I'm looking for a game. A very specific kind of game. I want an MMO, but I don't want to click in a UI to fight. I want to fight - I want an FPS. And I want to be able to level up my abilities: I become more accurate, run faster, jump higher, and so on. I want an RPG. I'm looking for an MMOFPSRPG. Never let it be said that I have low standards.

Last month, I got an invite to play the Tabula Rasa beta. I had signed up for it a long time ago and totally forgotten about it. Frankly, the idea for the game is something I'm burning to play. So I jumped at the chance to give this a try. Hours of downloading later, I started the game, logged in, and the game promptly locked up. It's been doing this for weeks now. Apparently, it fails to make it's connections to the server properly (something about my university network), and just sits there indefinitely. There's a ten page thread on the forums detailing the issue full of people with the same problem, and no responses from anyone representing the developers.

I'm a bit disappointed. I feel that this could be the game I'm waiting for - an MMO I can actually stick with for a little while. But, I'm not even going to consider buying the game until I'm sure that it'll work. The waiting might just kill me.

In the meantime, I'm borrowing a friend's Hellgate: London beta. It's not an MMO - at least not technically. But, it's kinda what I'm looking for. Honestly, I enjoy the game, but it feels simplified in every respect. When shooting a gun, there's no reloading and your ammo is infinite. When swinging swords your actions don't seem to be connected to results. I swing the sword and it passes through a bad guy. A split second later I'll see the blood and a death animation. It would actually look pretty good if all that synced up properly. But, it's still pretty simple. There's no way to make the melee acrobatic, and I don't think there's even different hitzones for guns (ie. headshots don't do more damage than shooting someone in the foot). But, at least it's kinda close, and it's interesting in the meantime.

Of course, Hellgate's got it's share of bugs. In fact, considering that the game's supposed to be launching on October 31 it's got more than it's share. I've been disconnected a few times, and the client has crashed twice. Both times the character I was playing was made inaccessible. They fixed the characters in the last patch, but it still feels like they're going to be pushing it to make their launch.

I'm waiting for the Huxley beta to drop - I have high hopes for that one, but I'm in for a long wait on that one, I don't think it's due out until next year sometime.

News swirling around about the RIAA adding yet more colleges to their shitlist has me wondering exactly how they determine who's who by IP addresses. I mean, I suppose some schools assign an IP per student, and keep the names on file so they know who got what, but not every school owns large blocks of IP addresses. Take for example Southern Polytechnic State University, where I attend.

The first time you plug a computer into the residential side of the network (it's separated from the campus network), you get an IP address form the DHCP server. This IP is in the rage of 172.16.x.x, with the third section corresponding to your living complex and the last section being totally random. From this point on, as long as the computer stays within that housing complex, you're always assigned the same IP. The system does this my remembering the MAC address and associating it with a private IP. Change your MAC address, and you get a new IP address.

This makes me question how the RIAA would go about suing students at a school like this, since all the IPs handed out are private. First of all there's only one public IP for everyone - you can't tell who's who from outside the network. In order to specifically finger people, they'd have to be able to monitor traffic from behind the school's routers. I wouldn't put it past the school to allow it; I very much doubt the university's role as a beacon of liberty and enlightenment these days.

But even if the network is monitored, it will only tell you that some individual is pirating music, not who. Remember - the network will allow anyone with physical access to a port to get an IP address. You don't have to sign up or give a name. Even if they keep logs all they get is an IP address and it's associated MAC address. Naturally, my MAC address is always spoofed so I can get a new IP. The best they could get from here is what housing complex you live in, which would narrow it down to somewhere around 250 - 400 people.

But what do I know? Maybe the RIAA has some magic NAT-busting technology that allows them to tell exactly who's doing what from behind that single IP address. If they do, I do wish they'd share it with the rest of us. It's a pain in the ass to share files when you can't accept incoming connections.

