Developers don't want to show gameplay at E3 anymore - <AUTHOR> https://www.vg247.com/2019/06/13/e3-gameplay-trailers/ <comment><USER4> Gabe Newell talked about this kind of stuff years ago. People are tired of big publishers promising the world pre-release, then putting out an unfinished product that is nowhere near the quality of what was advertised. Here's a snippet of an interview he did a while back:

You have to stop thinking that you're in charge and start thinking that you're having a dance. We used to think we're smart [...] but nobody is smarter than the internet. [...] One of the things we learned pretty early on is 'Don't ever, ever try to lie to the internet - because they will catch you. They will de-construct your spin. They will remember everything you ever say for eternity.'

You can see really old school companies really struggle with that. They think they can still be in control of the message. [...] So yeah, the internet (in aggregate) is scary smart. The sooner people accept that and start to trust that that's the case, the better they're gonna be in interacting with them.

<comment><USER5> "They will remember everything you ever say for eternity.'

Maybe. But outrage that results in meaningful action lasts a few months at most. The first person shooter industry is fascinating to me. Somehow Call of Duty is still extremely popular and commercially successful series year after year despite continued management by the exact same studios that repeat the exact same algorithm:

1\. Release re-skinned game each year with huge promises of new and original content to come

2\. Underdeliver on said promises and lock remaining ones behind micro- transactions, loot boxes, and DLC

3\. Abandon game 6-12 months in to begin preparation for the next iteration of the game after raking in millions on suckers

4\. Repeat

You'll see thousands of people swearing they'll never pay another $60 + add- ons for a CoD game ever again and yet somehow the cycle continues year after year.

There are numerous other video game series (not just in the FPS genre) that follow the same pattern. Some eventually get run into the ground, but only after a very slow and profitable death. People have short attention spans. You might remember touching a flame, but the feeling of pain quickly fades.

<comment><USER6> I don't think that's the point of the quote. If you said 5 years ago that the game was going to include a talking cube, the internet is going to remember that and when you publish is going to expect there to be a talking cube (or accuse you of breaking your promise). The outrage only lasts for a short period of time, but it can be based on promises said ages ago that without the internet would have been long forgotten.

<comment><USER7> Often that's not what happens. Devs say "Oh, hey, talking cubes are cool, maybe we will integrate one" people will accuse them of breaking their promise (which is nonsensical) if they don't include a talking cube.

But this doesn't happen in isolation. It's likely that people who dig up that "promise" had an axe to grind anyway, so it's about scoring points based on spin and lies.

<comment><USER8> Can you name any large controversies around something as small as that? As I understood it the large ones like No Man's Sky or Anthem even doctored gameplay footage during their presentations in addition to promising the moon and more. However when it was just "We might do this", then almost nobody blames them, a small minority might be angry or upset, but most don't care and many steps in to defend the devs in those cases.

<comment><USER7> The problem is that even something like "we are doing that" is seen as a promise which it isn't. It's just a description of what they are doing.

Even no man's sky was like 90% toxic exaggerated bullshit, 10% truth.

<comment><USER9> I think No Man's Sky went the wrong way when they started to promise whatever fans were begging them to promise...

If they had stuck with their seemly original plan, that was make a modern copy of the game Noctis, with no base building and a stronger focus on exploration of precedural worlds... things would have went better.

As soon they tried to mix it with minecraft they introduced incompatible elements on the game and ruined it, they made stuff they already had not work, and promised stuff that in the new game they were making made no sense.

I didn't played the current heavily patched version, but read about it, seemly the game shifted genre completely and is nothing like the original intention.

Meanwhile I wait for someone to make a cool noctis clone... or maybe have the original author finish Noctis 5.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I work for a AAA studio.

I even work(ed) on a game that was actually embroiled in a scandal regarding E3.

I can probably shed a little insight as to why:

1) Once you show gameplay footage, you've promised. This isn't necessarily the worst thing in the world but a lot of the time the "promise" is a mega polished version of what you want to show, it's on rails, it's going to show all the best features of the engine, you control the pacing etc. Even if those things make it into the game (as, my game actually was in 100% parity graphically, but we ran out of budget for animations) then people /perceive/ it worse, regardless.

2) what is shown isn't actually a game- even if it looks like one. It's a prototype. And there's many reasons that the final product has to be trimmed down. Either it's required because the budget goes towards something else (such as smarter NPCs, or better animations) or it wasn't ever possible to produce what was shown due to things that were not known at the time of creating the demo or footage. The fact is simply that you're showing something that may not be able to exist. So that is in direct violation of my first point.

3) we got burned the last console generation, we thought the machines were going to be at least twice as powerful as they ended up being. (You May notice that my publishers "downgrade" scandal happened post-E3:2013). What we had prepared was geared towards significantly more powerful hardware. (So, number of props on screen can't be as high, number of light sources can't be as high, issues with streaming "pop-in") My publisher won't make this mistake again and with a new console generation around the corner it doesn't makes sense to underpromise (and use the current gen, which our competitors may not have done this E3) or overpromise, and guess what the next console gen will have.

As an aside: I know it's a trope that "console gaming holds gaming back", and there's a grain of truth there, but I would caution allowing developers to use as much hardware as they can, our work machines have obscene hardware (latest high end Xeon with 64/128g Ram and a gtx2070 is common), if we were not optimising for a limited platform then pc would suffer too, I just don't know how much it is currently limited.

<comment><USER11> I really enjoy the infinite entertainment and presentation format that consoles provide, but I really question their utility next generation

and lol no PC gamers aren't a part of that equation whatsoever

I feel like the potential console gaming crowd is so heavily diluted towards mobile and casual formats. any of the good VR titles are also running in wireless mobile formats with good enough graphics

I hope there is a differentiating quality to make the 'set top box' format a staple in the 2020s instead of "just" better graphics. I feel like it is necessary

<comment><USER12> I used to be a PC gamer, but switched to consoles in recent years because I can spend a few hundred $ and have a machine that's guaranteed to run a large lineup of games at acceptable performance (sure, it won't be as good as a high-end PC, but the console also cost a fraction of what a high-end PC cost), and, has excellent exclusives (Bloodborne alone made buying a PS4 worth it for me). I will probably buy a PS5 for the same reason: laziness/convenience, exclusives, still costs less than a gaming PC (people often say its not true, but every time I price a passable gaming PC, it works out higher than the few hundred that a console costs, especially if you buy near console release and not when the hardware is a few years older)

<comment><USER13> With PC the hardware is more expensive but your investment can last longer and adapt with newer GPUs.

Also you are not locked into generations and such. I own a PS4 and I can't play my PS3 games for example unless I buy the "remastered" versions like Wipeout Omega Collection. Don't know if it's the same in the Xbox world. I know Sony has claimed that the PS5 will be backwards compatible with PS4 games at least. With a PC this is a non issue. I can still play Half Life 2 on any PC and it is a 15 year old game from the PS2 era.

The other issue is game prices. With PC you get huge discounts. It's common these days to find 50% discounts on a 3 year old AAA game during Steam sales, sometimes even 75%. The Sony Store never gets great discounts, except on very old or not so great games.

IMO the only clear advantage of console gaming is that it's "plug and play".

<comment><USER14> Xbox has been trying its best to move to the "PC model" where they don't break past games if they can avoid it in a generation change. The Xbox One at this point has a giant library of Backwards Compatible downloads for Xbox (OG) and Xbox 360 games, and the promise for the next generation (Project Scarlett) is that 100% of the games that run on the Xbox One will run on it.

Admittedly, the Xbox One still has a number of games that instead of showing up in the Backwards Compatibility library, encouraged repurchases for "Remastered" versions. Microsoft left that as a per-game decision to support BC or not, and whether or not to release a "Remastered" version. In some cases, Microsoft worked with the Publishers to help upgrade would-be BC owners to "Remastered" versions for cheap or for free (though often only through time limited deals and sales, so obviously not all owners benefitted in every case). Arguably one of the benefits in the case of some of the "Remastered" versions has been that publishers were given the chance to "upgrade" from custom ARM builds for the 360 to nearly the exact same x64 builds they run on Windows, further moving more of the library directly (and literally) to the "PC model".

Microsoft has a lot of good reasons to want the Xbox and PC to be friends and to increasingly apply the PC model to the Xbox. (Xbox Play Anywhere where you can buy a game once and play it both on PC and Xbox, often with cross-play between the platforms, is magical.)

The Xbox Store / Microsoft Store usually has good deals on par with Steam rotating every week, with the usual big sales around the holidays. They also generally have bonus discounts for gamers with Xbox Live Gold and/or Xbox Game Pass subscriptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yes the gaming community can be exceedingly toxic at times, but in this case I'd say that developers and publishers did this to themselves.

Biggest case-in-point since Watch Dogs: Anthem.

Here's the E3 reveal: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL5GSfs9fi4&t=330s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL5GSfs9fi4&t=330s).

We have since learned[1], after the disastrous launch of this game, that this video was showing _even the dev team_ what the game was supposed to be about. This game did not even exist yet as an official entity until after E3 2017 (heck, it was going to be called "Beyond" until the week-ish before E3), and then the team had just over a year to build and launch it, with predictable results.

[1] [https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went- wrong-1833731964](https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went- wrong-1833731964)

<comment><USER16> Is this the same Anthem that's plastered in ads all over Origin? I thought it was just meant to be EA's knock-off version of Fortnite/PUBG? It actually looks like it would be kind of cool as a single player game, I wonder why they went through the effort to make it multi if they only had a year to build?

