Posts Tagged

internet phenomena

GPU Prices Are Finally Coming Down From An All-Time High

Elizabeth Technology May 23, 2024

But why did they jump so high to begin with?

Assumed Superiority

Pre-built PCs are of the devil. At least, that’s what PC-Build forum elites will have you believe. If you didn’t pick out each part individually to make the most mathematically perfect device you possibly could, what are you even doing with your PC? Playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure? Pleb.

PC gaming rig subcultures can range from cool to sucky depending on who’s running the forum you’re visiting. Some are great, and they genuinely want to help kids just starting out with their devices. They keep baseline equipment reasonable and establish product tiers so no one part is bottlenecking others too hard. Others will insist users have the top-of-the-line hardware for their rig, even if it’s nearly too expensive for them. It must always go faster, there is no slow down. There is no stop. Only. Faster.

If you’re going to upgrade your device, there’s no point in taking a pit stop to save up for the next GPU. In fact, if you’re having a hard time affording it, maybe you should sell the GPU you’re currently using before you have a replacement lined up, just so you have a more accurate picture of your budget. (this is bad advice, don’t do this).

PC forums like the latter only build more hype for a hard-to-find item, and folks who follow them closely might feel like a GPU is worth double or triple what the manufacturer is actually charging for it – an unhealthy mentality with any high-price item market.

Enter: NVIDIA parts, specifically GPUs.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. A fabled card destined to descend from the heavens and sell out immediately, then disappear for months. The initial sales price for the units in the newly released set went from a low of $499 to a high of $1,499 over the three performance options. The RTX 3080 was the middle-of-the-road unit, and it came with “serious 4K gaming performance, with access to the latest ray-tracing and deep learning supersampling (DLSS) tech from Nvidia” (Tom’s Guide).

Unfortunately, due to Covid-19 and an assortment of other factors, the company couldn’t restock for months, and they began selling out of their weaker units too. When a shipment finally came in, it was gone in seconds – people had bots poised and ready to make the purchase as soon as it was an option.

Market Exploitation

The manufacturers know that their primary market doesn’t screw around when it comes to very expensive, very powerful machine components. Quality is everything. Streamers, professional gamers, people hosting tournaments, and even people who just like to go really fast all camp out to get the newest, fastest parts as they become available. This isn’t the first chip that Nvidia released and then immediately ran out of, so they knew demand was going to be pretty high.

However, this was the first time it took months to get production levels up to demand. Not only was there a pandemic slowing down overseas shipping, Bitcoin mining became profitable again. For those of you who don’t know, the process boils down to “solve algorithm – verify transaction – get rewarded”. Bitcoin transactions are heavily encrypted, and the money itself is virtual. Verification is essential to making sure the same Bitcoin hasn’t been used somewhere else first.

Anyway, cryptocurrency mining is very GPU-intensive. The reward goes to the person who verifies the transaction first, and multiple people can compete for each transaction. The only way to ensure you’re ahead of the guy with the supercomputer is to keep your device as fast as possible, and the GPU is a common bottleneck for Bitcoin miners. If you’re really making money off mining, then paying double the price for a scarce item that will keep you ahead seems like a good deal, and you’ll stay in line for a GPU selling on eBay while gamers leave and re-evaluate.

Arms Race

The pandemic keeping people inside, the pandemic preventing overseas shipping, the pandemic shifting the market and launching Bitcoin into another peak, the pandemic… everything wrong with the GPU market could theoretically be tied to the pandemic. All of it together creates a shortage of GPUs at every level, but new GPUs ran out first.

A new GPU on the market creates a cascade of used GPUs that trickle down. The used computer parts economy is actually pretty interesting, as depending on what part of the cycle you step into, the used part may cost more than the launch price of the new one. Memes to this effect flooded the market once users who’d sold parts in hopes of getting the 3080 realized everything was either out of stock or pretty scarce. Everything worth having, at least.

It’s not all bad: many of the folks waiting for the newest series learned to appreciate their old cards! A GPU in the PC is worth two in the void.

