fuchikoma

I think a big part of it is the question of why these guys even need to know you`re signing in to a Gawker site. Do you tell Google every time you drive somewhere? When you buy a plane ticket? When you mail someone a letter? Of course not (...on purpose anyway) - it's irrelevant. Gawker's not owned by any of these companies. There's no technical requirement for them to handle your login. It's just nosy and invasive and it's getting harder to avoid it no matter where you go.

I worded it as "jumping to their defense" because you've been consistently downplaying this inflammatory and controversial move they've taken, and even carried it to a pretty far fetched level, like implying that Gawker's data mining is somehow equivalent to Google or Facebook's - or that you don't care if these third parties get to know more about you (so no one else should?) Other sites to require things like this, and it's shitty there too, though there's usually an alternative or five. Discussing them here just wouldn't be very relevant since this isn't a thread about Facebook, it`s about Kotaku. Like I said, some people don't like being tracked everywhere they go by these giants. If you're sick of hearing people complain about Gawker, maybe "Fucking Kotaku" isn't the ideal thread for you?

If you get the Ghostery extension for your browser, you can safely disable Facebook and Google's various tracking bugs without disabling the core sites. It will also show you the wide array of other affiliates that track you on Gawker and other sites. And FDS, I'm not sure why you're so eager to leap to their defense... at this point it kind of sounds like you're making the old "you shouldn't mind being searched if you haven't done anything wrong" argument. Or maybe assuming that if you don't have a problem with it, no one should. Some people value their privacy and don't like having everything they do rolled into huge pervasive profiles even if they are just "to provide you with better service and make the ads displayed more relevant" - especially when they're not given a choice in the matter.

Will get something to you soon... for some reason, Paypal will encrypt their help pages, but not their sign-in form...

Facebook, Twitter or Google. Not much better. I went to post on Jalopnik the other day and got that. Now... Gawker can finally die for all I care. They suggested that if people still want anonymity, they should make an alternate account in these services - like Gawker is THAT important? How about if they still want users, they should still allow local logins...

I don't play many FPSes. I'm not into many mech games. This looks like one to watch though. I got a sort of Shogo/Armored Core feel from the videos I've seen. I also love the idea of "kitbashing" the levels, where they take a bunch of relatively primitive assets and reuse them creatively to build things instead of having a super high poly hi-res textured model for every little piece of background minutae. Efficiency is great.

The king of absurdist stream of consciousness writing was Tim Rogers... I think editing was a taboo to him or something. He'd just go on about how much smarter he is than everyone else and why other people are shitty, then meander through 2 dozen topics until he hit (or broke) the article size limit. For such a smart guy, I've never seen him write something that could let him pass a junior high writing class. Bash is lazy though - it seems he declined at some point, but the typos got really grating, I agree. It seems he uses the comments as a spell checker. I hope his books have a stricter editor than that!

I agree with Dean's burger analogy for a lot of DLC. Not all - GTA4's new episodes were like a whole new meal. Things I've read about Dragon Age (or the sequel?) and Hyperdimension Neptunia sound like you get the burger with a bite already taken out. Soundtracks I have no problem with buying separately, though I've pirated some and ripped others (Jet Set Radio is interesting - they're cut into pieces, so you can make custom looped extended versions... Like many, Ragnarok Online is just MP3s inside the main data file.) Deathsmiles L.E. made me want the soundtrack, and claimed to include it, but it was a bunch of remixes so I went and downloaded the real one that I paid for... I was pleasantly surprised to learn I got the soundtracks with Humble Indie Bundle 4 - I've been listening to Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV lately. I've always liked game OSTs though - Einhander, arcade and home versions of Tekken 3, and the Ridge Racer series are some of my favourites. I don't normally buy game soundtracks though. Maybe it's because I'm old enough to remember when "sound test mode" used to be a standard feature in the early to mid 90s. I'm glad Touhou games still include this, even with track commentary. (Actually, Touhou's kind of a freak as game cultrures go, but I've even gone out of my way to import fanmade arrangements by groups like Syrufit, Poplica, Silver Forest, SOUND HOLIC, and Hobby Atelier Carrot Wine. That's a weird case though in that it couldn't be DLC - the original creator isn't involved with them!) But it does make sense to me that soundtracks would be an extra thing. It's much more convenient than leaving the game running in the background to listen to it, or trying to capture it without sound effects while it plays. Some, like Castlevania, even get special arranged soundtracks with real instruments - though that's less of a special thing in the last few generations of console since we can have anything as a soundtrack now. If I bought the OST for something like Journey, I'd expect it to be exactly as in the game.

Because Luke beat him to it, and because he already has? I don't get the hate for this guy... to me, he's what made Kotaku more than a game news site. Other than that, it's what, night notes? Stories about game-related crime? He just presents the natural (in Japan...) overlap between games and other visual media in general otaku culture.

Yes. To me that says they will relax, not end their DRM practices, once no one pirates their games. So if someone pirates them, they'll still be jerks.

I could have sworn a lot of guys on TV used "mum" too. I've heard it so much (I thought?!) that it's not even something I think of anymore.

It's the end of the week. Time to get mellowwwwww http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9xy8wd7Ecw

You have no idea what effort it takes to... *sigh, here we go...* to type "An" on this keyboard! Whew... I need a break after that...

I also got Cogs in a recent bundle. Wasn't into Canabalt... Zen Bound I've tried on iOS, but was left kind of nonplussed. But I also don't have anything with Android and wasn't interested enough to get either Droid bundle on Windows... ah well, hit some, miss some. HIB 4 was awesome - I'm still playing with it and I haven't even dug into And Yet It Moves or Shank yet.

