion?

Everybody’s celebrating, even Google, with one of their famous doodles (uhm … does “please do not use them elsewhere” mean I’m not supposed to show it here?):

Google LHC Doodle

Onwards, a few explanations why it’s just a little bang and not a big bang CERN is producing, and an explanation why there won’t be dangerous black holes, and a less science-ey one too. So, none of the other particle colliders will kill us any time soon, either.

Hopefully.

Update 13:41: Very nice site that answers all questions, via kuschti @ Twitter.

http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/

Feel the source, Luke.

Update 14:02: For up to date news, follow CERN on Twitter.

I’ll take this opportunity to list all the plugins I found useful in my quest for a highly useable and convenient blogging experience for my readers, search engines, and me.

• Akismet – utterly awesome anti-spam plugin
• All in one SEO pack – for things like meta tags, rewriting titles, specifying which archives robots should search
• Breadcrumb NavXT – because I like breadcrumbs
• Google XML Sitemaps – more candy for search engines
• Lightbox 2 – because lightboxes look nice
• Admin Drop Down Menu – makes life easier for me when doing admin stuff
• Robots Meta – to avoid indexing of unnecessary stuff
• Search Unleashed – because it sucks less (still not perfect though)
• SEO Friendly Images – not sure if that’d still be necessary, but whatever, alt and title are good
• Simple Tags – easier tagging, nice tag cloud
• StatPress – you got me, I’m tracking you…
• Subscribe To Comments – nobody’s using this yet
• WP-PostRatings – those little stars below the posts removed
  
• WP-Syntax – syntax highlighting for my coding posts, really handy
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – aah, more gadgets

That’s it, my extensive collection (I removed the Ajax edit one, it slowed down the site horribly)

Update 08-09-10 12:00: I couldn’t stand having invalid CSS, so I changed some plugin CSS code and adapted the theme a bit further as well. The bad news: Rounded corners for image frames are gone. The good news:

Hooray

This is the third part of a three-part series, have a look at part 1 and part 2 first.

So let’s go on ahead and jump into the final bits of my troubles with MS Access and VBA as environment for medium and larger IT projects – basically, anything having 2 and up users.

Syntax

There are quite a few things that bother me about the VBA syntax. First of all: it’s inconsistent, even more so than the one of php (where mainly method signatures are inconsistent), in several places. The most prominent of them are functions. Take these lines:

Dim answer As VbMsgBoxResult
MsgBox "Hello World!", vbOKOnly
answer = MsgBox("Hello World?", vbYesNo)

Did you notice anything? Yes, indeed. Take note, the parentheses are forbidden in the first case, and mandatory in the second. Now assume that you have a function call that you suddenly need the answer from, whereas you didn’t need it earlier. Not only do you now have to write the assignment, but you also have to add parentheses to the function call. Way to spend productive time.

The same goes for “Set” and assignments to native data types and Objects: For Objects, it’s mandatory, for native types it’s forbidden. That goes even for Objects stored in a Variant variable – all Variants are not made equal, some will throw runtime errors when you assign stuff to them.

Another annoying syntax bit is this one:

' Won't work!
Dim someNumber As Integer = 5
' Will work :-/
Dim someNumber As Integer
someNumber = 5

Yay, more lines of code, how great. But wait, I have more! What do you think this produces?

Dim firstVar, secondVar As Double
Dim thirdVar, fourthVar As Object

Yep, you guessed it. “firstVar” is a Variant, “secondVar” a Double, “thirdVar” a Variant, “fourthVar” an Object. Oh, you got it wrong? Don’t worry, it’s just that silly.

My final pet peeve with the syntax is its capitalization (and thus technically the IDE and not VBA itself). VBA is not per se case sensitive – and it expresses that through simple means: Whenever it encounters a variable, it tries to capitalize it the way it’s supposed to be, to make it clear that it’s the same.

Now, enter scoping, and intuitively named API bits. So you have a local variable called “currentItem” … what happens if you try to access the property “CurrentItem” in, say, an Inspector Object? Right, it’s capitalized “currentItem”. It has nothing at all to do with my local variable, but the IDE is too stupid to notice.

Of course there’s other things amiss or strange, like the lack of a side effect free ternary operator, or the (nearly syntax) VBA developer gospel for the redundant Hungarian notation taken to wrong extremes, but I’ll just stop here.

MS Access

I won’t even go into how I find Access 2007 to be much worse than its predecessors when it comes to usability, with longer mouse paths and more clicks per action, the developer tab not showing by default, and shortcuts no longer easily visible. Just so much: it’s annoying. I guess I still haven’t gotten used to the new, less quick, way of displaying shortcuts, and often, object placements aren’t intuitive for me and I’m looking for things in the wrong tab.

What really bothers though is that Access has stability issues. Access is the only program so far that managed to crash on my development system. Dreamweaver MX 04 is quite an old make and has huge problems with Vista’s UAC, but it doesn’t crash. Nor does any other tool. But Access, which happens to often corrupt databases when it does.

