How the fight to stop piracy can backfire

With EA's new game, SimCity coming out relatively soon everyone is talking about DRM, or "data rights management". DRM is an attempt by software developers to keep piracy rates low, by restricting how/when you can play or install the game. Most games with DRM require you to be online, with your internet connected and logged into a special account linked to the game to play or install the game, making it so you can't take the disk you just bought and install it over on a friend's computer so he can play too. Obviously, this can have some pretty negative effects on your gaming experience even if you are playing the game completely legitimately. For instance, if you don't have any access to the internet you can't even play the single player versions of the games, or if your internet dies you can lose all your saved data, which can be extremely frustrating.

Well, this inconvenience is obviously just something that we need to put up with, otherwise piracy rates would just skyrocket, right? Wrong.

It turns out that almost every time a company has enacted strict DRM it's had almost the opposite effect. EA is one of the companies that best known for their restrictive DRM, and their games consistently take the record for the most pirated games ever. Spore, Mass effect 3, Dragon age 2, etc. All these games have had 100,000 + pirated copies downloaded off of sites like bittorrent and thepiratesbay.

The problem is that it's relatively easy for a computer savvy pirate to go into a game and disable the restrictive DRM . What this means is that the copy you can download off of piratesbay doesn't have any of the annoying problems you get with the legal copy, you can play it offline, you don't lose your saved game if your internet runs out, and you don't need to sign into extra accounts so it will generally run even faster than the original copies. Basically, the version of the game that you can get for free is even better and way more convenient than the version that EA expects you to pay 60$ for, so when that is taken into consideration it's no surprise that so many people choose to pirate the game.

You would expect EA to have learned their lesson by now. Most other game developers like Valve, Ubisoft, and Bethesda that used to enforce strict DRM quickly learned that it does more harm than good, and are either making it much less invasive or scrapping it altogether. Oddly enough, EA seems to have taken the opposite approach with their new version of SimCity coming out in March, with even more restrictive DRM than we're used to seeing from EA. Hopefully they'll listen to everyone and scrap the DRM before the release date, because it seems to me like it's a losing situation for everyone.

How Google fiber trumps Comcast in pretty much every way imaginable

The title sounds a little bit sensationalist, but I can't think of a better way to describe how much better Google fiber is than pretty much anything we've got around today. It becomes incredibly difficult to objectively compare Google fiber to any common internet provider without it sounding like an advertisement made by Google. Hell, I bet Google is going to need to understate their product for a lot of people to even believe them.

To start off, I'll give a bit of background into this. Comcast is pretty much the only service provider available to me in Marin, most places only have one or two options as far as internet goes, and for most people it's just Comcast. For a modem and high speed internet, we've been paying a little bit over 70$ a month. This includes 10 gb of online storage, and "high speed internet".

But let's just check what "high speed internet" really means. On www.speedtest.net  I've been getting an average of  ~ 15 megabytes per second download speed, and 4 megabytes per second upload speed. You can check this out for your own computer and check how your speed would stack up to google fiber too, if you want.Basically, for 70$ from comcast, right now I'm getting 15 mbps download, and 4 mbps upload with 10 gigabytes of online storage.

So what Is Google fiber offering?  Conveniently (for the sake of easy math) google's high speed internet plan comes in at the same price, 70$ a month, but what they're offering is radically different. For the same price, google is offering 1000 mpbs download AND upload, along with a terabyte of online storage. Let's compare those numbers for a minute. For the same price, I would be downloading over 65 times faster, uploading 250 times faster, and have 100 times as much storage space. To put that into context, it would take me less than 30 seconds to download all 5 seasons of The Wire off of Amazon.

Google fiber is already setting up in parts of the country like Kansas City, and it's become abundantly clear that without their monopoly on the market, Comcast is going to have to make some major changes to remain competitive. Either way, it's only good news for us consumers.

Are we ready for robots to fill our shoes?

In his TED talks speech, "Are droids taking our jobs?", Andrew McAfee puts together an extremely convincing argument as to why automated machines are going to drastically reduce the size of the work force, and a slightly less convincing argument about why that's a good thing.

