 After several years, there has finally been a decision about the Bnetd “unofficial” Battle.net-like servers. This began during my tenure at Blizzard and I got called an awful lot of bad names at the time in my dealings with Blizzard fans.
For those who didn’t keep up on the situation, a group of hackers/Blizzard enthusiasts (depending on which side of the fence you were on) did some reverse engineering on Blizzard games, specifically Warcraft III, as I recall, but my memory could be playing tricks on me. This allowed them to cook up their own version of Battle.net, Blizzard’s free peer-to-peer multiplayer network, called bnetd.
If you were in favor of the project, you pointed out that this allowed players to connect to a network with far fewer players and thus faster connections and so on. If you were against the project, you pointed out that this allowed pirated copies of the games to be used in multiplayer games — not being able to play on Battle.net has historically been one of the big disincentives against using pirated versions of Blizzard software. Both of these were true, as was the fact that a lot of bnetd spoke to the hacker mania of “look at this cool thing I was able to do.”
The real motives of those behind the project will probably remain murky forever, due to the heated emotional climate surrounding the issue. (The religion of Open Source gets invoked almost immediately in that Slashdot thread, for instance, which is pretty much the end of substantive discussions in my experience. You either believe in Open Source, or you don’t. Neither side tends to want to talk to each other in any meaningful way, most of the time.)
The legal argument, of course, was that monkeying with Blizzard games like this violated federal law, in particular the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (That link is a PDF file.) And that’s what the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with last week.
(It shouldn’t need to be said, but none of the above, to my knowledge, represents the opinions of Blizzard or their parent company, Vivendi-Universal. I haven’t discussed this issue with anyone there in years and have no idea what their lawyers were saying behind closed doors or even what employees thought other than “wow, this case sure is going on a long time,” which is sort of obvious.)
Penny Arcade weighed in on the issue back in 2002.
Reading some blogs, I remembered some more key details. Yes, the bnetd guys did ask to be able to connect to Blizzard’s software that verifies authentic copies. Yes, Blizzard turned them down, meaning that cracked games were going to be able to freely run on bnetd. But left out of the current coverage that I’ve seen so far is why: Blizzard felt, probably correctly, that giving access to the verification system would just make it easier to reverse engineer how the CD-keys and such were generated to begin with. You’re not going to find a lot of companies trying to combat piracy by handing over the keys to the vault.
Speaking of virtual worlds and users going beyond what the companies creating them intended, On the Media addresses buying and selling virtual gold for real money in their September 2nd edition, “The Unasked Question.”
From the Associated Press Stylebook, 2004 edition, page 49:
citizen, resident, subject, national, native A citizen is the person who has acquired the full civil rights of a nation either by birth or naturalization. Cities and states do no not confer citizenship. To avoid confusion, use resident, not citizen, in referring to inhabitants of states and cities.
Citizen is also acceptable for those in the United Kingdom, or other monarchies where the term subject is often used.
National is applied to a person residing away from the nation of which he or she is a citizen, or to a person under the protection of a specified nation.
Native is the term denoting that an individual was born in a given location.
I know that conflicts with the surprisingly sloppy dictionary definition, but it still bugs me hearing the word used loosely, especially by people who know full well that there’s no such thing as Hesperia citizenship.
Technorati is a dangerous tool, akin to the ability to pop open a million vapid Instant Messenger conversations and read them anonymously and secretly.
Amazingly, spammers have found a way to clog it, as they clog all search engines, with apparently machine-generated blogs about whatever keyword you might type in.
Well, almost any keyword.
Want to read real blogs from real people, bitching about their love life, work life, home life, whatever? (You know you do, in a train wreck sort of way, let’s not pretend otherwise.) I found the magic word. (Warning: By definition, many of the links off that page will be NSFW.)
 Well, it started out great, but it looks like Guyville, the get-fans-pumped-about-the-new-Liz Phair-album site is effectively dead. And me hundreds of points from being able to qualify for any of the free schwag.
Which is weird, since the early word on the new album is pretty decent. The Support System mailing list, which I’ve been on since … hmmm, forever … is usually of the view that anything after her debut album is crap. And they haven’t been, this time around, which about made me fall out of my chair.
In other news, I will find and kill the snipers who keep snatching away the promo disk versions of “comeandgetit” from me on eBay. With a shovel. It would be a bad idea to test me on this one.
Wow. After Tuesday night’s Rock Star: INXS, I would run, not walk, to pick up Marty Casey’s single, “Trees,” if it were released somewhere other than the crappy MSN Music. (Who, exactly, thought that trying to sell music that’s as difficult to listen to on a portable device as humanly possible was a good idea?) Marty did a great job combining his signature passion with a too-seldom-glimpsed sense of humor in the song.
Otherwise, I thought everyone did OK, but everyone also failed to cover themselves in glory. I voted for Marty and Jordis.
Astonishingly, it turns out that “Trees” was not the song chosen for the encore. America is clearly nuts. I will console myself with the knowledge that Sleater-Kinney’s “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” is finally available from iTunes.
OK, reading Marty’s Rock Star blog, “Trees” is an older song that he apparently did with his Chicago band, the Lovehammers. (The band name makes me giggle a bit too, but if I put a band together at age 13, I doubt I would have come up with a better name.) The lyrics to “Trees” can be found here.
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