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Officials Use Google Earth To Find Unlicensed Pools 650

Posted by samzenpus from the eye-in-the-sky dept.
Officials in Riverhead, New York are using Google Earth to root out the owners of unlicensed pools. So far they've found 250 illegal pools and collected $75,000 in fines and fees. Of course not everyone thinks that a city should be spending time looking at aerial pictures of backyards. from the article: "Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, DC, said Google Earth was promoted as an aid to curious travelers but has become a tool for cash-hungry local governments. 'The technology is going so far ahead of what people think is possible, and there is too little discussion about community norms,' she said."
Piracy

Ubisoft's Authentication Servers Go Down 634

Posted by kdawson from the single-point-of-well-you-know dept.
ZuchinniOne writes "With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."

Comment The end of Ubisoft's PC gaming arm? (Score 1) 631

by Undergrid (#31182072) Attached to: Ubisoft's Constant Net Connection DRM Confirmed

I wonder if this is Ubisoft's way of killing off its PC gaming arm (and possibly having a go at killing off PC gaming in general).

I mean, lets look at the platforms. The XBox 360, PS3 and Wii are all single hardware platforms, yes there are small differences like the existence or size of a hard disk, but one Xbox 360 is (to game developers) pretty much the same as another, same with PS3 and Wii. If you look at PC's you have DirextX 9, 10 and 11, Windows XP, Vista and 7 and nVidia and ATI video cards just to start. Thats 14 different possible combinations with just those three options. Developing for and supporting (though you wonder if any games company actually invests in customer support) that kind of target hardware has got to be more expensive than console targets. What better way to get out of the market than saying its rife with pirated games, very few people are buying our games any more, its not worth the investment.

Of course with DRM this vile you'll incur more support costs for people who bought the game and have problems with DRM, you'll drive people to buy the game and crack it (exposing honest people to the seedy underworld of the game pirates) and even cause people who would have bought it just to download a copy. Honest people will be branded and thieves because of bugs in the DRM (I'm looking at you Microsoft) and Ubisoft will either go bust, pull out of the PC market or retire older buggy versions of their DRM (or maybe just disable a game because its too old) and in the process removing access to the games for people who have paid money for them while the pirates play on. I wouldn't bet on Assassins Creed II being playable in 3 years without a crack.

I will admit I was a naysayer with Steam but I've grown to like that platform now. In general it doesn't get in the way, you can spot games that have additional DRM and avoid them (and DLC that sneakily adds DRM, I'm looking at you Borderlands), you can still play your games while offline and Valve have shown they can run the service reliably (apart from those pesky release days where everything slows to a crawl). But the difference between Steam and Ubisoft DRM is simply this, Stream has a huge benefit. I can buy a game and any time in the future download the latest version of that game and patches can be applied automatically, no more searching around for the latest version. Where is the benefit to the end user of this DRM?

Its not often I can say there is a game company worse than EA, Ubisoft have claimed that title.

I was looking forward to Assasins Creed II, but I’m voting with my money and not buying it or any other game with this DRM in it. Bye Bye Ubisoft.
Games

Ubisoft's Constant Net Connection DRM Confirmed 631

Posted by Soulskill from the enjoy-getting-flamed-by-the-entire-internet dept.
A few weeks ago we discussed news of Ubisoft's DRM plans for future games, which reportedly went so far as to require a constant net connection, terminating your game if you get disconnected for any reason. Well, it's here; upon playing review copies of the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers VII, PCGamer found the DRM just as annoying as you might expect. Quoting: "If you get disconnected while playing, you're booted out of the game. All your progress since the last checkpoint or savegame is lost, and your only options are to quit to Windows or wait until you're reconnected. The game first starts the Ubisoft Game Launcher, which checks for updates. If you try to launch the game when you're not online, you hit an error message right away. So I tried a different test: start the game while online, play a little, then unplug my net cable. This is the same as what happens if your net connection drops momentarily, your router is rebooted, or the game loses its connection to Ubisoft's 'Master servers.' The game stopped, and I was dumped back to a menu screen — all my progress since it last autosaved was lost."

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