Hacking and torrenting

The game I’m working on at the moment is a little bit of a clone of Uplink, an awesome hacker style game I played back in the day. I was too young to buy it back then (I think I was just playing the demo), and I sort of stopped playing it after a while.

I’m designing my game pretty much from memories of Uplink, but I’m a little bit stuck for inspiration on how to do a certain aspect (gosh, check me out being all secretive and careful with my words) so I decided to nab Uplink again and try see how they did it.

I decided to pirate it until I have money – I  know I’m strongly against the “I’m allowed to pirate because I’m poor” thing, but I genuinely will buy the multipack of their games when I do have money next. It pains me even more than it’s a small development company and not some multiconglomerate that I’m stealing from.

But the reason for my posting here is the comments on the torrent page. First, it’s ironic that people trying to download a hacker game don’t know how to install it. Second, it’s awesome to see that some of the people on there have already bought the game and they’re just torrenting it now for their own reasons. I’m against the “Oh, I bought a copy on CD, so now I’m allowed to bit torrent it” argument too, but it’s better than nothing. It at least shows that bit torrent sometimes does drive sales.

Product placement should save piracy

I’m just going to throw this idea out there; when TV show marketers are selling out slots for their product placement bits (whenever you saw a phone on 24, someone had paid for that to be there) do they take into account the number of expected illegal downloads the program will receive?

What phone does Elle use... Oh yeah.

Lost is one of the most expensively produce shows on Earth, maybe even the most expensive (the reason we’re not so much in Hawaii this year? because that was costing about half a million dollars each episode, probably more now). Heroes, Battlestar, and 24 are all probably ranking up there in the hundreds of thousands of pounds per episode too.

I’d be pretty annoyed if I was a network publisher and we weren’t capitalising from the ten and a half million people illegally watching TV by downloading it. Product placement must be worth more than traditional ads when trying to improve company image and recognition. Traditional ads are removed from every downloaded piece of TV I’ve ever seen, making the benefit to the advertisers zero. Whereas product placed adverts can’t be removed easily, and who would want to anyway? They’re not in the way. They rarely dilute the story. So all those millions of people are definitely going to see your business’ logo, which is what you wanted, right?

I expect that if they don’t incorporate those statistics into their pricing it’s because there’s no reliable statistics out there. ShowInsider grabs their data (I’m guessing) by monitoring how many seeds and peers a torrent has. That’s really not a very effective method that promises much accuracy. Some people hide their tracker data, they can’t be looking at data from private trackers, or just trackers that are too small to know about. There are a lot of fake seeders out there (MediaDefender-esk). Lost’s 1,700,000 downloads this week could easily be as little as a million or as great as three million. It’s just not possible to find out well.

Even if you do trust ShowInsider’s data, you still have absolutely no demographics on who’s downloading. It’s incredibly hard to find advertisers when you can’t tell them who’s watching your show (BMW don’t want be advertising to twelve year olds). I know that’s one of the reasons there was such a big overhaul in the distribution method over at Revision3.

Back in the day you used to be able to donate $5 a month (or however much, really) to get Diggnation earlier. What happened was that one guy donated teh $5 a month, ripped the video from the site, and posted it on his own, days before it was released to the general public on Rev3′s website. I don’t think Rev3 minded that so much (this was before there was advertising on their website) as it was all extra coverage for them, but the problem it lead to was who the hell was this extra coverage? Because they weren’t going to Rev3′s website they couldn’t poll them to find that information out.

That’s largely I suspect why things like Hulu and iPlayer exist now. ABC got annoyed with not having the demographics on their veiwers, so they decided to release their content in a way that they could. Piracy is so arrife because I can’t watch Hulu though…

This isn't fair!

I want to play WoW but this stupid connection lags too much. Normal surfing is fine, but the router can’t seem to handle my WoW connections. This is what happens when you put hundreds of people on one router and expect it to work well.

I’ve also used over half of my bandwidth allowance in just under two weeks, so I won’t be able to download Heroes this week either. Even if I could, I couldn’t watch it. BBC’s stupid “we’ll only buffer the next twenty seconds of the program, so we don’t waste all of our bandwidth if you only watch half of it” means that I can’t leave it to load. I have to watch twenty seconds, and then wait for it to buffer again. I can’t download the application to download it because that’s a P2P service which’ll use all my bandwidth allowance.

Seriously considering a 3G connection, so long as it’s fast enough.

Giving your TV away for free: you're doing it wrong.

I decided to check what was causing my hard drive to thrash, and it turns out it was Kservice.exe, which is basically a peer-to-peer service that 4oD uses.

I’m happy with that; Bittorrent was designed to take the bandwidth strain off distributors so that they can lower the costs of their service, which helps us out too by making them cheaper. What 4oD does is lets me download the TV show I’m watching from other people, and not just Channel 4′s servers.

I’m all for legal ways to use Bittorrent technology; the more ways there are, the more accepted it’ll become and ISPs will stop bandwidth throttling. What I’m against though is Channel 4 not telling me it’s doing this! It was most likely the the terms of service, which I don’t think any one really reads (Google’s TOS say that you have to be over 18 to use any of their services) so it should be more advertised that it’s doing it like this.

Not only was it uploading without me knowing, it was also maxing out my connection! Well, it’s not even my connection, since I’m sharing with my neighbours (they don’t know yet). There’s no where you can turn it down or even off unless you know what you’re doing. Kservice carries on uploading even after you’ve shut down 4oD which sucks.