This Fourth of July has probably got to be one of the most depressing in recent memory for me. It's depressing because what has been for almost two and a half centuries a celebration of freedom feels so unspeakably hollow to me. And it shouldn't.
Showing posts with label shenanigans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shenanigans. Show all posts
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Winter of Discontent
I cannot tell: the world is grown so bad,
That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch …
--”Richard III”, Act I, Scene iii
By now, everybody on the planet who has access to a radio, a TV, or an Internet connection has heard of the Newtown shootings. It’s arguably one of the most heinous events this year, and likely will be in American history for many years to come. If Euripides, Aristophanes, and Sophocles sat down together and tried to create the ultimate tragedy storyline, they probably couldn’t have bettered Newtown if they had a hundred years to work on it. And once again, in the face of incomprehensible horror, we’re hearing the same chorus of voices.
“It’s the guns! Ban ALL the guns!”
“It’s the violent media! It’s Hollywood movies and video games! Burn them all!”
“It’s the press! It’s all their fault! Make them stop reporting tragedies!”
“It’s the lunatics! Lock them all up for our own good!”
There is the understandable desire to Do Something, or failing that to be Seen As Doing Something. There are going to be blue ribbon panels. There are going to be Congressional hearings. There will be more drama and agony in the next year or so then there was during the actual event that sparked the whole thing. And it will not end well for anybody.
That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch …
--”Richard III”, Act I, Scene iii
By now, everybody on the planet who has access to a radio, a TV, or an Internet connection has heard of the Newtown shootings. It’s arguably one of the most heinous events this year, and likely will be in American history for many years to come. If Euripides, Aristophanes, and Sophocles sat down together and tried to create the ultimate tragedy storyline, they probably couldn’t have bettered Newtown if they had a hundred years to work on it. And once again, in the face of incomprehensible horror, we’re hearing the same chorus of voices.
“It’s the guns! Ban ALL the guns!”
“It’s the violent media! It’s Hollywood movies and video games! Burn them all!”
“It’s the press! It’s all their fault! Make them stop reporting tragedies!”
“It’s the lunatics! Lock them all up for our own good!”
There is the understandable desire to Do Something, or failing that to be Seen As Doing Something. There are going to be blue ribbon panels. There are going to be Congressional hearings. There will be more drama and agony in the next year or so then there was during the actual event that sparked the whole thing. And it will not end well for anybody.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
PSN'ing Me Off - Sony's Failure to Secure The PlayStation Network
Let us establish first and foremost the basic position in which Sony now finds itself with the gaming public: they are fucked.
Some of you will doubtlessly protest my very strong language and crude imagery regarding the current situation with Sony's PlayStation Network. Some of you probably expect nothing less. Either way, I stand by my assertion. The scenario that has played out couldn't possibly be conceived, even with assistance from LSD, salvia, shrooms, and mescaline all mixed together. DDOSing the PSN, that sort of thing should be something that any network engineer, security oriented or not, ought to be factoring into their designs when they build something like this. But this has gone way beyond a mere botnet or script kiddie attack. Somebody, or a group of somebodies, didn't just shut down the PSN the way that Anonymous "accidentally" did a few weeks ago. They broke in and made off with user data. How much user data?
Try all of it.
There are, best estimate, some 70 million PSN accounts. Those accounts contain names, addresses, and most importantly, credit card info. And every last bit of that data was taken. This is light-years above owning a box on Sony's network. It's like the Great Train Robbery, only considerably worse. What could you do with essentially unfettered access to 70 million credit and debit cards? Depends on how smart you were about it. The best part, from the perspective of the hackers, is that Sony has actually helped them get away with this. How so? By not owning up to the fact that they got hacked, and not owning up to the fact that personal data was lost. Because Sony sat around with their thumbs up their asses, putting out milquetoast "updates" which informed without actually enlightening anybody, and ignored the rising degree of protests far longer than they should have, they essentially covered for the hackers. Their prevarications have given those guys at least a week's head start to play around with other people's money.
One thing that should be kept in mind at moments like this is that it really is smart to avoid ascribing malicious motives to certain actions which can be better explained by basic stupidity. Consider Patrick Seybold, the Senior Director of Corporate Communications and Social Media for Sony. It's tempting to paint him as an outright villain, a corporate mouthpiece stooge who propagated a farrago of lies by repeating over and over, "we don't know how bad it really is" for six whole days. But it's perhaps more accurate to look at him as being stupid. The less flattering view would be the typical suit, a guy who is in the habit of talking a lot but not really saying much of anything, which might go over well in the boardroom but tends to make your customers start hauling out their pitchforks and torches. The more forgiving perspective would be a man who was given the mushroom treatment by another segment of his company and used as a human shield for a week. Continuing up the food chain, we have the engineers whose balliwick the PSN falls under. Again, real tempting to paint them as evil bastards. Again, much better to look at them as exercising gross stupidity rather than genuine evil. In a corporate environment the size and breadth of Sony, the size of a problem is proportionate to the speed with which one's CYA reflex kicks in. A tiny little problem, nobody will give it a second thought, just fix it and forget it. A bigger problem, say an authentication issue for the East Coast for example, and you can be sure there's some CYA going on before the problem actually gets fixed. When you've got a problem like the current one, everybody will be on the verge of panic trying to figure out how their posteriors can be sufficiently shielded, even as the small vestiges of their brains still capable of coherent thought inform them that there isn't a snowflake's chance in Hell they can make anything relating to the disaster look good. Fiascoes like this one tend to lead upper management to demand people's heads, and heads will be served up one way or the other. If the engineers weren't feeding Seybold any genuinely useful information, then it's certainly understandable why Seybold's blog posts weren't assuaging the public's discontent.
I would like to take a moment to address another example of stupidity, and one that has far more potentially damaging consequences. It is the stupidity of complacency. The stupidity of "don't worry, it's not a big deal." To some extent, Sony gave us this brand of stupidity over the course of the last week, and it's turned out that we shouldn't just be worried, we should be all sorts of pissed off and justifiably scared. An article on Ars Technica had some choice words from Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan who has seemingly made the current stage of his career focused on "analyzing" the video game industry. And by "analyzing," I mean "spouting mindless bullshit and getting paid six figures for it." In the past, I've done my best to avoid giving much thought to Pachter and his inanities, but his pronouncements in regard to Sony and the PSN breach just cannot go unchallenged. The first mistake is playing the "shit happens" card, stating that security breaches do happen and it sucks for customers. Sony wasn't even stupid enough to try and use that gambit, which doesn't start Pachter off on solid footing. Yes, security breaches happen, but in regards to the PSN, security breaches DIDN'T happen. Outages, yes. Authentication problems, more than Sony would probably like to admit. I know that no system is 100% secure and no system can avoid being breached forever. The PSN was probably the closest thing to an impenetrable system that Man has devised in the last decade. When it finally was breached, it was ripped wide open and the really valuable data, the personal user data, not the games, was sucked out like marrow from a cracked bone. The "hassle of tracking down whether somebody is fraudulently using credit info" which Pachter breezily dismisses isn't the sort of annoyance that can be dispensed with by clicking a mouse and re-entering some data. Assuming for a moment that the spread of credit cards stored on the PSN is evenly split up between the 4 major credit card companies (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover), then each of those companies is looking at dealing with seventeen and a half million cards that need to be cancelled and re-issued. It's likely not such an even split, but the company who's only handling four or five million card cancellations probably won't be feeling suitably grateful for the distinction. That's going to tie up massive amounts of resources which would otherwise be pointed towards day-to-day operations. The ripple effect on the economy just from having to process all those cancellations beggars the imagination. Even if it's handled at a lower level through local banks and credit unions, it's still eventually going to impact the operations of the credit card companies.
Pachter continues to show his absolute lack of anything resembling intelligent thought when he made the following pronouncement: "In my view, a serious hacker with evil intent would be better off hacking into a financial institution rather than a gaming network." He continues to diminish the scale of the disaster by concluding that the breach is "not a serious security threat." If I were a serious hacker with evil intent, directly hacking into a financial institution would be the last thing in the universe I'd want to do. It wouldn't matter to me if it was the Last National Bank of Zimbabwe. Shooting for a direct breach of bank data would be unbelievably stupid and ultimately profitless. Banks have been directly robbed so many times in physical form over the centuries that they tend to design their computer systems much like they would their branches. Lots of security fences, lots of redundancies, lots of alarms. Banks expect people to try and straight out rob them, so they harden themselves accordingly. True, they can still be breached, and user data can be obtained, but banks will go berserk the minute a breach happens and they will be locking down everything related to the breach very quickly. If you're lucky, you'll have about 24 hours worth of use out of that data, then it's pretty much wasted hard drive space. Rather than hit the banks directly, hacking a game network would allow somebody to come at them sideways. Remember how I asked what you would do if you had 70 million credit card accounts, all the personal data associated with those accounts, and a week's head start? If I were the smarter version of Pachter's hypothetical "serious hacker," I'd be making relatively small money transfers. A cash advance here, a direct withdrawl there. Keep the limit down to a C-note at a time. Even if I could only pull it off one time each for 10% of the accounts that I snagged, that's still 7 million accounts, and a Benjamin from each one of those accounts would add up to some serious money. Banks look for big money transfers into and out of individual accounts. Somebody shows up with a hundred million dollars and says, "I'd like to make a deposit," you can bet there's a manager on the phone to the Feds before the ink's even dry on the deposit slip. Small money transfers, on the other hand, it's background noise to a bank. A modicum of caution while pulling money out and putting in, nobody would have any reason to suspect anything, certainly nothing that would justify filling out a Suspicious Activity Report. And if I were being extra smart about it, there would be a mix of ATM withdrawals and electronic fund transfers. Shift a C-note to the bank of my choice, pull it out a few hours later, and the cash is mine. I could go on about how ATM cameras would be recording me, but if I'm smart enough to have planned and executed a plunder on this scale, dealing with ATM cameras would have been factored into my thinking and a suitable countermeasure developed. Bottom line: a gaming network is the perfect vehicle to rob a bank, because nobody will see it coming.