With the news that Time Warner is now packet shaping it's network, I figured this might be a timely time to examine some of the motivations behind such a move. Obviously, they're looking to throttle P2P usage to something the network can handle. They're not the first, and they won't be the last ISP to try to put bit torrent under with a stupid piece of hardware that delays sending packets. I still think that packet shapers in general are about the stupidest damn idea I've ever heard of. I base my experience off the one that my campus uses to avoid paying for a reasonable internet line. There, if your packet isn't HTTP, it may take a couple thousand milliseconds for a packet to reach you, if it reaches you at all before the connection times out. Granted, that a worst case scenario, with incompetent admins to boot, but I still think that the money spent on a packet shaper would have been much better spend trying to deliver packets faster, not slower.

But I digress. The simple fact is that there's no reason ISPs can't handle Bit Torrent traffic. I'm paying insane amounts of money every month for a measly 1.5 Mbps connection, and most of the time transfer only a few GB per month (it's mostly my parents using that connection, and they have little use for P2P apps or streaming video). Even if a small percentage of users are costing more money than they're worth, as ISPs claim, the profit margins on the vast majority of their customers are enormous. There should be money in there somewhere to upgrade the network, right? I certainly think so.

But, barring an ISP actually digging into it's own profits to cover the cost of running their service (god, are you mad? What business does that?!), the government has given them billions in tax breaks and incentives to upgrade their networks. That's right, we the people paid for lit fiber to every home, ample bandwidth, an ethernet connection for every child, wireless access points as far as the eye can see, tubes and trucks, and oh so much more. "But wait," I hear you say, "we got none of that, and oh so much less!" And no, no we didn't. Chances are your telephone company and cable company took that money and laughed all the way to bank. No fiber for you. Ladies and gentlemen, "we the people" got boned.

What's worse is that the government didn't even care. In fact, they've made the same deal over and over again, with the same result every time. If I didn't know any better, I'd say someone's getting a kickback somewhere. The only ISP I know that has a serious plan to upgrade their network to fiber is Verizon, and they're doing it at great expense, with great urgency, and to the great dismay of their shareholders. With great expense, because like all the other companies that got government money for upgrades, they blew it elsewhere while their network rotted. With great urgency, because their current network is incapable of handling even the measly service they now sell. Oh, their shareholders are burning their ass over all the capital outlay. Wow, life sure is painful when you take other's people's money and procrastinate for years, isn't it?

As some point all the ISPs are going to have to upgrade their networks. Their copper lines aren't going to last forever, and they'll slowly die, gasping for subscribers as everyone leaves them for the companies that had the foresight to upgrade. If a couple of these companies die in the process, you'll not catch me saying we should be in any hurry to save them. In fact, it would do my heart good to see a couple of the large ISPs go under, leaving chaos in large sections of the United States where they were granted the monopoly rights they abused so badly. No, it'd be a fitting justice, I say, if a couple of executives ended up in jail for gross mismanagement.

Companies like AT&T, Bellsouth (oh wait, they're AT&T now too!), Verizon, and SBC are a cancer. They sell slow, expensive connections, and then throttle on top of that. They spend more time, effort, and money killing municipal wireless than they ever did upgrading their networks. They're complicit with the RIAA, they hand over our information to the government, they steal our money, they weave contracts with terms so hostile it'd give a lawyer an orgasm, they abuse their government granted monopolies, they make questionable advertising claims, and then they have the absolute gall to complain that someone might not be using their service as intended.

Fuckers.

Early Friday morning I commented on a Slashdot article about the new version of Ubuntu being announced. Frankly, I'm impressed with the strides the Ubuntu people have made in making desktop Linux workable for the masses, and I said so. I also mentioned that the only complaint I could really come up with was that wireless networking was still not quite up to par for most people. I only mentioned this because I found such a complaint insignificant compared with what I was complaining about a year and a half ago. So props to the Ubuntu people then; they've made lots of progress.

But, it would seem that lots of people picked up on my wireless issues. In fact I was downright surprised to get no less than five responses either asking for more information on the issue, or giving me suggestions on how to get my stuff working. I didn't get anything working out of that, but I did learn a bit, so Slashdot has basically just renewed my faith in it's awesomeness. Anyways, I thought I'd lay out exactly what I've been working on the last month.

