As funny as it may be, EA got burnt early and hard (see: Spore) and thus slowly, but surely starts to wise up regarding DRM, and it's just a matter of time until other publishers follow. The DRM war is over. We've won.

Then again, maybe not.

Using just EA as an example, all you have to do is look at the next Command & Conquer 4 game; it will require an always-on internet connection to play, even with the single-player game. Although they tout this as a benefit to the customer (it will prevent cheating) it is still DRM.

Meanwhile, Ubisoft is moving in the same direction, although at least they aren't trying to pretend it's anything but an onerous copy-protection mechanism. Valve has been using this tactic for years (their "offline mode" notwithstanding as it still requires initial authentication and then occassional access to the net to reverify) and I expect the other publishers to follow suit.

Furthermore, online DRM offers publishers so many other advantages beyond preventing piracy that it is unlikely that it will ever be dropped. It kills those pesky sales of used copies, may require users to buy additional copies for extra machines (not so much an issue with games yet, but already taking effect in operating systems), can provide a channel to gather valuable demographic information and force advertisements down the throat of customers, and ultimately may reduce the publisher's dependence on the retail channel for delivering the product.

Short of a major community uprising against DRM (which does not include a three-month gripe-fest and then buying it anyway, or pirating the game in some vain hope this will convince the publisher's of the error of their ways), I don't see a victory for the consumer in the future.

Which is a completely bullshit argument to make.

You aren't *fighting* DRM that way; you are completely justifying the need for it. The way to fight DRM is to a) not buy the game and b) let the publisher know why you are boycotting the product.

You don't have a right to play the games just because you do not like the copy-protection.

Simply stealing the product will only encourage publishers to either: a) add more DRM (either in some vain hope it will actually stymie the pirates or in an attempt to do prove to their shareholders that they are trying to do SOMETHING to protect their investment) or, b) convince them to drop the PC platform entirely.

If you want to encouraging publishers to use no or consumer-friendly forms of DRM then only buy products that meet your requirements. Stop trying to justify piracy with the fallacious argument that it will somehow teach the publishers a lesson if you pirate the game.

Another issue with adverts that seems not to be covered here is the idea that advertisers can (and are) using internet advertisments to build profiles on users. For instance, if I were a visitor to Ars Technica, they might know I have an interest in nvidia video cards and open source software based on the articles I read. However, they wouldn't know that my other interests might include doggie porn (does that exist?) or sewing frilly pink dresses as a hobby*, because I go to other websites to fulfilll those needs.

Unfortunately, advertisers can do this very thing. It is quite likely that the same advertiser who sells impressions on Ars Technica may also sell impressions on NaughtyPooch.Com or PrettyInPink.Org. All of a sudden, simply by visiting sites I might enjoy, a single company can build up a detailed picture of me.

Of course, nothing you do on the Internet is truly private; just by browsing the web I am leaving a trail of information behind me. But I've no desire to help companies compile this information into a big profile about me. Thus, I block all advertisements in order to help reduce this likelihood. Maybe this is all wasted effort. Perhaps, as they say, privacy may be dead, but I've no inclination to shovel dirt onto its corpse.

* disclaimer for the humor impaired: no, I'm really not interested in any of these things. Please do not forward me interesting links to raunchy mutts in pink dresses

This reminds of when Salon decided to put all their content behind a paywall; it seemed to make economic sense to them at the time. Unfortunately when the users hit the paywall, many of them decided the content wasn't worth their money and left for greener (and freer pastures). Not only did they stop visiting the website directly, but whenever they saw a Salon link, they did not click it because they knew there was an intervening paywall.

Some time later, Salon decided to revist the issue of paywalls and decided making their content only available to paying customers was not the best way of doing things after all. Down came the paywall. But the people they lost *still* avoided the site because -as far as they knew- the content was still only available for a fee and therefore they continued to avoid Salon entirely.

Although the paywall arguably was necessary for Salon to survive an economic rough spot, it took them years to recover (in terms of numbers of readership) from that decision. I wonder if Ars Technica may suffer the same fate; users with ad-blockers will not be able to see the content, and decide to write off the site entirely. Should Ars Technica revisit their policy, those users will have no way of knowing, since they aren't going to the website and won't hear about the change.

