Game Security Technology

For years the gaming industry has tried to stay ahead of the crackers. Shortly after or sometimes even before a game is released there is a crack in which you can get the game for free or you can borrow your buddies game, download it and play it without the CD. They have changed from activation codes, to 4 disk installs, to inital online activation. While some of these things have helped none of them fixed the problem.

Last year it seems they may have found a fix that will keep people from stealing the game. I went and bought a $60 computer game about a year ago. I brought it home, downloaded it and then found out I needed to sign on to the Internet to play my game. So I load the game up and it goes through an error saying it can't initialize with the game server. So for two nights I wait and try each night getting the same error. On the third night it finally initialized and I was able to play my game. Well all of that doesn't sound so bad except that everytime you want to play the game you have to log onto Steam, they make sure your game is authentic and then you can play.

In short what it means is that companies are now requiring you to log onto the internet everytime you want to play the game and pass a check to see if your copy is legit. At first I was really mad and was thinking well they are gonna lose money but as I started thinking about it I wasn't so sure. Ten years ago this kind of security would of never of flown because not everyone had internet. It would be hard to go down a street where the majority of the people on the block didn't have internet these days. The only problem I see is that it only tells you it requires online activation it doesn't say that you have to have the net everytime you open the game. More and more games that come out utilize the same security.

I'm not sure where this security will go but I know for me it was a surprise and headache. Here is a link to the site they use for the games and servers. You can download games off here but even if you get a CD copy you have to use this server. The game was Empire Total War.
http://store.steampowered.com/

Virtual Machines

As all of you know we did Virtual Machine installations this week. I was really impressed with VMware and its capabilities. Having Windows 7 also on the machine was nice because I got to play around with Windows 7 which I hadn't touched up until that point. I think the thing I liked the most was how quick it was to install VMware and an operating system. While we did have some issues I think those were because we hadn't used VMware before and Windows 7 is new and has issues with it. I am very curious to try it out again because I want to be able to possibly run Windows 98 on a machine so that I can play older games that won't run with Vista or XP.

I think when I get a new computer in a few years I will take my old computer and try VirtualPC so that I can see both sides of it. I will probably prefer VMware but I still want to have knowledge in both so if someone asks me I can tell them why i like one better then the other. I'm sure we will be messing with it more so I hope to learn some new things that I can do.

Virtual Machines

Today I'm going in to do the VMware assignment. I had never messed with a virtual PC before this class but since talking about it and reading more into it I have seen its many uses. Last night I had a friend that was messing with the Mac OS on VMware because he had never used Mac and wanted to see what it was like. I think that is one of the best uses for the virtual PC is training.

You can sit someone down on one machine and have them work with multiple operating systems with little trouble. I think in the future this will be a bigger part of learning. Instead of reformating and installing I think all lessons will be taught on Virtual Machines. You can just have your students switch between the OS's to see the difference.

See you guys in Class

Windows Automatic Updates

My Post today is on Windows automatic updates and how it frustrates me. I wanted to keep my new computer up to date with the lastest Microsoft security measures and so my programs ran properly. Yesterday I had to turn it off because every 15-30 minutes it wants to restart my computer so I have to postpone it. If you don't postpone it force restarts your computer. At first I didn't mind but it gets really frustating when it tries to force start my computer 3-4 times a day. I think I will just turn on updates each sunday.