Elixis Technology

Las Vegas IT

What’s the Difference Between a .jpg and a .png?

Elizabeth Technology May 14, 2024

Loss, mostly.

Picture this: it’s 2005, you’re online, and you go to save a funny image to your family computer so you can send it to a family member later. The image saves, but when you go to open it again, you notice the image is a little grainier than it had appeared on the website. You shrug and brush it off since the image is still clearly legible, but then that family member does the same thing: they save the image from your email to send it to a friend they have across the state. That friend opens it, and it’s a little grainier than before. Repeat. Add grain. Repeat. Add grain. Eventually, the picture is a mess: seemingly random squares of color and gray splotches are everywhere, and the colors in spots that aren’t all glitchy are different.

So what happened?

Under Compression

Data needs to be compressed before it can be taken to or from places on the computer. Compressing the file means it takes up less storage space, which improves response time. However, there are different methods of compression depending on what kind of content you’re dealing with.

Lossless compression replaces long bits of data with shorter bits, while lossy compression deletes bits and pieces outright. If you open a losslessly compressed file, it is put back together exactly as it was; lossy files are still missing pieces.

The Curse of the JPG

Certain image formats are more focused on storage space than on the quality of the image. Generally, most people don’t have a problem with this, since saving an image once to send it somewhere (or hang on to for reference) doesn’t cause too much loss. Loss in photo terms means that some of the information in the photo was, well – lost. Jpgs can normally get away with this at first; lossy compression, after all, looks for unimportant parts to delete first during compression. At worst some of the shadows might get a touch harsher and some of the lines a little blurrier.

If it’s saved again as a .jpg, it’s compressed again and more data is lost from the image, blurring it a little more every time, which leads to that unique “.jpg rainbow” sometimes seen around text that was black but slowly turned red, blue, and green.

The PNG Files

Fun fact, .png files were actually made to replace .gif files, which were patented by UNIX at the time. Copyright gave us a better photo format, as .gif files aren’t fantastic at recreating colors accurately.

A .png is better suited for basically everything else except for storage space, which is a small trade-off if you’re trying to make graphics for things that you sell. Company logos, professional headshots, images that may need to be resized larger – all of these are better saved as a .png.  .png files also have the benefit of transparency, meaning that there’s no white square hiding behind the image if that’s how you saved it, like there would be for .jpg files no matter what you do.

Long story short: .png is better for graphics that have to look a certain way, and .jpg is better for casual photos that are allowed to get a little blurry.

Sources: https://shuttermuse.com/glossary/lossy/

https://www.techwalla.com/articles/why-is-file-compression-important

jpg-vs-png

What is Air Gapping?

Elizabeth Technology May 9, 2024

You might have heard it in the Matrix, or in a heist movie: what does “air gapping” mean?

Normal Devices, IoT devices, etc.

 In today’s age, many devices have internet capabilities. Your washer, dryer, your coffee machine, your fish tank equipment, things like glucose monitors and portable speakers, are all now capable of internet connection. Is it efficient? Sure, if you want those features – they wouldn’t still be made with WiFi enabled if they didn’t provide some use to the end consumer that was greater than the annoyance of getting it all set up. Is it safe?

No! Generally speaking, IoT devices are poorly defended and often don’t even come with passwords to prevent unauthorized parties accessing their internal computers. This can then act as a gateway to other parts of the network – your home computer, with it’s tax documents, or your business computer that shares a network with the coffee machine, to see valuable internal documents. One unlucky casino had their devices infected with ransomware after a fishtank thermometer allowed an unsavory agent to connect to it (learn more here on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2017/07/27/criminals-hacked-a-fish-tank-to-steal-data-from-a-casino/?sh=4be5c0832b96 ).

It’s unfortunate, but many networks are not as totally protected as they need to be, even without an IoT device providing an easy door in. Even crucial networks can be manipulated. The only way to truly secure a computer from outside threats is to not allow it any access to the outside at all.

Locked Away in a Tower

An airgapped computer may still be part of a network with other computers on it, but every part of an airgapped network is kept in physical isolation from the outside world, or any computers that are allowed to touch the internet at large.

It has no network interfaces: other devices cannot see the air gapped ones wirelessly. It will not receive updates, it will not be exposed to the online threats that a lack of updates can present. If data must be transferred to an airgapped system, it must be done via a physical data device like a thumbdrive, or disk. You may see an issue there – a malicious party could gain access and deliver a virus or malicious program on a device to infect the air gapped computer, so physical access must be tightly controlled as well. Famously, a nuclear reactor in Iran was infected with a virus known as Stuxnet via a thumbdrive, which caused a significant setback to operations in the plant by damaging centrifuges.

System requiring less protection can use things like data diodes to filter their incoming information – an unclassified computer can talk to a classified one, but only if the data is determined to be safe coming in, and only if the data leaving the classified system is carefully monitored to prevent exactly the situation such devices are used for in the first place.

Vulnerabilities

As mentioned above, the easiest way to get into an air gapped network is to somehow get close to the system physically with a portable data device like a thumbdrive. But a number of other methods to steal or transmit data exist too! A couple of researchers found success by transmitting acoustic signals, or using a cellphone to broadcast at certain frequencies – the computer was contacted and internal equipment was manipulated into behaving like an antenna, transmitting data back to the phone. Furthermore, if someone does get into the system, viruses are often able to spread much faster than they would be on other networks, because air gapped systems are not updated as frequently thanks to their lack of internet connection. Security holes not present in other systems might still be found in air gapped ones!

When Did we Forget About Trolling?

Elizabeth Technology May 7, 2024

Yanking your chain. Fooling with you. Messing around. It goes by many names, but online, it’s known as trolling.