The first part of his speech completely won me over, he provided a ton of extremely convincing examples of how things that people do are already being phased out by computers. Like how Ken Jennings, the winner of 74 straight episodes of the game show Jeopardy was completely demolished in a game against "watson" the Jeopardy playing super-computer. Or how Siri, the "personal assistant" many of you have installed in your I-phones is incredibly useful, even if it isn't perfect. He makes the point that these technologies can only improve, and are improving incredibly quickly. I can only think of more examples that further his point, technologies like the kindle are quickly phasing out a large portion of book sales, and with that they're making many of the jobs associated with the production and distribution of books unnecessary. It becomes pretty obvious that in 20 years droids are going to be doing a lot of the work that we're doing now.

The question then becomes about whether or not this is going to be a good thing. Andrew is convinced that it'll help just about everyone. His reasoning behind this is from parallels he drew to the industrial revolution. After the stream engine was invented, the increased efficiency led to an increased standard of living all across the planet. He thinks that the increased productivity we'll be able to get out of autonomous machines will just free up time for people to do other things. I'm a little bit more skeptical though. I don't have any doubt that the increased efficiency will be a great help to anyone who is benefiting from lowered prices, or is part of a booming programming industry, but Andrew avoids the big question here, what about the people who lose their jobs? This emerging technology could make entire fields pretty much useless, what will translators do when their years of education have been made all but useless because of Google translate? I think we will probably see the same thing we saw during the industrial revolution, more money going towards the wealthy. Overall we might become more productive, but with all of the benefits going towards their owners rather than the people who have lost their jobs.

3D printers, the next household revolution.

A 3d printer is exactly what the name implies: it's a machine that can create physical objects out of melted plastic. You basically just upload a design you made in a modeling program to the machine and you'll be able to print out pretty much anything you could think of: gears, mugs, picture frames, etc all in a matter of hours. Sounds pretty cool, right?

It's not just cool. I'd be willing to bet it'll be one of the most important inventions for day to day use in our lifetimes. I'm betting that in the next 10 years, 90% of households are going to have a 3d printer hooked up to their computers. Their price has come down incredibly quickly over the past few years. Where they used to cost tens of thousands of dollars, you can find machines for sale  on ebay for around 700$ US and the price will only go down. There are various materials that these printers can use, and the cheapest of which are easily affordable. In a few years, these probably won't be much more difficult to own than a regular printer.

The amount these printers could change everyone's lives is incredible. People are already making use of this in everywhere from medicine to toys.There are already people printing out pre-designed cookware, tires that are ready to install on your car, custom fit hearing aids and replacement teeth out of bio-compatible printing material, there are even people that have made and fired 3d printed pistols with live ammunition. I imagine that in a few years you won't be buying your kids toys anymore, you'll be downloading them.

Windows 8 hardware certification: a step away from open source?

In the past few days, there has been some controversy over the new Windows 8 certification process. As you probably know, Windows is an open platform. The software you install is completely up to you: if you want to install mods to popular videogames, you can do that. If you accidentally set up some malware instead, Microsoft lets you do that too. However, Microsoft appears to be taking a step away from their current model with Windows 8's app certification. They've been contacting different software developers, asking them to pass a certain amount of quality control to become certified windows apps, presumably to be sold in an app store hosted by Microsoft. Some people, like  Markus "Notch" Persson, the developer of Minecraft, aren't too thrilled, but what does that mean for the future of the operating system?

To understand Notch's position you need to know a little bit about his game. Minecraft is probably the most heavily user-modified game you can play. Users have released free mods that do everything from changing the graphics, to adding incredibly large new areas to the map. In my opinion, the mods are undoubtedly the best part about the game. However getting every single one of the thousands of user-created modifications for the game certified would be practically impossible, meaning to use the new app store they would need to release a new version with modding disabled - not something they want to do.

If you're on a PC right now, you probably already know where Microsoft is coming from. Countless casual users have turned their computers into a lump of scrap metal by installing some faulty software they thought would get them a smiley face for their cursor. Windows 8's verification process could solve this problem, the casual users could make it so they only install certified apps, while the more experienced users can turn this setting off and use the computer just like they're using it already.

You are probably thinking "well, what's Notch's deal? He can just sell the game like he does already, and not use the app store." You might want to blow it off as a non-issue, but the fear here is that to remain competitive you will need to be a part of the app store. You see the same thing with smartphones. For androids, the default setting is to only let people download from the app store, installing whatever you want requires changing the settings, and the majority of people I've met just haven't bothered. Because of this if a developer wants to make any money off of his app, he's practically forced to sell it in the app store. Will this be the case for computers as well? Maybe, but whether or not it's worth it is completely up to you.