This is the downside to the more intense PC-building communities. There’s pressure to not stop and wait, and pressure to not settle for a less powerful (but still adequate) device if perfection is available for double or triple its actual price. (Please note here – I’m not talking about people who had a card break right before launch and decided to wait for it.)

This mentality creates poor-quality markets with a lot of demand and nearly no supply. The perfect environment for scalping.

Scalping

As mentioned before, the used-part life cycle is really interesting. People look to upgrade when something new comes out, so they upgrade to something new and sell off their old GPU. That GPU becoming available on the market allows another person to let go of their old GPU and purchase a faster model than what they currently have. GPUs are durable, so barring a major part failure, they’ll last a while in this cycle. The gist of all of this movement is that 1st tier items become 2nd and 3rd tier when the next generation comes out, and everything moves down a peg in the wishlists.

Scalpers see this and disrupt it. The goal is to eat up available supply to drive up demand, and then resell those devices they hoarded – er, stocked up on – at the new, higher price. Now only 4th and below tier items are available at the original price! High-end GPUs are beginning to cost the same as used cars, so trying to get in on it should be a risky investment, but high-priced electronics have their own rules. If everyone waited for prices to lower, everyone but the scalper comes out better for it.

This does not happen. It didn’t happen with the Wii. This didn’t happen with the Playstation 5. It won’t spontaneously happen with GPU scalpers, not only because it wouldn’t happen anyway, but also because this is a particularly terrible year for supply. If you’re not getting it from a scalper or reseller, you may not be getting it at all! Previous years, it was possible to look at scalper’s markup as a fee for early access, while other folks waited for a restock. This year…

Blown Manufacturing

The first pandemic year was ugly for many reasons.

The lack of supply for the electronic is inevitably what drives scalpers to buy as much of the final product as they can, and we see this time and time again with other products. Why can’t the manufacturer do something about it?

The most common suggestion is buy limits, but buy limits are tricky. Multi-person households may not want to share a PS5, even though they’re ordering to the same address. This doesn’t include portable electronics like the Switch, where children may genuinely just want their own Switch, like they did for the DS series, even though they’d share a PS5. GPUs are much the same! Streamers who can’t afford to have downtime may be looking to buy a backup, and are they wrong for that? If more than one streamer is living at an address (this is surprisingly common) there’s going to be a suspicious number of cards going to one location.

They may not even want to curb the scalping, because even scalping is profitable.

Don’t forget about profits. Buy limits cut down profit if the manufacturer doesn’t do as well as it’s hoping. Some theorize that Nintendo doesn’t make enough of it’s products on purpose so it always sells out and always has demand. Widgets and electronics are expensive to make, and initial release may be the only time they can charge full price without being undercut by market forces, sales, and secondhand devices coming on the market. Besides, it’s easier to make more of a successful item than it is to get rid of unsuccessful items and still make profit.

There’s also the option of increasing supply, which would make scalpers irrelevant. See again PS5 and Wii – more did come out after the initial release burst. However, this isn’t an option right now either. Overseas trade is just now getting back to normal. The Nvidia chip was out out. This gave the scalpers inordinate power.

Long story short, this is a complicated, multifaceted issue. The best thing you can do is wait if you can afford to. If the chip’s working fine, and you’re not already experiencing bottleneck, wait it out. Patience is bad for scalpers but good for you!

Sources:

https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/how-the-great-graphics-card-shortage-had-me-panic-buy-an-nvidia-rtx-3090

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55755820

https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/12/22227040/nvidia-amd-gpu-shortage-rtx-3080-3070-3060-ti-3090-rx-6800-xt

https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/17/21441391/nvidia-rtx-3080-sold-out-online-instore-stock-shortages-graphics-card-gpu

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/terrible-time-to-buy-gpu-late-2020

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

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

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/

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.