And let's face it: most readers of Ars Technica are more technically-inclined than the rest of the Internet, and are thus more likely to be using ad-blockers. If they follow through with this policy, this could have some severe blowback.

Possibly you are thinking about the FADE, used first in Operation Flashpoint.

http://www.gameburnworld.com/protections_fade.shtml (first link on Google)

Like most DRM, it apparently has been circumvented.

And when the hell did straight edge have anything to do with being vegan? One can be one and not the other, or one can be both. Neither group is violent, if anything they're likely to be LESS violent than the jocks and hiphop kids.

I'm not in the least bit familiar with the Straight Edge movement (I'd not even heard of it until this discussion), but if we are to believe Wikipedia:

"By the early 1990s, militant Straight Edge was a well-known presence in the scene—the term militant meaning someone who is dedicated and outspoken, but also believed to be narrow-minded, judgmental, and potentially violent. The militant Straight Edger was characterized by less tolerance for non-straight-edge people, more outward pride in being Straight Edge, more outspokenness, and the willingness to resort to violence in order to promote clean living."

Apparently the group became less "militant" after the turn of the century, but since the case in question revolved around an event that occurred in 1999, I can imagine school officials being worried about "dangerous" followers of Straight Edge and felt the steps they took were necessary for the safety of their students. It's an indefensible position (don't teachers talk to kids anymore?), but I can imagine that being the train of logic that they followed.

This is likely to be the first game I will "obtain for free" for several years. Like you I liked AC1 and like you I was going to buy AC2 but fuck that noise, my net connection regularly goes down and I am NOT going to be denied an offline gaming experience because of it.

I hear this argument used frequently by pirates. I'm not sure that is how you intended it, but I'm going to use it as a starting point for a counter-argument.

It sounds like you are only going to justify Ubisoft's need for DRM. Just because you disagree with the copy-protection methods does not entitle you to a full copy of the game gratis.

Unless, of course, you intend to buy the game and then download a usable pirated version. That's slightly more acceptable, although that method is also counter-productive as it only encourages Ubisoft into releasing games with more DRM.

It does this in two ways: first, by reassuring them that customers will buy games with onerous copy-protection. Second, by increasing the number of pirate copies in circulation. After all, you don't really think the publishers take work-arounds like the above that into consideration when counting pirated downloads, do you? A pirated copy is a pirated copy to them, no matter if a customer actually paid for the game and is just trying to get a working product. More piracy justifies more more DRM, after all.

The only way to win this game -legally, morally and economically- is simply not to play. If you don't like the product, don't buy it, don't play it, don't do anything with it except avoid it.

DRM never justifies piracy. It definitely isn't going to "teach Ubisoft a lesson" (or if it does, they are going to learn an entirely different lesson than you intended). The only thing DRM justifies is a reason not to use that product.

It amused me that when I clicked on the link to the blog, I was returned a "503: Service Not Available" page.

I guess they are being hammered by Slashdot traffic right now, but I thought it also was a curiously coincidental comment on Apple's own response to their app.

Kindle sales may have played some part, in that Amazon sold a bazillion of them last quarter.

It's a bit of a digression, but...

Supposedly only 1.5 million Kindles have been sold (but there is a lot of guesswork being used in that blog, so take that number with a grain of salt).

I doubt it's enough to make up for the supposed losses claimed by the publishers. Anyway, Amazon isn't using cheap ebooks as a way to sell Kindles; rather, it's the other way around. Or it should be.

Now, back to the main topic...

Thanks for the interesting link. I was particularly intrigued by the chart indicating how much temperature has an effect on charge level. I'd wager that this is a major cause of a lot of these reported Windows 7 battery problems.

After all, Windows 7 is more resource intensive than XP, especially if you are using Aero Glass. Not only does that mean that CPU usage may be up, but also that the platform it is running on will be using more powerful CPUs. Both of these things result in more waste heat which can leak into the battery. XP, on the other hand, won't be heavily taxing the CPU/GPU under "ordinary use" (e.g., non-game) circumstances, and can run on less-powerful (and thus cooler-running) processors.