About as long as they've existed, actually. Late 1990s, I'd guess. My Motorola StarTAC couldn't do tones. A few early phones allowed you to input the ringtones manually into an editor. On my Nokia 5165, the only publicized way to set a custom ringtone was to order one and have it texted to me, though I found a loophole to download them online and send them by reencoding them with a third party app, encoding them as a special SMS message, packetize them into messages of a certain size, then intercept the messages and copy and paste the pieces into a webpage form that let me send text messages to myself. My Nokia 3220 also typically depended on ordering ringtones for cash, though I was able to load custom MIDI onto it with a $20 knockoff of a $70 adapter cable that most people wouldn't even know about. My Moto KRZR K1 connected to a PC with a USB cable! ...but the only way to get custom tones onto it without buying them was to load special phone hacking software, specially prepare the ringtone files, and replace the ones that were "baked in" - resulting in randomly-named custom tones. Actually, my iPhone 3GS is the first phone I've ever owned that has a legitimate method for loading user-made tones without esoteric adapter cables and hacks.

That's not really arguing against my point - you pretty much never find something that is purely good or purely evil. I'm just saying that something like this can be abused, and the way things have gone in industries like software and telecom, that's not as unlikely as it seems. I'm not talking about getting a cheap rental TV or something instead of widely available fully owned models. I'm talking about the former becoming the new standard, so avoiding it would be like trying to buy a cell phone without a camera, a game console with a homebrew programming kit built in, or a AAA video game that you really do completely own when you pay for it. I agree it sounds like a foil hat conspiracy theory - but like I've said, so did the idea of having to pay for a ringtone or wallpaper for a device, the idea that a single player game would ever require an Internet connection just to start, needing to pay money for the secondary costumes in a fighting game and other overzealous DLC, etc. These things have forced me to reconsider what is possible or likely and the speed at which consumer rights can be waylaid without much resistance to speak of. [edit: I wouldn't even assume it's DRM because it's Sony - they've been pretty permissive next to the other companies and the one major instance people tend to remember was a turnkey third-party solution bought by a company that was only half Sony to begin with. They're probably not planning much of anything sinister at this point, but when there's an opportunity to gain ground from consumers, someone always seems to be there to take it.]

Just as Ethan says - it doesn't seem like such a bad thing. People could practically accept it now for its convenience. But in time, if the infrastructure is there for such control, how can they not use it for other things? It's the kind of scope creep that led to putting rootkits on audio CDs (which isn't as much a Sony thing as many say, but regardless someone tried it.) "If you can listen to CDs on computers and computers can do anything you tell them to, how could we not tell them to not copy CDs?" Well, if you can selectively remote control which devices get power, then how can you justify letting people keep using it if they haven't paid some bill or another? Not paying the TV tax? I guess you don't use the TV then - *snip*. I could also be less optimistic since where I live, people will occasionally freeze to death at home and few enough companies to count on one hand control cellular, landline, television and Internet networks and are able to freely collude to charge some of the highest rates in the world for mediocre service and still become the most profitable companies in the whole country while foreign competitors are locked out or hobbled. All it'd take for something like this to be abused here is a nod from one of the regulatory board members who used to work for big industry and they could flout any consumer protection rules they like. But... I've made my point so I'll leave it at that. I know it sounds ridiculous, but so do a huge number of backward leaps for consumers I've seen in the last decade. I hope the optimists are right on this one! There is also, after all, a decent chance that this will never leave the lab anyway, as with most new tech ideas.

Someone reports you to a bill collector, they download a copy of your home management key from an escrow agent - like a utility company (who would have it so they could cut power for non-paying customers without killing ovens and furnaces for instance) - and then non-essential devices are cut off until you resolve the issue with them. I think it's a great idea for public outlets - though that seems like such a small niche. Maybe electric car charging stations, though that can be done without smart device authentication already. The potential for abuse is sky high though and looking at the last 10 years of tech, it's hard to imagine it wouldn't be abused. Of course it wouldn't happen tomorrow, but in a decade I could see it being a requirement for newer, higher end goods. It's as unthinkable as a game system that doesn't load physical media.

Sony doesn't forcibly install anything - but they would kick you off their game network if you don't agree to remove features you paid for from your console. You're perfectly free to refuse the offer, but if you want continued service, you comply. To put this in homes, they'd only need to make a wall plug adapter with RFID and maybe Wi-fi, then come up with some novel use that isn't DRM, like usage logging. I know it sounds ridiculous now, but after seeing the success of things that used to be free becoming DLC, DRM that requires an Internet connection for single-player games, or even full-price disc-based games that only come with a handful of activations, I've learned to be more pessimistic because when it comes to consumer exploitation, anything is possible. At one time I thought people would never pay money for phone ringtones. After that, I thought they'd never pay for phone wallpaper - why would you? They did. I can see a future where devices check with their manufacturer over the Internet before they'll power up - why not - it's the same thing people have been accepting in software for years and that also sounds crazy. There's nothing consumers won't put up with.

I usually love Sony, but We've already seen a lot of software go from something you buy, to something you license usage of, to a service you license as you use it (buy a month, buy 100 plays, buy 100 game coins, etc) - how long before household appliances become something you subscribe to annually? Yes, market competition should make this kind of thing irrelevant, but I've seen so much unchecked collusion I'm not optimistic - bring this in as a safety feature, or offer rebates for making your outlets "smart and eco friendly" then throw in some value-added thing like TV set social networking and bam - you're subscribing to your TV set itself... (...or "sorry, we've detected previously that this game console has been modified and in accordance with our user agreement, it will no longer receive electricity.")