How To Handle A Hack: Blizzard in 2012

Elizabeth Technology April 2, 2024

In 2012, game developers were beginning to experiment with a principle known as “always on”. “Always on” had many potential benefits, but the downsides keep the majority of games from ever attempting it. Many of the notable standouts are games that require team play, like Fall Guys or Overwatch. Others without main-campaign team play tend to fall behind, like Diablo 3 and some of the Assassin’s Creed games. Lag, insecurities, perpetual updating, etc. are all very annoying to the end user, so they’ll only tolerate it where it’s needed, like those team games. It’s hard to say that this hack wouldn’t have happened if Blizzard hadn’t switched to an “always on” system… but some of their users only had Battle.net accounts because of the always-on.

Blizzard’s account system was designed with their larger team games in mind. It was forwards facing, and internet speeds were getting better by the day. Users were just going to have to put up with it, they thought. Users grumbled about it, but ultimately Blizzard was keeping data in good hands at the time. You wouldn’t expect Battle.net accounts created purely to play Diablo 3 to lose less data than the user profiles in the Equifax breach, right? Blizzard kept the ball here! What did Blizzard do right to prevent a mass-meltdown?

Hacker’s Lament

The long and the short of it was that Blizzard’s storage had multiple redundancies in place to A) keep hackers out and B) make the info useless even if it did end up in the wrong hands. Millions of people had lost data in similar events before, and security experts were more and more crucial to keeping entertainment data safe. Blizzard was preparing for the worst and hoping for the best, so even when the worst struck here, they weren’t left floundering telling people they lost their credit cards.

The actual hack was defined by Blizzard as ‘illegal access to our internal servers’. It released the listed emails of players (excluding China), the answers to security questions, and other essential identifying information about accounts into the wild. However, due to Blizzard’s long-distance password protocol, the passwords themselves were scrambled so much that the hackers might as well have been starting from scratch. This is still a problem, but it’s not a world-ending, ‘everyone has your credit card’ problem. Changing the password on the account and enabling 2FA was considered enough to shore up security.

Potential Issues

Lost email addresses aren’t as big of a problem as lost passwords, but they can still present an issue. Now that the hacker knows an email address was used on a particular site, it’s possible to perform a dictionary attack, or regular brute forcing! This strategy will eventually work, but the longer and more complicated the password is, the less likely it is to succeed on your account in particular.

A secondary problem is the lost security questions. Those are a form of 2FA. Depending on the question asked, guessing something that works or brute forcing it again is dangerously easy. Sparky, Rover, and Spot are very popular names for American dogs, for example. If the hacker is able to identify that the player’s American, and then guess the name of their first dog, they’re in! They can change the password to keep the legitimate player out. (Part of Blizzard’s response is forcing users to change their security questions for this reason). 2FA that uses email or mobile is generally preferred.

Battle.net acted as an overarching account for all the games, and made the stakes higher for an account breach. All the online Blizzard games went through Battle.net. Losing access could mean losing access to hundreds of hours of game progress. Or worse: credit card data and personal info.

Online, Always, Forever

The event provided ammo for anti-always-on arguments. There was no option to not have a Battle.net account if you wanted to just play Diablo’s latest game. Some users were only vulnerable as a result of the always-online system. If they’d simply been allowed to play it offline, with no special account to maintain that always-online standard, there wouldn’t have been anything to hack! Previous Blizzard games didn’t require Battle.net. People who stopped at Diablo 2 seem to have gotten off scot-free during the hack. This is annoying to many users who only wanted to play Diablo 3. They might not find value in anything else about the Battle.net system. Why bother making users go through all this work to be less secure?

When discussing always online, there’s good arguments to be made for both sides. Generally, always on is better for the company, where offline gaming is better for the consumer. Always on helps prevent pirating, and it gives live data. Companies need data on bugs or player drop-off times, which can help them plan their resources better and organize fixes without disrupting the player experience.