As my high school forensics coach told me oh so many years ago, it's considered good form to concede at least one of your opponent's points during a debate. And while I firmly believe that describing Michael Pachter as a halfwit is overly generous praise, his little chat with Ars Technica did produce one point which I can agree with. "Over the long run, we'll all forget about this, unless it happens again." Perhaps not entirely accurate, but close enough. The brouhaha will eventually die down, people will be fired, and life will return to something resembling normal. How quickly things return to almost-normal, and how close they come to the established benchmark of normal prior to the breach, depends very heavily upon what Sony does next. The smart thing to do would be complete disclosure. Let the world see how thoroughly they fucked up and how badly they got taken. Make sure that the conditions and the environment which allowed the breach to happen do not recur. Sony needs to be crawling on their hands and knees over broken glass coated in lemon juice and salt to win their customers' confidence back. Even then, it may never quite reach the level of confidence that they once enjoyed. The question is how to prevent a new breach from happening. If the hackers got in through a hacked PS3, what would Sony do? Update the firmware to further cut off functionality? Brick every PS3 currently out in the world and make their customers buy all new ones just to rebuild the integrity of the PSN? Both of those options would almost certainly exacerbate an already infuriated customer base, as well as give hacker groups like Anonymous more grist for their mills. Until Sony discloses how the hack was pulled off, it's exceedingly difficult to say how best to proceed. Continuing to do what they've been doing for the last week is guaranteed to make the situation worse. "Proactive" measures which somehow result in a further diminished user experience for the PSN when it finally does come back up will have the same effect. For the immediate future, Sony is fucked as far as their customers are concerned, because there is nothing they can do that won't piss people off even more. Even SCEA's board committing seppuku on YouTube wouldn't make people happy. Sony will just have to take their lumps and contemplate the scale of repairs needed not only to the PSN, but to their reputation and their customer base.
Some of you will doubtlessly protest my very strong language and crude imagery regarding the current situation with Sony's PlayStation Network. Some of you probably expect nothing less. Either way, I stand by my assertion. The scenario that has played out couldn't possibly be conceived, even with assistance from LSD, salvia, shrooms, and mescaline all mixed together. DDOSing the PSN, that sort of thing should be something that any network engineer, security oriented or not, ought to be factoring into their designs when they build something like this. But this has gone way beyond a mere botnet or script kiddie attack. Somebody, or a group of somebodies, didn't just shut down the PSN the way that Anonymous "accidentally" did a few weeks ago. They broke in and made off with user data. How much user data?
Try all of it.
There are, best estimate, some 70 million PSN accounts. Those accounts contain names, addresses, and most importantly, credit card info. And every last bit of that data was taken. This is light-years above owning a box on Sony's network. It's like the Great Train Robbery, only considerably worse. What could you do with essentially unfettered access to 70 million credit and debit cards? Depends on how smart you were about it. The best part, from the perspective of the hackers, is that Sony has actually helped them get away with this. How so? By not owning up to the fact that they got hacked, and not owning up to the fact that personal data was lost. Because Sony sat around with their thumbs up their asses, putting out milquetoast "updates" which informed without actually enlightening anybody, and ignored the rising degree of protests far longer than they should have, they essentially covered for the hackers. Their prevarications have given those guys at least a week's head start to play around with other people's money.
One thing that should be kept in mind at moments like this is that it really is smart to avoid ascribing malicious motives to certain actions which can be better explained by basic stupidity. Consider Patrick Seybold, the Senior Director of Corporate Communications and Social Media for Sony. It's tempting to paint him as an outright villain, a corporate mouthpiece stooge who propagated a farrago of lies by repeating over and over, "we don't know how bad it really is" for six whole days. But it's perhaps more accurate to look at him as being stupid. The less flattering view would be the typical suit, a guy who is in the habit of talking a lot but not really saying much of anything, which might go over well in the boardroom but tends to make your customers start hauling out their pitchforks and torches. The more forgiving perspective would be a man who was given the mushroom treatment by another segment of his company and used as a human shield for a week. Continuing up the food chain, we have the engineers whose balliwick the PSN falls under. Again, real tempting to paint them as evil bastards. Again, much better to look at them as exercising gross stupidity rather than genuine evil. In a corporate environment the size and breadth of Sony, the size of a problem is proportionate to the speed with which one's CYA reflex kicks in. A tiny little problem, nobody will give it a second thought, just fix it and forget it. A bigger problem, say an authentication issue for the East Coast for example, and you can be sure there's some CYA going on before the problem actually gets fixed. When you've got a problem like the current one, everybody will be on the verge of panic trying to figure out how their posteriors can be sufficiently shielded, even as the small vestiges of their brains still capable of coherent thought inform them that there isn't a snowflake's chance in Hell they can make anything relating to the disaster look good. Fiascoes like this one tend to lead upper management to demand people's heads, and heads will be served up one way or the other. If the engineers weren't feeding Seybold any genuinely useful information, then it's certainly understandable why Seybold's blog posts weren't assuaging the public's discontent.
I would like to take a moment to address another example of stupidity, and one that has far more potentially damaging consequences. It is the stupidity of complacency. The stupidity of "don't worry, it's not a big deal." To some extent, Sony gave us this brand of stupidity over the course of the last week, and it's turned out that we shouldn't just be worried, we should be all sorts of pissed off and justifiably scared. An article on Ars Technica had some choice words from Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan who has seemingly made the current stage of his career focused on "analyzing" the video game industry. And by "analyzing," I mean "spouting mindless bullshit and getting paid six figures for it." In the past, I've done my best to avoid giving much thought to Pachter and his inanities, but his pronouncements in regard to Sony and the PSN breach just cannot go unchallenged. The first mistake is playing the "shit happens" card, stating that security breaches do happen and it sucks for customers. Sony wasn't even stupid enough to try and use that gambit, which doesn't start Pachter off on solid footing. Yes, security breaches happen, but in regards to the PSN, security breaches DIDN'T happen. Outages, yes. Authentication problems, more than Sony would probably like to admit. I know that no system is 100% secure and no system can avoid being breached forever. The PSN was probably the closest thing to an impenetrable system that Man has devised in the last decade. When it finally was breached, it was ripped wide open and the really valuable data, the personal user data, not the games, was sucked out like marrow from a cracked bone. The "hassle of tracking down whether somebody is fraudulently using credit info" which Pachter breezily dismisses isn't the sort of annoyance that can be dispensed with by clicking a mouse and re-entering some data. Assuming for a moment that the spread of credit cards stored on the PSN is evenly split up between the 4 major credit card companies (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover), then each of those companies is looking at dealing with seventeen and a half million cards that need to be cancelled and re-issued. It's likely not such an even split, but the company who's only handling four or five million card cancellations probably won't be feeling suitably grateful for the distinction. That's going to tie up massive amounts of resources which would otherwise be pointed towards day-to-day operations. The ripple effect on the economy just from having to process all those cancellations beggars the imagination. Even if it's handled at a lower level through local banks and credit unions, it's still eventually going to impact the operations of the credit card companies.
Pachter continues to show his absolute lack of anything resembling intelligent thought when he made the following pronouncement: "In my view, a serious hacker with evil intent would be better off hacking into a financial institution rather than a gaming network." He continues to diminish the scale of the disaster by concluding that the breach is "not a serious security threat." If I were a serious hacker with evil intent, directly hacking into a financial institution would be the last thing in the universe I'd want to do. It wouldn't matter to me if it was the Last National Bank of Zimbabwe. Shooting for a direct breach of bank data would be unbelievably stupid and ultimately profitless. Banks have been directly robbed so many times in physical form over the centuries that they tend to design their computer systems much like they would their branches. Lots of security fences, lots of redundancies, lots of alarms. Banks expect people to try and straight out rob them, so they harden themselves accordingly. True, they can still be breached, and user data can be obtained, but banks will go berserk the minute a breach happens and they will be locking down everything related to the breach very quickly. If you're lucky, you'll have about 24 hours worth of use out of that data, then it's pretty much wasted hard drive space. Rather than hit the banks directly, hacking a game network would allow somebody to come at them sideways. Remember how I asked what you would do if you had 70 million credit card accounts, all the personal data associated with those accounts, and a week's head start? If I were the smarter version of Pachter's hypothetical "serious hacker," I'd be making relatively small money transfers. A cash advance here, a direct withdrawl there. Keep the limit down to a C-note at a time. Even if I could only pull it off one time each for 10% of the accounts that I snagged, that's still 7 million accounts, and a Benjamin from each one of those accounts would add up to some serious money. Banks look for big money transfers into and out of individual accounts. Somebody shows up with a hundred million dollars and says, "I'd like to make a deposit," you can bet there's a manager on the phone to the Feds before the ink's even dry on the deposit slip. Small money transfers, on the other hand, it's background noise to a bank. A modicum of caution while pulling money out and putting in, nobody would have any reason to suspect anything, certainly nothing that would justify filling out a Suspicious Activity Report. And if I were being extra smart about it, there would be a mix of ATM withdrawals and electronic fund transfers. Shift a C-note to the bank of my choice, pull it out a few hours later, and the cash is mine. I could go on about how ATM cameras would be recording me, but if I'm smart enough to have planned and executed a plunder on this scale, dealing with ATM cameras would have been factored into my thinking and a suitable countermeasure developed. Bottom line: a gaming network is the perfect vehicle to rob a bank, because nobody will see it coming.
