CDRWin Vigilantism

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Something that I have been wanting to complain about for a long time is CDRWin from Golden Hawk. Back in the days when CDs were still common (and most piracy was with CDs), burning CD images to blank CDs was a task that some people did often. There were plenty of programs and image formats, but CDRWin was a popular one that worked fairly well, at least that is, until version 4.0.

To deter piracy (which is of course a Sisyphean endeavor), Golden Hawk chose not to increase the complexity of their licensing system, but rather, to play vigilante and sabotage users’ system when they suspected an attempt at piracy.

What happened was CDRWin basically had three modes of operation:

  • Unregistered/evaluation
  • Registered
  • Vigilante

When you enter a serial-number/key to register CDRWin, if the key is invalid, then it will complain and remain in evaluation mode. However, if the key is valid, then it may accept the key and say thank you and display a Registered stamp in the titlebar and About dialog, but secretly be in vigilante mode whereby it pretends to be registered and appears to be in all manner, except that whenever you burn a disc, it corrupts it, resulting in a “coaster”.

This is unacceptable for several reasons

  1. The method that it uses to detect if the key was created using a “key generator” instead of from Golden Hawk themselves seems to be flawed because legitimate customers were incorrectly affected.
  2. The surreptitious nature of the anti-piracy tactic (it gives not warning whatsoever) prevented identifying the problem and made it look like the software is simply buggy, thus damaging the developer’s general reputation (imagine that, reviews from pirates having a big impact on sales!)
  3. This is essentially vigilante behavior, not anti-piracy techniques. If vigilantism is illegal in the real world, why would it be acceptable in the digital one?
  4. The sabotage it does is actively harmful to the user. By corrupting (apparently all) discs that are burned with the software, they are causing the user to have to throw them out because they are now useless. Would it be any more acceptable if the software were designed to fry a user’s CPU, burn out their monitor, or print hundreds of pages of solid black/color with their printer to waste their ink cartridges? Of course not! Wasting blank CDs isn’t any more acceptable.

Valve is Destroying the Game Industry

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Valve is single-handedly leading the way to the ruination of the game industry.

One of (if not the) primary function of their Steam platform was to prevent, or at least reduce, software piracy of video-games. However, not surprisingly, Steam did little to reduce piracy and a different function ended up gaining a lot of momentum and is destroying video-games.

A big selling point of Steam is that developers can get their games out to users faster and easier and release patches and updates to users faster and easier. While this seems like a good thing, it is actually hugely detrimental.

In the old days of programming, you had to spend time designing your software, then more time writing it, then testing and debugging it until it was as good as possible. Then you would release it to manufacturing to be written to disks/discs, shipped to stores, and sold to customers. The users would then use it, and sometimes find problems or shortcomings. Developers would then gather these reports and requests and roll them up into an update or full upgrade and repeat. This would happen once in a while and would make it worthwhile to upgrade to a newer version because there were a lot of fixes, changes, and enhancements. (The same was true for hardware.)

Now look at how things are today with Steam. Developers write a half-baked game with a massive quantity of bugs and missing features, then rush it out the “door” (i.e., publish it to Steam) to get it to gamers as fast as possible. They have no qualms about doing this because they can just fix/complete the game after release by posting bug fixes every few days to Steam and releasing the features they cut to get it out fast as “downloadable content” (often for more money).

This is terrible programming practice. Not only does it encourage sloppy, lazy programming, but it costs the users tremendously. Users frequently have to keep paying for things that should have been included, they have to constantly use monumental amounts of their own bandwidth to get patches that seem to grow ever larger (don’t even get me started on the unacceptably large size of games these days), and the actual quality of the games (in all areas) just keeps going down.

Another horrible consequence of Steam is a part of its anti-piracy mechanisms. It requires an Internet connection to let you play most of the time which of course is undesirable, but because of this design, it means that they perform a server check on the game license. While the server check can (and has) be hacked, it means that you cannot buy or sell used games. In the old days, you could sell your old games (whether to buy new games, buy your children winter clothing, or to pay for your mother’s surgery). You could also buy used games for cheap if you could not afford them when they were new and expensive. Now, however, you have to create a Steam account to activate the game (even if you bought it on DVD), and the game then gets locked to that account, so you cannot buy or sell them. This is absolutely unacceptable in every way.

Imagine if Ford designed their cars and titles such that you were not allowed to sell or even give your car away. You would be stuck with it forever and never able to buy a used car, which means that anyone who is not rich would be locked out forever.