If something like that gang rape happened within visible range of 20 random adults, then I'd find it hard to believe that at least half of them wouldn't have tried to call the cops.

Maybe it's different with gang-rape versus murder, but read up on the story about Kitty Genovese. People -especially in groups- often do not respond the way you would expect when witnessing a crime. Social psychiatrists even have a term for it: the bystander effect.

I remember a similar story a couple years ago about an elderly man who was hit by a car and nearby watchers did nothing.

Valve has stated that should Steam cease to be a distribution platform and go under, they will release a patch to unlock all of the games you have bought and allow you to play them without logging into the dead steam servers. Problem Solved.

I've seen this quoted over and over again. Does anyone have a citation for this claim? Have they made it in any legally binding way or is it just some random employee of Valve spouting off in some web-forum making claims he may not be in any position to make.

After all, I have to wonder if they even are legally allowed to do this. I guess they could in the case of their own games (Half Life, Left4Dead), but would they be allowed to strip the DRM from titles they did not develop but only distributed? I guess that might be in a contract between publisher and distributor, but I can't imagine a big company like EA allowing that. Not to mention that, assuming Valve does go out of business, where are they going to get the money to develop these promised patches? Are we supposed to believe that they already have been written and are just sitting on a hard-drive somewhere?

It just sounds like a flight of fancy that people who have bought into Steam use to reassure themselves that they aren't going to get screwed out of their purchases in a few years. I'd like to see some proof to which Valve can be held accountable.

I think even the *title* of this article is quite indicative of the whole problem, and that problem doesn't have anything to do with the actual acts of terrorism. The article implies that we need "saving" from the terrorists, as if terrorism is such an overwhelming threat that we are all constantly at risk. We aren't; the percentage of people killed by these criminals is insignificant when compared to, well, almost any other cause of death. We don't need to be "saved"; phrases like "protected from" or "help identify" would be more accurate but they don't use those because they doesn't push the same emotional buttons as a word as laden as "save" and thus they can bypass rational thought about the issue. Politicos and journalists keep using this sort of hot-button terminology; watch out for it.

Is NIMF's inability to procure funding just a sign of the harsh economic climate or is it an indication that people are becoming less concerned with the issues it promoted. 15 years ago, computer and video games were making the transition from "toys for children" (Sonic, Mario) to more graphic and mature titles (Doom, Duke Nukem). Parents and (older) adults saw these gore-soaked, stripper-filled games and wondered what effect this would have on the younger generation. Worriedly, they funded -through contributions or taxes- groups like NIMF.

More than a decade later, a generation has come of age having played these games for most of their lives and -surprise, surprise!- they are not any more messed up than any previous generation. Video games, it seems, are not the corrupting influence people thought they might be. Not only are the supporters of yesteryear lest likely to fund these groups, but the same generation NIMF etal were meant to protect -now grown up themselves- are equally unlikely to open their pocketbooks to them.

Claiming it is merely the "economic climate" that is shutting down these groups is buying into their argument that there is a necessity for the services they provide but that harsher realities requires our finances to be redirected to more essential things. People generally consider "protecting the children" to be a priority. That NIMF is closing is just as likely an indication that we recognize they are not necessary to keep the kids safe because there never was any real danger to them in the first place.

Possibility 4:

This is all another marketing scheme, along the lines of what they did with the "Games for Windows" promotions when Vista was coming out (remember those fancy kiosks?) to push Windows7. It'll be big news for a few months, then it will seem as if Microsoft as lost interest in it and it'll hang around for a year or two afterward, at which point Microsoft will abandon the idea.

Sure, in the unlikely event it takes off, Microsoft will follow through on it but my bet its just to get the word out on the streets about the "cool" things Microsoft does (Surface, for example) so as to promote sales of their newest operating system, Windows 7.

This is Microsoft; they have the money to blow on extravagant schemes like this.