<comment><USER17> Anthem was supposed to be a destiny 2 killer (shoot, loot), instead it's become a sad joke. The Kotaku article does a good job explaining why.

<comment><USER18> I thought Destiny 2 was already dead? It seems it still has it's following, although I always thought Warframe was the leader of shooter looters, even though these aren't my type of games.

<comment><USER19> I'm yet to see a game that's as smooth and polished as Warframe. I've tried like 10 and I'm amazed how such a small studio like DE basically raised the bar for everybody else.

<comment><USER20> But the grind is utterly soulless. I understand the company wants to make money, but I shouldn't have to put in 40 hours a week to make any progress

<comment><USER19> That is sadly true. My wife and I spent 3 months in a haze last year while starting from scratch and it was fun but it eventually gets to you.

Truthfully though, I'm not bothered. I play very scarcely in the last 9-10 months (not only Warframe bit in general) and only when I'm in the mood. If I miss out on progress then oh well, much worse things can happen. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So the gaming community reiterated loudly and clearly that it doesn't like being lied to with "gameplay" demos crafted specifically for E3 that share no code with the actual game being developed (looking at you, Halo 2), and the dev's takeaway was "Don't show them any gameplay."

I would hope we could collectively rally against this sort of behavior by refusing to buy such games that refuse to preview any actual gameplay. But I doubt that will work, given that Dead Island sold five million copies[0], based off what I can only assume was due to enamor with the trailer.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Island#Sales](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Island#Sales)

<comment><USER22> In software development, 1.0 is the version number you assign to what's ready at the end of the last day you are permitted to continue working on your release.

Before online gaming, games were required to deliver a 1.0 and had no further chance to patch or improve it. They would do so in silence — like Nintendo does — and essentially work for years on things that no one even knew existed until they released their 1.0 gold master and began producing marketing material from it.

Nintendo continues to follow this policy today — we get demos when they've finalized the game, and not before — and Nintendo refuses to market games until they've finished them, so we get years of "will there ever be another Super Smash Bros" and "OMG TELL US WHAT'S COMING" which they silently ignore.

Now you declare openly that game developers who tell us what's coming while it's not yet finished will be punished if:

1) What's not yet finished doesn't match what's finished on 1.0 day in any way that is personally meaningful to you and/or anyone;

and/or,

2) What's announced is announced only with a complete finished 1.0 product from which marketing materials are exclusively developed and provided immediately upon announcement.

So, you're championing the Nintendo model, which is fine — we will hear nothing about any upcoming games until they're ready to be released, and if that means years of silence from the owners of properties such as Halo, GTA, Pokemon, and so on — then that's _completely acceptable_ and we should expect to hear no complaint from the gaming community as a result.

I am not led to believe by your response that "we will hear no complaint" is the outcome that will occur if and when the entire gaming industry complies with your demands by stopping all pre-release announcements altogether, which leaves me wondering: How, precisely, do you expect a valid outcome to occur from your requirements that both satisfies your demands without triggering complaint over the lack of updates over time from studios who are busy complying?

EDIT: To pre-address the most obvious reply — "they should only demo what's done" — I guarantee that nothing is ever done until the final day of development, as critical features can be cut literally hours before gold master if there's an undiscovered flaw that QA discovers at the last minute — so since "nothing" is ever done until the final 1.0 release, "they should only demo nothing until the final 1.0 release is done", and we're back to the above question.

<comment><USER23> "Lie to us" and "don't mention the game until it's done" are not the only two options. There's plenty of middle ground, including "show us a cutscene video that is obviously a cutscene video" like Cyberpunk 2077 did. Don't say "this is actual gameplay" if it's not actual gameplay. Don't show videos simulating actual gameplay if it's not actual gameplay. Don't have people on stage mimicking actual gameplay while a video plays that is not actual gameplay.

"Don't lie" is a _very_ low bar, and there is a lot of room to exist above it.

<comment><USER24> Right, but what can easily happen is you show gameplay footage at E3 with good intentions, then the game changes.

Maybe, things change because the mechanics proved to hard to learn.

Maybe, things change because to fit X number of characters on screen in level Y, you had to downgrade the main character visuals.

Either way... Is that a lie?

In the eyes of most developers no, it's just part of development.

In the eyes of consumers...yes?

<comment><USER25> Changing gameplay between the E3 demo and the final release isn't the problem, it's when the difference between the preview gameplay is vastly better quality than the final. In the 12-24 intervening months one would expect a project to improve in quality and focus, not to devolve.

It's the curated experience intended to oversell the state of the the current offering (i.e. pre-release) that raises gamers' ire.

<comment><USER26> Have you worked on a product that has had to show a vertical slice 2 years before the product is released? I've worked on a few e3/e3-like demos for games and there's a whole bunch of issues. It's not always quality - <USER2> that were considered "easy" or "we can solve that later" can come back and bite you. Things that are fun in a vertical slice demo might not actually be engaging for more than 15 minutes or so(or an hour, or three). It can be _very_ difficult to extract a 10 minute piece of gameplay that you have some context for to show people even if you have the entire game made, which means you might have to out in some temporary "features" (add a power/remove a pathway) to make the experience fit. All or these changes can have a butterfly effect. Adding X to simplify a demo can make Y seem more important than you want it to which means Z is now redundant, but you've already spoken about Z.

There had to be done realisation that things change in games over a 2 year period, (heck, things change massively in games over a 2 week period in some games) and some acceptance of that fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I would trace it to a few factors; most important is the rise of the influencer advertising strategy.

It is vastly cheaper to simply pay streamers to hype up your game on Twitch or youtube than it is to give an honest, sober demo live on an E3 stage. The audience at these press events has shifted from enthusiast reporters/critics to hyperventilating influencer personalities. It was so bad this year that they were obnoxiously screaming and interrupting the presenters every few seconds to the point where the people on stage were losing their train of thought.

The other aspect is that putting together a demo takes time out of development. Almost every game shown this year had a release date of either Fall 2019 or Spring 2020. That means they're either on crunch or ramping up for it and can't afford to set aside a few months to make a vertical slice for E3. This is partly due to the end of this console generation with new hardware coming next holiday season.

The longer term trend is that marketing has caught on to the irrelevance of E3. They can run their own Nintendo Direct style live stream whenever they want to speak to their audience and the press will disseminate that info to the wider community.

You're even seeing companies like EA experiment with dropping a new title with zero advance notice as they did with Apex Legends (their take on battle royale, from the Titanfall developers). They just had an influencer preview event the week before and dumped it to the public with pretty wild success.

</comment><comment><USER28> The average build for a AAA game coming out in 2020 is barely in playable shape and certainly not ready to be shown at E3. Making one polished enough to show off is both time consuming and not representative of the final product. I really wish people were more open to seeing blocked out levels and unpolished animations to have an idea of where these projects are going but unfortunately even the most pristine presentations get picked apart online so I don't think that's happening anytime soon.

<comment><USER29> That's more or less what Steam Greenlight was and one reason why I love it even if it goes by a different name now. I can pick up something interesting, play around with it, and then catch up on it's progress over years.

I've done this with Subnautica, Starbound, Rimworld, and The Long Dark. I don't regret going on a journey with the developers at all.

<comment><USER30> Yes, Steam Greenlight (whatever it's called these days) is a cute idea, but for every gem like the games you mention, there are hundreds if not thousands of crap, minimal effort "games", many of them in a barely working state, which are released there just to make a quick buck or two, either via direct sales, or via the Steam card sales.

<comment><USER31> Which is also why the Steam curation function is an absolute boon. Let influencers I know trawl through the ocean of games and show me what is good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> >where at times developers appeared afraid of their audience

Good. The amount of abuse the gaming industry has heaped upon consumers the past ten years is almost beyond belief. Microtransactions. Day-1 DLC. Season Passes that don't include all the DLC. So many versions of games you need a literal spreadsheet to keep track of how to get what feature. Broken piles of shit that rely on a "90-day roadmap" to tell us when they'll be playable. Using gambling mechanics to make children rob their parents to pay for loot boxes. The list is endless. Every second game dev could have night terrors for the next decade and it still wouldn't make up for how they have mutilated their own art form in the pursuit of unlimited profit. Almost every major games publisher, from EA to Activision-Blizzard to Ubisoft to Warner Brothers has behaved absolutely reprehensibly and in a just world would be burned to the ground by an angry mob.

<comment><USER33> >Good. The amount of abuse the gaming industry has heaped upon consumers the past ten years is almost beyond belief.

Not to mention how they chew up and spit out the people making the games.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's a mystery to me how the gaming industry exists in its current form. I subscribe to Humble Monthly and occasionally buy a Humble Bundle. This all costs me $20-$30/mo and I get my hands on enough good games to last me a lifetime. I very occasionally will buy a cool looking new indie game, usually for $30 or less, when they come out. In general if a game looks like it has some interesting/novel gameplay I'll give it a shot. Most of them come from small indie developers, aren't super well known, and will run just fine on a 7 year old gaming laptop.

Meanwhile there is this enormous multi-billion dollar world of dozens of AAA publisher FPS titles that all look basically the same. People apparently line up in droves to pay $60 for these titles and the publishers are now so confident about their revenue stream that they don't want to release gameplay footage before they sell you the game? The #1 thing I do before buying a game or installing one I already own (since I own hundreds, thanks to Humble) is look at gameplay videos on Youtube. No gameplay video = not touching it.

What insane alien planet is this? It's certainly not the Earth in the dimension I live on, and it sounds much lamer.

<comment><USER35> Setting aside the Skinner Box aspect of the gaming industry for a moment, I think you're missing the social dimension of gaming.