Just because they made Half-Life does not make them good. Valve is bad and is destroying the game industry. Users need to stop supporting Valve and Steam. Unfortunately, that will not happen. People may be angry and may even intend to boycott stuff, but the truth is that they won’t; the ones that can afford new games, will just buy them when they come out no matter how mad they may be.

Get Lost Facebook and Twitter!

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Friggin’ social networks!

I have social-anxiety disorder, so I have NO interest in any kind of social garbage, yet Facebook constantly emails me with notices about this and that social crap. It keeps telling me that I may know this or that person even though I have yet to know even a single one of its suggestions (the worst and stupidest thing is when you create a new account with absolutely no information in it and Facebook—and Twitter—immediately start to make presumptuous suggestions about who they think you might know or like).

How can I tell Facebook to piss the hell off and leave me the hell alone?

No option to decline friend requests anymore? Only Yes and Not Now? What the hell is that, forcing people to be “friends”?

Twitter is no better, constantly emailing me to check out feeds of people I have nothing to do with nor any interest in.

Both networks have an option to disable that specific notification at the bottom of the emails, but this means two things:

  • Opting out of the notification only affects that specific type of notification and has no effect on others, so you will continue to receive those (“legitimate” spammers use this sort of trick by letting you unsubscribe from that specific message which means nothing for other, future messages)

  • They automatically opt you in for everything and force you to manually look through the endless list of notifications and manually opt out of anything/everything instead of opting you into only the most important things automatically and letting you choose to add more notifications like a proper site should

Stupid social networks; SHUT UP and behave!

Who Said Life Was Fair?

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I am so sick and tired of hearing people respond to unfair circumstances with the trite line Who said life was fair?

Um, everyone! As you grow up, everybody from teachers, to parents, to television and movies tell children that life is fair and just and that the good guys win and that if you work and study hard, you can get a good job and money, a car, a house and a great life.

It isn’t until it is far too late that you realize they are all full of crap.

“Asian” Semantic Hypocrisy

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I had written on this before, but today I noticed that the Asian People page on Wikipedia has a not-worldwide-view flag, which I agree with because the article definitely has the tone of being predominantly written by an American.

The term Oriental is all but taboo in North America as somehow being offensive because it is Eurocentric, yet the same people who eschew it find nothing wrong with saying Middle-East. (One would think this attitude by Americans of obsequiousness to Orientals and abasing Middle-Easterners would make sense given the political climate and international relations, however as the article stated, the conference took place in 1968, long before either the U.S.’ insurmountable debt to China or its ablating relations with the Middle-East.)

That hypocrisy has always irritated me, especially since in North America, the term Asian is used pretty much exclusively to refer to the Far-East (which I suppose is, or at least should be as “offensive” as Oriental). This co-opting of the term that should refer to anyone from the largest continent on the world by one half of it (no matter how many people may be packed into it) is more offensive than any Eurocentricity since it is basically an affront to people from dozens of countries across the rest of the continent.

(Of course, I grew up and learned the names of the continents before the explosion of over-political-correctness that infected North America later on. Aside from the hypocrisy, personally I like the term Oriental because it has that exciting air of mystery whereas Asian is so bland.)

Google’s Moog Synthesizer Doodle Killed My Laptop!

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Last night I was using our family laptop. I Googled something and noticed the Moog Synthesizer “Google Doodle”. It was amusing and I played it with it for a few seconds. I fiddled with some of the switches and pressed some of the keys, listening to the awful resulting noises. I fiddled with a few more switches (not having a clue what I was doing since it had no documentation) and clicked one of the keys. I heard a loud, high-pitched popping sound that jolted me and I freaked out because I thought that something in our still-new (four-months old) laptop had burst.

I listened and smelled for any warnings signs and found none. I clicked a few more keys on the doodle keyboard and found my fear realized: there was no sound. I opened the Windows Run dialog and pressed Alt+A (a quick, easy, and reliable way I always use to test sound) and heard nothing. I ran a game I had just been playing and again heard nothing.

The Google doodle had blown the little speaker in our laptop.

Then Check it Yourself!

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There was a news report today about how there are no mandated checks on importing human ova.

The report compared it to importing of chicken eggs and how there are strict standards and requirements to bring in eggs from other countries, but that human eggs can be brought in without having to pass any sort of examinations or testing. It also compared it to human sperm which requires testing for diseases and such before being allowed to be imported.

