Author: Brian Carnell

Okay, I stopped playing Diablo II after Blizzard nerfed the Necromancer character and after getting tired of finding new ways around the copy protection on the game CDs.

Now the suckers — I mean customers — who kept on playing the game are witness to more Blizzard nonsense. Okay, the original version of Diablo online was hack central, so this time around Blizzard used a client-server model with characters being stored on Blizzard’s servers. They said this would give greater security, and it did.

But then somebody within the past couple weeks figured out how to hack the system. The hack lets someone login and take control of another player’s character. The hackers are going through and systematically killing characters that people worked hundreds of hours to get to high levels by simply taking control of the character and then intentionally getting it killed.

No system that can be accessed publicly is safe from hacking, and Blizzard did a pretty decent job considering it took about 9 months for someone to figure out this particular vulnerability. What is not excusable, however, is Blizzard’s complete reticence to talk about the issue. To my knowledge they haven’t issued a single statement saying “This is what’s happened, this is what we’re doing about.” They’ve stuck to the modus operandi they established when people had problems shortly after the release of the game. Blizzard staff simply post “Servers will go down at XXX” and “Servers are back up now” messags without ever explaining what they did.

This apparently burned a lot of people who assumed when the servers went down last night and then back up today that the bug had been fixed. It hadn’t, and people who had been hiding high level hardware on mule characters were victimized by the hackers.

And based on what’s been happening the ladders that rank people, Blizzard didn’t have very recent backups of their servers. Ouch.

As a customer, I have come to expect that there will be bugs and problems with software. What separates good from lousy experiences with companies is their willingness to be up front and provide detailed information about problems and possible solutions with software. Blizzard’s tight-lipped approach really sucks.

Phillip J. Longman laments that the pace of technological progress is slowing. According to Longman, if the typical middle class 1950s family (exemplified in his article by the atypical Ozzie and Harriet) were whisked to 2000, they would see only incremental change rather than any technological revolution.

Longman, like a lot of other commentators, fails to note that sufficient incremental improvement can itself be revolutionary. When I was a kid, we had a phone but I still thought Star Trek communicators were an impossible science fiction invention. Now everybody and their brother seems to carry around miniscule cell phones. Who would have thought that the first calculators would eventually morph into a super computer on the desktop.

Even without the incremental change, however, Longman ignores one advanced made well after the early 1950s that would certainly have shocked Ozzie and Harriet and is certainly one of the top 10 most important inventions of the 20th century — the birth control pill. Love it or hate it, cheap, effective chemical birth control profoundly changed American culture so thoroughly, that I would argue only the automobile had a more far reaching effect.

A couple weeks ago The New York Times featured an in-depth look at the future of Internet advertising. Once upon a time, the conventional wisdom was that banner ads would take the world by storm. Of course it didn’t quite happen that way.

Even high quality content providers have found it very difficult to remain profitable relying solely on banner ads, with only ubiquitous sites such as Yahoo! finding banner ads to be the path to profits. So what’s a struggling .Com in search of profits supposed to do?

Interrupt the browsing experience with annoying ads, that’s what. The theory here seems to be that since people tolerate such ads in radio or television that they’ll tolerate them on the Web. Michael Tchong, editor of ad newsletter Iconclast, told The New York Times,

Rudely interrupted? Hey, we do that with radio, we do that with any serially served medium. It’s accepted in other media because they grew up with it.

From personal experience I think Tchong is dead wrong. I grew up watching commercials on television and listening to them on the radio, but that hardly means I tolerate them. In fact, when an ad comes on the radio or television, my first reaction is to change the channel immediately unless there is some compelling reason not to do so (for example, during the Super Bowl).

In fact, when given the choice, people will go out of their way to avoid watching commercials. It might surprise Tchong to learn that people often bring along CDs or cassettes on long drives specifically to avoid ad-infested (and content-limited) commercial radio, and that devices which allow people to zap past commercials during television shows seem to be very popular (such a feature is one of the selling points of Tivo, for example).

On the Web, the person doing the browsing has even more control. If MSNBC.Com throws up an interstitial ad or message, as it frequently does, so what? I’ll just visit a news site that does not waste my time. Especially if the site begins serving up so-called “superstitial” ads — ads that contain animation and audio akin to a television commercial.

The one thing I absolutely detest are web sites that insist on playing some sort of audio message or god-awful MIDI file when I visit them. Superstitials definitely fall into the “it’s a bug not a feature” category.

The major long-term effect of more interstitial and superstitial ads would probably be to give more impetus to software which blocks all advertisements. Software to block banner ads already exists today, but few people go to the bother of downloading and installing such software. Why? Largely because banner ads are not terribly intrusive.

Start throwing up 30-second ads complete with animation and sound, however, and suddenly it might be worth my time to start using such a program. Get enough people using such programs, and today’s much bemoaned low click-through rate for Web advertisements might turn out to be a high water mark for Internet advertising.

Thinking of running off to Las Vegas for a quick wedding? You can rest assured that the bureaucrats in Clark County, Nevada, have your safety in mind. New regulations require ministers to undergo fingerprinting and background checks before they can perform marriages in the county which includes the quickie marriage capital of the world, Las Vegas. Starting today ministers must submit to background checks, and anyone with a felony conviction on his or her record will be ineligible to perform wedding ceremonies. The regulations also require that the minister have a weekly congregation of at least 20 people.

Clark County Clerk Shirley Parraguirre told the Associated Press, “We needed a standard. We need something to go by.”

The Nevada American Civil Liberties Union criticized the new regulations, which are a blatant violation of the First Amendment. As ACLU lawyer Allen Lichtenstein pointed out, under the standards Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and Sir Thomas More would all be banned from performing marriage ceremonies under these standards.

Parraguirre says she’s only interested in helping couples avoid fraud, but an easier way to achieve that would be to get the government entirely out of the marriage business altogether.

Source:

Las Vegas Ministers to Be Checked. The Associated Press, December 22, 2000.

Peggy McMartin Buckey, 74, was found unconcious at her California home and prounced dead on December 15, 2000. McMartin should have lived the last years of her life peacefully but instead was one of the victims in a witch hunt that claimed too many lives.

Buckey helped her family operate the McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan Beach, California. In 1983 children who had attended the McMartin Pre-School began telling fantastic tales of ritual sexual abuse directed at them, much of which allegedly took place in secret tunnels beneath the pre-school. Ultimately 349 of 384 students at the pre-school told investigators that they had been sexually assaulted at the pre-school. The fact that there simply no secret tunnels and that the claims of the children proved false in many details did not deter prosecutors from charging McMartin Buckey and others with sexually assaulting children

The case helped kick off a nationwide hysteria about Satanic and ritual abuse of children, helped on by a gullible media. McMartin Bukey was charged with sexual assault, but the case against her fell apart after it became clear that the testimony of the children had been improperly shaped and coerced by social workers who acted as latter day agents of the Inquisition. McMartin Buckey was acquitted on all charges, but was shadowed by the destruction of the business she helped run and the stigma attached to those even accused of sexual abuse of children.

Investigator’s relied on the highly specious belief that children always told the truth about such acts and could not be coerced to give false testimony or fail to remember accurately. In a series of experiments, memory expert Elizabeth Loftus demonstreated that it was relatively easy to get young children to falsely believe in events that had never happened.

Unfortunately there are still many people in jail based on testimony gleaned under such coercion or based on psychologists who used false memory techniques on their clients. The hysteria is largely over, but the effects still remain.

Source:

McMartin Case’s Legal, Social Legacies Linger. Ted Rohrlich, The Los Angeles times, December 18, 2000.