On the other hand, consumers with poor internet are left out, as lag and bugs caused by poor connection destroy their gaming experience. As games move more and more to pure digital, buying a ‘used game’ only gets more difficult for the consumer. Companies treat purchased games as a ticket to a destination, rather than an object the consumer buys. Games used to be objects, where anybody could play the game on the disc even though save data stayed on the console. Buying access to Diablo 3 via Battle.net means that there’s no way to share that access without also allowing other people to access the Battle.net account, which stores the save data. It’s the equivalent of sharing the console, not just the disc.

Handling

The response to the stolen, scrambled passwords was for Blizzard to force-reset player passwords and security questions, just in case the hackers somehow managed to unscramble them.

2FA is always a good idea, and Blizzard strongly recommended it too. 2FA will do a better job of alerting you than the default email warning  ‘your password has been changed’ will after the fact. After you’ve received that email, the hacker is already in. Depending on when you noticed, they could have already harvested all the data and rare skins they wanted by the time you get your support ticket filed! Setting up 2FA first means that you’re notified before that happens.

All in all, Blizzard handled this particular incident well! Companies are required to inform their users about potential online breaches, but some companies do this with less tact than others. Formally issuing an apology for the breach isn’t part of their legal requirements, for example. What made this response possible in the first place was Blizzard’s competent security team, alongside a set of policies that were strictly followed. Logs and audits in the system ensured that Blizzard knew who accessed what and when, which is critical when forming a response. Blizzard was able to determine the extent of the problem and act on it quickly, the ultimate goal of any IT response.

Sources:

https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/12060

https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/9852

https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/08/09/its-official-blizzard-hacked-account-information-stolen/?sh=2ecadbc955d1

Blizzards Gaming Server Has Been Hacked

https://medium.com/@fyde/when-too-much-access-leads-to-data-breaches-and-risks-2e575288e774

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19207276

Pirating Is a Crime

Elizabeth Technology March 26, 2024

Piracy is a crime. Don’t pirate things. They’re serious about it. There are real reasons beyond “big music corps are people too”.

Why are the fines so steep?

Piracy seems victimless. In reality, the victims are just barely affected with each instance, up until the cumulative effect starts to affect their desire to create. Art has a price, and if folks aren’t willing to pay it, art disappears. Not all of it, of course, but the niche, unusual, and otherwise less profitable stuff goes by the wayside.

Fines are a strong motivator for many people – the main goal is to make piracy so undesirable that nobody does it for fear of the fines, not for the fear of being a thief (or “thief”, depending on how you define copyright violation). Many people don’t see anything actually wrong with stealing content from big name artists. What would the harm be? They aren’t really wrong, but they’re not right – they won’t be affecting that artist very much by themselves, and the amount missing from their art consumption is maaaybe a couple of pennies.

For example, Pharell only made something like $2,000 on Spotify when he was #1 on the top 40. Pirating that song would cost him maybe a twentieth of a cent, more in potential lost sales if you were intending to buy it on iTunes but went to LimeWire instead. However, now that Spotify is not monetizing any songs under 1,000 listens, you not listening in a legitimate channel could make a bigger difference to smaller artists. It’s like littering: if everyone left their trash at the park, the park would close for cleanup. One person is just an inconvenience to the groundskeeper. One plastic bottle won’t ruin the park’s water, but dozens will, and the rangers only need to catch one to get some of the others to stop. Fines keep litterers and minor pirates alike in check. If everyone thinks ‘my trash won’t hurt’, you get a trashed park. If every pirate thinks ‘my pirating won’t hurt’, you get musicians and moviemakers on strike.

Besides, fines for piracy are massive. Up to $250,000, and possible jail time!

Who are you actually going to hurt?

Small artists who get ripped off with copyright breaches and stolen songs are the people on the cutting edge of new. New music, new tech, new art – the small artists create things that you won’t find in Bed, Bath and Beyond, or on the Top 40. Cost these people money, and you’re destroying a complicated ecosystem of inspiration and passion-projects that the Top 40 is not looking to recreate. Layer Ariana Grande songs over each other, and you’ll discover patterns you didn’t notice before – patterns the producers definitely did notice, and they went down a checklist to get that song out and on the charts.