The way forums dealt with trolls was a set of rules that users were commanded to follow, first and foremost being “don’t feed the trolls”. The goal of trolling is to get the other side keyboard-smashing upset with the troll, so by denying them a reaction, you’re starving them of the attention or the control they desire. If a forum is overrun by people intentionally acting in bad faith, it dies, and all the legitimate members leave, creating a ghost town. As such, anti-trolling measures were not just a comfort, but a necessity. Cries of “Don’t Feed the Troll!” under bad-faith questions choked out arguments before they started, and kept conversations more or less civil.

Where did all of this knowledge and wisdom go? Because now it’s gone, and trolls are trolling like never before.

Negative Comments

There is a certain thrill to saying something mean to someone online – what could the other side do about it? If the troll says someone’s art sucks, for example, the worst the artist can do is block them, or try to take the high road by saying they hope the troll finds peace. If the artist gets upset, then the troll wins. This desire for control and the attention of another person is largely why trolls do what they do. If someone is deeply isolated, and they can’t get people to stick around and talk about the weather, sometimes all they can do instead is start an argument about it. Humans need social contact, and they’ll get it one way or another. A combination of factors steer all sorts of people into social isolation, and the internet can act as a release valve where they can pick fights with strangers who can’t enact consequences.

However, if the old forum rules about trolls were still being followed, these people would eventually have to move on. The rules still work; nobody has gotten more determined or better at trolling, the average person posting to social media has just gotten worse about responding.

We know ignoring them still works! For example, a soapmaker I follow was getting nasty comments, so instead of responding, she blocked the commentor. The commentor came back with a different account, and they were blocked again. The process repeated seven times in total before the troll gave up. The effort of circumventing a block is ten times the effort it takes to block! By not responding until the person had left, by blocking and not engaging, she exhausted the troll before they could get the payoff of a reaction from her or her audience. Obviously, this wouldn’t work if it were a ton of people all commenting together (which happens), but then she still wouldn’t be an entertaining target, she’d just turn off the comment section. This is how you deal with trolls. She has a nice, happy, peaceful comment section because she doesn’t respond, she just blocks. 

Content Mills – And Algorithms

Responding is the worst thing you can do. If the commentor is a normal person who was just having a bad day, then responding might get them to apologize, but it also might just make them delete the comment and move on. If they aren’t, they usually get even meaner, and the response shows other trolls that this person will read their comment and possibly reply to them, too.

The opposite of the soapmaker is another content creator who attempted to reply to a troll patiently and rationally. Why? Why even bother? There is a line of thought in debate that you should hear everyone out. This works in business and politics, but does not work at all on public social media! This guy went from dealing with one troll in his comment sections to dozens, picking on everything from his beliefs to his social life to his looks. He lost. He replied, and he lost. Trying to tell a troll that looks are not correlated with morality is like trying to explain physics to a flat-Earther. Of course they already know the physicist’s arguments, and they disregarded them all, which is why they’re still saying the Earth is flat. No amount of describing orbits and gravity could possibly sway them – they are not arguing from a position of logic, they are arguing from a position of imagined superiority. There is no value in responding. Blocking and moving on when someone called him ugly the first time was the only way to move forward. But he didn’t, and the next twenty videos were dealing with the fallout of that one video.

But that’s kind of convenient, isn’t it? Doesn’t it actually work out in your favor if you can make twenty videos out of basically nothing? The way TikTok works, if you stop posting for a bit, you stop popping up so high in the algorithmic “For You” page’s feed.

The problem with today’s social media is that influencers and creators who want to make money need to always be making content, and negative comments are a boundless source of argument seeds. On TikTok, you can rant and rave for three minutes about someone leaving “U Stink LOL” in the comments, replying directly to the commentor with a whole video. This is the most infuriating arrangement because both sides get what they want via conflict: the troll gets the attention they want, and the creator gets a “free” video. It’s a very ugly win-win.

In this way, the people populating the comment sections have become used to arguing. They assume bad faith, because they have been trained to respond to trolling, and anything even slightly ambiguous as though it were also trolling. This keeps content flowing, this simulates social connection, and thus the cycle is self-perpetuating. To put the brakes on like the soapmaker did and actively resist the siren’s song of feeding the trolls, you have to opt out of the easy way.

The New Internet Is Full of Bots

Elizabeth Technology May 2, 2024

Ever see a bizarre post with a comments section full of people spamming emotes or otherwise responding in a way that suggests they read a description of the post, but didn’t actually see it? Of course interaction bots have been here for a while, but now with AI art (rather than stolen art) it becomes obvious these are actually bots and not people.  

What Is An Interaction Bot?

Firstly, in this area, ‘bot’ refers to a bit of code that does something. What the bot does depends on its creator’s goal – some bots sit and ‘watch’ videos to boost view count, others scrape data from websites to analyze it, and some do things like scroll, interact with buttons, and leave simple, plausibly human-sounding comments on posts online. An interaction bot is meant to be a substitute for real human interaction on a post. Since many social media sites now offer moneymaking opportunities based on views or likes, and since everyone likes feeling popular, this is a problem that said social media sites have been fighting since internet points were invented.

Every time some new ‘tell’ makes the bots easier to purge, the bot makers come up with another way to thwart moderators. When bots were getting too specific with likes, the bot makers told them to like a handful of other posts before they started interacting with the desired post, and to stagger when the interactions happened so they didn’t all hit at once. When the comments got too repetitive, a library of  comments scraped from places like Reddit started re-appearing in comment sections. It’s easy to borrow human habits, and we’re at a point where an uninterested user is borderline indistinguishable from a bot pretending to be a human, at least just by looking at their browsing habits.

The goal of some bots is to get a lot of followers to follow one account so that account can then be used to sell the new followers something, whether that be a political belief or an actual product. Even on services where views are not tied to money, those eyes are still useful. The way most algorithms work, a popular post becomes more popular because the website shows those popular posts around to new people who might not have seen it. It does this because the popular post in question created engagement, and if the website can keep you engaged, you’ll stay on longer and see more ads. Having bots enter this ring and artificially boost the popularity of certain posts has resulted in a strange new kind of post dominating Facebook. Where a post had to be written by people, and a picture had to at least be stolen from a real person in the past, the widespread availability of ChatGPT and image generators makes some of these fake posts stick out like a sore thumb.

