Browsing Posts in Games
Earlier this year, Sony had its Playstation Network (PSN) hacked and it was down for more than a month. Several users brought a class-action lawsuit against Sony and, now, Sony is fighting back. The PSN now has a mandatory upgrade for all users in which part of the TOS forces the user to give up their rights to ever suing Sony again. Sony has gone so far as to suggest that anyone refusing to upgrade will be banned from PSN.
This is Sony’s blatant attempt to remove any responsibility on their part if or when their servers are hacked again. Considering the fact that not only were user names and passwords compromised, but so were credit cards and personal information of its PSN members, Sony should not be allowed to modify its user agreement to get out of paying any legal damages. Unfortunately, it appears that the Supreme Court might side with Sony on this one as they have ruled that a company could force you into, at the very least, arbitration. Note that Canada may already have a law on the books making Section 15 of the new EULA from Sony illegal.
What most users don’t know is that there may be an option to opt out.
It is, however, possible to opt out of the agreement within the next 30 days.
Gamers will now have to try to resolve any legal issues with an arbitrator picked by Sony, before being able to file a lawsuit.
Section 15 of the new EULA describes how this can happen.
RIGHT TO OPT OUT OF BINDING ARBITRATION AND CLASS ACTION WAIVER WITHIN 30 DAYS. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE BOUND BY THE BINDING ARBITRATION AND CLASS ACTION WAIVER IN THIS SECTION 15, YOU MUST NOTIFY SNEI IN WRITING WITHIN 30 DAYS OF THE DATE THAT YOU ACCEPT THIS AGREEMENT. YOUR WRITTEN NOTIFICATION MUST BE MAILED TO 6080 CENTER DRIVE, 10 TH FLOOR, LOS ANGELES, CA 90045, ATTN: LEGAL DEPARTMENT/ARBITRATION AND MUST INCLUDE: (1) YOUR NAME, (2) YOUR ADDRESS, (3) YOUR PSN ACCOUNT NUMBER, IF YOU HAVE ONE, AND (4) A CLEAR STATEMENT THAT YOU DO NOT WISH TO RESOLVE DISPUTES WITH ANY SONY ENTITY THROUGH ARBITRATION.
Make sure you remember to write to them via snail mail and keep a copy of your tracking number and receipt for the letter. You can view Section 15 here [pdf] . You can fill out a form letter here.
I understand that video game publishers do not like the used game market. This is mostly due to the fact that they do not get any revenue from said sales. I have never understood why this could not happen as game retailers know when they’ve sold a used copy and could easily ship a percentage of the sale off to the publisher. Capcom, however, has taken a step to try to kill the used game market, which will, eventually, drive more people into piracy.
It’s been confirmed that Resident Evil: Mercenaries 3D for the Nintendo 3DS is a game that once finished, cannot be reset for complete replay. According to both the U.S. and U.K. game’s instruction manual “saved data on this software cannot be reset.”
Basically what Capcom has done is make Mercenaries 3D a one-time play affair. Once you’ve unlocked all the goodies and played the entire game, you will not be able to erase the game’s save data and start fresh as if it were a new copy.
By doing this, Capcom has made it so that you cannot even loan the game to a friend or a relative as well as making the game useless to yourself should you want to play it again. How many times have you played a game through more than once? Now, think about the fact that, with Capcom’s strategy, you have to pay for the game again each time you want to replay it.
By acting the way they are, Capcom is losing sales and preventing gamers from playing games that they should own. Any sort of DRM prevents full functionality of a game. This results in either gamers never purchasing a game or heading down the piracy route so they can make their game fully functional. If this is the future of gaming, there are going to be a lot less sales of games in the future.
Anyone who has been to my house has seen my game collection. Yes, I replay many of them. As a matter of fact, I’m on my third time round of the original Tomb Raider. In Metal Gear Solid there is a scenario that, if you submit to Revolver Ocelot’s torture, Otacon will give you his stealth camouflage at the end of the game and you could then replay it while invisible. If I can’t replay them, I’m not buying them.