Small bands don’t have the same resources. When something sounds good, it’s because they made it sound good by themselves – you’re rewarding individual talent by not pirating. Tame Impala didn’t have access to a recording studio for their first album. He wrote the songs himself. He mixed it, himself. The same goes for Billie Eilish, and any other number of bedroom musicians (musicians who record their music in their bedroom). No disrespect to Ariana Grande, but she can’t make albums with the creative freedom that a bedroom band can. The people who invested in her can’t afford to have a flop, so she always gets breathy, poppy, peppy songs with high notes. It’s her strength, so it’s all she gets to release. She has creative input, but not a lot of control.

Pirating wouldn’t directly affect her unless everybody started pirating. It would take significantly less to accidentally crush something like early (early!!!) Tame Impala, or early Billie Eilish, and you might not hear anything like them ever again.

Don’t pirate the music if you want more of it!

Movies: More Serious

Movies are more serious to pirate. The theater runs on a tight margin to keep the tickets cheap. This is why a cup of popcorn is six dollars, that’s where the operating cost goes – the ticket is just paying for the movie’s rental of the reel from the studio.

The studio puts its money towards making back the budget of the film, and if the film does well enough, there may be a sequel. Trolls, for example, did well enough for studios to invest in Trolls: World Tour. The same goes for Tenet, and for Sonic. They made enough money back that the studio wants to keep the gravy train running. Not all sequels are good – and some may say that money shouldn’t be running art – but the world we live in has these rules. More money = more creation. Many talented artists literally cannot afford to create art full-time if they aren’t being paid for it.

However, assume pirating eats into the profit. One guy copies the file and sends it out and around, and a bunch of people see the pirated version on disc or download. They don’t want to spend money to see it again. Pirating takes the movie off the watchlist of hundreds or thousands without actually funding the movie. That wouldn’t have ruined Sonic or Tenet necessarily, but for an indie project, that can be devastating.

Pirating can happen at the theater too! You think you’re watching a legitimate copy of Fast and Furious 8, but the owner had pirated it from a connection he had who got it early for review. That theater makes blockbuster movie money, and the studio sees none of it. Stuff like that is why the fines are so huge, that owner would gladly do it again for a $2,000 fine. Illegitimate rental places were also a real problem. BlockBuster franchises (and small locally-owned rental stores) making illegal copies of recent hits was a profit-killer.

And as small bands suffer more than big bands, so too do small movie studios. Some of the wildest, most creative movies ever pushed to the big screen come out of small studios. The group that made Coraline, for example, is relatively small compared to Disney or Pixar. Pirating a newly released movie en masse could seriously dampen their funding for the next movie even if it wouldn’t make a dent for Disney.

It’s cumulative. They won’t catch everyone who pirates… but they’ll get enough to be a deterrent. Good art comes from protecting the artists who made it!

Sources: https://variety.com/2020/film/news/trolls-world-tour-streaming-theatrical-window-future-1234573263/

Sony’s DRM Nightmare

Elizabeth Technology March 21, 2024

In 2005, an organization had been covertly installing a program similar to a rootkit onto consumer devices without warning. For those who haven’t heard it before, a rootkit is simply a program that is designed to remain unfindable on a device. They aren’t all bad, but their difficult-to-detect nature and ability to evade even aggressive anti-virus makes them a top-of-the-line tool for hackers. Back to the story.

The rootkit was on the lookout for ‘suspicious activity’, and if it detected any, it would quietly alert the parent company. However, even if you had nothing to hide, you still had something to fear: the rootkit left a gaping security hole, and a smart enough hacker could piggyback off of it to get Trojan Horses, Worms, and other nasty bugs in without alerting the computer that “hey, there’s an .exe file doing weird stuff!”

The rootkit was designed to hide itself, and it would hide the bugs behind it. There was no mention of this anywhere in the EULA agreement for the program that had the rootkit.  The parent company hadn’t meant to leave a backdoor, but they did, and attempts to fix it without removing their own program just made the problem worse. Attempting to fake fixing it with an uninstaller only hid the program deeper in the system, and trying to uninstall it could brick the computer, depending on which program you got. They’d really screwed themselves, and they hadn’t expected to get caught.