Even crashes aside, occasionally the database just corrupts like that, without any visible reason. Or it keeps code that you deleted, and keeps spitting error messages how that code isn’t valid – without you having any possibility to do anything about it, not even overwriting helps.

I hope you make backups every couple minutes, I certainly learned to. I haven’t found another reliable way to get those databases back into stable conditions.

Then, what’s one of the many responsibilities of a proper DBMS? Housekeeping! What does Access do? Provide you with “compact and repair”, which is user-initiated only. Well, I guess with huge databases that Access couldn’t handle anymore anyway, that would make sense, not having that an automated regular task.

Furthermore, every single user needs MS Access installed on his computer. Potentially a security risk, certainly not something that should be necessary. You don’t go and install an MS SQL Server on everybody’s machine. At least Microsoft consequently follows through, and their Access security FAQ is all about how you can protect your computer from malicious Access macros, and not how you can secure your Access databases.

By the way, Access doesn’t scale – what else is new. Multiple users are a problem, for larger databases (>2GB, but you’re hitting performance bottlenecks way before that) you have to move to a proper backend – essentially, lugging around the whole DBMS part of your GUI windowing toolkit for naught afterwards.

It does at least have proper locking, quite refined permissions, and with Access 2007, database encryption (without which all the permission structures in the world are worth naught) as well.

Other Things

There’s a few other small things that I found incredibly annoying, coming from other languages like Java, Python and my personal favourite, Ruby.

For one, Null comparisons work in odd ways, VBA uses ternary logic (although admittedly, this is consistent with the way SQL handles Nulls).

The next minor thing are silly defaults – there are two lines every halfway serious programmer adds as a very first thing to every single bit of VBA code they write (and this goes so far that there’s option settings to add it automatically to every source bit):

Option Explicit
Option Compare Database

The reason for this is simple: backwards compatibility. While VB6 (maybe earlier?) changed the default to the need for explicit variable declaration, VBA never did, and thus it’s still possible to mistype a simple variable and never find the error later on. And as for Compare Database … yeah sure, let’s compare stuff everywhere a bit differently, to make sure the database behaves completely unforeseeable.

Another one: No external source file support. If you want to use any library or other cool thingy you found on the net or elsewhere, you have to copy-paste the code into Access. Where it’s needed, that is, which of course means that if it’s needed anywhere else, you have to copy-paste it again. The only way around this are Access databases that allow you to copy-paste (oh, look, a pattern) the respective classes or modules as a whole. No, you can’t just link (with very limited exceptions). Hooray?

We’re not done yet: You can’t return an array! If you want a Function that returns an array, you have to define it as returning a Variant. If you do that, you can return arrays (since they’re a subtype of Variant), but will lose all meta information: Data type, size, everything. So if you want to return an array and its size, you have to do it via separate functions, or with a stateful returning object, or with a custom ADT.

Something that was rightfully pointed out to me (thanks Ste!) – why is it that VBA (and VB.NET, for that matter) distinguishes between Functions and Subs? There’s no fundamental difference, one returns something, the other doesn’t (so, essentially returns Nothing), but that’s it. Visual Studio goes so far to automatically change the keyword from Sub to Function when you return something.

Conclusion

I guess it’s apparent by now: I do think that it’s justifiable to say that VBA is outdated and should be dumped right now.

For Microsoft: There are good replacements, there’s no reasonable reason beyond “it was easier” to have Office 2007 use VBA still, and there’s certainly no reason to make the next version of MS Office still have VBA support – particularly if that means that there still won’t be native VB.NET support inside MS Office.

How delusional of me to think they’ll actually see this, though

For anybody considering Access and VBA for their projects: Well, if you still want to, you can of course. Or get the free Visual Studio Express for VB.NET plus SQL Server Express, and stick to a Microsoft environment with a very similar but much more mature language, and a more performant database, for less money.

I still do work with VBA, when I really have to, but I think I laid out here why it’s a fact that I really only do so when there is no other way.

part 1 – part 2 – part 3

I hate piracy, but even more so I can’t stand rigid DRM. Particularly when it has compatibility problems with legit programs, restricts other legitimate activities on a computer, or acts akin to a rootkit. Even if EA removed the need to be online to play an offline game.

Anyway, that alone wouldn’t warrant a blog post – but this is utterly hilarious: Tons of customers that are as disgruntled as I am (or even more so, apparently) went to Amazon and did this to Spore’s review score:

Spore Reviews

Well-deserved, EA. This comic here sums it up nicely.

Other reactions: Now also on Basic Thinking (in German), with fitting video, and on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, where the poster takes a stance different from mine and the discussion in the comments is tremendously interesting. Next step: BBC – the mass media are picking up!

Update 08-09-09 20:57: Amazon US meanwhile has nearly 1500 1-star reviews, while Amazon UK deletes anti-DRM comments, and EA continues using SecuROM, all via Basic Thinking. Let’s hope the momentum carries this a bit further into mass media and provokes some more attention before it all dies down under the censoring monetary weight of major corporations.

Update 08-09-12 00:23: More coverage, on ars technica (that I saw, but haven’t linked before), and in German at Spiegel Online, via Crossmediale Kommunikation (German as well).