A lot (if not most) of these new AAA games that are coming out have a strong social aspect. The game is a way to hang out with friends, the same way going to see a movie in the theaters might be, or checking out a new restaurant, or trying a new board game, etc. The novelty of the new game helps to decorate the shared experience.

<comment><USER36> IE - marketing works, especially to generate hype and word of mouth.

<comment><USER33> Partially that, but as an example of the social aspect of video games: my college friends and I have scattered across the country for work and relationships. The cheapest way for us to stay in touch is a weekly video game night. We play old stuff, emulator stuff, new stuff we all like, all on PC connected over Discord for voice and occasionally video chat. It is our primary way of socializing with our friend group, often digressing from the video game we're playing into what is going on in our lives.

It's much cheaper than plane tickets, we can all drink the booze we like and have whatever dinner we want, all for the low price of one $60 game a quarter, at most.

<comment><USER19> I get you fully, but none of that requires a modern $60 - $150 AAA game.

<comment><USER33> Agreed. I even said as much in my comment. We get a lot of games on sale from Steam and GOG for less than $20, often less than $10.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The problem is publishers are not managing expectations. If you're showing gameplay footage of a product that is still a year out or more in development, you had better follow up with new trailer releases as major elements of the game change. Look to [Hideo] Kojima Productions' Death Stranding for an example of hype tempered with gameplay footage that is released in drips and drabs as development of the game progresses. You can get a realistic sense of how the game will play.

</comment><comment><USER38> The corresponding drawback of trying to reap the business benefits preorder and hype-wise, of an overly ambitious or misleading (intentionally or otherwise) vertical slide demo or trailer is the backlash and loss of consumer trust when you under-deliver or cut back.

It can often be really hard to make a demo or trailer that isn't a mess without polishing it as much as possible. Development is messy. But sometimes you really can say "that's a lie" or "no, it [game feature] won't do that" and those ones beleaguer the benefit of the doubt.

It's a tough problem.

</comment><comment><USER39> Worst kind of lie is a lie, mixed with true facts: even if we believe Ubisoft that they didn't downgrade quality, this article should not put The Witcher 3 as an example - there's even official patch to restore downgraded quality, and official explanation "we just tried to make game looking the same on consoles and PC".

Gamers community trained to don't trust publishers - this article trying to say "because gamers are too stupid and suspicious", but in reality, as usually, because publishers lie too often.

<comment><USER40> Ubisoft didn't say that they didn't downgrade quality, they said "the notion we would actively downgrade quality is contrary to everything we've set out to achieve"

Sometimes you set out to achieve something and you fail, ending up with something that's contrary to what you set out to achieve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Avoiding the topic at hand, which it sounds like gamers brought on themselves, I've got to say that that Doom screenshot brought back some memories.

I remember way back whenever, being excited to pick up a copy of Doom 3 for my new top-end system to show off what it could do. And being amazed that Id had spent so much time and effort to build this incredible engine to show effects that you couldn't ever actually see.

Because they'd chose a color palette consisting of only Black, Dark Grey and Dark Brown, and set the game in the dark.

It's nice to see they haven't backed down from their stance that "Nobody should be able to see anything in our games". In the linked screenshot, the entire world is literally _on fire_ and the things standing in front of you are still too dimly lit to see.

And they're Black, Dark Grey and Dark Brown.

<comment><USER42> Doom 2016 was only dark enough to be atmospheric. Important things like incoming fire are bright and loud.

The muted backgrounds and bright targets are needed though. Unlike Doom 3, Doom 4 and now 5 are so fast paced you'd have a bad time if the whole game looked like a pride parade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > _In truth, gameplay demos at events like E3 are subject to change. They're > often built as vertical slices – self-contained examples of what a sequence > will look like once every feature and asset in the game has reached its > highest level of polish. They can help studios accurately schedule the rest > of development._

Yeah, but they never deliver. They show a carefully remastered video and then they release a game with a worse quality.

It's not about what could an E3 demo be used for. It's not a corporate event. Show us gameplay. It's a consumer show.

</comment><comment><USER43> This has been going on for at least 15 years. Here's a 2005 penny arcade comic calling it out

[https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/12](https://www.penny- arcade.com/comic/2005/09/12)

<comment><USER44> It's kind of a running joke. Any "in-game" footage shown at a conference like E3 is almost guaranteed to be running on a high end modern PC even if the game itself will be released on a five year old console.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's no coincidence that the OGs who focus on _gameplay_ \-- Nintendo, iD Software, Rockstar -- show the least BS.

They've all had bad experiences in the past when they demo'd graphics and learned from it. Nintendo's 2000 Zelda video sent expectations the entirely wrong way for Wind Waker. iDs Doom 3 mishap (no one wants a sneaky, shadowy Doom Guy).

</comment><comment><USER45> CGI trailers and other filler content don't build hype to nearly the same extent as gameplay does. Don't forget that the lack of gameplay shown was one of the reasons this years E3 was considered a big disappointment by most.

The reason Sony's 2016 E3 press conference is widely regarded as the best press conference ever, in addition to the live orchestra, was that they blasted the audience with long gameplay demo after gameplay demo. It had very little filler speeches by executives and few empty CGI trailers, and it made a big difference.

If you haven't watched Sony's 2016 conference recently, which you should, here it is: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwofRzkROo4&t=1800](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwofRzkROo4&t=1800)

</comment><comment><USER46> It seems to me that a brave decision would be to let gamers into the dev process openly - a regular vlog like approach by an optimistic old hand showing skin texture experiments or changes to explosion algorithms and so on - not lying, not cut scenes ... just openness

But then again, a couple of cut scenes every six months and secrecy otherwise is probably safer

<comment><USER47> I've followed a couple games like that, and the end result is disappointment. Every feature that didn't work out feels like something I really wanted. So, really, it's a lot of effort on the developer's part to more thoroughly disappoint the potential buyers.

In my outsider's opinion, spending that time focused on building something fun without the outside world intruding would be better. When it gets to the point of only needing polish, then start showing it to the world.

<comment><USER48> Problem with most popular games is that they are not made by hardcore gamers but by cashgrabbing businessmen and huge companies (you can find out more here [https://bit.ly/2ILPdHw](https://bit.ly/2ILPdHw)). Most indie games, if not 99 percent of them die being unseen. For example fortnite, althrough popular and addictive, it can only addict people new to such mechanisms (to games similar to fortnite) or 8 year old kids who never played. But does it make money? Oh boy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Besides gameplay, what else is there? Trailers, that have never and will never capture whether a game is fun to play? Good luck.

<comment><USER50> E3 is a marketing event for big publishers, if cinematic trailers create more consistent hype than gameplay trailers then that's what they will do. Critics very frequently point out the formulaic, rehashed gameplay of big budget titles and they probably want to limit that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The main issue is that sometimes the entire team would stop to produce a demo for E3 or other shows which in retrospect would delay the game from actually coming out. Some would spend so much time making sure their demo looked good, it became an engine show-off and they knew the game wouldn't ship complete like that.

</comment><comment><USER52> Games are so high quality these days, but gamers are insufferable. I can't read any content about games any more because it's hysterical children screaming at the top of their voice about some inconsequential difference from some concept video.

<comment><USER42> They _could, should and can be_ high quality. Which is why there is such outrage when developers show one thing and deliver an early beta build for $80.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> There was an interesting quote about how demos are expensive to produce - <USER3> think this is something a lot of people dismiss. People seem to think that a demo is easy, just show what you have right now! But a lot of the time is is a huge distraction from what you otherwise would be working on.

<comment><USER33> The amount of turd polishing that goes on for an E3 demo is massive. I had a friend that worked in the AAA games space, and he said that between half and three quarters of the team would halt work on moving the game forward and focus for three to four months on polishing the demo shown at E3.

</comment></comment><comment> yoz-y I don't get it. How do players feel that something was stolen from them? Do they make their purchase decision based off a trailer aired 2 years ago?

There are tons of journals and streamers out there that review finished games. At that point it is pretty obvious how the game actually looks and plays. If the preview would be anything like the real game they would be shipping it.

SMH

</comment><comment><USER54> Has this not ever been so? Look at the covers of 1980s games with lovely pictures or even photography for a game that ran on the Apple II.

Why the outrage now?

<comment><USER55> Those covers were obvious cover art. That's completely different from showing things that you could reasonably expect, as if they were actually included.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Maybe turning everything gaming related into a SJW minefield was not a very productive decision, either.

</comment><comment><USER57> I'm pretty sure E3 started being rote 2 decades ago.

<comment><USER58> Definitely a decade; I'm not sure about two.

In any case it took a big down turn so the industry agrees/agreed with you contrary to the downvotes. Big publishers went off and did their own events at the same time at a different location.

I think E3 is still important, though, because it pulls the industry together. Now whether or not something like GDC could replace it is another thing but I don't think E3 is any more rote than CES.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> After the disaster and outright lies that were the Anthem "gameplay" trailer, vs what actually shipped, gamers don't want to see fake gameplay either.</comment>


Does a refrigerator cool more efficiently when full? - <AUTHOR> http://straightdope.com/columns/read/2657/does-a-refrigerator-cool-more-efficiently-when-full

<comment><USER2> I've heard this before, but one thing I have always wondered is why the jugs you fill empty space with should be _full_. The article concedes that chilling the thermal mass of water is initially more energy-intensive, but that you benefit by displacing air that can easily spill out whenever you open the door (being replaced by air that then needs to be cooled). You would get this same benefit and none of the drawback from an _empty_ jug.</comment>


From Cinepak to H.265: a brief history of video compression - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/guides/2009/12/from-cinepak-to-h265-a-survey-of-video-compression.ars

<comment><USER2> Overall a pretty good, albeit quite brief, article, though the description of H.265 is terrible:

 _H.265 will be lossier than H.264, in other words, but lossy in ways that won't be too obvious to humans and our imperfect image-processing brains. Pause an H.265 video and break out the spyglass, and you'll find many technical imperfections compared to older codecs, but it's all about perceived quality when the moving picture is, well, moving._

The way in which loss is applied to the video is generally determined by the encoder, not the video format. The Joint Video Team is still busy optimizing everything for PSNR, so they don't appear as if they're going to change the entire concept behind video coding just yet. For example, we'd benefit hugely from coding-layer improvements to increase the visual energy of the video, much as Vorbis's failure mode is noisy audio as opposed to metallic warbling.