This wasn’t some Russian hacking scheme, or some government overreach – it was Sony, attempting to keep copyrighted material off of pirating websites. Talk about an overreaction.

The History

At some point, a company has to admit it would rather ruin the legitimate user’s experience than let a pirate go unpunished. That’s very understandable: stealing is wrong, and smug pirates behaving like they’ve gotten one over on ‘the system’ are frustrating. Ordinary responses to this can be anything from asking for the license # on the inside of the clear case to more subtly ruining the audio quality of pirated copies. This is a normal level of copyright protection. Very determined pirates could still get around these measures, but hey, you can’t spend all your resources on the fringe cases.

Companies are aware of this, and some begin to factor ‘unstoppable piracy’ into their calculations – you know, like grocery stores will factor in ‘lifting loss’ and spoiling produce. Companies usually determine they’d be spending more on preventative measures than they’d be keeping on the shelves. Theft is wrong, but so is littering and driving without a license. Somehow, all three still happen anyway. Sony is very mad that pirates are getting away with fresh content, and they want to do the equivalent of TSA pat-downs on everybody at the exit of the grocery store to stop a small percentage of thieves.  They don’t care anymore; nobody is going to get away with it.

Was it Reasonable?

Napster and LimeWire are making inroads into the music industry’s profit, and 2005 was the peak. The pirating of copyrighted content is only made easier with the rise of the internet, and Sony realizes it’s nigh impossible to find the illegitimate downloaders, and uploaders were only marginally easier. They decide to go for the source, but they decide to hit hard.

“The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams… It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what… Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source – we will block it at your cable company. We will block it at your phone company. We will block it at your ISP. We will firewall it at your PC… These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake.” – Sony Senior VP Steve Heckler

This quote was said in 2005, after Sony had merged with another company, BMG. BMG had an incident in Europe in the 2000’s, when they’d released a CD without warning users of the copyright protection on the inside. Apparently, burning money to replace those CDs (and burning goodwill) was not enough of a lesson, and Sony and BMG together prepared to take a stand against pirates.

The Problem

They’re going after the big boys, the folks downloading music to upload everywhere else…for free.

These are the people depressing profits, in theory. Some companies theorize that once these people are gone, the people passively pirating by downloading stuff from them will also disappear and go back to buying the content. They’re somewhat right, and this audience shrinks over time. More on that later.

This is illegal and very annoying! The estimated lost sales from piracy were in the billions, and many companies were beginning to look at more intense DRM: Digital Restriction Management.

To some people, DRM is the root of all evil, the seed of the eventual downfall of consumer’s rights. After Sony’s screw-up, they were right to call it as such. John Deere, Apple, Sony, Photoshop, etc. are all slowly eating away at their own best features for the sake of pushing users into proprietary software. Software they’re not allowed to repair because of DRM. Take Deere: if a new Deere tractor detects a common tractor repairman’s diagnostic software, a Deere tractor will stop working until you call out a Deere technician. This obviously drives up demand for Deere technicians, and it’s horribly restrictive to the user. Lawsuits are in progress right now over this because the obvious result is that Deere can cost you your farm by doing this.

To others, DRM is an essential part of the free market. Companies should be allowed to protect what they made, and if users find their methods extreme, they shouldn’t have bought it. And in less extreme circumstances, they’re right! That’s what the EULA, the End User License Agreement, is for. The user can decide if they’re willing to put up with the DRM specified in the Agreement, and if they’re not, they don’t have to buy it. ‘If you pirate this, it will only play static’ is reasonable.

Sure, some super-cheapskate who found a sketchy download off some sketchy site is going to listen to static with Hint of Music, but the average user would rather buy the disc and be done with it. If the company can make the ripped upload sound like garbage when it’s off its home CD, they won. The company has successfully used DRM here to keep their honest customer honest, and any would-be pirates away. And they did it without destroying either computer! As Stewart Baker of the Department of Homeland Security said, “it’s your intellectual property – it’s not your computer”.