As my high school forensics coach told me oh so many years ago, it's considered good form to concede at least one of your opponent's points during a debate. And while I firmly believe that describing Michael Pachter as a halfwit is overly generous praise, his little chat with Ars Technica did produce one point which I can agree with. "Over the long run, we'll all forget about this, unless it happens again." Perhaps not entirely accurate, but close enough. The brouhaha will eventually die down, people will be fired, and life will return to something resembling normal. How quickly things return to almost-normal, and how close they come to the established benchmark of normal prior to the breach, depends very heavily upon what Sony does next. The smart thing to do would be complete disclosure. Let the world see how thoroughly they fucked up and how badly they got taken. Make sure that the conditions and the environment which allowed the breach to happen do not recur. Sony needs to be crawling on their hands and knees over broken glass coated in lemon juice and salt to win their customers' confidence back. Even then, it may never quite reach the level of confidence that they once enjoyed. The question is how to prevent a new breach from happening. If the hackers got in through a hacked PS3, what would Sony do? Update the firmware to further cut off functionality? Brick every PS3 currently out in the world and make their customers buy all new ones just to rebuild the integrity of the PSN? Both of those options would almost certainly exacerbate an already infuriated customer base, as well as give hacker groups like Anonymous more grist for their mills. Until Sony discloses how the hack was pulled off, it's exceedingly difficult to say how best to proceed. Continuing to do what they've been doing for the last week is guaranteed to make the situation worse. "Proactive" measures which somehow result in a further diminished user experience for the PSN when it finally does come back up will have the same effect. For the immediate future, Sony is fucked as far as their customers are concerned, because there is nothing they can do that won't piss people off even more. Even SCEA's board committing seppuku on YouTube wouldn't make people happy. Sony will just have to take their lumps and contemplate the scale of repairs needed not only to the PSN, but to their reputation and their customer base.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
The Great Firewall of America
For the last year or so, I've been keeping an eye on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) with a slightly more than casual level in interest. It is a far reaching and expansive "trade" treaty that seeks to impose harsh penalties on copyright infringers and those who deal in counterfeit goods. A little over a year ago, the Obama Administration refused to divulge any information about ACTA in the first place, citing "national security concerns." Over the last ten years, anybody citing "national security concerns" over anything that isn't remotely related to defense spending, intelligence activities, or military deployments automatically falls into the category of suspicious as hell in my mind. Naturally, the text of the draft agreement leaked out on to the Internet. At that time, the most heinous portions of the agreement were provisions that demanded DMCA-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that demanded material be removed from websites by ISPs if the ISP received word that the material was infringing on somebody's copyright, without any actual effort or mechanism to investigate the veracity of the complaint or appeal the decision. Additionally, there were provisions that prohibited breaking DRM for any reason (again, shades of the DMCA), and rules requiring ISPs to actively police sites with user-contributed material for potential copyright violations, as well as cutting off Internet access to accused (not convicted) infringers. The entire Blogger site, not just this blog, would doubtlessly shut down because of the literally prohibitive cost involved in trying to cover the costs of lawyers who did nothing all day but scour blogs looking for POSSIBLE copyright infringements.
A year later, things have not gotten any better. Two months ago, the MPAA sent a representative to an information meeting about ACTA down in Mexico. It's not terribly surprising in and of itself, since the MPAA has championed the cause of ACTA by crying foul over piracy and believing that ACTA (or the analogous American version of it, COICA) would allow it to finally crush movie piracy in much the same way that the Death Star was supposed to crush the Rebel Alliance. What was surprising at this meeting was that the MPAA rep asked the seemingly innocuous question of whether or not ACTA could be used to block "dangerous" web sites such as WikiLeaks. Keep in mind that this was coming shortly after WikiLeaks dumped almost a hundred thousand pages worth of documents that the Pentagon had classified which contained some of its dirty laundry. The government was pissed off at WikiLeaks and such a question answered in the affirmative could very easily be used as justification to go after equally "dangerous" web sites, though the danger the MPAA is most afraid of is the danger to the bottom lines of the studios as opposed to any trifling concerns about the safety of troops in the field or American civilians potentially targeted by terrorists.
Recently, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) left the Senate Judiciary Committee. As the EFF reported earlier today, the bill probably won't come up to the full Senate until the start of the next session, but it's troubling given bipartisan opposition to the bill and a host of engineers who basically helped assemble the Internet piece by piece, protocol by protocol. The first most troubling element of the bill is the blacklist. The Attorney General (or those underlings acting in the name of the Attorney General's Office) would suddenly have the power to kill a website if it allegedly had infringing material. Much like the DMCA and ACTA, there's no mechanism in place to contest or appeal such an action, nor is there any provision for an investigation into verifying a claim of copyright infringement. DMCA claims aren't 100% right, what's to say that the COICA would have a better average? It's an unregulated, unchecked, and unspeakably dangerous power. There is simply too little in the way to prevent a gross abuse of the power. The Attorney General's Office and the Attorney General are not elected officials, but rather filled by executive appointment, which means there is absolutely no means of accountability that can effectively be exercised against them. Unaccountable bureaucrats given unchecked power is completely anathema to every principle America claims to hold dear.
The second most troubling element of COICA is the subversion (or perversion, if you prefer) of the DNS infrastructure currently under U.S. control. For the last sixteen years, ever since the Internet became open to public and commercial use, the U.S. has rightly maintained a very hands-off policy towards Domain Name System servers. You type in "Google" in the address bar of your browser, your command brings up Google by directing the request to one of the many servers which hold an IP address owned by Google. This simple mechanism allows used to access sites both puritanical and prurient, commercial and crass, polished and amateurish. Nations like China, Iran, Burma, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia have various filters and cutouts in place to divert requests for "undesirable" sites to sites that are "approved" by the existing regimes, or outright block the requests from ever reaching the undesirable sites, essentially cutting them off from being seen on the "official" Internet by their inhabitants. Such filtering and blocking, exemplified by "The Great Firewall of China," is in place to crush dissent, inhibit communication, and ultimately control the population to keep the existing regimes in power by attempting to mask the inherent flaws and weaknesses in the system. Yet this bill proposes that we emulate those countries, countries that the State Department, the United Nations, and various private organizations have been hectoring for years about their repressive Internet policies. Worse, the bill proposes we do so not to prop up the existing government, but to prop up media conglomerates, businesses that have grown bloated over the years and are deathly afraid of technologies that have the potential to render them extinct. The fact that the U.S. government would have the means to do precisely the same thing as the aforementioned nations is merely poisonous gravy.
The COICA, much like the PATRIOT Act, has been rushed through with absolutely indecent haste, previous efforts to table the bill notwithstanding. Like the PATRIOT Act, the stated benefits cannot possibly outweigh the potential liabilities. Unlike the PATRIOT Act, the single purpose motivating this unholy abortion of a bill is pure unadulterated greed, whatever high minded language might be employed to claim otherwise.
Normally, I don't ask much of my readers. I take it as a given that my work will eventually percolate through the Internet and people will read it. This once, I'd take it as a personal kindness if people who read this would pass a link along to friends and family members. I want people to get mad about this, because it's something they rightly should be mad about. I know that it doesn't seem as important as the unemployment situation, or the financial markets, or the fact that gas and food prices are going up. It's not one of those issues that seemingly has any survival value. Rather, it's an issue that affects the value of survival, and it's important for that reason. What does it gain you to have food in your gut and gas in your tank, but live under threat of being silenced and cut off from the larger world just because some rich bastards in Hollywood are crying foul? Nothing, which is precisely what you have to lose by spreading the word. Thanks.
A year later, things have not gotten any better. Two months ago, the MPAA sent a representative to an information meeting about ACTA down in Mexico. It's not terribly surprising in and of itself, since the MPAA has championed the cause of ACTA by crying foul over piracy and believing that ACTA (or the analogous American version of it, COICA) would allow it to finally crush movie piracy in much the same way that the Death Star was supposed to crush the Rebel Alliance. What was surprising at this meeting was that the MPAA rep asked the seemingly innocuous question of whether or not ACTA could be used to block "dangerous" web sites such as WikiLeaks. Keep in mind that this was coming shortly after WikiLeaks dumped almost a hundred thousand pages worth of documents that the Pentagon had classified which contained some of its dirty laundry. The government was pissed off at WikiLeaks and such a question answered in the affirmative could very easily be used as justification to go after equally "dangerous" web sites, though the danger the MPAA is most afraid of is the danger to the bottom lines of the studios as opposed to any trifling concerns about the safety of troops in the field or American civilians potentially targeted by terrorists.
Recently, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) left the Senate Judiciary Committee. As the EFF reported earlier today, the bill probably won't come up to the full Senate until the start of the next session, but it's troubling given bipartisan opposition to the bill and a host of engineers who basically helped assemble the Internet piece by piece, protocol by protocol. The first most troubling element of the bill is the blacklist. The Attorney General (or those underlings acting in the name of the Attorney General's Office) would suddenly have the power to kill a website if it allegedly had infringing material. Much like the DMCA and ACTA, there's no mechanism in place to contest or appeal such an action, nor is there any provision for an investigation into verifying a claim of copyright infringement. DMCA claims aren't 100% right, what's to say that the COICA would have a better average? It's an unregulated, unchecked, and unspeakably dangerous power. There is simply too little in the way to prevent a gross abuse of the power. The Attorney General's Office and the Attorney General are not elected officials, but rather filled by executive appointment, which means there is absolutely no means of accountability that can effectively be exercised against them. Unaccountable bureaucrats given unchecked power is completely anathema to every principle America claims to hold dear.