The general tone of the report was that of bewildered outrage and concert as well as an implication that it should be required that human ova pass tests to be imported. Unfortunately the report is completely misplaced. The testing should be incumbent on the recipient, not the sender. If you are concerned about transplant parts being diseased or otherwise no good, then why not just have the recipient do the testing and simply “chuck it out” if it’s not up to par? If you were going to be receiving a transplant of questionable origin, then would you not test it yourself, or would you just trust their word that it’s good?

When you bring old junk into a pawn-shop, you can swear that the item is not fake and that you did research and had it authenticated until you’re blue in the face, but the pawn-shop owner will still do their own testing. How in the world are body parts any less important that the recipient wouldn’t bother to test for themselves?

The only rational reason for requiring the donating parties do the testing is if the recipient is unable to do the testing, but for most transplantable parts, this is not an issue.

Rogers’ Continuing Bandwidth/Overage Charge and other Frauds

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I strongly believe that Rogers Cable Systems is actively and purposely engaging in fraud to steal money from its customers in the form of bandwidth (and likely also mobile-phone) overage charges. Here are the facts.

Rogers provides a page on their site where you can view your “current” bandwidth usage, however it is never up-to-date and always at least a full day behind. Financial transactions are usually a day behind because they require a human to approve them. However bandwidth is nothing like that and can and should be up-to-date down to the second (except perhaps for the bandwidth of the actual usage page itself). I do not believe this is a mistake or a technological limitation but rather done on purpose so that customers cannot know how much actual bandwidth they have used.

Rogers also provides a notification service which will insert a banner into web pages to let you know that you have reached 75% or 100% of your monthly bandwidth. However just like the bandwidth usage page, this is never up-to-date (in fact, they even admit in the banner that it detects the usage to within two days). You can easily sail well past the threshold and not receive the notifications until at least a full day later, thus rendering them completely useless, even more so than the usage page since this is supposedly an “alert”. By having it be as behind as the usage page, it becomes completely useless and no more than a slightly more convenient way to access the usage page (though most people would argue with the term “convenient” in regards to a banner inserted into all web pages—some sites even detect the framing as a security risk). Again I believe this is done on purpose so that customers cannot know their actual current usage. In fact, the “notifications” are so much worse because they lull customers into a false sense of security, thinking that they will not go over because they will get an alert when they pass the two thresholds.

Of course this is all only relevant when the MyRogers site actually works, which seems to be rarely. Most of the time when you go to the MyRogers site to check your account status, bandwidth usage, etc., you are greeted with red text that says that they are having technical difficulties and/or that they cannot retrieve your account information and to please try again later. It has been like this since they created the site about a decade ago. I’m not convinced that it even truly is technical difficulties because it always seems to be worse towards the end (last week or so) of the billing cycle (on whatever day of the month that happens to fall for the account in question), when you are most likely to want to check how much bandwidth you have remaining.

The two mechanisms that Rogers provides customers to monitor their bandwidth usage are both behind the actual usage by at least one full day (when they work at all). I strongly believe this is on purpose so that customers have no way to know what their precise usage is and worse, believe that they are safe. In this way, customers are more likely to go over their usage than if they are provided with correct numbers. This way, Rogers can charge them a lot more money per gigabyte they go over. Moreover, not only do they raise all of their prices for everything almost every single damned bloody month, but they have also raised the fee for bandwidth overage, so they can gouge customers even more with this little scam of theirs.

It seems that since October 2012, the situation has gotten even worse! The stupid MyRogers website where you can check your bandwidth usage has stopped showing decimal places and rounds down to the nearest gigabyte, so you get even less accurate information than even before, obviously in an attempt to trick people into going over their limit. This is almost certainly on purpose to push anyone who uses their allowance over the line so that they can charge them extra. Despicable behavior from a despicable company.

What’s even worse is that the different Internet service tiers they have provide overage charges in the opposite way of common sense. That is, the tier with the highest monthly bandwidth cap (currently 100GB/month) has the lowest overage charge (currently 50¢ per GB over) while the tier with the lowest cap (currently 15GB/month) has the hight overage charge (currently $4 per GB over). (The interceding tiers follow suit.) This is absurd. If anything, the higher ones should be penalized more for using excess because they already have plenty of room, while the ones with the lower caps should have lower charges since they have such little to work with and are more likely to need to go over sometimes.