H.265, so far, is shaping up to be larger macroblocks, a few much-wanted improvements such as a larger transform size, and a huge amount of brainstorming that has resulted in an enormous number of really stupid ideas. I'd give it at least another half decade before it has a chance of becoming a real spec, if only to filter out the bad ideas to find the really good ones. There's tons of interesting stuff there though, and it's worth following if only to read the JVT [Joint Video Team] papers.

The real problem though is that H.265 has no chance of possibly satisfying the needs of those who really want it. The cable companies _really really_ want to be able to solve the following problems in one fell swoop:

1\. They want to have hundreds of channels, but can't bother laying new wire, so they want each HD channel to fit in an SD mux (~3.25 megabit CBR).

2\. They want to get rid of interlacing, but they also want the smoothness of motion that 60 fields per second gets, and they _also_ want the marketing name of 1080, so they want to switch to 1080p60. From what I've heard so far, H.265 won't even support interlacing, which is the single best decision I've seen out of the JVT.

3\. They want this all available in reasonably-priced implementations as soon as possible. Oh, and it can't have significantly higher hardware requirements for decoding either.

By comparison, x264, one of the best H.264 encoders, on its absolute slowest, non-realtime settings, can make 1080p _30_ look _tolerable_ at about 3-4mbps.

In other words, they want a 2-4x improvement over H.264, for zero extra CPU cost. They want fucking _unicorns_. This isn't going to happen.

<comment><USER3> thanks. i've never understood why we had xvid, divx, quicktime6 et all sice they are the same format. and the article failed miserably on this topic. but your line about the encoder being responsible for the lossles made me see it.

although i think it would be irresponsible to claim that the lossles possibilities a format allows for the encoders don't play any part in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm really hoping that Google opens VP8 up. From what I've seen, VP8 provides better image quality while requiring less CPU power to decode. If Google hopes that the <video> tag is going to take off, we'll need a freely available video codec that also has a company behind it that can sell patent guarantees. Firefox can't redistribute a non-free codec and Apple and Microsoft won't distribute something that leaves them open to potentially huge liability.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's too bad ATSC didn't wait for H.264 to be practical. You could fit 4 to 8 channels in the space of one MPEG2.

<comment><USER6> To make progress, at some point you have to stop waiting for the next new thing and use what you've got right now instead. (See the Duke Nukem story: <http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_duke_nukem/>)

<comment><USER7> Agreed. We've just started working with Canon 5D 1080p h264 video files in Premiere. Even on a new Core i7 machine, with RAID 0 disks, Premiere just doesn't work very smoothly with h264 video (we convert it to Cineform Aspect HD as an intermediate). MPEG2 by comparison, is lighting fast.

If you go back to when HDV was new, people were bitching about how slow MPEG2 was compared to DV (since it wasn't all I frames). That's just the way progress works.</comment></comment></comment>


Kickstarter threatened by business-method patent owner? - <AUTHOR> http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/kickstarter-patent-fan-funded-artistshare-243632

<comment><USER2> Turns out that the cooler, evidence-based heads are in no danger of prevailing.

For now, we're stuck with the mindless fundamentalists who view the number of patents issued each year as a clear measure of progress. In a earlier age, these would be the guys congratulating themselves for burning the most witches ever.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's got to be a tipping point where everyone has eventually seen a company they've followed get threatened by patent trolls with questionable patents like this and gets behind the movement to ban software, business model, and other the other patent forms that are causing more harm than good. I just hope that this happens before we see too much damage to companies like Kickstarter that are doing good work.

</comment><comment><USER4> I just wished that somebody patented the patent trolling business method, and used that against all the patent trolls...

<comment><USER5> You mean like this? [http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se...](http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220080270152%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20080270152&RS=DN/20080270152)

<comment><USER6> A guy from Halliburton patented patent trolling? Seriously?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Kickstarter needs to crowd-source the legal defense :P

<comment><USER8> $5,000 for signed transcripts of the trial... $100,000 for the courtroom sketch?

<comment><USER9> Cute, but with something like a legal defense or a ballot initiative, where a warchest of a given size could swing an outcome, hitting the fundraising goal could be incentive enough to kick in.

Here's the classic college example: in California it costs 1-2 million dollars to pay for the signature-gathering to get an initiative on the ballot. Would 100k college students pay $20 to get, say, 'hot issue' on the ballot? You only pay $20 if the full amount is collected. For 100 million you might have a 'sure thing' campaign, could you get 1 million people effected by 'hot issue' to pay $100?

How much does it cost to get a patent invalidated, assuming a patent reeking of frivolousness should thereby have grounds for invalidation?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What is key in patents are claims. I don't see that this patent passes the new pencil and paper test for process patentatibility.

(see [http://www.ims-expertservices.com/blog/2011/the-new- pencil-a...](http://www.ims-expertservices.com/blog/2011/the-new-pencil-and- paper-test-for-process-patentability/)).

I think they are just trying to scare people away with basically nothing.

</comment><comment><USER11> Let Brian Camelio, the CEO of ArtistShare know how you feel:

email@example.com

<comment><USER12> Let's not resort to mob mentality, please.

<comment><USER13> I think it would be perfectly valid to write something along these lines:

"Hi! I just found out about ArtistShare.com. Looks like a great site! Unfortunately, the way I heard about it was that I learned of the patent suit by its founder, or a licensee, against Kickstarter.com. In protest, I will not be participating on ArtistShare. Just thought I would let you know. Have a great day!!!"

<comment><USER14> That's the sort of thing that only hold weight if you ever intended to use ArtistShare.com.

It's like me threatening to boycott Time Warner, McDonald's or Barney's - I'm not their customer, and I never will be, so what do they care?

<comment><USER13> I'm only one customer, but I'm clearly in the target market, as I've contributed to three projects on Kickstarter.

You're right, it would have been useful to point this out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This just makes me sick.

Brian Camelio, congratulations - you're a scumbag.

There are no two sides to this story.

</comment><comment><USER16> This patent madness calls for some kind of localized troll-defense. Maybe a fee pool? I.e. startups (especially the underfunded) in cityX share potential legal costs by contributing to a fund which will be used to hire lawyers to defend any member sued by a patent troll. Maybe get local govt to chip in too (support startups as future employers and economic growth contributors). ...A local startup guild? Union? Or should insurance firms develop anti-troll coverage packages?

It's just crazy that aside from 100 other challenges of being an early stage company, you now have to contend with the increasing possibility of being hit by a troll. Any change in legislation will be a long time coming and in the meantime, trolls should be pushed back in some way.

</comment><comment><USER17> Kickstarter actually has 2 of its own very specific patents. So this article is a bit mis-leading. Kickstarter is in a much better position than this article or the behavior of ArtistShare would seem to indicate. Bottom line ArtistShare. Stop wasting everyone's time and get back to building a great business.

</comment><comment><USER18> Given that the KickStarter is a method of finding crowd based funding for arts and other small projects/inventions. Could there be room for a startup that does more "classical" artist/inventor funding by patronage? Using the Internet to connect funky arts/inention people with patrons that want to support them.

</comment><comment><USER19> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system>

<comment><AUTHOR> This may be a good lead on prior art. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article itself doesn't qualify: Its earliest version dates back only to 2003; the original provisional patent application was filed in 2002.

<comment><USER3> The Street Performer Protocol definitely predates the patent, although I don't know if it directly addresses the claims of the patent:

<http://www.schneier.com/paper-street-performer.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've been working on a project in this same general area (crowdfunding) and this scares the everliving bejeezus out of me.

Perhaps the only real revolution we can do to improve the system of capitalism is to increase the ability of creative minds to gather funding and address the needs of the masses. If everyone is a capitalist--if everyone is able to easily seek funding to address public needs--then things can get better for everyone.

This is the sort of thing that prevents that. :(</comment>


Journalists claim North Korean official was "purged", then he shows up on TV - <AUTHOR> https://thegrayzone.com/2019/06/03/us-journalists-fake-news-north-korean-official-purged/ <comment><USER2> There are better articles about this news than this over-editorialized axe- grinding blog post. For instance, this one about the official's reappearance: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/world/asia/north- korean-p...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/world/asia/north-korean-purge- kim.html) (and the original NY Times report was pretty careful with its words about his disappearance: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/world/asia/north- korea-en...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/world/asia/north-korea-envoy- execution.html)).

<comment><USER3> The submitted article is about how western corporate media handled a story about North Korea, not about the North Korean story itself. That NYTimes article is about the North Korean story, not western media's treatment of that story.

<comment><USER2> AFAIK, HN hasn't has any posts about the disappearance or reappearance. We should probably have one, rather than this.