The second most troubling element of COICA is the subversion (or perversion, if you prefer) of the DNS infrastructure currently under U.S. control. For the last sixteen years, ever since the Internet became open to public and commercial use, the U.S. has rightly maintained a very hands-off policy towards Domain Name System servers. You type in "Google" in the address bar of your browser, your command brings up Google by directing the request to one of the many servers which hold an IP address owned by Google. This simple mechanism allows used to access sites both puritanical and prurient, commercial and crass, polished and amateurish. Nations like China, Iran, Burma, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia have various filters and cutouts in place to divert requests for "undesirable" sites to sites that are "approved" by the existing regimes, or outright block the requests from ever reaching the undesirable sites, essentially cutting them off from being seen on the "official" Internet by their inhabitants. Such filtering and blocking, exemplified by "The Great Firewall of China," is in place to crush dissent, inhibit communication, and ultimately control the population to keep the existing regimes in power by attempting to mask the inherent flaws and weaknesses in the system. Yet this bill proposes that we emulate those countries, countries that the State Department, the United Nations, and various private organizations have been hectoring for years about their repressive Internet policies. Worse, the bill proposes we do so not to prop up the existing government, but to prop up media conglomerates, businesses that have grown bloated over the years and are deathly afraid of technologies that have the potential to render them extinct. The fact that the U.S. government would have the means to do precisely the same thing as the aforementioned nations is merely poisonous gravy.
The COICA, much like the PATRIOT Act, has been rushed through with absolutely indecent haste, previous efforts to table the bill notwithstanding. Like the PATRIOT Act, the stated benefits cannot possibly outweigh the potential liabilities. Unlike the PATRIOT Act, the single purpose motivating this unholy abortion of a bill is pure unadulterated greed, whatever high minded language might be employed to claim otherwise.
Normally, I don't ask much of my readers. I take it as a given that my work will eventually percolate through the Internet and people will read it. This once, I'd take it as a personal kindness if people who read this would pass a link along to friends and family members. I want people to get mad about this, because it's something they rightly should be mad about. I know that it doesn't seem as important as the unemployment situation, or the financial markets, or the fact that gas and food prices are going up. It's not one of those issues that seemingly has any survival value. Rather, it's an issue that affects the value of survival, and it's important for that reason. What does it gain you to have food in your gut and gas in your tank, but live under threat of being silenced and cut off from the larger world just because some rich bastards in Hollywood are crying foul? Nothing, which is precisely what you have to lose by spreading the word. Thanks.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Honor At Stake
I've tried not to rant about this.
I've made a great deal of effort since this whole fracas with Medal of Honor started up to not say anything. To bite my tongue and hope that something resembling sanity and good sense prevailed at EA. Looking for the triumph of hope over experience when it came down to the tough call between sticking to one's guns and caving in to popular (if misguided) pressure.
And how I hate to have been disappointed.
The fracas started a couple months back. A British Member of Parliament went berserk when word got out that players would have the option of taking on the role of Taliban fighters in multiplayer matches. There was, as former SEAL Dick Marcinko might say, an F3 (Full Fucking Faulkner; lots of sound and fury) in the House of Commons as the MP decried the impending ability of gamers to commit atrocities on innocent women and children and kill honorable British soldiers in the name of electronic sport. From there, it just got worse. Canada's Minister of Defence also decried the news. Fox News, not exactly known for it's sense of gravity or restraint when it comes to U.S. armed forces, paraded about the mother of a soldier who died in Afghanistan to denounce what a horrible and callous company EA was for allowing this sort of thing to go through and belittling the sacrifice of soldiers who had died in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. Army went on record as saying they were "disappointed" with the decision. Eventually, EA caved in and changed the name from "Taliban" to "Opposing Force."
Bearing in mind for a moment that I despise pretty much everything EA stands for, it perhaps sounds strange that I might be defending EA's original position, or more specifically DICE's original position, regarding the designation of one multiplayer faction as the Taliban in Medal of Honor. The aim of this particular iteration of Medal of Honor was to cover a different sort of conflict, a new theatre of warfare, one that might have lacked the headlines and press coverage of battles fought in previous eras, but one that undeniably has heroes worthy of the nation's highest award for courage and valor above and beyond the call of duty. I can understand why DICE and EA didn't use the swastika and other iconography of Nazi Germany in previous MoH games, but the part of me that demands historical accuracy has never agreed with that decision. Over sixty-five years after the end of WWII, there's still a taboo about those symbols outside of very carefully delimited fields, and they're still flat out illegal in Germany. But in a way, that earlier decision is very much a double-edged sword when applied to the current controversy. Some will argue that the fact DICE didn't put in swastikas in earlier iterations of the title means that it's perfectly fine for them not to use the name of the Taliban for the bad guys in the new game. Others will argue that they're letting themselves be used as a subtle means of propaganda against the Taliban, by refusing to "dignify" them with the proper designation. If one were to reduce the matter down to a pissing contest between who's worse as a bad guy, then I would unequivocally say that however morally and ethically reprehensible the Taliban have behaved over the past twenty years or so, they're lightweight amateurs when stacked up against the industrialized atrocities of the Third Reich. And however much the multiplayer screen might say "Axis" or "German" in earlier MoH games, if you weren't fighting in the jungle, you were fighting Nazis, you knew you were fighting Nazis, even the guys on the other side during a multiplayer match knew that they were playing the role of the Nazis for that round. None of the gamers who played the bad guys legitimized the Third Reich, nor did they diminish or belittle the pall it casts upon history. By the same token, labeling bad guys in turbans with AKs in Afghanistan as Taliban in the game is not giving any sort of blessing to the actual Taliban. It's not paying them a compliment. It's merely acknowledging an existing fact.
An interview between Industry Gamers and three U.S. Special Forces members is particularly telling about this whole situation as far as the reaction from the guys who are actually in the suck. For the most part, they seem rather pragmatic fellows, which isn't entirely surprising. I will say (spoiler alert!) that the JTAC they interviewed seems to have a rather skewed sense of reality. He decries the game as "war profiteering," but he states that he's perfectly willing to give the game a try. He openly states that the Taliban will make use of Medal of Honor as a recruiting tool, though it seems difficult to picture Taliban fighters or those sympathetic to them to somehow start smuggling in Xbox 360s and PS3s into South Waziristan. Perhaps the statement that really irritated me was the one at the end where he states that adding the Taliban into the game made them "recognized as a legitimate fighting force." Clearly, years of military aid to the Taliban and others like them during the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan didn't rise to the level of recognizing the legitimacy of the Taliban as a fighting force, insofar as the JTAC is concerned. It bothers me when people spout off about how such-and-such a group or so-and-so's army isn't a "legitimate" fighting force. It sounds far too reminiscent of the Vietnam War, when the higher ups in the Pentagon derided the Viet Cong and the NVA even as they were chewing up American troops with gusto. If they're willing to tangle with you more than once, I'd say that pretty much gives them "legitimacy." As for the other two operators interviewed, both of them applauded EA's refusal (at the time of the interview) to cave in under pressure. Part of me would like to get their opinions now that EA has caved in. They both spoke to the inherent inability of any game, even one as detailed as Medal of Honor, to truly capture the essence of modern combat. They both saw no reason not to label the Taliban as Taliban in the game. If guys at the sharp end don't seem to mind, it says a lot about the brass in Washington who are "disappointed" about the situation, and none of what it says is particularly flattering.
I would like to take a moment to defend what has been stated by some as the intellectually lazy position that Medal of Honor is "just a game." Strip it off all the specifically identifying labels, remove all the fancy mechanics and graphics, and what do you have? You have "cowboys and Indians." You have "cops and robbers." You have good guys vs. bad guys, running around a predefined field, attempting to achieve an objective in order to claim victory over their opponents. Folks, that right there is a game. Does it trivialize the ongoing conflict in the region? I would say not. If anything, it's giving people a different perspective on the conflict, admittedly a very narrow one, but different all the same. Is it, as the JTAC stated, war profiteering? If so, then every news agency, wire service, broadcast network, website, and blog that even thinks to discuss the conflict is just as guilty, including this one. I will not deny that the perspective provided by Medal of Honor is narrow, even shallow to a degree. For a truly deep representation that goes into the larger issues and the smaller day-to-day perspectives of Afghanistan, I'd point to Armed Assault II and it's scenario building tools as having the best ability to model the conflict for the average person. As far as I know, nobody has attempted to make such a model, but that title would be the best suggestion I would make to somebody looking to create such a model.
The bitter irony of the whole situation is that EA released a game centered around men who refused to quit fighting even at the expense of their own lives, but gave up fighting when popular pressure over one small detail grew too loud for their liking. Had they continued to persevere, I might not have liked EA much more than I did, but I would have respected them a little more.
I've made a great deal of effort since this whole fracas with Medal of Honor started up to not say anything. To bite my tongue and hope that something resembling sanity and good sense prevailed at EA. Looking for the triumph of hope over experience when it came down to the tough call between sticking to one's guns and caving in to popular (if misguided) pressure.
And how I hate to have been disappointed.
The fracas started a couple months back. A British Member of Parliament went berserk when word got out that players would have the option of taking on the role of Taliban fighters in multiplayer matches. There was, as former SEAL Dick Marcinko might say, an F3 (Full Fucking Faulkner; lots of sound and fury) in the House of Commons as the MP decried the impending ability of gamers to commit atrocities on innocent women and children and kill honorable British soldiers in the name of electronic sport. From there, it just got worse. Canada's Minister of Defence also decried the news. Fox News, not exactly known for it's sense of gravity or restraint when it comes to U.S. armed forces, paraded about the mother of a soldier who died in Afghanistan to denounce what a horrible and callous company EA was for allowing this sort of thing to go through and belittling the sacrifice of soldiers who had died in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. Army went on record as saying they were "disappointed" with the decision. Eventually, EA caved in and changed the name from "Taliban" to "Opposing Force."