ChatGPT and Image Generators

You can tell a bot to ask MidJourney or Dall-E to generate an image, and then put that image into a Facebook post with a caption you pre-wrote. Once you set it up, you don’t even have to check on it. Once the post has been put up, other bots show up to comment on it or like it, whether they’re yours or someone else’s.

This has resulted in posts like Spaghetti Jesus or The 130 Year Old’s Peach Cream and Filling Birthday Cake getting hundreds of comments all saying “Amen!” or “Looks Good!” with maybe a dozen people asking what everybody is talking about, because the picture usually looks terrible and fake. This isn’t a case of tech-illiterate folks seeing something obviously bizarre and giving it a ‘like’ anyway – these people don’t exist. The better ones may get a couple of real people, but the strange ones are certainly not (look at these pictures The Verge has collected as an example: https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/15/24131162/ill-see-your-shrimp-jesus-and-raise-you-spaghetti-jesus-on-a-lambo ).  

We’ve circled around! This new generation of bots are so advanced that, when given the chance to show off the state-of-the-art tech entering the market, they do it without question and accidentally pull back the curtain in the process.

What To Do?

Unfortunately, managing this issue as a user on the web is basically impossible. Even if you keep bots from following your accounts, you’re not immune to seeing bot-run accounts when you’re searching or scrolling. Instead, the best thing you can do is just refuse to engage with engagement bait – when something asks you to say “Heck yes!” in the comments, or leave a like if you love X hobby, you can ignore it, and avoid accidentally propping up bot accounts trying to get big. As for imagery, the bizarre spaghetti creatures and uncanny peach cake bakers are only going to get better – we’re entering a phase of the internet where pictures must be assumed to be fake and verified before they are treated as real, the opposite of what most internet users are accustomed to. On forums like Reddit or Tumblr, a user must look at the comments before taking a post as fact, because upvotes and comments are not necessarily the sign of quality they used to be when the internet was young and lacked bots. It’s a strange new world out there, and the bots are part of it now, for better or worse.

Please Share Less Info With TikTok

Elizabeth Technology April 25, 2024

TikTok is a terrifying place. Users regularly show their entire face, cons that they’ve attended, and personal stories with too much detail to their audience. They show the inside of their apartment building and their unit number. They tag their small towns. Distinctive, unique tattoos get shown off to thousands of people, as well as the view from their front yard and what stores they can walk to. Some of the TikToks that came out of the pandemic were about remote learning, with the teacher visible on the screen. License plates and unblurred faces abound.

Even the tiniest detail can be used to turn someone’s life upside down, especially if they’re underage.

The worst part? It doesn’t have to happen immediately! Sometimes a ticking time bomb isn’t noticed until it’s already gone off. Kids posting a video of themselves violating school rules weeks later can still be shuffled up front on the feed. Ticked off a more anonymous user somehow? You’ll never know how the school found out you broke a rule. Videos of dance trends that kids wouldn’t want their parents seeing are getting sent to their parents based off of information gathered over weeks or months of posts. All of it’s online. Video is an incredibly information-rich format, and when each video is under a minute long, any one person could look through them all.

It’s no surprise people are getting their own details shoved in their face when they’re posting this much about themselves!

The easy solution? Just don’t. Don’t download the app. If you do, don’t make videos. Of course, this isn’t going to happen, so the second-best option is to always film indoors away from windows, or in generic buildings like Targets or chain grocery stores. Don’t film yourself in a distinctive school uniform or in an identifying area of said school, because sometimes all it takes is specific colors. In Las Vegas, many of the school buildings look the same, but the colors are totally distinct to each school. If a kid has posted about living in Vegas before, those colors narrow down their location dramatically.

Shia LeBeouf’s flag, and 9Gag’s ‘meme hieroglyph’

It’s dangerous to attract too much attention from certain forums. 4Chan in particular is notorious for finding the unfindable, triangulating exact locations based off of things like truck honks and light positioning. See the saga of Shia LeBeouf’s flag project, where the flag was found over and over until he was forced to put it in a featureless white room.

9Gag put a limestone pillar covered in ‘hieroglyphs’ (which were really just old memes carved into the surface) underground for future archeologists to find. 4Chan and other forums found it by cross-referencing information in the background (Spanish writing on a truck) with available limestone mines and open fields in Spanish-speaking countries and found its exact coordinates based off of that little information. They couldn’t do much about it, because it was a 24-ton piece of limestone, but they found it.

Crimes

If you post things online, someone may be able to find you given time and determination no matter what you do. The best thing you can do to avoid that determination is fade into the background, as hard as you can, and don’t post crimes or social misconducts to TikTok or social media. Even if you’re not planning on committing crimes, you should set accounts to private, don’t overshare, and don’t do things that get you online attention for the wrong reasons. Once again, TikTok is terrifying because small accounts may think they’re sharing with their friends, only to end up trending unintentionally!

Maskless groups of friends posting videos at the beginning of the pandemic were scolded for being maskless, and because interaction makes videos more likely to appear on the ‘For You’ page, those maskless videos were getting thousands of people’s worth of harassment. If they were lucky, it stopped there – if they weren’t, they’d find that their school or place of work were being told about their conduct. Post something dumb? Algorithm catches it juuuust right? Previously anonymous posts then get a glance from hundreds to thousands of people! Suddenly, it matters a lot if you’ve ever posted videos that looked bad with no context.