This particular article is just loud axe grinding and baseless complaining. For instance, it labels the original Bloomberg report "fake news" and a "false story," when it was in fact pretty careful with its words and spent _a significant amount of prominent space casting doubt on the report_. You can read it yourself here: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-30/north- kor...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-30/north-korea-envoy- executed-over-trump-kim-summit-chosun-reports).

This blog post is not so much about "how western corporate media handled a story about North Korea" but how Ben Norton of thegrayzone.com _feels_ about the Western media and how he _wants_ us to _feel_ about it too.

<comment><USER3> > _" North Korea Executed Envoy Over Trump-Kim Summit, Chosun Reports"_

That Bloomberg headline is itself egregious. Who is Chosun? That Chosun Ilbo is a right wing propaganda tabloid with a reputation for making shit up should have been mentioned in that headline. _' Headlines that seem plausible with details hinting at fabrication in the article'_ is a bad formula and deserves to be criticized.

In fact, Chosun Ilbo's reputation should have prevented the story from being republished by western media at all.

<comment><USER2> > 'Headlines that seem plausible with details hinting at fabrication in the > article' is a bad formula and deserves to be criticized.

Readers need to read more than headlines, and newspapers shouldn't censor things as if they don't.

> In fact, Chosun Ilbo's reputation should have prevented the story from being > republished by western media at all.

No, that's just your opinion, which other people are free to disagree with without being wrong. For instance, I find it perfectly acceptable that the story was initially published with ample reliability disclaimers, then later corrected when new information surfaced.

<comment><USER3> > _" Readers need to read more than headlines,"_

They should, _but they don 't._ They know that and you know that. Knowing that, it's irresponsible to publish headlines that are misleading when taken in isolation.

<comment><USER2> > They know that and you know that. Knowing that, it's irresponsible to > publish headlines that are misleading when taken in isolation.

They made reasonable editorial decisions that you and thegrayzone.com disagree with, that's all. They weren't irresponsible nor were they misleading.

<comment><USER4> In reading some of the other articles from the source link, the site makes some fairly large claims based on thin evidence and appears pretty anti American and pro Russian propaganda. I'm not sure the sure can claim to not be guilty of the very same thing it is claiming others are guilty of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe it was a Deep fake video?</comment>


SEO friendly Bootstrap blog template for startups - <AUTHOR> https://niceverynice.com/bootstrap-blog-template/ <comment><USER2> No demo? And the pricing is insane.</comment>


Galileo's attempt to outsmart the Catholic Church - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1399588/galileos-newly-discovered-letter-shows-his-attempt-to-outsmart-the-inquisition/ <comment><USER2> > Galileo had invented a powerful telescope

Galileo did not invent the telescope and his telescope was not powerful. His inovation was in the places he chose to look and the way he interpreted what he saw.

</comment><comment><USER2> > the heliocentric model of the solar system, according to which the Earth and > other planets rotate around the Sun.

The planets do not rotate around the sun. The planets revolve around the sun.

</comment><comment><USER2> > Here's where our boy Galileo gets deliciously sneaky,

"Our boy Galileo"?? What kind of language is this? Is she trying to be funny? She should try to get her facts right first.</comment>


Apple's iOS 13.3 update finally lets you disable those annoying Memoji stickers - <AUTHOR> https://mashable.com/article/ios-13-3-update-memoji-stickers/ <comment><USER2> They can also be hidden/shown by tapping the Recent clock icon in the emoji toolbar (since they were added weeks ago), assuming they're not pref'd off as shown in the link above.

</comment><comment><USER3> It always makes me chuckle when iOS updates tout Memojis as their headlining feature.</comment>


Ask HN: please review my html5 web game - <AUTHOR> http://planetfunk.posterous.com/last-man-standing-a-zombie-apocalypse

<comment><AUTHOR> A couple of weeks ago I showed you guys a web game I wrote for the 10k contest.

I wrote that in about 7 hours and hadn't intended to submit anything until the last minute which is why it was so rough.

It's been 18 days since then, and this is where I'm at so far.

It uses the html5 canvas and browser database (SQLite not indexedDB) so will only run in Safari, and Chrome, and I've been specifcally targeting the iPhone.

The url goes to my posterous for an overview of the game and links to it and the source.

Being my first game, I would greatly appreciate any comments you have on it.

To go directly to the game:

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/165110/lastmanstanding/index.html>

Or see the original 10k Apart entry:

<http://10k.aneventapart.com/Uploads/358/>

Edited for spelling and 18 "days"

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought the game was really neat. Very impressive.

Feedback:

1) Control scheme was not as intuitive as it could be. Maybe it would be more obvious on an iPhone using my finger? I lost 95% of my health trying to figure out how to move my character.

Not a big deal since I could restart, but I was frustrated and might have left if I wasn't trying to figure it out : )

Also problematic is that this leads me to keep accidentally using up grenades because I keep thinking the intuitive behavior is to click-to-move, not drag- to-move.

2) Something of help could be to show gun ranges, so you know better how to move / draw a path.

3) Bigger issue: it would be very helpful to have a notice or info on what the kinds of Zombies are and what their special abilities are. Tutorials can suck, but even a few lines of text might help here, or something to help out the novice player. Likewise how to use health packs.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) My initial game was arrows keys and mouse to shoot which didn't translate into touch. That's the best I've got at the moment that allows movement and throwing grenades. Ideas would be appreciated.

2) I place a light grey outer circle around the player for weapon ranges initially but my wife hated it :) i'll see what else I can come up with.

3) Help screen. You're absolutely right. I'll make it my first priority.

Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Man, that game is so much fun!! It gets really hectic at points! What are the guys the spit junk at you called? Are they like bosses?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, they're based on L4D specials, so you have boomers, smokers, and tanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The next time that somebody tells me that Flash is dead and that HTML5 is its replacement I will show them this game.

</comment><comment><USER6> Cute, and it seems to work well, but it's not something that I'd play for more than 30 seconds.

</comment><comment><USER7> The graphics game me pleasant flashbacks of long and gory Cannon Fodder (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannon_fodder>) sessions. Good work! -"War Has Never Been So Much Fun".

</comment><comment><USER8> Uh, I hate to inform you, but it doesn't seem to function properly on Firefox trunk.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct. You'll need Safari or Chrome to play.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SQL_Database>

Web SQL Database is supported by Google Chrome, Opera and Safari but will not be implemented by Mozilla(Firefox) which instead advocates Indexed Database API access.

<comment><USER9> Maybe you should try to use the simpler storage API like localStorage as it is more widely supported?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, I've replaced the database with localStorage and it's all good to go - <USER2> least in FF 3.6.8, although it seems to be washing out the font colors.

Thanks for the suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very nice. Maybe I'm missing something but controlling two survivors is hard though, I lost him in a day.

</comment><comment><USER11> I like it, it also works well on the iPad. Perhaps make it bigger for ipads screen.</comment>


Show HN: Bender – Let's Standardize Serverless ETL - <AUTHOR> https://engblog.nextdoor.com/bender-ff65a6edee92 <comment><USER2> ETL stands for Extract, Transform and Load. So this is a data pipeline framework. Nextdoor please put that in your blog post as I do not believe it is a very common acronym.

<comment><USER3> It's not that uncommon, especially in data science/analytics/engineering. I've definitely heard "ETL" more often that data pipeline or analytics pipeline.

This is a nice list[0] of ETL software.

0: [https://github.com/pawl/awesome-etl](https://github.com/pawl/awesome-etl)

<comment><USER4> Not uncommon in the ERP/Enterprise/Business computing either. (I say that while I'm working on just such a project for a food distributor).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Its nice but AWS released GLUE for similar use case a couple of weeks back

<comment><USER6> I have so far been unimpressed with GLUE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Gobblin ([https://gobblin.apache.org/](https://gobblin.apache.org/)), which looks like it does something similar, can be packaged up as a single .jar, and run on AWS Lambda.

Anyone had working experience with either?

</comment><comment><USER8> Great work. I'm in the process of writing an ETL and while I don't think this will suite our needs (so unfortunately I need to keep writing) this article provides a lot of great detail that helped me see the process more clearly.

<comment><USER9> It would be great to know what doesn't fit your needs - can you describe your project in more detail?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Link to the source in the document doesn't work.

<comment><USER9> Can you point me to where -- I scanned through the Blog and havn't found a bad link yet?

<comment><USER10> The last link, to github, was to some internal repo. It has since been fixed.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Web Toolkit 50 minute presentation - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/presentations/gwt <comment><USER2> This looks extremely promising. Using Ajax functionality without actually using Ajax by compiling from Java into Javascript, and then having all of the user state on the client side without the need for a session object on the server. Wow. Now we just need the compiler for Lisp into javascript :)</comment>


A Data Leak Exposed the Personal Information of over 3k Ring Users - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/carolinehaskins1/data-leak-exposes-personal-data-over-3000-ring-camera-users <comment><USER2> This seems important:

"Ring does not alert users of attempted log-in from an unknown IP address, or tell users how many others are logged into an account at one time. Because of this, there is no obvious way to know whether any bad actors have logged into people's compromised Ring accounts without their consent."

I can understand not having 2FA turned on by default, but a _bare minimum_ for this kind of service would be to alert users when someone successfully logs in from a new device.

<comment><USER3> I've recently had a similar problem with Spotify. My account was stolen. In part because I did not have 2FA turned on... because the app doesn't offer it for some reason. And, in part, because whoever logged into my account from a different IP and device supposedly didn't trip any of their security measures. So I was never even told that someone took hold of my account until I tried to get on.

It's baffling to me that any popular app wouldn't have 2FA (or any app, for that matter.)

<comment><USER4> I'm curious as to how stolen Spotify accounts are monetised? What's the value of them?