Bearing in mind for a moment that I despise pretty much everything EA stands for, it perhaps sounds strange that I might be defending EA's original position, or more specifically DICE's original position, regarding the designation of one multiplayer faction as the Taliban in Medal of Honor. The aim of this particular iteration of Medal of Honor was to cover a different sort of conflict, a new theatre of warfare, one that might have lacked the headlines and press coverage of battles fought in previous eras, but one that undeniably has heroes worthy of the nation's highest award for courage and valor above and beyond the call of duty. I can understand why DICE and EA didn't use the swastika and other iconography of Nazi Germany in previous MoH games, but the part of me that demands historical accuracy has never agreed with that decision. Over sixty-five years after the end of WWII, there's still a taboo about those symbols outside of very carefully delimited fields, and they're still flat out illegal in Germany. But in a way, that earlier decision is very much a double-edged sword when applied to the current controversy. Some will argue that the fact DICE didn't put in swastikas in earlier iterations of the title means that it's perfectly fine for them not to use the name of the Taliban for the bad guys in the new game. Others will argue that they're letting themselves be used as a subtle means of propaganda against the Taliban, by refusing to "dignify" them with the proper designation. If one were to reduce the matter down to a pissing contest between who's worse as a bad guy, then I would unequivocally say that however morally and ethically reprehensible the Taliban have behaved over the past twenty years or so, they're lightweight amateurs when stacked up against the industrialized atrocities of the Third Reich. And however much the multiplayer screen might say "Axis" or "German" in earlier MoH games, if you weren't fighting in the jungle, you were fighting Nazis, you knew you were fighting Nazis, even the guys on the other side during a multiplayer match knew that they were playing the role of the Nazis for that round. None of the gamers who played the bad guys legitimized the Third Reich, nor did they diminish or belittle the pall it casts upon history. By the same token, labeling bad guys in turbans with AKs in Afghanistan as Taliban in the game is not giving any sort of blessing to the actual Taliban. It's not paying them a compliment. It's merely acknowledging an existing fact.
An interview between Industry Gamers and three U.S. Special Forces members is particularly telling about this whole situation as far as the reaction from the guys who are actually in the suck. For the most part, they seem rather pragmatic fellows, which isn't entirely surprising. I will say (spoiler alert!) that the JTAC they interviewed seems to have a rather skewed sense of reality. He decries the game as "war profiteering," but he states that he's perfectly willing to give the game a try. He openly states that the Taliban will make use of Medal of Honor as a recruiting tool, though it seems difficult to picture Taliban fighters or those sympathetic to them to somehow start smuggling in Xbox 360s and PS3s into South Waziristan. Perhaps the statement that really irritated me was the one at the end where he states that adding the Taliban into the game made them "recognized as a legitimate fighting force." Clearly, years of military aid to the Taliban and others like them during the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan didn't rise to the level of recognizing the legitimacy of the Taliban as a fighting force, insofar as the JTAC is concerned. It bothers me when people spout off about how such-and-such a group or so-and-so's army isn't a "legitimate" fighting force. It sounds far too reminiscent of the Vietnam War, when the higher ups in the Pentagon derided the Viet Cong and the NVA even as they were chewing up American troops with gusto. If they're willing to tangle with you more than once, I'd say that pretty much gives them "legitimacy." As for the other two operators interviewed, both of them applauded EA's refusal (at the time of the interview) to cave in under pressure. Part of me would like to get their opinions now that EA has caved in. They both spoke to the inherent inability of any game, even one as detailed as Medal of Honor, to truly capture the essence of modern combat. They both saw no reason not to label the Taliban as Taliban in the game. If guys at the sharp end don't seem to mind, it says a lot about the brass in Washington who are "disappointed" about the situation, and none of what it says is particularly flattering.
I would like to take a moment to defend what has been stated by some as the intellectually lazy position that Medal of Honor is "just a game." Strip it off all the specifically identifying labels, remove all the fancy mechanics and graphics, and what do you have? You have "cowboys and Indians." You have "cops and robbers." You have good guys vs. bad guys, running around a predefined field, attempting to achieve an objective in order to claim victory over their opponents. Folks, that right there is a game. Does it trivialize the ongoing conflict in the region? I would say not. If anything, it's giving people a different perspective on the conflict, admittedly a very narrow one, but different all the same. Is it, as the JTAC stated, war profiteering? If so, then every news agency, wire service, broadcast network, website, and blog that even thinks to discuss the conflict is just as guilty, including this one. I will not deny that the perspective provided by Medal of Honor is narrow, even shallow to a degree. For a truly deep representation that goes into the larger issues and the smaller day-to-day perspectives of Afghanistan, I'd point to Armed Assault II and it's scenario building tools as having the best ability to model the conflict for the average person. As far as I know, nobody has attempted to make such a model, but that title would be the best suggestion I would make to somebody looking to create such a model.
The bitter irony of the whole situation is that EA released a game centered around men who refused to quit fighting even at the expense of their own lives, but gave up fighting when popular pressure over one small detail grew too loud for their liking. Had they continued to persevere, I might not have liked EA much more than I did, but I would have respected them a little more.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Totally Uncalled For
I have a pretty simple outlook as far as the Internet goes. I don't mess with you, you don't mess with me. It's a system that has served me pretty well up to this point.
However, somebody over in China thought it would be a tremendously fabulous idea to hack my Gmail account, and my Facebook account, and otherwise poke around where they should not be poking. I do not appreciate it. I do not like it. While I'm somewhat glad they didn't mess around with anything as far as I can tell, I'm a little annoyed that they didn't leave a note saying "This is how we got in. Please close your door more securely." As it turns out, Google was good enough to give me a warning. It would have been nicer if they'd warned me when it happened instead of two days later.
Since somebody, or more likely several somebodies, felt it was fine to hack my account for no good reason, I feel no particular compunctions about keeping silent on the matter. Below are the IP addresses of the individuals that hacked my accounts, along with the providers for those IPs. Yes, I know, somebody could be spoofing the IPs, but it's a place to start. Special thanks to All-Nettools for their free SmartWHOIS tool which helped make all this possible.
183.90.187.126
183.90.187.0 - 183.90.187.255
Asia Data (Hong kong) Inc. Limited
Block B 08/Floor
Hi-Tech Industrial CTR
No. 491-501 Castle Peak Road
ASIA DATA HONG KONG INC LIMITED - network admin
FLAT/RM 24 BLK B 08/F HI-TECH INDUSTRIAL CTR NO 491-501 CASTLE PEAK RD
TSUEN WAN HONG KONG
+852 39043643
+852 60618724
stanley@adi.hk
220.200.49.192
220.192.0.0 - 220.207.255.255
China United Network Communications Corporation Limited
No.21 Financial Street,Xicheng District, Beijing 100140 ,P.R.China
Xiaomin Zhou
No.21 Financial Street,Xicheng District, Beijing 100140 ,P.R.China
+86-10-66259626
+86-10-66259626
zhouxm@chinaunicom.cn
118.124.16.163
118.124.0.0 - 118.125.255.255
CHINANET Sichuan province network
China Telecom
A12,Xin-Jie-Kou-Wai Street
Beijing 100088
Chinanet Hostmaster
anti-spam@ns.chinanet.cn.net
No.31 ,jingrong street,beijing
100032
+86-10-58501724
+86-10-58501724
Remember, folks, I don't mess with you, you don't mess with me, and everybody's happy.
However, somebody over in China thought it would be a tremendously fabulous idea to hack my Gmail account, and my Facebook account, and otherwise poke around where they should not be poking. I do not appreciate it. I do not like it. While I'm somewhat glad they didn't mess around with anything as far as I can tell, I'm a little annoyed that they didn't leave a note saying "This is how we got in. Please close your door more securely." As it turns out, Google was good enough to give me a warning. It would have been nicer if they'd warned me when it happened instead of two days later.
Since somebody, or more likely several somebodies, felt it was fine to hack my account for no good reason, I feel no particular compunctions about keeping silent on the matter. Below are the IP addresses of the individuals that hacked my accounts, along with the providers for those IPs. Yes, I know, somebody could be spoofing the IPs, but it's a place to start. Special thanks to All-Nettools for their free SmartWHOIS tool which helped make all this possible.
183.90.187.126
183.90.187.0 - 183.90.187.255
Asia Data (Hong kong) Inc. Limited
Block B 08/Floor
Hi-Tech Industrial CTR
No. 491-501 Castle Peak Road
ASIA DATA HONG KONG INC LIMITED - network admin
FLAT/RM 24 BLK B 08/F HI-TECH INDUSTRIAL CTR NO 491-501 CASTLE PEAK RD
TSUEN WAN HONG KONG
+852 39043643
+852 60618724
stanley@adi.hk
220.200.49.192
220.192.0.0 - 220.207.255.255
China United Network Communications Corporation Limited
No.21 Financial Street,Xicheng District, Beijing 100140 ,P.R.China
Xiaomin Zhou
No.21 Financial Street,Xicheng District, Beijing 100140 ,P.R.China
+86-10-66259626
+86-10-66259626
zhouxm@chinaunicom.cn
118.124.16.163
118.124.0.0 - 118.125.255.255
CHINANET Sichuan province network
China Telecom
A12,Xin-Jie-Kou-Wai Street
Beijing 100088
Chinanet Hostmaster
anti-spam@ns.chinanet.cn.net
No.31 ,jingrong street,beijing
100032
+86-10-58501724
+86-10-58501724
Remember, folks, I don't mess with you, you don't mess with me, and everybody's happy.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
You Don't Know Me And That's How I Like It
Recently, Bitmob put out an article postulating what would have happened if Blizzard had pounded RealID through above the objections of its customers. I like the fact that they called shenanigans on the weak arguments most people were bandying about against RealID, but I dislike the fact that they didn't commit an equal amount of effort to the weaknesses of Blizzard's arguments for RealID. Allow me to make the arguments that Bitmob neglected to mention.