And More Crimes

If you’ve seen posts that said “help me find her!” with some sob story about a missed connection, this is one way of finding people who don’t necessarily want to be found. Sure, it might be legit. It might also be a particularly clever stalker using a sad story about ‘I was out of swipes on Tinder!’ to get unsuspecting ‘good Samaritans’ to help him chase some woman’s Facebook profile down. Missed Connections on Craigslist is one thing – that’s pretty anonymous, and it doesn’t usually come with a picture or video attached showing everyone what the other person looked like. Posting a missed connection to thousands of people on Reddit or TikTok is an entirely different thing. It’s effectively setting a mob after that person to get them to respond to the poster. Imagine dramatic music – this is a horror story. The same goes for Missing Persons posts – if the number is anything but a police department’s number, you should be wary of trying to help, because sometimes people run away for good reason.

Sources: https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/How%20to%20Prevent%20Online%20Harrassment%20From%20Doxxing.pdf

https://dataprivacylab.org/projects/identifiability/paper1.pdf

Emulators And The Legal Gray of AbandonWare

Elizabeth Technology April 23, 2024

What is an Emulator?

An emulator is a program that emulates a game console, usually for the purpose of playing a game that is – either by price, age, or device – inaccessible. Streamers commonly use emulators to play Pokemon games made for the Gameboy, so they can screen-record their gameplay directly from their computer instead of having to somehow hook the Gameboy up to it. Zelda fans might want to play Ocarina of Time, but they might also find that the console to play it on is awfully expensive for one game where an emulator is pretty cheap! In certain cases, games are geolocked – countries restrict access to certain forms of art as a means of censorship. Emulators can make those games accessible to people who want to play them in that country.

In the 1990s, consoles were on top when it came to games. Computers were rapidly gaining in power, however, and some folks realized that the console could be recreated using a home computer. The first emulators were born via reverse-engineering console coding. They evaded legal action by only copying devices that were outdated, but that changed too with a major emulator made for the Nintendo 64 while it was still in production. Nintendo pursued legal action to stop the primary creators, but other folks who had already gotten their hands on the source code kept the project going.

Ever since then, emulators have lived in a strange space of both making games available and making them so available that the parent company decides to step in and try to wipe it out, which is nearly impossible once it’s out on the open web. Gamers simply won’t allow a good emulator to die!

Copyright

Copyrights are crucial to the gaming ecosystem, and it’s a delicate balance of allowing fan art, but disallowing unauthorized gameplay. Allowing game mods, but disallowing tampering that could lead to free copies being distributed against the company’s wishes. Allowing fun, but not theft. Copyright laws are always evolving – new tech comes with new ways to copy, create, and distribute intellectual property. Generally, though, copyright falls back to permission: did the original company intend for their IP to be used in this way?

Emulators and copyright don’t get along very well at all! Emulators are, by their very definition, creating access to the game in a way the original company didn’t intend. As such, it’s unofficial, and if money is exchanged, it’s not normally between the copyright holder company and the customer, it’s the customer and some third unauthorized party.

Games aren’t selling you just the physical disk. You’re buying a license to play the game. If you take it as far as Xbox intended to back when the Xbox One was coming out, friends are only allowed to come over and play with you on your license because the company can’t enforce it. It’s a limitation of the system that they can’t keep you from sharing disks or accounts.

Not every company thinks like this (see the Playstation 5 and a number of more recent cases regarding digital content ownership), but that’s the most extreme possible interpretation. You bought a disk so you could play a copy of their game that they have licensed out to you. You own the right to play that copy of the game, you don’t own the game itself.

Consider: Death of a Console

When a console dies, it’s taking all of its content with it. There is no more money to be made off of it, and the games are going to slowly disappear into collections and trash bins.

Does art need to exist forever, or is it okay if some art is temporary? Not every Rembrandt sketch is still in trade – some of it was just sketches, and he obviously discarded some of his own, immature art. Immature art is interesting to see, but it’s not what the artist wanted their audience to see. Otherwise it would have been better kept. Think about the ill-fated E.T. game that Atari made, they weren’t proud of it, they didn’t want it seen, and they saw fit to bury it. So they buried it. It was directly against their wishes for people to find this game and then play it. Emulating it is obviously not what the copyright holder wants.

But then consider all the little games included on a cartridge that’s just forgotten to the sands of time, made by a programmer who didn’t want it to fade away? Acrobat, also for the Atari, isn’t very well-remembered, but it still made it onto Atari’s anniversary console sold in-stores. 97 games on that bad boy, and Acrobat was included. It’s not a deep game, it’s nearly a single player Pong. But the programmers who made it didn’t ask for it to be excluded from the collection, so some amount of pride must exist over it, right? Does the game have to be good to be emulated? Is only good art allowed to continue existing officially?

Is all art meant to be accessible to everyone?

If some art is made with the intent to last forever, is it disregarding the creator’s wishes to not emulate it, against their production company’s wishes? If a corporate exec decides a work of art is better used as a tax writeoff than launched even though it’s already complete, is it better to listen to that exec, or the dozens – perhaps hundreds – of people opposing the exec’s will?

If art’s made to last forever but the artist (and society) accepts that that’s simply unrealistic, is it weird to emulate it, in the same way it’s weird to make chat-bots out of dead people?

When you get past the copyright, it’s a strange, strange world to be in.

Ethical Dilemma

Stealing goes against the ethics of most societies, modern or not. The case against emulators is that it’s stealing.  It often is! An emulator/ROM (ROMs act as the ‘disc’ or ‘cartridge’ for the emulator) for Breath of the Wild was ready just a few weeks after the game launched, which could have seriously dampened sales if Nintendo didn’t step in to try and stop that. That first emulator, the one for the Nintendo 64, also drew a lot of negative attention for the same reasons, potentially siphoning away vital sales.

However, there’s a case to be made for games and consoles that aren’t in production anymore.