<comment><USER5> [https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_&_nkw=spotify+warranty&_sac...](https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_&_nkw=spotify+warranty&_sacat=0)

All keylogged/phished/etc.

<comment><USER4> This is fascinating - the individual prices are so low that they really must be moving a great number to turn a worthwhile profit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Even if it was the official article title, "Data Leak" is extremely misleading; the attack is called credential stuffing and is unrelated to any sort of breach on Ring's end.

Edit: finished reading the article, and the entire text is just as misleading as the title, credential stuffing happens all the time and really isn't newsworthy.

<comment><USER7> > _credential stuffing happens all the time and really isn 't newsworthy._

If a bad thing happens all the time and people are unaware of it, calling attention to it is entirely newsworthy.

To you, as a jaded security person who understands that there are systemic risks to any network-connected service and nobody is good at defending against them, perhaps it's perfectly normal. To a customer who is making the decision between buying a network-connected doorbell for their security and buying a perfectly normal offline doorbell, the fact that credential stuffing happens all the time is a thing they need to hear about!

(Also, there are straightforward ways to resist these attacks, such as "You must use 2FA," "You can only pair a new device with your Ring account while it's in physical proximity to your Ring device," "You must use either 2FA or physical proximity," "The app will generate a password for you and won't let you use an existing one, feel free to write it down on a piece of paper," etc. A home security system _should_ be more paranoid than a politics forum or a meme generator at keeping accounts secure.)

<comment><USER5> I really hope physical proximity is also some kind of handshake with the device, and not spoofable in-app "GPS"

<comment><USER8> I hope physical proximity does not mean standing in front of the door. Outside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just after this came out, another batch of 1,500 Ring credentials was discovered. [https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/19/ring-doorbell-passwords- ex...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/19/ring-doorbell-passwords-exposed/)

"of those we spoke to none had been contacted by Ring — contrary to the company's claim."

</comment><comment><USER10> It's fascinating how Ring's business model benefits from local crime prevalence, which in turn might lead people to invest in home security.

It is also fascinating how media companies are likely to pounce on the slightest of flaws(some malignant, and some innocuous) with either Nest or Ring, since it feeds on people's sense of security/safety again, and thus are likely to lead to more clicks.

<comment><USER11>
        It's fascinating how Ring's business model benefits from local crime prevalence, which in turn might lead people to invest in home security.

That's an interesting point. The whole Ring ecosystem is kinda boosted by Amazon's other business too: leaving boxes on peoples front porches to be stolen. Amazon really knows how to grow a circular ecosystem huh?

<comment><USER12> A friend of mine recently made the excellent point that Ring also provides Amazon with surveillance footage of their own delivery service employees. Synergy!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not referenced in this article, but something I've been thinking about while reading about the security kerfuffle, why are people putting cameras in their kids rooms?

I get the exterior, but why are they spying on their kids? I can't think of a security reason for it, it's just super controlling and creepy.

<comment><USER14> Baby monitors are a thing and have been for close to 80 years. Now that cameras and displays are cheap video is on there too.

<comment><USER13> I don't mean baby monitors, I mean cameras in the room of an 8 year old.

[https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man-hacks-ring- camera-8...](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man-hacks-ring- camera-8-year-old-girl-s-bedroom-n1100586)

<comment><USER15> So that they can be watched from elsewhere in the house...

<comment><USER16> Obviously, but the question is _why_ parents would do this.

<comment><USER15> Probably because they have multiple rooms in their homes.

<comment><USER16> That doesn't really answer the question. If technology allows unlimited monitoring of your children where would you draw the line? Do you want to raise people who accept constant surveillance as a fact of life? They're home, give them their own space.

<comment><USER15> In my own house I have cameras wherever I find them convenient. A playroom is not a bedroom or a bathroom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> J Cox did some analysis of the dumps, writing:

 _" I just ran these in a script I wrote to process them through HaveIBeenPwned in bulk. Every single email except ~20 was already compromised. These Ring dumps going around (+Buzzfeed prob) are highly likely password reuse; not evidence to suggest internal DB"_

source [https://twitter.com/josephfcox/status/1207864924459978752](https://twitter.com/josephfcox/status/1207864924459978752)

</comment><comment> uhoh-itsmaciek If you hold sensitive customer data, you should idiot-proof your security, even if you can't help the better idiots. It's silly to even call these users idiots, when the service could implement several features to make them safer-- whether or not they are idiots is totally beside the point. They're customers.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm curious if Ring operates a different security engineering team than the rest of Amazon. Because Amazon.com or AWS would not get hacked; not like this.

<comment><USER19> Given what I've seen of acquisitions the teams remain distinct _decades_ later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Amazon's response seems quite defensive. They are typically a bit black box when it comes to security issues.

<comment><USER21> Maybe it's because literally every password protected service is vulnerable to users reusing passwords on other insecure sites.

It would be like a website writing an expose on how ford trucks are killing hundreds of drivers and expecting a response from ford, but when you read the details it's because users are driving their trucks into brick walls, something that literally every car on the market is susceptible to.

<comment><USER20> MFA?

<comment><USER22> They do have MFA, but only via SMS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "An intruder could also access live camera footage from all active Ring cameras associated with an account, as well as a 30- to 60-day video history, depending on the user's cloud storage plan."

If its stored in the Cloud, then it ain't private.

</comment><comment><USER24> Ring sure is doing a whole lot of good for privacy awareness

...by showing how not to do it</comment>


Ask HN: Perspectives on graph-bound logical inference - <AUTHOR> I am researching graph processing (OLTP) and graph databases for a system where semanticity is inherent.
I am currently exploring logical inference (or reasoning) (Stardog [1], GraphDB [2], Grakn [3]) and stumbled upon «The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview» (2003) [0].
Semantics aside (this system would mandate for Stardog and Grakn's lazy reasoning rather than GraphDB's total materialization), I am interested in practical analyses of logical inference as I find some [0] arguments to be sound and atemporal and am therefore "undirected."
Although it does not support automatic reasoning, Datomic [4] viewpoints are welcome. <comment><AUTHOR> [0] [http://web.archive.org/web/20180311022804/http://www.shirky....](http://web.archive.org/web/20180311022804/http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/semantic_syllogism.html)

[1] [https://www.stardog.com/docs/#_owl_rule_reasoning](https://www.stardog.com/docs/#_owl_rule_reasoning)

[2] [http://graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation/enterprise/reasoni...](http://graphdb.ontotext.com/documentation/enterprise/reasoning.html)

[3] [http://dev.grakn.ai/docs/knowledge- model/inference](http://dev.grakn.ai/docs/knowledge-model/inference)

[4] [https://docs.datomic.com/on-prem/query.html](https://docs.datomic.com/on- prem/query.html)</comment>


Let the Browser Handle Your UI Logic for You - <AUTHOR> http://blog.parse.com/2014/11/10/let-the-browser-handle-your-ui-logic-for-you/ <comment><USER2> This is really, really clever. I mean, I guess it could be obvious to some people, but I tend to over-think things quite a lot and probably would have never come up with such novel uses for radio-buttons and check-boxes.

Definitely going to be keeping this in mind next time I'm working on a web application.</comment>


Valve And Xi3 Team For 'Piston' Steam Box - <AUTHOR> http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/01/08/it-begins-valve-and-xi3-team-for-steam-box/ <comment><USER2> This might not necessarily have bearing on their ability to create decent hardware for running Steam, but if I'm not mistaken ISYS Technologies (the company behind the Xi3 brand/architecture/model) started selling computers running beta versions of the Google's open source Chromium OS under the name "Chromium PC" and then sued Google for trademark infringement when Google launched the Chromebook.

I feel like that kind of behavior is probably worse than being a patent troll.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook#Trademark_dispute>

<http://www.isys-tech.com/xi3-architecture.php>

<comment><USER3> Could the lawsuit be a defensive legal maneuver?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really hope Valve succeeds in migrating the PC gaming community off of Windows and onto Linux (maybe Blizzard will help?). It will not be easy.

<comment><USER5> I look to how successful Valve was in getting games for the Mac made. That success rate is mixed:

* All the valve games were ported. * A bunch of casual games get ported. * Civilization V * Um, some of the GTA catalog, IIRC.

Frankly, it was kind of a desert. I can't imagine the Linux gaming will pick up unless the GabeN had "bet the farm" on Linux versus Windows 8. Which I don't see happening. He might hate Windows 8, but Steam games play nicely on it, TTVM.

<comment><USER6> At a certain point, it's up to the users to show up. I think that's what sinks OS X support. [1] And that's the big, recurring question-mark with gaming on Linux.

The vocal subgroup asks and cajoles and begs. But those devs who make the effort don't seem to find a large enough market to justify it.

[1] It didn't help that Apple's Mac App Store arrived so soon after OS X Steam showed up. Nor that mobile computing got so large to the point that PC upgrades basically stalled.

<comment><USER5> Another thing to consider about Mac gaming: since iMacs and MacBooks are essentially un-upgradable and they're not particularly designed for gaming in mind, they tend to age faster than a similarly-priced self-built tower PC (at least for gaming.)

I don't think that's going to be an issue for Linux enthusiasts, but it will be an issue for this "magic grapefruit" they're talking about.

<comment><USER6> I seem to recall gabeN posting to the effect that the average Mac running Steam was better-equipped than the average PC running Steam. If that's true, the non-upgradability might not have entered into it.

As to this "piston" thing here - I don't think upgradability will be an anchor. The whole project isn't remotely feasible unless a distro for build- your-own boxes is also launched. In which case the specifics of this box are more a blueprint for builders and a performance baseline for developers.