The Original Setup

Originally, I had a Toshiba Portege 3500 tablet PC that I picked up for free. It was broken, but turns out it just need a hard disk, an expense I couldn't pass up just to get a free tablet. It does not, however, have an internal CD-ROM. There was apparently a portable CD-ROM that connected through the PCMCIA slot at some point, but I've not been able to track one down. Of course, the darn thing won't boot anything through it's USB 2 ports. So, I also bought and adapter to connect the new laptop hard disk to my desktop computer, and installed an old copy of MS-DOS 6.22 on a 2 GB partition, copied my Windows XP CD to that partition. The cool thing is, I can now put the hard drive back in the laptop, boot to DOS, and then run an executable (i386/WINNT.EXE, if I remember correctly), and the installer will come up. It required a little bit of DOS knowledge I had long since neglected, such as setting up himem.sys and smartdrv (disk caching), but it worked.

Once I had Windows installed, it was all pretty much smooth sailing. Everything seemed to work fine, only I couldn't connect to my school's wireless network. It turns out that the wireless card in the laptop only supports WEP encryption, and my school wisely uses WPA encryption. So I bought a USB wireless card that uses the Ralink RT73 chipset, which was said to be Linux compatible, and had support for newer encryption standards. It worked great with SecureW2, the supplicant my school chose to handle encryption and authentication. It's roughly comparable to xsupplicant or maybe wpasupplicant on Linux.

Now, With New Linux Flavor!

Of course, I had to format the laptop when Windows started doing odd things, and using the same steps did not yield working results (damn Window's inconsistencies!), so I figured now was as good a time as any to play with Linux on it. I had been considering this since I bought the "Linux Compatible" wireless card anyways. I actually spent a good bit of time attempting to get the install working from DOS in the same manner I did for Windows. It turns out that while there are some tools that can help with this, I was not able to figure it out after a month of trying. So instead I hooked up the laptop hard drive to my desktop again, and installed Ubuntu on it on my desktop. I then moved the drive back to my laptop. This worked well enough; I had to rewrite some config files but it did work and I was very happy to note that it detected all my hardware beautifully.

Then I hooked in the USB dongle. It was detected, and immediately associated with my neighbor's unprotected access point. Nice! Working support, as advertised on the box! Ubuntu pops up telling me I should update my install before I get owned by a script kiddie, and I start the process of downloading and installing something like 120 updated packages. I go get something to eat and when I come back everything's done. I restart the laptop, and I've never been able to replicate my first success with Ubuntu's built-in driver again. Ever. Ever after reinstalling.

About That RT73 Driver

It turns out, of course, that the "rt73usb" driver is actually an old version of the open source driver project by Serialmonkey, which deals with support for man Ralink wireless chipsets. This included driver version in Ubuntu is known to be broken by the Ubuntu people. Of course new versions of this driver from CVS (the only way to get the driver) haven't worked properly since December 30, 2006. It's still an extremely beta driver. Unfortunately, I'm not very proficient with Linux yet, and haven't figured out how to pull old versions of the driver from CVS, and didn't really want to mess with compiling it, so I didn't. Instead, I went and got the manufacturer's driver for the stick. Reading through some information about it, it doesn't support the Linux Wireless Extensions (wext). This is an API that has become the standard for wireless management tools. Tools such as xsupplicant, wpasupplicant, and so on generally require either specific chipsets and drivers, or that your driver support wext in order for the magic to happen. The manufacturer instead expects you to use their configuration program, which supports WPA in various configurations, none of which are vigorous enough to connect to my school's network with. So that pretty much kills all the native Linux drivers, at least for my purposes.

What I ended up doing is blacklisting rt73usb, installing ndiswrapper, and using the same driver I used on my Windows setup. This seems to work pretty well, it will connect to unencrypted or WEP access points. I can't test WPA because I don't have an access point that supports it to test with, though. It will, however, hotplug beautifully. That's right, using a Windows driver though ndiswrapper to run a USB wireless adapter actually doesn't cause a monstrous rip in the space-time continuum, which both surprised and disappointed me.