First, there is the implied argument that Blizzard is doing a mitzvah to their customer base with RealID by exposing the trolls, ostensibly shaming them into good behavior by revealing their real names. As the webcomic Ctl-Alt-Delete so eloquently demonstrated in this strip, revealing the identity of a troll is no deterrent against the behavior of a troll. The flaw in Blizzard's theory is that trolls are capable of feeling shame when it is amply demonstrated, time and again, that they are incapable of that. There is not a single iota of evidence to suggest even the slightest hint of remorse, regret, or shame in the behavior of a troll. They're petty, small souled, simple minded, and cretinous, which means that they go for the simple pleasures, the easy hit. They don't care who gets offended or what they get offended about so long as somebody gets offended and knows that it was what the troll put up that caused it. They feed off the recognition that they punched somebody's buttons. They're bullies, and they're a particularly obnoxious form of bully because they can't be smacked down like the Neanderthals that shake down kids for their lunch money. They're confident because they feel safe in the knowledge that they cannot be touched, and so they cannot properly suffer the consequences of their actions. Being simple minded, when somebody does manage to somehow verbally slap a troll down, the troll will not just stop. They're incapable of learning more than one lesson at a time. They might fade back for a bit, then they'll be back punching buttons again. Eleven million plus subscribers to World of WarCraft would have had their names exposed, the vast majority needlessly associated with their alter egos, in order to pursue a futile attempt to punish a tiny majority in a way that will completely fail to deter them. There would have been no happy ending with that course of action, nor will there ever be a happy ending with that course of action. Until the population of trolls genuinely outnumbers the population of decent folks on the boards, whatever monetary cost savings are made will be lost in terms of customer backlash, cancelled accounts, and future sales losses. As strange as it may sound, not even Blizzard or WoW is immune to the masses. All it will take is one issue, one position stated too strongly, one policy adoption that offends the common core of a large enough percentage of the subscriber base, and it will trigger an avalanche of defections that the company might not survive. Consider the example of Facebook. They've been pissing off a lot of people over the last year or so. One too many changes, one extra little line, or one unclear clause buried the boilerplate of the TOS, and Facebook stands to lose not only subscribers but substantial revenue. The same situation applies to Blizzard. Making people believe your hype is a perfectly acceptable business move. Believing your own hype is a recipe for disaster. Despite what Blizzard and the rabid core of Blizzard's fan base might believe, WoW is not the only game in town, even if it currently is the biggest.
And now we come to my second argument that Bitmob should have thought to make. While many would argue that even in an MMO, customers have a right to privacy, I will argue that one has a right to anonymity. The distinction might seem lost on some folks, so allow me to elucidate. As I've said before, MMOs are very much like amusement parks. There are a lot of activities that you can do within the park, but you as a player are coming into an environment where you have no direct control over anything except your avatar. You influence nothing within the game. You can make changes to yourself which ultimately have no practical effect outside of how you look and what kind of rides you can go on. Yet when you're at the park, other people know you're there because they can see you. Other players are aware of, or can be made aware of, your presence. Whether you're grinding mobs in The Barrens, spamming in trade chat in Ironforge, or simulating some Night Elf-on-Gnome action in the tunnels of the Deeprun Tram, awareness of your presence in the game simply cannot be completely hidden. Proximity to other players, even in the shady corners of the Deeprun Tram, constitutes most players' awareness of each other. Global chat channels, friend lists, and guild rosters further add to the sign every MMO player wears around their neck saying "Here I am!" Privacy in MMOs, at best, is a relative sort of thing, and it's fleeting.
Anonymity on the other hand is a little different, and something that should not be in the hands of any company, not even Blizzard. Anonymity is the choice we make to acknowledge our presence to other people within the MMO. Consider Mila Kunis or Curt Schilling, very famous people who are avowed WoW players. If they want to advertise the names of every toon they run, that's perfectly fine. If they don't want to, also fine. The critical component is that they choose if and when to connect their toons to their real identities. Yeah, it's fun talking about Family Guy or the place of free agents in baseball while you're doing a ten man raid on Icecrown Citadel, but it's not why we fork over $15 a month. The fact that we want that level of remove, that layer of insulation, between our virtual names and our real names isn't a reason for suspicion, nor does it indicate nefarious intent, nor does it even suggest we're trolls in player's clothing. Of all the choices one can make in an MMO, the only one with any true significance is whether or not we give somebody our real name. If somebody wants to put their real name in for their toon, whether for vanity or lack of imagination, fine and well. If somebody wants to come up with a completely different nom de guerre, also fine and well. Once you make that connection public, however, you're going to have to rely on the imperfect fleshy memory of people to forget that connection. It for damn sure won't fade away on the Internet. The ability to control our identities, for good or ill, is perhaps the fundamental right of the 21st Century. The ability to moderate, granulate, and compartmentalize who we are goes right to the very heart of our concepts of self and identity, whether it's physically or virtually. And Blizzard has no business trying to usurp that ability, nor do they have any basis to demand their customers surrender that ability just to play games they develop. To an extent, they can and do refine that identity just a bit, but they do not have any commercial or financial justification for breaching the divisions we make between our real world selves and our virtual alter egos.
Thus ends my arguments. Good job otherwise, Bitmob.
First, there is the implied argument that Blizzard is doing a mitzvah to their customer base with RealID by exposing the trolls, ostensibly shaming them into good behavior by revealing their real names. As the webcomic Ctl-Alt-Delete so eloquently demonstrated in this strip, revealing the identity of a troll is no deterrent against the behavior of a troll. The flaw in Blizzard's theory is that trolls are capable of feeling shame when it is amply demonstrated, time and again, that they are incapable of that. There is not a single iota of evidence to suggest even the slightest hint of remorse, regret, or shame in the behavior of a troll. They're petty, small souled, simple minded, and cretinous, which means that they go for the simple pleasures, the easy hit. They don't care who gets offended or what they get offended about so long as somebody gets offended and knows that it was what the troll put up that caused it. They feed off the recognition that they punched somebody's buttons. They're bullies, and they're a particularly obnoxious form of bully because they can't be smacked down like the Neanderthals that shake down kids for their lunch money. They're confident because they feel safe in the knowledge that they cannot be touched, and so they cannot properly suffer the consequences of their actions. Being simple minded, when somebody does manage to somehow verbally slap a troll down, the troll will not just stop. They're incapable of learning more than one lesson at a time. They might fade back for a bit, then they'll be back punching buttons again. Eleven million plus subscribers to World of WarCraft would have had their names exposed, the vast majority needlessly associated with their alter egos, in order to pursue a futile attempt to punish a tiny majority in a way that will completely fail to deter them. There would have been no happy ending with that course of action, nor will there ever be a happy ending with that course of action. Until the population of trolls genuinely outnumbers the population of decent folks on the boards, whatever monetary cost savings are made will be lost in terms of customer backlash, cancelled accounts, and future sales losses. As strange as it may sound, not even Blizzard or WoW is immune to the masses. All it will take is one issue, one position stated too strongly, one policy adoption that offends the common core of a large enough percentage of the subscriber base, and it will trigger an avalanche of defections that the company might not survive. Consider the example of Facebook. They've been pissing off a lot of people over the last year or so. One too many changes, one extra little line, or one unclear clause buried the boilerplate of the TOS, and Facebook stands to lose not only subscribers but substantial revenue. The same situation applies to Blizzard. Making people believe your hype is a perfectly acceptable business move. Believing your own hype is a recipe for disaster. Despite what Blizzard and the rabid core of Blizzard's fan base might believe, WoW is not the only game in town, even if it currently is the biggest.
And now we come to my second argument that Bitmob should have thought to make. While many would argue that even in an MMO, customers have a right to privacy, I will argue that one has a right to anonymity. The distinction might seem lost on some folks, so allow me to elucidate. As I've said before, MMOs are very much like amusement parks. There are a lot of activities that you can do within the park, but you as a player are coming into an environment where you have no direct control over anything except your avatar. You influence nothing within the game. You can make changes to yourself which ultimately have no practical effect outside of how you look and what kind of rides you can go on. Yet when you're at the park, other people know you're there because they can see you. Other players are aware of, or can be made aware of, your presence. Whether you're grinding mobs in The Barrens, spamming in trade chat in Ironforge, or simulating some Night Elf-on-Gnome action in the tunnels of the Deeprun Tram, awareness of your presence in the game simply cannot be completely hidden. Proximity to other players, even in the shady corners of the Deeprun Tram, constitutes most players' awareness of each other. Global chat channels, friend lists, and guild rosters further add to the sign every MMO player wears around their neck saying "Here I am!" Privacy in MMOs, at best, is a relative sort of thing, and it's fleeting.
