Zombie Fortress: The Hiatus

Some people have been wondering why I stopped updating the blog. Very few have asked me directlly, which of course is connected to the rather small amount of regular readers I have. Still I want to share what happened: 

Like a small ASCII creature in the great Dwarf Fortress game, I was stricken by a mood. I think "Naphtha withdraws from society..." would've been the ingame message. The dwarf would stop all he was working on and try to gather some things to create his raison d'être, a legendary artifact. Now if you know the game there's two possible outcomes: Either the dwarf gets all he needs and starts working on that artifact or something's missing for so long that he goes insane at some point and ultimately dies one way or the other. Sadly, a digizombie return is not implemented.

The artifact is my life. Either I create a legendary return from the chasm I fell into, or I die trying. But I found all the ingredients I needed and I'm working on it. Until then I will have to suspend the DZA blog. If you want to follow my progress, visit the blog I created for it - Naphtha: Life Under Construction. It's rather personal and quite different from DZA, but if you enjoy human drama (and since Tool's Vicarious we know we all do), it might be for you.

I will see you in the future, my trusty digizombie horde.

ZomPi

Happy Pi Day!

DRM And Zombies

While it was funny enough to see Ubisoft's great new uncrackable DRM for Silent Hunter 5 getting cracked in less than 24 hours, there's more to it. Ubisoft has created a system making every gamer zombie dependant on their servers and services. Just yesterday remarkably demonstrated when a few people thought it would be more appropriate to take their fight directly to Ubisoft by attacking the servers that validate an install.

The servers couldn't withstand the massive attack, leaving thousands of gamers with legitimate Ubisoft titles unable to play. Ubisoft's servers were running with »reduced service« between 2:30pm and 9:00pm CET and were only fully restored at 1:00am today.

In a bid to downplay the situation, Ubisoft said that only people trying to login were affected. Given that you need to login in order to play the game, Ubisoft was essentially saying that only those who tried to play their games were affected. Well, that's not really good now, is it?

I rather enjoy Gabe Newell's take on this. The co-founder of Valve, developer of such fun titles like Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and the game-selling copy-protection platform Steam, doesn't list piracy as the biggest issue for game developers. Despite the fact that the Steam system has been repeatedly hacked, their games sell just fine and they provide excellent service over the platform. Friends lists, mod-support and good multiplayer support are combined with packet deals, special sales and ads. Quite a good concept I enjoy using myself.

He sais the misconception within the industry was that copyright infringement was conducted by those who wanted to steal material. Newell believes that it is in fact »bad service« that leads people down the illegal route. Looking at the 650 posts [growing] on publisher Ubisoft's forum complaining about the DRM issues of people who actually bought the game...yeah, your system and support are probably perceived negatively, Ubisoft.

High Quality Undead: Interactive

I have to admit, this is rather old, but since it was offline for some time its resurfacing is enough for me to write about it. I'm talking about The Outbreak, an interactive movie by studio SilkTricky, who are usually busy making high end interactive flash features / movies for big brands like Lexus and Nike [which you should check out on their homepage btw.]. For someone as much into movies as me, it's nice to see this so well filmed and edited. Definitely not one of those cheaply produced interactive movies on YouTube I've seen in the past, but high quality delivered via broad bandwidth. And - of course - it has zombies. They make everything better.

So go, take a swing and try your luck in an interactive zombie outbreak!

Advice! Old TPB Torrents

In my torrent client were some old torrents I never really got completed. Looking in the tracker info I saw a socket error with the trackers of The Pirate Bay and thought my ISP had blocked them. Outrageous!

Quickly googling for it revealed that they changed their tracker url a while back, though. So if an old TPB torrent of yours isn't working and you can see a socket error in the tracker status, add »http://tracker.openbittorrent.com/announce« to the list of trackers and you should be fine.

Tracking Down The Dead

There's a fun new research project by public rights fighters at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Panopticlick. The boffins there believe it is very likely that you can be (almost) uniquely identified by the cumulation of info in your browser. They say that the sum of installed OS, browser handle, language, plugins, local time zone, usable fonts, etc. form a profile of you that is almost as unique as a fingerprint. A few lines of Javascript can read this out. Even if your browser has a private browsing setting, that doesn't help.

Now you can just add things up. Maybe you have cookies enabled, too. Oh, that will identify you very uniquely. Maybe not, but the server could still get additional info on your rough location and ISP by looking at your IP adress, unless you use a proxy all the time.

A website can easily identify you with those information and link what you do online to your profile and you. For example Google. Just think what the big G knows about you. Their Superbowl commercial made it quite clear, ironically. Life situation, hobbies, sexual preferences, possibly illegal actions even (not depicted in the ad). It can be as detailed as you wish.

There are certain restrictions, of course. For starters, however rare your browser fingerprint may be, it is probably not unique. One in 250.000 browsers may have your info. [check your browser's uniqueness here] But they could still get a specific zombie pinned down by ISP & location. The other restriction is bigger, though. What if I update my browser? Install new plugins? New fonts? Yep, your fingerprint just changed.

With that said you'd have to take certain heuristics into consideration when trying to log someones profile. How many parameters can change in what time span? Well, fonts probably won't get deinstalled, only new ones installed. With new applications for example. A little hard, but achievable.

Now if some site had those info and your real life adress and name - like eBay or some online shop for example - it goes wild. No privacy no more, mister zombie man!

What can you do against it? Pretty much nothing. Changing your browser, plugins and so on every once in a while is not very feasible. Of course you can browse via proxies like Tor to mask your IP, but that can be rather slow and then they could log your traffic or passwords. A few ISPs don't give region handles with their DNS servers, but you have to look a bit to find one. You can deactivate Javascript and every other extension, but that would harshly hinder your internet experience. 

In the end, the digizombie of today has to take that risk. Just think about it the next time you enter something on a website.