Is this a victimless crime, if the original game company really can’t make any more money off of it? It’s one thing to condemn piracy when the company is still relying on that income to make more games and pay their workers, it’s another entirely when the game studio isn’t interested in continuing support, and the console had a fatal fault in it that caused many of them to die after 10 years. That game is as good as gone forever without emulators. With no money to be made, why not emulate it?

In less extreme circumstances, the console’s still functioning, but the cartridges that went to it are incredibly rare. The company could potentially make money off of the game if they someday decided to remaster it, but that’s unknowable. Licenses could be available for purchases… but they aren’t right now.

Or, even better, the cartridges are still available for purchase in the secondary market. You just don’t happen to have the console, which has now spiked to a cost of 400 dollars due to reduced supply over time. You buy the cartridge – you’re still buying the license, you just don’t have the car, right?

According to copyright, you need a specific car for a specific license, but ethically, you’ve done the best you can as a consumer.

Brand Name

Much like Disney did with Club Penguin’s many spinoffs, emulators are kind-of sort-of overlooked up until they start eating into sales. More aggressive companies will go after emulators before they blow up (see Nintendo challenging Yuzu, an emulator) but most companies just don’t want to spend money to enforce an issue like emulators – their game is still being played, their brand is still out there, and the users are going to be very upset if this big company decides to step in and ruin fun when they don’t need to (see Nintendo challenging Yuzu, a beloved emulator). It may do more harm than good to try and wipe the emulator out when most people want to do the right thing.

Obviously, they’ll need to put a stop to emulating new games – the goal is to spend just enough money to do that effectively without also overstepping and destroying emulators for consoles no longer in production. It takes money to make games, games should earn money as a result. Removing emulators for games and consoles no longer in production isn’t helping them earn money – as such, many are allowed to stay. For now.

Sources:

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-ethics-of-emulation-how-creators-the-community-and-the-law-view-console-emulators/

https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/njtip/vol2/iss2/3/

NeoPets Is Still Online, Somehow

Elizabeth Technology April 18, 2024

Neopets was huge. At 21 million users during its peak, the website was a behemoth of the early 2000s. It’s still going today! Neopets is a free-to-play digital pet game, where the user can interact with digital pets, the Neopets. Games, chatrooms, and all the usual fixings of 2000’s era children’s sites were available to users.

It was also the subject of a couple of scandals, although nothing quite as dark as Club Penguin Re-Written’s issues.

The Avatar Swap

Firstly, the biggest one: the black market surrounding rare avatars.

Like many children’s games, Neopets self-funded with website ads sprinkled here and there, right up until it was purchased by a larger company, Viacom, with some big ambitions for the franchise: everything from console games to real-life toys was supposedly on the table. They’d need more money to execute these plans, however. Additional funding snuck in, and certain items became purchasable with Neocash, which players could buy with real money!

Now pets with certain upgrades are more valuable than others because they have money invested in them – the market begins to form as soon as an update allows for pet trading. Trades weren’t an official thing by any means prior to that, all a player can do is drop off the Neopet in the Neopet pound and hope the other guy managed to snag the ‘abandoned’ pet. This feature of the game actually held back the flood for a while – no guarantee of pet? No guarantee of pay, and so trades were rarer in the early days. Still, trades happened, and finally Neopets admins allowed trading to happen officially. It allowed them to monitor the action, and the feature was very much requested anyway.

Trades: Value

Trades were about to become an issue, however. Neopets was constantly bandaging over or changing things, which left items in the lurch. New features and decorations for pets were steadily coming and going, but the old versions weren’t always taken out of the equation.

Once such change converted the formerly-unclothable pets into new, exciting, dressable ones. Most of the Neopet avatars were changed overnight with little warning. Players were disgruntled, as some pets got swapped into new categories: ‘sponge’ pets, brightly colored pets made of dish sponge material, turned into ‘mutant’ pets, a collection of tentacled and fanged creatures with a muted gray/green color palette. This is understandably upsetting! Pets that were cute became cuter, pets that were weird became weirder. The visuals on the ones that didn’t change category were still tweaked – the update added eye-shine, fur texture, and new poses to flattened original arts. However, not all of the avatars were converted! Some were allowed to keep their old art, although new art had been made for the species.

Neopets allowed players in this final category to choose whether or not to convert, and essentially created a black market for unconverted pets with unconverted art. Only a few species were allowed to stay as-is in their player’s dashboard, and any new players who created a pet of that species would be using the new art. As a result, these unconverted pets became legacy items, and their value exploded. People began trading real money for these pets, with deals set up in forums and private chat rooms. It was against the rules, of course, but when did that ever stop anyone? A tiered system that ranked pets popped up, which turned the pets into a sort of stock market! Pets had value based on what the community perceived their value to be.

Security

Admins did their best. Club Penguin had an enormous team covering a smaller userbase, while Neopets’ team was too small to focus on anything but the biggest fires.

Nowadays, the end of Flash Support means the game is frequently buggy and uncooperative with player inputs. Staff is working to move to HTML5, but the age and size of the website makes that a Herculean task. Even before then, though, it had issues. It’s initial transfer from Viacom to Jumpstart Games in 2015-ish came with a lot of lag and glitches all by itself during the move to new servers. Glitches that only made the situation with that black market worse! Now certain items could be ‘accidentally’ duplicated or deleted, and minigames were harder to play, encouraging the purchase of Neocash with real cash over grinding for points day in and day out. This is understandably frustrating for younger users.

Today, the website struggles with maintaining time – the game’s clock is about two minutes behind the real world’s time, and as a result, things like 2-Factor authentication are very difficult to use. The website can send a code, the user can receive it and try to put it in, but at that point the website sees a code from two minutes into the future and declines it. Essentially, the website’s security is broken by the grandfather paradox.