Sales probably wouldn't even track net adoption until the enthusiasts build out their custom rigs and start convincing their less-technical friends they can have almost all the same awesome without getting any thermal paste on their hands.

<comment><USER7> "I seem to recall gabeN posting to the effect that the average Mac running Steam was better-equipped than the average PC running Steam"

Which makes sense, however that doesn't mean that there are anywhere close to more "gaming" level Macs running Steam than there are PCs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It will be called Piston.

The demo unit of Piston features one ethernet port, 1/8" audio in/out, SPDIF optical audio, four USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports (with one dedicated to keyboard input), four eSATAp ports, two Mini Display Port ports and one DisplayPort/HDMI port.

It will probably cost between $500 and $1000.

[http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve- steam-b...](http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve-steam-box- xi3)

Edit: for those who haven't heard of Xi3 before like me, this promotional video shows what it's about:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-ox90oXq8c>

<comment><USER9> > It will probably cost between $500 and $1000.

So they won't be able to subsidize the console price as Sony/Microsoft does? Because the price seems a bit on the high end for a gaming console.

<comment><USER10> Well the PS3 launch price was $600, seems reasonable to me.

They wont get me away from my $1600 gaming rig despite being a huge advocate of steam.

<comment><USER11> PS3 was $500 for the lower version, $600 was for the bigger HD. It also didn't sell well. PS3 didn't start to pick up in sales until the price started to drop, and at the time of release PS3 was incredibly powerful.

I can't imagine someone dropping $500-$1000 on this, at that point just build your own computer people!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > could provide access to thousands of gaming titles

Does this mean 1) the box will be based on Windows, 2) or there have been way more progress in getting publishers to port their games to Linux than what we have heard of yet, 3) or that "could" indicates that "thousands" is a meaningless hypothetical number?

<comment><USER13> rumored to be running Linux so definitely 3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I very much doubt that this is Valve's "official" steam box offering. This article is a bit more sensational than others' that have been posted on the subject today.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. Hopefully, Valve will respond with something official soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think we're about to be in for a whole new console wars, except this time, instead of pushing more bits, it'll be a battle between ecosystems. It won't be a console war, but an ecosystem war.

By and large, with the exception of a few exclusives, the 360 and the PS3 have more or less the same set of games. Both were incredibly advanced and were a logical progression of the course that these systems were going. But they both more or less have the same software ecosystem. Most of the library available on one is available on the other.

Yet the Wii outsold both of them, using far less advanced technology and offering far inferior on-line play. Many people credit the control scheme, but because of the controls (and an incredible first party development house) Nintendo offered a truly unique software ecosystem.

So this current generation we've _really_ had two software ecosystems, the 360/PS3 one and the Wii one.

So today we have three new consoles about to hit the market in the upcoming months, Valve's, the Ouya, and Project Shield, right after the Wii U.

Valve is going to offer the PC gaming ecosystem and probably the strong on- line offering that PC gamers enjoy, the Ouya and Shield are offering Android (plus some exclusives on either side), and the Wii U will continue to offer Nintendo's ecosystem. This leaves Microsoft and Sony to respond, probably with announcements this year and releases before Christmas of next, with their next offering.

Back in the 16-bit days, the market showed that there can really only be two console players. Third place was a very distant third (PC Engine). But it's worth it to keep in mind that the Megadrive/Genesis and Super Famicom/SNES had wildly different software ecosystems as well.

In the generation following we had a plethora of platforms as well, and it rapidly shook down to 2 (with 3rd place so bad that Sega made one more go of it with the Dreamcast then exited the business entirely). Nobody remembers the CD-I, 3D0, Jaguar, CD32 from this generation.

Following that we had the PS2, XBOX, Gamecube and Dreamcast. It shook down to an unusual _3_ this time, but the XBOX was artificial in this environment with Microsoft willing to lose tons of cash on the investment and if you look at the numbers they really just split 2nd place with the Gamecube.

Today instead of two major consoles, we have two major ecosystems. 360/PS3 and Nintendo (in transition to the WiiU)...and we're about to add 2 more to it. I don't think it'll work. Somebody's going to exit the market. It just can't sustain 4 (5 if you count iOS which is kind of stretch).

The Console business is _hard_ and the public is fickle.

<comment><USER17> Disagree a bit with the ecosystem comments.

You're underselling the exclusives on PS3 and X360. For all of the Zelda, Mario, and other first party Nintendo games, you have a bunch of Uncharted, God of War, Killzone, Gran Turismo, Halo, Gears of War, Forza, Viva Pinata, etc. between PS3 and X360. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_exclusives_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_exclusives_\(seventh_generation\)) \- there are a lot of exclusives between the two.

I would just say Nintendo was left out of all of the cross-platform games, which is a shame. Much of the Wii's "unique" ecosystem is garbage.

We may be going through a new "shakeout" period, similar to the 3DO and Jaguar days. As for mainstream adoption, I don't see any of the newcomers (OUYA, Project Shield, Piston) taking off, but it'll be fun to see what happens.

<comment><USER18> If Valve makes their new platform the only way to play Half-Life 3... that might be the first game in the series that I'll have to skip. I hate to say that, because I don't doubt that it will be an awesome game, but it's just not enough to sell me on a whole new gaming platform.

<comment><USER19> I don't see that happening, partially because it would be very un-Valve-like, and partially because it would be stupid.

Valve, in the past, has pushed for more hardware to be able to play its games, not less. Sure, it started out on Windows, but it's made a very respectable delivery platform for the Mac, and now they're on their way to Linux. Saying, "the only way to play our game is on this one specific piece of hardware you have to buy from us" would go against quite a bit of what they've been doing over the past 5 years.

Also, it would be stupid. The people who are drooling over the possibility of HL3 are PC gamers. People who invest cash in gaming rigs, who probably like building their own computers. Saying, "Want HL3? Now you have to buy our hardware!" would be more or less giving their fans the middle finger.

I expect the Steam Box will be hardware, and possibly a customized Linux distribution. And I expect that if you want to "build your own" Steam Box, you'll be able to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I always wondered why there was this heterogeneity between consoles and PCs. You're playing the same games, why would it be good for anyone to have to develop/buy something twice or for one exclusively.

Hopefully the Steam Box destroys this distinction and makes a more consistent and flexible gaming landscape.

<comment><USER21> Development-wise that problem has mostly been solved. In the past cross- platform game development was done as separate projects, often handing off "porting" the game to a platform to an external team, even. Today it's more common to use engines (such as the unreal engine) which support all the major platforms (PC, 360, and PS3 typically, for first-person, high graphic-load style games), and then do the development for all versions concurrently. Typically you'd just have your regular builds set up to produce versions for each platform as a matter of routine, and you'd have a consistent testing experience for each. You'd still end up with customizations and tweaks for each individual platform but for the most part all of the hard work of targeting and optimizing for each platform is automated.

<comment><USER22> Just for another perspective, my experience doesn't really align with this. From my (biased) perspective, this sounds like "in theory" as opposed to "in practice" so I'm honestly curious if you've managed to get away from having to really deal with cross-platform differences.

I know that in theory you use a cross platform engine that hides away all the messy details from you.In practice, I've found the PS3/360 have quite different CPU/memory architectures and you start dealing with the reality of that sooner than you'd expect. Whether that requires manually down sizing certain swaths of textures or writing code that will run on the SPU, there's quite a bit of manual work involved.

Also, most game studios tend to roll their own tech which generally requires at least a small cadre of people manually targeting and optimization for each platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The days of walled-developer-gardens are over! The barrier to entry into the lucrative console markets are lower and lower with every day that passes .. as a developer who could never afford a PS3 or XBox dev license, I've been participating as much as I can in the open hardware arena (GP32, GP2X, Wiz, Caanoo, Open Pandora) as much as possible .. and now the dream is finally coming true!

I can't wait until the day these things start shipping - I for one welcome the opportunity to have as much diversity in this market as possible ..

<comment><USER24> Not sure about that.

Valve might want to have their own walled garden rather than ending with walled gardens. It's a tested and very profitable model.

<comment><USER23> The point is, between "totally tyrannically rulled wall garden", and "nicely maintained arena of culture", is a big difference!

I'm perfectly fine with Linux as a dev platform. Steam on Linux is an admission that in fact, you can use Linux to make great games. Maybe I have to sign my binaries before Valve gives them to 20 million users, but okay; I'm still going to be, locally, 100% developing on Linux, nevertheless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> FYI, a $500 PC that attaches to your TV is not going to sell well. It might be profitable and a good idea, but it's not going to stop console gaming from "winning". The magic price point is $199.

Something like the OUYA is more likely to hit the mainstream. $99 is a great price point. What people are discounting is that something like OUYA could get updated every 1-2 years unlike the 7ish year console lifecycle we are currently in. ARM keeps getting faster, it will certainly be "fast enough" soon...

</comment><comment><USER26> Is this the final design? Am I the only one who thinks this looks extremely ugly? Hope it's not the final design, I'd love for it to succeed.

<comment><USER18> No, you're not the only one. It's awful.

<comment><USER27> Needs some gloss, monotone finish and its shaped changed into a rectangle with beveled edges.

<comment><USER18> Haha, well I'm no industrial designer, so who knows what it ought to look like... but if it looks like this image, you can be sure I won't ever have one sitting next to my TV.

I'm not really interested at this point anyway, but an ugly hardware design virtually seals the deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> More pics on polygon [http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve- steam-b...](http://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve-steam-box- xi3)

</comment><comment><USER28> I'd like to know more about the OS and price.