Just for kicks, I upgraded to the 7.04 (feisty) beta, and attempted to do some work there. The Serialmonkey driver is not SMP-friendly, and apparently can possibly cause all sorts of issues. Ubuntu's kernels are all compiled with SMP enabled now. Of course, I ran into one of these issues where the computer would lock up anytime the stick was connected. Attempting to blacklist rt73usb in 7.04 just like I did in 6.10 didn't work, so I got pretty much nothing done. It does raise the question: has the driver been changed? Because I didn't used to have this problem. I read a launchpad page (which I can no longer find) that said they would not have this driver updated in time for shipping 7.04, so either they changed their mind or the newer kernel is bringing out flaws that were previously unexpressed.

The Sooper-Secure Wireless Network

My school provides a nice list of specifications that apparently aren't very complete. At least, I was using all kinds of things that aren't listed. They also provide a setup guide for Mac OS X, which proved to actually be more useful for me. The school doesn't give any instructions for Linux. In case they take those pages down or something, the specifications say this:

SSID:hornet
Authentication Method: 802.1x
Authentication Type: EAP-TTLS
Encryption Type: WPA
Key Style: TKIP
Certificate Authority: Thawte
Domain:(leave blank)

I also get a username and password. They left out the fact that the authentication is done through PAP, and the specific certificate they're using, which happens to the Thawte Premium Server CA, which I found located at /etc/ssl/certs/Thawte_Premium_Server_CA.pem. I know what cert they're using only because I was reading the output from xsupplicant and noticed it complaining that I hadn't specified that root CA.

Network-Manager Sure Is Nice

I fancied myself pretty swift when I figured out that I could just use ndiswrapper to get around my issues, and moved on actually configuring wpasupplicant (I tried it first). Of course, being the lazy person that I am, I really didn't want to have to research how to write the configuration myself, so I decided to install Network-Manager, a GNOME application that will configure all this stuff for you. How nice, except it seemed to break everything. My loopback interface quit coming up, my network interfaces seemed to go up and down randomly, and I couldn't scan for a list of access points anymore. Turns out I hadn't configred it correctly; it took posts by Knuckles and WaZiX to straighten my ass out. Doesn't matter anyways though, because Network-Manger currently doesn't support phase2 authentication (at least in the version Ubuntu is shipping), which I apparently need because my network does it's authentication though PAP.

Config File, We Meet Again

It took me quite a while to generate a configuration file for wpasupplicant, and even after hours of tweaking and walking back and forth between my school's network and my room (which is not in range of the AP), I still couldn't get it to do anything interesting. I thought maybe wpasupplicant didn't support my school's decidedly odd setup (I'm under the impression that WPA with TKIP is kinda unusual, as TKIP is usually a WEP thing) was messing things up. So I went googling and found xsupplicant instead. I wrote up a config file, and lo and behold, I got authenticated! But it still won't move any data back and forth, so I get no IP and no love. A bit more Googling tells me that you can apparently run both xsupplicant and wpasupplicant at the same time, and it may be required in order to get my setup fully working. To do this, you write your full xsupplicant config, and then just specify your SSID and WPA-EAP to wpasupplicant, and you're good to go. This would seem to be on the right track as I got "AUTHENTICATED" status in xsupplicant, but wpasupplicant keeps getting some error about failing a 4-way handshake when trying to set up the encryption. Going back to the same page, you apparently need to use a -W switch when running xsupplicant, so it will provide keying material to wpasupplicant (whatever the hell that means). Of course, I can't find this switch documented anywhere, it doesn't seem show up in my version of xsupplicant anyways. Either I need a newer version or an older version, but I can't tell which.

Where We End Up

So, basically where I'm at now is I don't know if I even have my config files set up correctly, and I can't find the command switch I need. I still don't understand why wpasupplicant isn't capable of anything on it's own, or why xsupplicant apparently needs wpasupplicant to handle WPA encryption. It may be that I just can't do what I want to do because I'm using ndiswrapper. I don't really know how well we can map those Windows drivers into Linux, but it seems to at least almost work. I'd love to try a native driver, but I'll probably have to wait for further development for that one.