Anonymity on the other hand is a little different, and something that should not be in the hands of any company, not even Blizzard. Anonymity is the choice we make to acknowledge our presence to other people within the MMO. Consider Mila Kunis or Curt Schilling, very famous people who are avowed WoW players. If they want to advertise the names of every toon they run, that's perfectly fine. If they don't want to, also fine. The critical component is that they choose if and when to connect their toons to their real identities. Yeah, it's fun talking about Family Guy or the place of free agents in baseball while you're doing a ten man raid on Icecrown Citadel, but it's not why we fork over $15 a month. The fact that we want that level of remove, that layer of insulation, between our virtual names and our real names isn't a reason for suspicion, nor does it indicate nefarious intent, nor does it even suggest we're trolls in player's clothing. Of all the choices one can make in an MMO, the only one with any true significance is whether or not we give somebody our real name. If somebody wants to put their real name in for their toon, whether for vanity or lack of imagination, fine and well. If somebody wants to come up with a completely different nom de guerre, also fine and well. Once you make that connection public, however, you're going to have to rely on the imperfect fleshy memory of people to forget that connection. It for damn sure won't fade away on the Internet. The ability to control our identities, for good or ill, is perhaps the fundamental right of the 21st Century. The ability to moderate, granulate, and compartmentalize who we are goes right to the very heart of our concepts of self and identity, whether it's physically or virtually. And Blizzard has no business trying to usurp that ability, nor do they have any basis to demand their customers surrender that ability just to play games they develop. To an extent, they can and do refine that identity just a bit, but they do not have any commercial or financial justification for breaching the divisions we make between our real world selves and our virtual alter egos.
Thus ends my arguments. Good job otherwise, Bitmob.
Friday, April 9, 2010
What Goes Around
Tuesday wasn't exactly a banner day for the FCC as a federal appeals court unanimously decided that the agency had overreached itself when ordering broadband provider Comcast not to block its customers from using BitTorrent. Comcast's spokesman was clearly pleased with the ruling when relaying the company's official statement: "our primary goal was always to clear our name and reputation." And yes, I just threw up a little in my mouth typing that.
This particular case has me feeling highly ambivalent. On the one hand, I'm not exactly a cheerleader for the expansion of government power, and the FCC has demonstrated that when they use their power, they're about as subtle as a sequoia falling down, and not nearly as intelligent. One slipped nipple and the Super Bowl halftime shows have largely suffered for it for the last several years (though I did like it when Tom Petty went on). On the other hand, I'm not exactly a firm believer in the inherent goodness of the average American corporation either, particularly not one who's in the position to dictate how a measurable percentage of Americans access the Internet. The old saw about being between the Devil and the deep blue sea certainly comes to mind.
So, what exactly happened on Tuesday and how is this going to affect the country? To begin with, while I am not at all happy about the ruling, I do have to tip my hat to the judges for at least recognizing that the stated goal of the FCC in attempting to keep the Internet "free and open" wasn't at issue, merely their efforts to go about making it happen. In a nutshell, the court ruled that the FCC's policies did not have the force of law. By and large, this is a quite reasonable position to take, since the ruling doesn't just prohibit sound policies from being applied as law, but it also prohibits stupid policies from being applied as law. If the FCC wants to enforce net neutrality, they have a few options available to them. The first option would be to go to Congress and tell them to give the FCC the necessary power to make Comcast stop blocking subscribers. This is probably the least likely to happen, mainly because it could possibly be years before such a bill got out of committee and up for a vote. Moreover, Congress isn't exactly beloved of the people right at the moment, and all it would take to kill any bill would be a few whispers placed in the right ears of the right talking heads. "Look!" the heads would say with gravity and outrage, "Look how Congress is trying to ram more government down our throats!" The second option would be to appeal up to the Supreme Court. This one might actually take longer than having to deal with Congress. With Congress, you can always reintroduce a bill. If the Supremes decide to take a case, or decline to take it, that's it. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
Probably as we speak, Comcast technicians are putting the port blocking in place for BitTorrent and other file sharing programs, and probably other programs that it feels "unfairly competes" (read: free) with their subscription services, all while the suits are chortling and thinking that they showed the FCC who's boss. That would be a fatally foolish attitude to be adopting, because there is a third option, one that is not only the most expeditious but also potentially the most troublesome. The FCC could decide that that broadband services are to fall under the same rules as phone lines, with all of the attending "common carrier" regulations. It's less of a "nuclear option" and more of a "neutron bomb option," meaning that all the infrastructure will still be there, but nobody will be around to use it. Why will nobody be around to use it? Because once those regulations are in place, the broadband ISPs like Comcast and Cox will not be lowering prices, they will be raising them. Purely for "administrative costs" to defray "traffic generated by other networks." The increase in prices, particularly in a recessionary climate, will cause people to cut back or even abandon their broadband connections, as much as it will pain them to do so. This will cause the ISPs to raise prices further, to cover the costs of "maintaining our award winning broadband services." In turn, more people abandon their broadband. When it's all said and done, ISPs won't be offering broadband anymore because they'll claim that "there's no interest in the product." Nevermind the fact that people once had broadband and were quite happy with it as a general rule. The difference between a ripple effect and a blast wave is a matter of perspective.
It's not going to be just the average American consumer who's going to get hit by this. The earliest victims will be bandwidth-intensive but incredibly popular sites and services. YouTube? Reduced to a shell of its former self. Skype? Gone. Hulu? The biggest disappointment for NBC Universal since they screwed Conan O'Brien. From there, the carnage spreads out into other areas, predominantly into the game sector. The twelve million plus players on World of WarCraft will suddenly find themselves brought down by a foe more terrible than Onyxia or The Lich King. Microsoft's XBox Live and Sony's Playstation Network will become shadows of their former glory, reduced to branded patch servers. Steam and Impulse will collapse as gamers are cut off from the virtual marketplaces. All those stupid bastards who went and bought the PC version of Assassin's Creed II will howl at the money wasted because Ubisoft wasn't smart enough to foresee the possible amputation of broadband, and the guys at Blizzard will probably be living out of their cubicles to try and change Diablo III to avoid that same mistake. Would there be any survivors of this apocalypse? Twitter might well survive, despite some people's desire to the contrary, since anybody with a cell phone could update on that. Facebook and MySpace will probably take a hit, but continue on as before.
I can hear somebody out in the Peanut Gallery saying, "The world will not end because you stupid Americans don't have broadband!" Whoever that is, you're right. The world will not end. But it will change. If the last fifteen years or so have been any indicator, what happens on the Internet and to the Internet in one geographic area can have almost incalculable changes to the rest of the world. And there is no guarantee that those changes will be good for any other part of the world. It would be a sorry state of affairs that America entered the Information Age equivalent of a Dark Age simply because one ISP went and sued the FCC because of a spat over the use of bandwidth for a program that competed with the ISP's non-Internet products. Some will doubtlessly argue that such a nightmare scenario could never possibly happen. Perhaps not to the degree that I've outlined here, but don't think for one instant that the blowback from this case won't touch anybody beyond Comcast and the FCC.
Even today, karma is a vital and active force within the Internet. What goes around does come around. And I don't like to think what will happen when it finally comes around.
This particular case has me feeling highly ambivalent. On the one hand, I'm not exactly a cheerleader for the expansion of government power, and the FCC has demonstrated that when they use their power, they're about as subtle as a sequoia falling down, and not nearly as intelligent. One slipped nipple and the Super Bowl halftime shows have largely suffered for it for the last several years (though I did like it when Tom Petty went on). On the other hand, I'm not exactly a firm believer in the inherent goodness of the average American corporation either, particularly not one who's in the position to dictate how a measurable percentage of Americans access the Internet. The old saw about being between the Devil and the deep blue sea certainly comes to mind.
So, what exactly happened on Tuesday and how is this going to affect the country? To begin with, while I am not at all happy about the ruling, I do have to tip my hat to the judges for at least recognizing that the stated goal of the FCC in attempting to keep the Internet "free and open" wasn't at issue, merely their efforts to go about making it happen. In a nutshell, the court ruled that the FCC's policies did not have the force of law. By and large, this is a quite reasonable position to take, since the ruling doesn't just prohibit sound policies from being applied as law, but it also prohibits stupid policies from being applied as law. If the FCC wants to enforce net neutrality, they have a few options available to them. The first option would be to go to Congress and tell them to give the FCC the necessary power to make Comcast stop blocking subscribers. This is probably the least likely to happen, mainly because it could possibly be years before such a bill got out of committee and up for a vote. Moreover, Congress isn't exactly beloved of the people right at the moment, and all it would take to kill any bill would be a few whispers placed in the right ears of the right talking heads. "Look!" the heads would say with gravity and outrage, "Look how Congress is trying to ram more government down our throats!" The second option would be to appeal up to the Supreme Court. This one might actually take longer than having to deal with Congress. With Congress, you can always reintroduce a bill. If the Supremes decide to take a case, or decline to take it, that's it. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
Probably as we speak, Comcast technicians are putting the port blocking in place for BitTorrent and other file sharing programs, and probably other programs that it feels "unfairly competes" (read: free) with their subscription services, all while the suits are chortling and thinking that they showed the FCC who's boss. That would be a fatally foolish attitude to be adopting, because there is a third option, one that is not only the most expeditious but also potentially the most troublesome. The FCC could decide that that broadband services are to fall under the same rules as phone lines, with all of the attending "common carrier" regulations. It's less of a "nuclear option" and more of a "neutron bomb option," meaning that all the infrastructure will still be there, but nobody will be around to use it. Why will nobody be around to use it? Because once those regulations are in place, the broadband ISPs like Comcast and Cox will not be lowering prices, they will be raising them. Purely for "administrative costs" to defray "traffic generated by other networks." The increase in prices, particularly in a recessionary climate, will cause people to cut back or even abandon their broadband connections, as much as it will pain them to do so. This will cause the ISPs to raise prices further, to cover the costs of "maintaining our award winning broadband services." In turn, more people abandon their broadband. When it's all said and done, ISPs won't be offering broadband anymore because they'll claim that "there's no interest in the product." Nevermind the fact that people once had broadband and were quite happy with it as a general rule. The difference between a ripple effect and a blast wave is a matter of perspective.
