Trènt's Wîrëd Åssìgñmènt

She needs more power

2005-09-18T00:56:00.000+12:00

Faster, cheaper internet this is something many people around New Zealand would love to have. New Zealand compared with other countries has relatively slow internet at a mere max of 10MBs for private use and that’s with the Telstra Clear cable.

Telecom has been holding out on us, they have been offering the some of the cheapest deals for everything they do because they own the [telephone] lines and the competition cannot compete. They are just releasing the speeds a little higher every so often, not all at once this gains them money (they are a company so this is what they do) but this is also setting us back lots in terms of speed, cost and usage.

By the end of the year hopefully this will change. If Telecom fails in signing up 250 000 broadband customers with a third coming though wholesale channels (to the other major companies) then you would be likely to see a boost in the internet quality.

America being the home of today’s internet has the fastest connections available with 2.45GBs speeds on an OC48 cable (Fibre Optic Cables) of course this is just the backbone because most sites are hosted on copper cable base servers. This is the sort of speeds we hope to get here hopefully in the next 5 to 10 years but that is just hopes.

Maybe we will have faster internet even sooner seeing as the launch of a new Satellite from ShinSat, this satellite has capability to have broadband speeds of 45GBs and can reach right down here to New Zealand and with ISP’s like that soon see the end of Telecoms “slow speed” internet

New Zealand has the 6th highest internet users per capita and although Telecom isn’t the only ISP out there it is the leading one and it is holding back speed for profits. Also it is holding back the other ISPs by not releasing high speeds sooner and not only are they holding back the other ISP’s they are holding back the whole country from going into a new connected age.

Is it fair to hold back internet speeds for profits? Possibly. But is it alright to do so if it is stopping others from upping their speeds? Is it ok to charge what other countries pay for high speed to get low speeds? I sure hope not.

With the world being thrown forward in communication how can New Zealand stay with slow speed of 2MBs.

REFERENCES

Stuff.co.nz (September, 15 2005) - Telecom plays down Labour's internet wholesale policy
Retrieved (September, 18 2005) from
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3408314a28,00.html

Amy Kazmin (September 12, 2005) High-Tech Hopes for Rural Asia - Financial Times
Retrieved (September, 18 2005) from
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-ft-shinsat12sep12,1,5477464.story?coll=la-headlines-business

Arrr, I got me some pirate’s booty

2005-09-10T15:54:00.000+12:00

Hundreds of millions is the amount of multimedia data that is transferred every month though peer to peer (p2p) download software such as Kazaa, BitTorrent, Bearshare and eDonkey. Is it alright? Were you planning to buy that song, movie, or game before you downloaded it straight from someone else’s hard drive. I mean they paid for it, and you don’t have the money at the moment but when you do get it of course you will by the CD right?

Sure there are many causal users out there just out to try a song or two before they get the over priced CD. But then there are the others who don’t earn lots of money for many different things just in their flat or parent’s house with a computer, a high speed connection and a lot of time. These are the people who you download those songs, games and movies off with 500 GB hard drives what do you expect them to full it up with.

I “just” downloaded one song once, but I still have more CD’s than mp3s does that make it right? Those songs are just so hard to get in New Zealand you know those underground and indie bands you hear people rave about in the states. But what about the big artists like Metallica fought against download agent Napster and now it pays a price for each and every song you download. These huge multi-million dollar band and record labels (Universal, EMI, Sony BMG, Warner and Australian’s own Festival Mushroom) you cant really compare what these guys make to what a 15 year old male makes.

There has also been a slump in quality music, movies and even games recently as well, I mean is it worth buying that brand new Assault on Precinct 13 movie, that new Star Wars game and I know I wont be rushing out to go buy the new Corrs CD, but I may just have a little bit of a listen if I feel it maybe alright.
Alright so its all just little drops in a drop of water, I may download one CD but so will someone else it does add up, but what also adds up is the fact they will still be millionaires and I will still be a hundredaire. There are millions of people out there who don’t get paid to dress a certain way and lip-sync songs and sadly I am one of these people who don’t get this.

I can see why the companies think this is so bad and is damaging the music industry but if these so called artists like Metallica care so much about the music they should be proud to have people download and listen to their music. There are a few artists out there who don’t care in fact they are happy people get to listen to they music they make any way possible.

Somethings are not avalable other than to get it by downloading such as old games, TV series and music videos all copyrighted property but you can't get them any other way other than downloading through a p2p software program.

Piracy is also like free advertising if its downloaded and its good you would be likely to get the CD or movie and you would tell your friends how great it is and then they would get it and eventually all the good stuff would stand out and the bad fade away.

Sure it is must be morally wrong because piracy is stealing and is illegal. But it is sort of a Robin Hood case steal from the rich and give to your friends, yourself or whoever. I know I will still be downloading tomorrow, I will still be in the far future but they wont call it downloading they will call it hafflelopping you know to be discrete.

REFERENCES

BBC News. (September, 05 2005) Kazaa hit by file-sharing ruling - BBC news UK
Retrieved (September, 10 2005) from
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4214810.stm

On the Case of Money

2005-09-06T19:43:00.000+12:00

Have you ever lost anything that wasn’t yours? Well then have you ever had something that wasn’t yours taken away from you? This is the case of Richard Kyanka webmaster of popular website something awful (http://www.somethingaweful.com/). Something awful is one site to mock them all, something awful other wise known as SA mocks all sorts of people, pornography forums, music, games and just about anything else you can think of, because your not quite laughing unless your laughing at someone.