Hacks

Admins could reverse trades. But, doing so could reset an entire train of transactions if that pet was obtained illegitimately. This is obviously very annoying to players who just wanted a new shiny pet and had nothing to do with the initial theft. Responses to the issue from admins were mixed, and no one solution was universally applied. That sounds great, but every custom solution left people questioning the admins’ decisions. They seemed uncoordinated.

Even worse, hacking the website itself became a problem, and some guy created a bunch of unconverted pets via admin tools. The next few hours of gameplay for everyone were strange as the admins worked to remove the new unconverted pets from the game again, some of which were already traded far down the line. Since black-marketeering was against the rules, the community could only police itself by banning issue players or thieves from their forums, but their work was in-demand and theft would happen anyway.

Surprisingly, big external hacks seem to be pretty rare – all the hacking going on for the black market are done from inside the site, which needed the site to keep going to be worth it. Rare doesn’t mean non-existent: one very big hack got several million assorted accounts in varying levels of completeness… the database was too old to be of much use, and many passwords were missing corresponding emails. Which brings up the next point!

Dormant Users

The site never purges old, inactive users. This is a problem when the pet’s name is essentially it’s ID number – once a Neopet is named Spot, there can’t be another named Spot. Pets don’t disappear when they’re voluntarily discarded, either, they go to the Neopets pound where another player can adopt them. As such, the pet’s name adds value to the pet! Pronounceable names with no underscores, dashes, or numbers are significantly more valuable than keysmashed names in the black market.

This favors the early users who got first pick of the names, many of who then abandoned their pets as they outgrew the game. Which encourages hacking! It’s not exactly malicious, as the hackers have no idea if the original user is ever going to come back to their pet, but it’s not exactly white hat, either, because of the personal information tied to the account and all that. Rather than treating abandoned accounts like accounts, they’re being treated like a mine. This is a non-renewable resource, so when the old accounts inevitably run out, what happens next? Where does the next supply of market-fodder come from? Not to mention that it’s difficult to actually gauge inactivity from the outside– the age of the account doesn’t necessarily mean it’s abandoned!

The admins could prevent the issues all of this causes by purging the accounts, so why not do that?

Purging users means that the unconverted pets in these inactive accounts would either A) flood the market, if the team releases them to the pound, or B) disappear forever, thereby destroying the new supply of unconverted and well-named pets. The adult users have more voice than the kid users do, so they’d be flooded with complaints and negative feedback on every channel.

Sources:

https://www.polygon.com/videos/2021/5/6/22423404/neopets-future-black-market-drama

https://www.polygon.com/22334511/neopets-still-exists-black-market-cheating

https://www.vice.com/en/article/ezpvw7/neopets-hack-another-day-another-hack-tens-of-millions-of-neopets-accounts

https://theoutline.com/post/4190/neopets-was-run-by-scientologists

http://www.neopets.com/

What Remains of Flash

Elizabeth Technology April 16, 2024

It’s been a while since Adobe Flash was made defunct.

What Did Flash Actually Do?

Flash was one of a host of plugins that allowed users to view ‘rich’ content. Everything from Flash games to autoplay audio to vector graphics to dynamic menus… if the website had visuals besides plaintext on it, there was a solid chance Flash was used somewhere. Adobe Flash Player sorted to the front of the pack because it was free, and played well with most mainstream browsers. It allowed a whole new world of interactive content! Since most browsers had a version of Flash, most websites were able to use Flash content – notable exceptions included Apple products. Even then, Safari could still view it.

Why Drop?

Adobe Flash and Flash Player had problems. They always had problems, but the benefits of dynamic content and nice, quickly-loading visuals outweighed the issues Adobe Flash had. Most of the time, Flash was used on a stationary device that didn’t need to worry about battery, like a home computer. Laptops were growing in popularity, but they were still bulky, and often prioritized battery life over size. Flash could afford to be a little inefficient to get the content moving on screen faster.

Then the first iPhone came out. Safari users could access Flash content, but most webpages weren’t optimized for mobile yet, so the iPhone was using excessive battery on websites anyway. The next gen of smartphone owners, who also had Android or Microsoft devices, noticed that Flash ate battery life even though the website was designed with mobile in mind. That was more of a problem now that smartphones were popular, but vendors hoped they would improve on their own. After all, Flash was always updating to keep up with browsers and plug-ins.

Windows 8 came with Flash Player bundled in, and it was better, but it still wasn’t the picture of perfect efficiency. What was Windows going to do, reinvent the wheel, and then ask everybody to switch to their version of Flash, for greater efficiency? No. Adobe’s products were fine, and fine doesn’t have to be perfect. They filled a gap, and they enabled a lot of creativity via those browser games, which eventually became Flash’s number one usage for users aged 10-20. Interactive content needed Flash.

Adobe’s advantages far outweigh their negatives at this point. However, that was about to change.

Security

Having a tool that can run rich content all by itself was great. However, Adobe was about to get into a slog of zero-day attacks and malware fixes that would have ruined anybody’s reputation, in 2013. Flash’s widespread use meant that hackers could assume Flash Player was on a targeted device. By creating online ads that contained specially designed malware, hackers could get into any device where Flash content could play. It was as good as an open door if the virus could trick the browser into thinking it was also Flash content that needed to be downloaded to view the page. Suddenly, a Trojan Horse is on the device!

Antiviruses of the time could stop the clumsy attempts before they became a real problem, but undefended people were often unpleasantly surprised by a Flash malware getting into their system and downloading things. 2013 onwards saw a constant uphill grind against hacker organizations who had access to real tools and real skill.

Apple then releases a memo clarifying that they won’t be using Flash because of these security issues. A malware known as Flashback had infected about 600,000 devices, and Apple is unhappy – users were duped into downloading a fake Flash update that was indistinguishable from a real Flash update notice. ‘Don’t download things from a third-party website’ is common advice now, but because Flash was always pushing to keep users as patched up and flawless as possible, they often pushed these ‘update Flash’ notifications to other websites that were hosting Flash content. You might remember the gray screen and plug warning when trying to play a flash game – Flash did that so often it got kids as well as adults.