Doing it this way means normal consumers still get a high-quality product, and if the DRM is limited entirely to the content itself, there’s no risk of it coming back to bite the company in the butt.

Still, if you really disagree with DRM, there were companies that successfully reduced their piracy problems in other ways. Some found that guilt was enough, others found that once certain websites were gone, their piracy problems disappeared too. Warning folks that piracy was still a crime got the people who didn’t know any better to stop. Fines did a number on the folks who were too bold or too dumb to not get tracked with non-DRM means, and for the people who were doing it because it was more convenient? They reduced their pirating when better paid methods became available. Sony’s problem could have been solved in a lot of ways!

Besides, Sony wasn’t struggling. Lost sales are not the same as losses! Companies are still making profit, just not as much as they’d like. Property is not being damaged, and nobody is experiencing physical harm as a result of pirating.

The Response

Sony’s DRM was a severe overreaction to the problem at hand, and it did lead to several lawsuits. As said at the beginning, Sony had not only installed software without the user’s knowledge, but they’d then left a big entry point for security threats to get in undetected. Hundreds of thousands of networks were affected, and some of them were government. Once someone blew the lid on the DRMs, they released a cover-up “uninstaller” that just hid the rootkit better and installed more DRM content on the user device.

This does not help!

The blown cover for the rootkit meant that black-hat hacking organizations could tool around and create something that could get into anything with that rootkit on it, undetected. Eventually Sony was forced to admit this was wrong, but not before screwing over a couple million people who just wanted to listen to Santana or Celine Dion from a CD they paid for. Over pirates.

Yeah, there’s some lost profit – but it doesn’t outweigh the regular customers.

The Aftermath

Sony’s first instinct is to hide it. As mentioned in the article above, the uninstaller available didn’t actually uninstall it, and some users reported issues of system crashes and their machine bricking up when the uninstaller’s poor programming tried to interact with the rest of the device’s programming.

Their second decision is to lie – ‘the DRM has no backdoors and doesn’t pose a risk to your computer’s security’. This is demonstrably untrue, and given that they were already in the beginning stages of recall, could be considered a deliberate lie.

Sony’s third action is to recall the discs with the DRM on it, but they don’t get all of the discs. Some users aren’t sure if their disc is affected or not, and even non-profit organizations dedicated to maintaining free internet can’t figure out what discs have it and what discs don’t. The best they can do is a partial list. Stores in New York and Boston are still selling the discs three weeks after the recall. However, users do get to swap their disc with an unprotected one through the mail. Sony seems to have acknowledged their screw-up at this point.

Sony’s fourth action is more a consequence – they stick a class-action lawsuit sign-up notice on their home website, and users affected can claim damages up until 2006. Class-action lawsuits filed by individual states start to drag down Sony’s profits more than the piracy ever did, and the end result is a mandate to put warnings on the cover of discs and to stop using DRM that could damage a user’s computer. DRM is still allowed, it just can’t be possible to destroy a computer to protect a song license. The feds actually considered this a breach of federal law and stated that it was engaging in deceptive and unfair business practices. Sounds about right – consumers wouldn’t have bought a disc that downloaded DRM without their knowledge. From conception to execution, this was a moral, ethical, and legal mistake. While pirating is wrong, it’s possible to be more wrong trying to stop it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal

https://us.norton.com/internetsecurity-malware-what-is-a-rootkit-and-how-to-stop-them.html

https://www.wired.com/2006/12/sony-settles-bm/

https://www.theregister.com/2005/11/01/sony_rootkit_drm/

https://money.cnn.com/2005/06/24/news/international/music_piracy/

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2998251/sony-bmg-rootkit-scandal-10-years-later.html

https://fsfe.org/activities/drm/sony-rootkit-fiasco.en.html

https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4058&context=thesesdissertations

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2194292/sony-bmg-rootkit-scandal–5-years-later.html

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