Being one of the most popular websites on the web it gets huge amounts of internet traffic daily. This has its advantages such as becoming somewhat famous and disadvantages like large bandwidth bills to pay each month which Kyanka pays for himself with a little help from advertising.

Being the “famous” person that he is people tend to like him, want to help him, be him even. This helped a lot when hurricane Katrina hit the southern United States, this just so happened to be where Kyanka’s servers were. At the loss of his site he set up a temporary website asking for help finding a new server but also asking for donations for the Red Cross, the bonus for donating thought Kyanka was free merchandise.

$30 000 was the approximate amount raised in under 9 hours initially for the Red Cross to help the victims of the hurricane. Unfortunately this didn’t go though, Kyanka decided that Paypal would be the best form of payment to get everything into one account to ready donate, he choose Paypal because of the unique ability to collect the names and address of all donators so he could send them free merchandise for their troubles.

Seeing $30 000 flows into a bank account shouldn’t raise an eyebrow. But Paypal is not classed as a bank “Paypal is an Internet business which allows the transfer of money between email users and merchants” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paypal). The account was locked, the only people who had access to that money is Paypal themselves.

This up set a lot of people none more than Kyanka himself. Paypal is not the easiest company to get a hold of an intelligent human to help solve your problems. Before Kyanka even tried contacting Paypal he had a go at trying to unfreeze his account though the 6 easy steps on how to but somewhere Paypal decided it needed to get tracking numbers on the donations, but that’s was impossible seeing as they were donations and he wasn’t sending anything directly back to the people.

Kyanka had to contact Paypal directly though hotline, which he couldn’t find on the Paypal website it, has to be found from another website. This call got no where, but eventually Kyanka got a hold of them he was informed that everyone was guilty until proven innocent, and that he wouldn’t be able to donate for at 9 days. After hearing this Kyanka asked if they could just send the money to the Red Cross for him without him even seeing the money, this wasn’t good enough for Paypal so they suggested an alternate “United Way” which has had a lot of bad publicity and a lot of the donators objected to.

Eventually the money found its way back into their owner’s bank accounts, this was done with a loss only to overseas donators.

Why is it that a company that hold so much money cannot be a bank? Is it because they retain complete control of the money that you put in there able to take whatever they want freeze accounts and impose whatever rules and regulations they want without having anyone to govern them like a normal bank or loan agency would.

This brings up the issue of who should write the rules of what happens or not happens over the net. A bunch of old judges? A young bunch of savvy lawyers? Or even some of the fathers of the internet, some things go without saying but on the case of young companies like Paypal who can be sure what laws need to apply to it. Should they simply class it as a bank or just leave it as it is still able to gain access to over 78 million accounts.

REFERENCES

Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka (September 04 2005) – Something Awful - The Paypal Fiasco: In Summary
Retrieved September 06 2005 - http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=3186

Charlie Demerjian (September 04 2005) The Inquirer - Paypal freezes Something Awful's relief fund
Retrieved September 06 2005 - http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25915

Retrieved September 06 2005 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paypal

Reverse Engineering for Success

2005-09-04T16:40:00.000+12:00

Should you be able to reverse-engineer games? Games manufacture Blizzard Entertainment have recently filed and won a third lawsuit against Ross Combs and Rob Crittenden, creators of software “bnetd”.

Bnetd was created to let users connect to unofficial or private servers (non battle.net servers) to play popular blizzard games such as Starcraft. Using an unofficial or private server had such advantages such as faster speeds, be able to by-pass firewalls, get pass the sometimes lack of connectivity and numerous disconnects. It also let you customize and moderate things if you created your own server.

Bnetd was created by reverse engineering the blizzard protocol, which is technically is allowed. The lawsuit was filed for bypassing antipiracy measures, which the software did. While running on Bnetd you weren’t asked for the regular CD-key checks that blizzard has done when connecting to battle.net proving that you did in fact pay for the product.

The modding of games and the creations of new servers have always been allowed until recent years likely because companies are bringing out their own host software (such as valve has steam) to keep tabs on “their” gamers, monitoring their playing time and details.

The question’s you need to ask here is, should you be able to reverse engineer games to improve the playability? And is it alright to make your own improvements freely available to the public even if it does bypass antipiracy measures? And even is it alright value piracy issues over privacy issues?

There are a many popular games and great programmers wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the modding games into something new and different. Games such as counter-strike now the most played online game in the world was based of modifications of quake III and unreal tournament.

Sometimes their modding does beach the piracy issues, this is not a risk many major companies want to risk even if the game does reach new heights, making the experience better, longer, and more interesting for thousands of gamers should be enough to keep the companies happy. When is the point that you have too much?

REFERENCES

Declan McCullagh (2005, 02 September),
Cnet games and entertainment - Blizzard wins hacking lawsuit,
Retrieved (2005, 04 September) from http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/warcraft3reignofchaos/news_6132467.html

Anon (2001, 05 August),
Bnetd FAQ - 1.4) Why create bnetd when Battle.net already exists?
Retrieved (2005, 04 September) from
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~owend/free/bnetd-faq.html