At the moment it's just "There will be a small PC you can plug into your TV and play games on" and I can do that for myself. What advantage will this box have over that?

<comment><USER21> The advantage is that it will be a streamlined experienced for non tech-savvy people.

<comment><USER29> That would be effectively the same as adding Steam to startup in Windows, which the installer does anyway.

<comment><USER30> It doesn't go direct to Big Picture mode though and you still have to click through UAC and firewall alerts when launching newly installed games quiet frequently. Having full control of the software stack lets them take out quite a friction points.

<comment><USER29> Adding an option to boot directly to big picture mode would be a huge problem and the Steam Windows client automatically adds firewall exceptions etc for games that you install.

Since I mainly use Linux my Windows 7 PC is basically a Steam box already.

<comment><USER31> For what it's worth, there actually is an option to boot directly to Big Picture mode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Anyone got any idea how technically challenging it would be for Valve to get Steam Linux running on ARM?

The idea of a possible future convergence between Linux and Android gaming intrigues me.

<comment><USER33> Modern 3D engines usually contain some not-insignificant amount of assembly for performance reasons. It'd require almost completely retuning, probably, undoing years of ideas since ARM is an entirely different architecture.

Wouldn't hold your breath this early.

<comment><USER34> Modern 3D engines contain almost no assembly anymore these days, and for the rare bits that are still hand-coded assembly, platform-independent alternative codepaths always exist. We've been long past the point where raw CPU performance even matters for high-end games anymore, for some time already. Porting between e.g. PPC as used in consoles and x86 is business as usual, so I don't see why porting to ARM would be much more difficult.

The main problem right now is that ARM performance is simply not there yet. It might be somewhere in the future, but even that remains to be seen, it's not entirely clear how well ARM designs will keep scaling up as they start to approach midrange x86 chips. Right now, ARM is just starting to match Atom, which is dog-slow compared to Core i3/i5/i7, and basically useless for non- trivial gaming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Would it kill them to put a f-ing link to Xi3 in that article?

<comment><USER28> You'd get more upvotes if you contributed something to the discussion, like so:

The original article didn't have a link to xi3, so here it is: <http://xi3.com/>

<comment><USER27> Yes, it's all about the upvotes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Without matching input devices like gamepads the added value is limited. One of the best things of console gaming is the normalized gaming experience.

</comment><comment><USER29> So the Steam box will basically be a standard PC in a cool box with Steam branding on it?

<comment><USER37> Which is exactly what a console is. I do not understand all these "but if you would pay x more you could get this and that and ..." here - yeah, you can do this, but people still buy a X-Box/PS3/whatever. The value of a console (or Steam box) is the _standardization_ i.e. all models of the Steambox are exactly the same. You test one, it works on all of them. Contrast this with the millions and millions of configurations that PCs have which are all subtle different. People can test as long as they want but can never be sure that a game will run on _your_ (or my or anyone else) PC.

<comment><USER29> The biggest value of an xbox is probably the heavily subsidised price point and access to a proprietary ecosystem and console exclusive games.

Unless Valve can pull out a huge amount of launch titles this will have a very weak ecosystem of it's own so will have to compete directly against other "gaming PC" companies such as Alienware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> i tried throwing money at the page but it didn't work. Browser issues? :-)

</comment><comment><USER39> Content warning on dismembered human being in background image, kthx.

<comment><USER40> I'm not seeing a dismembered human. I'm seeing some poorly drawn cartoon characters in what looks to be a prison fight, and the picture includes what could possibly be poorly drawn blood on the ground. Are you seeing something else?

<comment><USER39> > Are you seeing something else?

I was. The ad being served was Hotline: Miami not Prison Architect when I made my comment.</comment></comment></comment>


Portrait of the Hilbert Curve (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://corte.si/%2Fposts/code/hilbert/portrait/index.html

<comment><USER2> I once had the idea to use space-filling curves to speed up CPU image convolutions by increasing the probability that 2D-adjacent pixels would be 1D-adjacent, and hopefully get loaded in the same cache line. IIRC the effect was measurable but not large enough to be worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER3> Aldo's project is awesome. I remember reading this a few years back and was really curious to see what would happen if you plotted color spaces other than RGB on a Hilbert Curve. Plotting colors in YIQ and HSV spaces turns out to be really fascinating.

[http://visualmotive.com/colorsort/](http://visualmotive.com/colorsort/)

</comment><comment><USER4> There are several images of this sort on [http://allrgb.com](http://allrgb.com), which collects square images that have precisely one pixel of each of the 2^24 RGB colours.</comment>


2600 Accused of Using Unauthorized Ink Splotches (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://2600.com/print/27097 <comment><USER3> Followup apology from accuser: [https://www.2600.com/node/27106](https://www.2600.com/node/27106)

</comment><comment><USER4> I was expecting this to be about Rorschach slides for some reason. Somehow this is even sillier.

Maybe there should be some kind of way to sue for damages for claiming damages from work you don't own. What a waste of time.

<comment><USER5> But it is about Rorschach slides.

\- What do you see when you look at this picture?

\- I see a copyright infringement.

\- How do you feel about it?

\- Rather litigious...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Should be illegal.

I'm sure countless people pay these kinds of fines, just assuming that the company threatening to sue them is legitimate.

What's to stop me from just making a cool company name and sending cease and desist letters asking for fines for all kinds of "IP"?

<comment><USER7> The company issuing the threat had identified what they thought was a copied bit of artwork. This isn't a company just randomly attacking anyone - <USER2> honestly thought (via automated system) that one of their images had been partially copied.

<comment><USER8> >they honestly thought (via automated system)

that sounds like passing the blame to someone else ("automated system")

<comment><USER7> I was responding to a claim that it was entirely spurious. It did show signs of being a copy of a portion of the image. It turned out that that portion was a copy of another image, which they (or their system) didn't realise. But none of this is (as the top post in this thread claims) just invented. Had 2600 copied that portion of that image, court action against them may well have succeeded.

All of this could easily have happened without an automated system involved.

<comment><USER6> If it wasn't an automated system, they would have the cost of someone going through everything.

Do you really doubt that this is constantly happening and people are paying? Just look at the people who get DMCA'd for content they made themselves. Same system, just instead of paying a fee they lose their youtube/Twitch.

<comment><USER7> I agree with you that people are unfairly impacted by such practices; the whole thing even discourages some people from producing things.

Again, I was arguing against the claim it was without merit. A large team of people could have made the same mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had a run-in a few years back where a company claimed rights on a screenshot of work I did and tried to shake down bloggers who reproduced the original image saying that it was a derivative work of the screenshot. It turned out to be a completely innocent mistake, but with no disincentive to making such a mistake it will no doubt keep happening.

</comment><comment><USER10> I got a copyright ding on YouTube for children singing come all ye faithful. I challenged it and they never responded, but the claim remained on the video for 30 days.

It's especially frustrating because the companies involved in claims and even the content is rarely identifiable and of course has no consequence.

</comment><comment><USER7> Their claims that such copying would have been fair use are spurious at best. If they had copied that portion of the other image directly, it would have been copyright infringement. The fair use provisions are for specific circumstances, not just randomly copying. But they didn't copy it and had instead used a freely licensed common source, so they're in the clear, anyway.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is nothing more than taking IP law to its logical conclusion... ;)

</comment><comment><USER12> When was this published? The letter from Trunk Archive is dated August 2015.

</comment><comment><USER13> I believe this is from 2015

<comment><USER14> That's why there is a (2015) after the title.

<comment><USER13> Seems there wasn't when I made the comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> this has got to be automated right ?

</comment><comment><USER16> (2015)

<comment><USER17> Thanks! Updated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> They literally took a portion of someone's image and duplicated it wholesale. What's so ridiculous about the original copyright infringement claim?

<comment><USER19> The original artist had licensed it freely, both 2600 and the Trunk author had used that freely licensed work.

<comment><USER18> 2600 didn't mention that in their original post. Did they know that at the time they chose to use the image?

The argument they originally used seemed to be that the original work isn't actually worthy of copyright protection because it's just ink splotches.

<comment><USER14> From the article:

> _But it gets even better. You see, not only are they trying to get us to pay > them for using a few ink splotches, but as it turns out, the ink splotches > don 't belong to them in the first place! Our cover artist happened to keep > meticulous records (probably not something they anticipated) and traced the > source of the ink splotches to a Finnish artist at this page. [3]

And as you can see below, the Loadus image (which is at least five years old) is a background to both our Spring 2012 cover and "Harry Potter in a Vest" or whatever Trunk Archive is calling their image (which also may not even be theirs)._

<comment><USER18> Here they are still expressing their willingness to infringe copyrights. They're still unaware of the license of the work at this point. They're only lamenting that the wrong party has lodged a complaint.

<comment><USER20> > They're still unaware of the license of the work at this point

No, they actually link to the original work, which if you follow, it's licence is pretty clear. Not reading the article the first time is fine (and common), but repeatedly insisting that people who have are in the wrong is kind of inexcusable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> You used the image without permit, you dint ask. I would do the same and go after you. Good image recognition software they have. Are they still able to read the watermark within the pic?

<comment><USER14> They link to the _freely licensed_ source splatter image they used in the article. Someone else used the same _freely licensed_ splatter in their photo, and they then got a claim because of that.</comment></comment>


Designing Interfaces - <AUTHOR> http://www.designinginterfaces.com/ <comment><USER2> Not a very good book. Oreilly publishes a similarly named and more recent book that I expect is better. I do have this book, and it probably was really useful in the days of swing, but for web applications it misses the mark by a wide margin.</comment>