The Outdated

Flash did a lot of things, but they were all things that could be done better if web developers had better tools. HTML5 was released in 2014 and was extremely lightweight compared to Flash. It used web browsers to its advantage, by using a tagging system that most browsers (which was updated for the new tech) could interpret, rather than download. Since less data needed to be shared over the user’s internet connection, the content loaded faster – all the browser needed was those tags.

There were issues with this, in the early days of HTML5, different browsers could interpret the same tag differently, and sometimes older versions couldn’t interpret a new tag at all, but it was so much easier to work with and so much faster that minor issues were overlooked. Another bonus was less malware!

HTML5 and WebAssembly both step in to take some of the weight off of Flash after it’s first major security event, and people notice that loading times have gone down. Apple’s departure from Flash also slashed it’s popularity, and Flash starts it’s downhill decline.

Support

Adobe announced it was planning for Flash’s End-Of-Life a whole three years before the end-date to give developers time to remove it. Still, for older sites that couldn’t switch, an open-source project called ‘Ruffle’ hopes to fill the gaps and keep Flash games running a bit longer. Ruffle behaves a lot like Flash, but it’s third-party. The website itself has to support Ruffle’s use, so if all the Flash stuff was abandoned because the website itself was abandoned, Ruffle isn’t going to be much help. At least there is an option, though, as limited as it may be.

Ironically, Flash was so deeply embedded in the fabric of the internet that fake Flash updates are still getting people. Remember, if a pop-up says you should update something on your device, whether it’s Minecraft or Excel, you should always go to the home site and verify it there. It’s really easy to copy an application’s layout nowadays!

Sources:

https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/end-of-life.html

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news-features/flash-post-support/

https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/09/04/update-adobe-flash-end-support/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/06/22/adobe-flash-cut-off-will-kill-millions-of-websites/?sh=413027e3d718

The History of Adobe Flash Player: From Multimedia to Malware

https://blog.trendmicro.com/history-of-flash-zero-day-and-other-vulnerabilities/

HTML5 vs Flash

Is Brand Twitter Over?

Elizabeth Technology April 11, 2024

Popular fast-food restaurant chain Wendy’s has been getting a lot of attention online. It’s not a good thing: Wendy’s briefly attempted to announce “surge-pricing”, where prices would go up around mealtimes, and was promptly (and rightfully) bullied into retracting the idea. Wendy’s used to be a cornerstone of the hip, online, highly-Millennial marketing of the 2010s, so how could it make such a huge mistake?

You Can’t Win Marketing Bad Ideas

This should be obvious: people will tolerate your jokes at their expense only as long as they like you enough to overlook you crossing lines. Wendy’s forgot this. Sunny-D forgot this when it tweeted it’s now infamous “I can’t do this anymore” tweet. More severely, Elon Musk forgets this when he tried to convince advertisers to stay on the platform after a number of controversial statements regarding advertisers and free speech. Once that rep is lost, it’s almost impossible to recover. Metaphorically, even companies can say things that they can’t take back.

So what part of this pricing plan is a bad idea? Think about it from the investor standpoint, people who don’t actually eat a lot of fast food: every part of restaurant life is harder because people tend to come in waves, with giant lines out the door at lunch and dinner time and long periods of quiet in between them. Everything from stocking to training to staffing is beholden to this cycle. If companies could have a perfect world, they’d probably choose to have people come in at a steady pace throughout the entire day, rather than bunching up at lunch. So, discouraging people from showing up all at the same time with a time-sensitive fee makes sense! Right?

But, if you do regularly go to fast food restaurants for lunch, this is a terrible idea. It reeks of being out-of-touch: most people don’t have much flexibility around when they get their lunch break. Most people don’t choose when they get hungry, either. Some consumers will eat a late breakfast if they know they’ll be going to lunch late, sure, but is Wendy’s good enough to plan your entire day around like that, assuming you even can? What if it’s not? It doesn’t spread out the surge at all. If someone is already a devout Wendy’s fan, they’ll still go during their lunch break. If someone is not, they’ll go somewhere that doesn’t jack up the price during lunch, they won’t just wait for the price to go back down if they’re already hungry and there are other options next door.

All this also fails to consider the climate: right now is a mega-uncool time to pull tricks like this!

Who Is Wendy’s?

Everyone is feeling the impact of inflation. The tradeoff, the secret agreement when it came to fast food was always “sure, it’s not really good, but it’s cheap!” and when it’s not cheap, what is it? We’re experiencing a crisis of market share, where companies aren’t sure what their consumer is supposed to look like or act like any more. The rising prices of everything are forcing consumers out of their reliable habits as a matter of survival. Wendy’s targeted Millennials when it was funny on Twitter a decade ago, but when that market is not going out to eat because they’re trying to save money or pay down debt, Wendy’s seemingly has no idea what to do. So they did something that instantly cracked the fragile shell of relatability that they’d been cultivating, and made everything worse.

When Wendy’s threatened a price spike now that every big business is selling goods at overinflated prices, suddenly it wasn’t “cartoon mascot Wendy, who’s funny on Twitter” sending out news and slinging burgers, it was “corporate giant Wendy’s spokesperson, a man in a suit”, telling me that if I showed up at the wrong time, I’d be charged an extra fee for the inconvenience of daring to ask for a hamburger at lunchtime. To then try to joke with users on Twitter like Wendy’s is still a relatable, friendly restaurant after that is insulting. Other people on Twitter consistently refused to let them and instead mocked Wendy’s relentlessly no matter what it said in the tweet, until eventually Wendy’s was forced to backtrack on the idea altogether. Wendy’s Twitter will no longer be a viable source of marketing material until this dies down. Even then, potential customers are going to remember this. The internet never forgets.