I'm probably going to go talk to some people in Ubuntu's IRC channel at some point, someone in there probably can give a next step to try anyways. I hate doing this sort of thing through IRC, though. Chat rooms move entirely too quickly for me to track who I'm talking to currently, and they're not the best medium for long-winded explanations like this from long-winded people like me. They also don't transfer config files gracefully. But, apparently all the good help is hanging out there, not on the forums, so I'll give it a shot.

I suppose that in a way it's a good thing that Wikipedia garners attention from the mainstream press at all. At the very least, it demonstrates the impact it's had on the world. It's probably one of the more accessable examples of open source, and it's a damn fine example, really.

I do consider Wikipedia to be an "open source" encyclopedia. It behaves in much the same way as any other open source project and encounters many of the same challenges. Any open source project has the possibility of allowing bad code in. Wikipedia is no different. The expectation is that other coders, or writers as the case may be, will find these mistakes and fix them. In this case the infringing article was removed when it was found.

I think the Big Deal surrounding Wikipedia lately has more to do with just a bit of "culture shock." In the minds of many people, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and as such is inherently trusted. I'm going to disregard the fact that this line of reasoning is inherently flawed; suffice it to say that the public at large will generally trust whatever you write in an encyclopedia. Then there's Wikipedia. It's something different entirely, really. Not really an encyclopedia of the kind Joe Average knows about. Yes, it looks like one in many respects but it rarely behaves like one. The fact that it's open source changes things significantly. But Joe cares about none of this, he's just happy to have an encyclopedia with an article on virtually everything.

This is where the culture shock comes in. The first few times Joe uses Wikipedia as a source, it works our pretty well. Then he stumbles across something wrong. Well, as any good Wiki user knows, you edit the entry. Joe doesn't edit the entry. Instead he gets all bent out of shape because suddenly this trustworthy source of his is handing out wrong information. Joe and a good portion of the rest of the world has misunderstood just how wikis and open source in general works. And now that they're figuring it out, they're finding it's not quite a utopian way of doing things. Personally, I still think it's a better way of doing things, but it does require some user partisipation. And, it does require you to think about what you're reading. Heaven forbid it, surely.

Now, in the above paragraphs replace "Joe" with "John Seigenthaler," the guy who got libeled in a Wikipedia article. He's pissed, and everyone else is surprised. "You mean anyone can add an article to Wikipedia? Holy crap, I don't like that! That would be what every frickin' page on the site says, guys. From any article on the site, the first line says "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." What, you didn't think we were joking, did you Joe?

I'm fully convinced that many people who end up on Wikipedia pages got there from a Google search and never even took the time to examine their source. Not that it would have helped any, it takes something like this to pound it into many people's thick skulls. This is a great demonstation of what's expected from the users in an open source environment.

I'm not knocking John Seigenthaler for being pissed over the fact that someone would write the content. I am knocking everyone else who keeps bitching about the very aspects that make Wikipedia better. Yes, it's open source, anyone can change or make articles. Read accordingly, or don't read at all -- I don't really care. Just -- for the sake of everyone else -- be quiet. You will never find an encyclopedia with more information. Some may call it trivia, but I've needed some pretty obscure stuff and Wikipedia has rarely let me down. That's not something any other encyclopedia can give you.

The below was originally supposed to go into a discussion as a response to someone's reasoning against the .XXX TLD, but it got very long and wasn't really the topic at hand anyways. So now it's a journal entry. My first journal entry on Slashdot - that's a landmark or something in nerdom.
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First and most important: Who mandates it? Nobody has authority over the interwebbernet

The simple answer is, you let the registrars enforce it. Put it in the TOS: "If you host XXX content on this shiny new .com, we'll hand your name over to law enforcement and cancel your account. We'll also have your balls. You should buy a .XXX instead." Of course, there's a bit more to it than that. To enforce this, make a complaints form. One field of the form is to put the full URI of the offending page. The other field is a place for user comments. You can disregard the user comments, they're just there to let angry users with an agenda bitch. When the user hits the submit button, download a copy of the URI and put it in a database along with the other information. If you get more than say 3 complaints, check your cached copies and see if you've got an obvious offender. Places like Network Solutions already show pictures of websites when you do a WHOIS lookup. Try looking up slashdot.org on it.