Unfortunately customers cannot even just switch to a tier that fits their needs better because the tiers are so unevenly distributed. For example a lot of customers would find the second lowest (and least expensive) tier to be excessive. Not too many people need 12Mbps speed or 60GB per month. However the next lowest tier is only 3Mbps with a cap of 15GB per month. Why in the world is there not a tier in the middle that provides ~6Mbps with 30GB per month? Because then customers are force to either go down a level to one which is too tight and get nailed with $4/GB over every month or go up a level to one that is too much for their needs and pay a higher monthly rate. Again, this is not by accident. They do this on purpose in order to squeeze every last penny they can out of customers.

This is specifically about Rogers’ Internet service, however because mobile phones are subject to bandwidth limits and overage charges, I would not be surprised if it applied in exactly the same way to their wireless phone service as well.

I wish I could say that this sort of behavior surprises me, but unfortunately I have come to expect very little from Rogers. This company has time and again proven itself to be a disgusting, money-grubbing, customer-abusing, greedy, manipulative, lying, fraudulent company. Customers should call them (1-888-Rogers1) and demand to talk to the highest level person that is available and demand that Rogers provide an up-to-the-second and kilo-byte accurate way for them to monitor their own Internet and mobile-phone usage. They should also demand more appropriate caps and overage charges and better tier distribution.

Another example of Rogers’ ongoing deplorable behavior is their continuing throttling of customers’ bandwidth despite being ordered to stop it almost two years ago by the CRTC, saying that they did stop, getting caught lying, saying they would stop, and yet continuing to do so. I am glad that Ted Rogers is dead and wish the same for the other executive rapists of that disgusting pile of garbage.

Most people (rightly) complain that there should not be a cap/limit in the first place. They are correct because bandwidth is measured in BPS. The “seconds” in BPS means that bandwidth is transient and therefore cannot be saved or hoarded for later. Either you use it or it is gone forever! There is no sense is limiting people and wasting bandwidth. Unfortunately, ISPs are just like airlines; they overbook so that they don’t waste their service, but end up overbooking over-zealously, and thus selling more than they have, so they have to limit everyone and then take advantage of that fact by charging more for better service.

“Population Control”

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It is so aggravating when hunters have the audacity to justify killing animals for fun by calling it “population control”. Their argument is that they are “helping” the animals by thinning out their numbers otherwise there would be too many of them, causing their food supply to dwindle and result in their dying of starvation. Right, because nature was doing such a bad job of population control for the past, oh, 3-4 BILLION YEARS before humans were invented. 🙄 There’s already a natural mechanism in place to control population; it’s called the predator-prey cycle. Whether the prey is other animals or plants is irrelevant, the point is that as food supply increases, the population of the animal that eats it increases. As their numbers grow, the food supply decreases, which in turn causes the population to go down and so on and so on, hence the “cycle”. It’s worked just fine for billions of years, so it is incredibly specious and arrogant for humans to act as though they are somehow doing animals a favor by killing them. Worse, if they are giving themselves permission to interfere with nature “for the good of the animals” then why the hell do nature photographers just stand by and let animals die? They argue that they are just filming nature and not getting involved. Well I have to say that you are not Walter Cronkite, and even if you were, so what? What gives humans the right to selectively interfere by shooting deer but let a starving polar bear cub just die?

Like I have been saying for years, the faster that humans go extinct, the better off the entire universe will be.

DVD POUPs

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DVD authors usually disable certain actions so that viewers for example cannot skip the FBI warning about copying the disc (they were perfectly able to fast-forward through it back in the VHS days). These are called POUPs or Prohibited User Operations.

Not surprisingly, consumers have their quibbles about being forced to sit through when they just paid money for the movie. It’s like having to watch commercials in a DVD. In fact, being forced to watch commercials and trailers is one of the POUPs that consumers complain about. Fortunately POUP commercials and trailers are rare and can usually be skipped.

One POUP that is relatively common is being forced to see the rating and the notice about movies being different formats. This is absurd since an R-rated movie is not supposed to fall in the hands of a minor anyway and if it does, it’s not like the kid is going to see the notice and stop watching. That makes forcing viewers to watch the rating notice completely pointless and irritating. Forcing them to watch a notice that the movie has been formatted to fit the screen or is a different cut from that shown in theaters is equally stupid and pointless.

Thankfully, because there are numerous operations, a lot of DVD authoring companies miss some. For example, while notices are usually blocked from being skipped with the next function, they can often be skipped by fast-forwarding through them. That said, sometimes a DVD authoring company is particularly bad and blocks everything, so that for example, you cannot stop once a forced video has started.