Wendy’s was allowed to be funny and edgy on Twitter during the 2010’s because the burgers were what they said they were (not frozen, square, pretty decent for the price) and because they weren’t actually being all that offensive when they responded sassily to someone who said something goofy in their retweets. “Looks like you forgot refrigerators existed for a second” isn’t exactly a burn worthy of being signed to a label, not that this stopped Wendy’s from launching a rap track dissing Burger King. It’s not like that anymore – they have no diss capable of dispelling three hundred tweets all saying “at least Burger King doesn’t charge more at lunch”. The era where companies could just pull up a seat and act like other real users was already on the way out, but this might have killed it for good.

Are ARGs Still Cool?

Elizabeth Technology April 9, 2024

Okay, so the Mandela Catalogue’s creator recently got into some hot water, and now the interference from the real world is starting to rain on the parade he had going on in the virtual world. Many of the ‘great’ projects are either on haitus or unofficially finished, meaning no new content. But hey – maybe this is an opportunity, and not a downside to the ARG’s big moment in the spotlight a couple of years back?

Firstly, What is an ARG, or an Alternate Reality Game?

It is what it sounds like: the game’s creator wants to create an alternate reality where their game takes place. Whether it’s through implying the existence of demons in ‘real life’, or simply moving game elements into physical locations like Geocaches, ARGs create a new alternate reality for these things to happen. These games have existed before, but they used to be limited to the people with TV or print presence – the internet allows the Average Joe to get in on reality-bending fun!

Video Series

ARGs are trying to lead users into unraveling more of the story – unlike games, it usually doesn’t come in the form of unlockables, and sometimes there is no solid answer after the fact. The most distinguishing part of Youtube-based ARGs is that they’re played straight, as though everything in them is reality and being posted by a real person. Picture a movie like Paranormal Activity, but instead of purchasing a disk or watching it in theaters, it’s posted up on Youtube as though a friend of the family found it, and is even looking for answers themselves. Suddenly the context changes a lot, and the movie changes with it.

Marble Hornets, one of the most popular Slenderman fictions, can be called an ARG by these standards. It tells the story of a man attempting to film a movie while a mysterious figure comes closer and closer in the background, slowly being edited together by the original filmer’s friend, who he swore to never discuss the film with.

Adult Swim’s This House Has People In It spun a wild tale of an allergy medication that spread psychosis and split apart struggling families. One video, which focuses on a family right before their young son’s birthday party, is used as advertising for a surveillance company that doesn’t exist – but it does have a website, which reveals that the company’s incredibly shady. How else are we, as viewers, seeing this content if not through that company posting it?

Another plays as an advertisement for that aforementioned allergy medication with side effects including psychosis and death. It starts like an average ad, only to bleed into a strange waltz through a woman’s life as she struggles to fight off the effects of the meds. Police are seen in front of her house, she dances through an unfinished basement in her wedding dress, she even draws over her child’s portraits with caricatures… the drug has done something to her, and she can’t reconcile that reality with this one.

Film ARGs are some of the most entertaining communities to be a part of, as popular theories come and go. Maybe these take over the space left behind by weekly TV shows – the puzzles keep coming, and the community is united by a common goal of understanding an Alternate Reality.

Other Types

But if the creator is especially skilled, you may find projects like Welcome Home even more engaging than any video-based project. Welcome Home is a current favorite of many ARG fans because of it’s unique approach to the “haunted children’s media” trope. Instead of scaring you with hyperrealistic images or distorted pictures of the cast, Welcome Home invites you into a seemingly normal website based on a seemingly normal show from the seventies where a couple things here and there are… off. The site itself seems to be leaking something from an alternate reality into our world, where links sometimes take you places you don’t want to go, or play audio clips from “behind the scenes” of the show. But that doesn’t make sense – the show is based on puppets, and puppets need to be puppeted by real people to put on a show. Right?

…Right? It’s brilliant!

Such a convincing setup would be impossible without such a well-polished website. The Welcome Home project is currently ongoing, and – because the creator has set this up in such a brilliant way – the breaks between updates are very natural and make sense to us as outsiders.

Bad ARGs

All of this sounds great, and entertaining: what happens when the ARGs kind of suck? When the creator doesn’t understand puzzles, or the conclusion doesn’t make any sense? Or even worse: what if it’s way too easy to solve? What if it was derivative of another project from beginning to end?

Reddit’s ARG subreddit laments the split between the bad ARGs and the good ones: the bad ones are often promoted more than the good ones are, because the original creator either doesn’t know how to suck people in organically or spread word on social media well enough. An ARG on Tumblr managed great success by imitating spam ads, so sometimes it really is just a matter of repetition and posting about the project obsessively, something too commonly associated with pushy salespeople to feel comfortable to most. Popular ARGs put a lot of work in to get a following, for better or worse, and being easy to spot or jump into is not necessarily a great indicator of quality.

Bad ARGs often don’t know where they’re going, story-wise. Or if they do know, it might not be compelling or interesting. Have you ever gotten to the end of a video game, and it goes off the rails in a bad way? Or have you ever watched a TV show end so badly it erased all of it’s cultural impact afterwards (looking at you, Game of Thrones)? When the world ends in the story, you are reminded, as a viewer, that it was just a story and not a window into a different world. The story of the ARG is just as important as puzzle features.

Now that we’re past the initial buzz of the medium itself getting attention, what happens next will be interesting: will creators keep falling into these tried-and-true paths about extra-dimensional monsters and secretly-murderous children’s content? Or will we find something else frightening to build puzzles around?

ARGs are a great new way to tell stories – finding good ones are like finding gold!

Sources: https://wiki.gamedetectives.net/index.php?title=Afterbirth_ARG

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-pj8OtyO2I (This is the video for This House Has People In It)

What is WRONG with ARG’s
byu/RegularDimension inARG

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