Sony has mad the news over the last 4-5 weeks for all the wrong reasons. If you would like to see the detailed list of how many times they’ve been hacked, just head over to Absolute Sownage and read all about it.
The most disgusting part of all this is that Sony stored the passwords of its users in plain text. It’s absolutely pathetic that a corporation as big as Sony can’t even get the basics of security right.
the latest hack was performed using SQL injection: a rudimentary technique that depends on improper handling of website URLs. Being susceptible to SQL injection is embarrassing enough—techniques to prevent it are well-known, and easy to apply to any database-driven website—but what makes this hack even worse is the data that has been compromised.
The fact that anyone who can read a database can read the plain text passwords is just the tip of the iceberg. Sony has no excuse for not fixing or patching their systems to prevent well-known SQL injections.
Sony customers are also going to suffer. Many reuse passwords on other sites and many of Sony’s compromised accounts included real name, address, and phone number. Until people take security seriously on the individual and corporate sides, things will only get worse.
It also gives another reason for me to stay away from online gaming and to continue to use multiple passwords online.
If you’re a gamer in Vietnam, you’re no longer allowed to play games online between 10pm and 8am. Vietnam’s Ministry of Information and Communication asked ISPs to block access for online gaming during this time in an effort to curb side effects from online gaming.
“Provincial departments of information and communication will inspect on-line games activities nationwide and deal with organisations that violate regulations by cancelling their services,” said the ministry’s Deputy Minister Le Nam Thang.
Some on-line game service providers like VTC Intercom and Asiasoft said that the (internet access block) measure reduced entertainment access to adults who have paid a lot for internet access.
They also said it created difficulties for the maintenance of on-line games.
Officials at the Department of Education also complain that students’ education is affected by spending too much time online.
The department’s random checks on 370,390 students from over 1,120 schools showed that more than 82 per cent go to internet gaming shops from one to six times per week to play online games. Of these, nearly 14 per cent can not help entering internet gaming shops eight times per week and 3.4 per cent admit to going more than ten times per week.
Most players spend two or three hours in the shops each time. Some 22,110 students, or 5.9 per cent of the total, spend between four and seven hours each time and 1,745 players, counting for 0.5 per cent, admit they can play non-stop for eight to ten hours on each occasion, the survey said.
Young players prefer playing online games during school time, especially during the noon break time. About 7.9 per cent of players usually play after 10pm.
“Online games and their harmful effects are considered social evil at schools,” Prof Van Nhu Cuong, headmaster of Luong The Vinh Private High School said.
“It’s hard to ban students from playing while internet gaming shops are booming. It’s high time we banned all games with violent or sexual content,” Cuong said.
As in America, instead of parents doing the job of parenting, it’s just easier to censor everything instead. If parents were actually paying attention to their children, a ban from 10pm would not be necessary as the students would be home studying or in bed.
According to the city schools’ estimates, 566 of the 3,874 gaming shops located within 200 metres of schools were still operating despite the recent ban.
Duong Van Ba, deputy director of the ministry’s Student Affairs Department, said the control of online games was not easy, especially in big cities as there were no regulations stipulating which kinds of games were allowed to be published.
While it might be a good idea to regulate the amount of time that children spend on the internet, this blanket rule affects everyone. If you work twelve hours and have the next day off, too bad. You can no longer play your games online because the ban covers a huge swath of the population without taking into account why people are playing.
What if you work the night shift and have the night off? You can’t play games either because the Vietnamese government is convinced that people who play during these hours are addicts and they must be stopped. What if you’re retired and your hobby is online gaming?
Make all the justifications you want, this isn’t about concern over people being addicted to online gaming, students spending time gaming instead of studying or any other excuse the government comes up with, it’s about control. The problem is that people can only be controlled for so long and the internet can’t be controlled. If the Vietnamese government stopped to think for a moment, they would realize that a citizenry who would rather spend all their time online playing games rather than being outside is one that is more likely to be compliant to what the government chooses to do. If you’d rather be gaming, you don’t really care what the government does.
Proxies and VPNs will, as usual, provide the means around any such government blocks. The rest of the population will simply play their games first, then, at 10pm, do their homework.
