Steam prime target for Virus Creators

There are a few basic things a virus must do to be successfull:

• Replicate and
• Remain Hidden,

These are two of the most important. Industry seeks to prevent these things happening. However, some vendors make a virus's life much much easier (Steam/Value j'accuse).

One method for limiting viral harm is limiting exposure. This can, in most instances, be done simply by only allowing connections to known secure IP addresses. This means that any virus incomming has also circumvented the security of a secure peer.

Sadly, this is made impossible by some product designs. Steam being the worst case. Internet load balancing should not be happening at the user client (in Steam client this is the case). Regional internet servers should be setup and DNS resolution should load balance within a small range of IP addresses for each area / network region. So, for example, Steam requested in Chicago should not be contacting an address in China (as an example found happening using Windows Update) for an update. It should be load balanced between up to 10 servers within a sensible range.

Steam just appears to try to load balance between 100's of servers. It could be possible they may have 100's of servers within my region, I am however exceedingly dubious of this (I don't think so).

Anyway, the point is, because steam connects to a massive range of IP addresses it is not easily possible to secure against viral attack, since either one must learn every single IP used by steam or just give up and allow Steam total free communications (inviting it as a great launch platform for any form of viral infection. Infect the process with the most permissions and or the most freedom).

The second evil of steam is it cannot run in a non elevated state.

I actually find myself HOPING someone targets Steam because they are behaving like Tyrants.

Oh, and yes.. Windows Update is nearly as bad (but at least I could conceivably mangage Windows Updates Manually).

Modern Gaming Industry standard business practices styfles economy

It occured to me today that the way modern gaming products launch (in legal terms) is completely designed so that they might reap any revenue which comes from the game. This, at first glance, makes complete sense. They put in the effort, they should be receiving the appropriate reward.

Then, I thought on this. The manor in which they seek to "protect there investment" almost excludes any other business (unless that business is going to be paying them a healthy fee and secondly divulge entirely their enterprise up front in case they where having to be already going to do that).

So, in short, its quickly not viable for others to produce related items for profit.

I only really noticed this on realising how MineCraft has had the opposite effect with its approach. The relative openness of the developer and his company has lead to many, many spin-off "developments" which may or may not earn each person a seperate profit.

Basicly, to my mind here, the lesson is simple. Less restrictive practices and looser licencing lead to economic boom.

A random cartoon...

More Microsoft Tricks! (makes me want to hug open source.. poor as it makes me)

So, Microsoft want us to upgrade our internet browser. From what I can figure out their *strategy* to get us to upgrade goes as follows:

1. End Support
2. Try to force the upgrade upon us via Windows Update (if possible)
3. Update all their webpages so they use a feature of the new browser, which just happens (*cough bullshit*) to break compatibility with their oldest brower still compatible.
4. Provided other "security updates" to 'related' parts of the operating system which *cough* again just happen to slowly break their oldest browser in increasingly annoying and agravating ways (example with IE 7, alignments suddenly different for same pages.. Suddenly the arrow keys no longer work for scrolling pages etc, previously smooth scrolling replaced by jagged glitchy scrolling).
5. If any user notices these facets, they will say "Please update your browser to resolve this issue, thank you".
6. Make the browser completely (artificially) incompatable with their next operating systems.

So, there you go.. if anyone reading this knows a Microsoft Executive who is be behind (or in support of) these "ideas" please, please, please do something just a little nasty to them (hide their car keys, erase their address books, factory reset their phone).

Let me know you have in comments and make my day ;).

Cancel is NOT Undo! Damnit!

Reciently I've had a few problems with my PC which necessitated some reinstallation. So I needed to reinstall a few programs. I had the files already inplace and just needed to restore the registry settings. So I run the install, and ooh nice it put the settings back =) hurray. I don't need to put in the other 4 CD's to complete the install, i'll just cancel the install here and all will be good.

So, I hit cancel.. .the "£(*$ application starts REMOVING all the files. OMG! Cancel, Cancel!!!! NOT UNDO. >.<

Life, don't talk to me about Life

That of course was a quote made my "Mavin the paranoid Android" from the The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG).