Oh, and it's intarweb. Gosh, I thought everyone knew that.

What about a national geographic-style site that would include topless women from some tribe in africa?

This could be handled via the complaints system. User complains to registrar, registrar examines sites and could suggest that National Geographic might want to invest in nationalgeographic.xxx domain for some of their content. Of course, if you've just got a bunch of complaining prudes then you put nationalgeographic.com on a reject list and when people try to submit it, they're told to sodmize themselves. Sure, this means that some "grey area" sites might remain on .com while others are in .XXX, but that's not really the purpose (inconsistency in grey area sites). The purpose is to put obviouspornosite.com on obviouspornosite.xxx instead.

What about a site selling underwear as well as other non-questionable content? Like Amazon.

Then they might want to invest in amazon.com and amazon.xxx to split up their content. Most companies own multiple variations of their domain anyways, and since the cost of registering a new one is minimal, it's not too much to ask. Also, and underwear ad isn't exactly the same thing obviouspornsite.com. Again, the purpose is to move the most obvious crap out of the regular namespace.

What about webcam sites where people are free to be as nude or not-nude as they like?

This is an easy one: ony non-nude cams on webcams.com. If you want nudity on your cam, you register at webcams.xxx which is owned by the same company. If you can't be assed to abide by those rules, don't worry. We'll move your webcam for you.

What about informative sites teaching kids about their own body? (clitical, jackinworld, etc)

Use one of those warnings where you have to click ok to get in. Besides all that, I highly doubt your average hormone pumped teen is really intrested in an educational expaination of how sex works. Also, places like this are a better way to figure out who sex works and a porn site (believe it or not, not every orifice was intended for sex), so stop bitching. You have choices - completely getting rid of sex on the internet isn't one of them.

What about non comercial personal pages that include nudes

Don't host nudes on your personal or other non commercial website unless it's an XXX TLD. Again, you can buy two domain names. They're not expensive, Yahoo! will sell you one for 5 bucks.
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I'll admit I've got motives for seeing the .XXX TLD go in. I'm really tired of getting porn results mixed in with my google searches. Image searches are espicially bad about this because porn sites have started masking images with more normal names and such.

And I'm not a prude either. I don't want porn completely gone from the internet, I just want to be able to control my experience online. It also has one other benefit: I don't have to listen to people bitch anymore. "I found porn in our Temporay Internet Files, Johhny's been looking at porn!" Actually, Johnny's just been doing Google image searches, but he's fucked anyways - his parents don't know the difference. I've seen things similar to this before. One kid I know got in trouble for looking at porn because his parents recieved a pornographic spam. The not-too-bright parents assumed the mail was generated by their kid surfing porn and pretty much banned him from the internet. And yes, they still use AOL to this day, and still haven't got a clue how the internet works. Granted .XXX doesn't stop this problem in particular, but I can only imagine that punishment would've been death had porn been found on the family's hard disk.

I must address the crowd claiming that a .XXX domain just legitizes porn. Yes, it does. And you can just quit bitching. We're way past the point of stopping porn altogether and frankly I'm not sure I'd want it entirely eradicated. That would be too close to a China-like solution. This argument puts you in the worst possible situation: you don't like it, but you can't do anything about it because meerly acknowledging that it exists would legitimize it.

This is why the rest of the world wants to take control of the DNS system from the United States: we're too busy being whiny, bitchy, little pussies to do something about it. Trial a .XXX TLD. If we can't make it work, trash it or make it optional. It wouldn't be the first "special" TLD that's become useless. I consider most every TLD added recently to be quite useless.

Oh, and existing porn sites have six months to a year to buy a .XXX domain. Their exact domain in the .com section will be reserved for them in .XXX. They may keep their .com and have it redirect if they want (after all, blocking software can still block .XXX even if you end up there through a redirect). After that time has expired, your name is no longer reserved and you can be fined for not following the rules. And the fine gets bigger each time we catch you. NOTHING on your porn site should be accessable through a .com even if you're just using it as an image server. Images will load as well from a .XXX domain as a .com.