It's not going to be just the average American consumer who's going to get hit by this. The earliest victims will be bandwidth-intensive but incredibly popular sites and services. YouTube? Reduced to a shell of its former self. Skype? Gone. Hulu? The biggest disappointment for NBC Universal since they screwed Conan O'Brien. From there, the carnage spreads out into other areas, predominantly into the game sector. The twelve million plus players on World of WarCraft will suddenly find themselves brought down by a foe more terrible than Onyxia or The Lich King. Microsoft's XBox Live and Sony's Playstation Network will become shadows of their former glory, reduced to branded patch servers. Steam and Impulse will collapse as gamers are cut off from the virtual marketplaces. All those stupid bastards who went and bought the PC version of Assassin's Creed II will howl at the money wasted because Ubisoft wasn't smart enough to foresee the possible amputation of broadband, and the guys at Blizzard will probably be living out of their cubicles to try and change Diablo III to avoid that same mistake. Would there be any survivors of this apocalypse? Twitter might well survive, despite some people's desire to the contrary, since anybody with a cell phone could update on that. Facebook and MySpace will probably take a hit, but continue on as before.
I can hear somebody out in the Peanut Gallery saying, "The world will not end because you stupid Americans don't have broadband!" Whoever that is, you're right. The world will not end. But it will change. If the last fifteen years or so have been any indicator, what happens on the Internet and to the Internet in one geographic area can have almost incalculable changes to the rest of the world. And there is no guarantee that those changes will be good for any other part of the world. It would be a sorry state of affairs that America entered the Information Age equivalent of a Dark Age simply because one ISP went and sued the FCC because of a spat over the use of bandwidth for a program that competed with the ISP's non-Internet products. Some will doubtlessly argue that such a nightmare scenario could never possibly happen. Perhaps not to the degree that I've outlined here, but don't think for one instant that the blowback from this case won't touch anybody beyond Comcast and the FCC.
Even today, karma is a vital and active force within the Internet. What goes around does come around. And I don't like to think what will happen when it finally comes around.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
"We Have A Turd In The Punch Bowl"
One of the many things that I missed out on while I was working graveyard shifts was getting a chance to see new episodes of South Park. Last week, I got the chance to catch a season premiere. Admittedly, I was more interested about catching the series premiere of Ugly Americans, but catching the premiere of South Park after missing the last few seasons of it was a pleasant little bonus. It didn't fail to disappoint. After all these years, Matt Stone and Trey Parker have kept their satirical edge wickedly sharp, and they pulled no punches to kick the season off. I suppose it wouldn't be a South Park episode if it didn't offend somebody. However, the offended party in this case is not who you would initially expect.
The premiere centered around Tiger Woods and his recent sex scandal. Hilarity ensued as Kyle, Kenny, and Butters were all diagnosed as future sex addicts and were stuck in a therapy group with other luminaries as Charlie Sheen, Bill Clinton, David Letterman, and Woods. As usual, the message was pretty straightforward: "Don't screw around! Be honest with your spouse! Take responsibility for your actions!" It never fails to amuse me that, as much howling and screaming as some people make about how offensive South Park is, the show consistently holds up the fundamental message that we need to be decent human beings to each other. However, the controversy concerning the premiere has nothing to do with the unflattering parody of Tiger Woods or his wife, or even the general cycle of "deny, confess, apologize" that has reached the level of cliche in the public consciousness. It appears that EA Sports has announced plans to sue Stone and Parker (or at least their studio), most likely making an argument for infringing on EA's copyright of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11.
According to a post on Daily Informer, a source inside EA Sports has said that shortly after the episode aired, the suits at EA sat down, discussed the episode, and apparently proceeded to discuss how best to proceed with a lawsuit. At the time of this writing, there does not appear to be any official word from Stone & Parker about getting sued. My prediction: there's not a hope in hell this suit will succeed, though it doubtlessly net the legal departments involved a tidy little bundle of billable hours between the time the first papers are filed and the moment the judge's gavel comes down after the words, "Case dismissed!" finish echoing in the courtroom. Come on, if Scientology can't squash these guys, EA Sports doesn't stand a chance.
Let's take a closer look, shall we? EA Sports' only possible angle is a flimsy argument that South Park somehow infringed upon Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11, a fictitious version of which was used as a narrative device for the episode. Somehow, EA's lawyers would have to convince a judge and or jury that the scenes in the episode were representative of the actual game. Unless the developers are willing to create the kind of DLC needed to turn a high end golf simulator into a Street Fighter-esque fighting game with "Pre-Nup Power-ups" and scenes involving marital violence, Vicodin abuse, and press conferences, not even the most jaded or pop culture deprived jurist could avoid seeing quite clearly that the depiction of the game and the actual game have absolutely nothing in common. When a show regularly disclaims at the start of every episode that the presentation viewers are about to see is quite obviously a parody, and proceeds to demonstrate quite thoroughly that it is a parody, no amount of pettifogging legalistic sleight-of-hand is going to come even close to making the case reach trial. EA Sports would have no standing to bring a suit because of the depiction of Tiger Woods in the episode. Nor would they have any standing to bring a suit because of the licensed use of Tiger Woods' name or the mention of the Professional Golf Association in the title of the game. Even the mention of the title falls under the parody exceptions.
When South Park put World of WarCraft in it's crosshairs, the guys at Blizzard not only got the joke, but incorporated the title of the episode into the game as an achievement. Nintendo didn't summon the lawyers when South Park made fun of the wait involved for the first Wii systems. There wasn't a hue and a cry when Guitar Hero was spoofed. This is quite obviously the stupidest example of filing suit for no other reason than "the honor of the flag" that EA or its subsidiaries has come up with in recent memory. Somewhere, there has got to be somebody, hopefully in the legal department of EA or EA Sports, that will sit down with the suits and make it painfully clear to them that they're wasting a lot of time, money, and resources that don't need to be wasted. The only person who might possibly be offended enough to try a lawsuit would be Tiger Woods himself, and chances are his own legal advisers have made it clear to him that he's got no shot. The only thing this lawsuit will accomplish will be to add another notch, and a very high profile notch, on the belt of a show which has faced down bigger and meaner opponents than EA and won without breaking a sweat.
The premiere centered around Tiger Woods and his recent sex scandal. Hilarity ensued as Kyle, Kenny, and Butters were all diagnosed as future sex addicts and were stuck in a therapy group with other luminaries as Charlie Sheen, Bill Clinton, David Letterman, and Woods. As usual, the message was pretty straightforward: "Don't screw around! Be honest with your spouse! Take responsibility for your actions!" It never fails to amuse me that, as much howling and screaming as some people make about how offensive South Park is, the show consistently holds up the fundamental message that we need to be decent human beings to each other. However, the controversy concerning the premiere has nothing to do with the unflattering parody of Tiger Woods or his wife, or even the general cycle of "deny, confess, apologize" that has reached the level of cliche in the public consciousness. It appears that EA Sports has announced plans to sue Stone and Parker (or at least their studio), most likely making an argument for infringing on EA's copyright of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11.
According to a post on Daily Informer, a source inside EA Sports has said that shortly after the episode aired, the suits at EA sat down, discussed the episode, and apparently proceeded to discuss how best to proceed with a lawsuit. At the time of this writing, there does not appear to be any official word from Stone & Parker about getting sued. My prediction: there's not a hope in hell this suit will succeed, though it doubtlessly net the legal departments involved a tidy little bundle of billable hours between the time the first papers are filed and the moment the judge's gavel comes down after the words, "Case dismissed!" finish echoing in the courtroom. Come on, if Scientology can't squash these guys, EA Sports doesn't stand a chance.
Let's take a closer look, shall we? EA Sports' only possible angle is a flimsy argument that South Park somehow infringed upon Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11, a fictitious version of which was used as a narrative device for the episode. Somehow, EA's lawyers would have to convince a judge and or jury that the scenes in the episode were representative of the actual game. Unless the developers are willing to create the kind of DLC needed to turn a high end golf simulator into a Street Fighter-esque fighting game with "Pre-Nup Power-ups" and scenes involving marital violence, Vicodin abuse, and press conferences, not even the most jaded or pop culture deprived jurist could avoid seeing quite clearly that the depiction of the game and the actual game have absolutely nothing in common. When a show regularly disclaims at the start of every episode that the presentation viewers are about to see is quite obviously a parody, and proceeds to demonstrate quite thoroughly that it is a parody, no amount of pettifogging legalistic sleight-of-hand is going to come even close to making the case reach trial. EA Sports would have no standing to bring a suit because of the depiction of Tiger Woods in the episode. Nor would they have any standing to bring a suit because of the licensed use of Tiger Woods' name or the mention of the Professional Golf Association in the title of the game. Even the mention of the title falls under the parody exceptions.
When South Park put World of WarCraft in it's crosshairs, the guys at Blizzard not only got the joke, but incorporated the title of the episode into the game as an achievement. Nintendo didn't summon the lawyers when South Park made fun of the wait involved for the first Wii systems. There wasn't a hue and a cry when Guitar Hero was spoofed. This is quite obviously the stupidest example of filing suit for no other reason than "the honor of the flag" that EA or its subsidiaries has come up with in recent memory. Somewhere, there has got to be somebody, hopefully in the legal department of EA or EA Sports, that will sit down with the suits and make it painfully clear to them that they're wasting a lot of time, money, and resources that don't need to be wasted. The only person who might possibly be offended enough to try a lawsuit would be Tiger Woods himself, and chances are his own legal advisers have made it clear to him that he's got no shot. The only thing this lawsuit will accomplish will be to add another notch, and a very high profile notch, on the belt of a show which has faced down bigger and meaner opponents than EA and won without breaking a sweat.
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