Still, right now I'm so tired of the pointless fight. People aren't valued, effort is only valued for the rewards it brings to the person the effort is made for. Good ideas go unrealised because people need to keep paying for bad ideas because once someone thought it was a clever idea to ensure that a "popular" or "clever" idea remained profitable and somehow unextractably entangled it to some life essencial so we became forced to continue to pay for the bad idea.

Life (by which I mean human effected / created life) seems full of examples of this (indeed these things thrive on this):

• American Laws..

Seemingly if any "bill" is put forward for consideration and is seen to be a potentially "popular" proposition, everyone tries to find a way to Tac on their unpopular little proposal in the hope that people want the good enough to pay for the crap that comes with it (whilst making the crap they add seem plausably connected).

• Loans (Banks),

Sure, you can have that money.. just give it us back (*small print* with 10% extra repayment per day you don't).

•  Most Business

Hey, buy this.. its great and just LOOK how cheap it is (*small print* accessories not included, battery must be replaced weekly, must use OUR model of battery/ink/credits/web-site).

Hell, maybe this is the whole of life. Though, looking at nature, it tends to come with more rewards than traps.

The funny thing is, life is full of examples of how people really value other people. Its just disconnected, it only goes so far and then starts going in reverse (that is, for example.. I value you, you value you friend, your friend values their friend.. good. Though, your friends, friend hates you. You hate your friends, friend, friend. So on). Everyone generally has good reasons for why the like or don't like another person (value or not. If we define here good as making sense to them and their definition of good).

Trying to think about all this just hurts the brain. So, everyone, value everyone.. if you can't see their value, value that they give everyone else a greater sense of value by showing exactly how valuable they are by comparison.. thusly, appriciate them.

As for the people providing definite negative value, the ones killing, bombing, opressing, claiming their way or the highway ect. ect. Well, we can't appriciate them, but we can pity them and remember how their example shows just how bad people are when they don't value or appriciate even one.

People, please stop funding web-crime!

Someone, they are nameless, are paying unscrupulous companies to advertise their products. They may not even know these companies are unscrupulous.

Here is the short tip version:

DO NOT PAY ANYONE FOR HITS!

Hits on your website do not equate to customers or even often remotely interested parties. There seems to be an entire industry built around taking money from people who equate hits on their site to customer awareness or product sales.

Let me explain paitiently.

There is a massive number of ways in which a person may attract "hits" to their website. Howeve, the only quality hit is the hit from a person who has arrived at your site in search of a service or product you are offering. This type of hit is very hard to get because of the MILLIONS of companies out there being PAID by third parties to get ANY kinds of hits to their customers sites (customers who may infact by dying for your services are being redirected to a million sites with people offering them nothing they want). Unscrupulous advertisers are very successfull in this ends. These sites get millions on millions of people directed to them because they are conned, fooled, tricked and otherwise mislead into arriving at these sites. The action of a person thus, conned, fooled, tricked is (in 99% of cases I susspect) to immidiately leave the site and try to find what they ACTUALLY where looking for.

Now, some people paying for web-advertising are slightly better informed, they realise that 'How long a person views your page is an indication of interest' and ask for only these hits to be counted (since this is a measure which can be taken). However, again, unscrupulous companies have this covered! They simply trick the web-public into clicking their advert but avoid the user actually realising they are viewing the advert to it appears they viewed it for a long time (because they either didn't notice it was there or the window appeared under other windows). The customer may be shown a quite "compelling" legitimate" advertisement for their product to add to the fraud.

So, therefore, the length of time each "clicker" spent viewing your page becomes a nonsense as well.

So, stop paying for clicks!

Pay for results! Google has a reasonably solid system to ensure you get quality clicks. However, watch out, because a number of third party companies re-selling Google services can easily warp this system by "trickyly" created pages.

I recommend that whenever you enter into a contract with a company for web advertising, that you contractually only pay them based on the sales comming directly through their advertising program, proven ideally by individual customer acknowledgement or sufficiently by unique ID references placed in the advertising campaign.

If you do go with a clicks only advertiser, should you be lucky enough to get sales from the campaign, you are still hurting your company image over because as millions of misdirected people may see your company as "unscrupulous" as well (since the trick lead them to your company name).

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PEOPLE STOP PAYING FOR CLICKS.. PAY FOR RESULTS.

As my final note, its interesting that this kind of "commerical activity" is entirely LEGAL. I also feel the law should be updated to make "misleading" online an offence against the law.