Anti-Piracy for Dummies

Are you a content producer or the holder of copyright you didn't actually create? Are filthy thieving pirates downloading and uploading your content all across the web, driving your gross revenue into the negative? Fear not! Immigration and Customs Enforcement is here to help!

Beginning several years ago, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, in conjunction with the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, now handles copyright and other intellectual property enforcement through Operation In Our Sites. Through this program ICE has the authority to forcibly seize web sites that infringe your copyrights et al, providing critical relief for those besieged by piracy such as you. Once seized, these sites prominently display the ICE et al logos and a brief explanation that the site has been seized. As an example, observe the fate that befell torrent-finder.com for the rampant theft of copyrighted works it harbored.

It's a common misconception that you need to have special government connections, secret backroom deals, or incriminating evidence on politicians to request such a seizure. In fact, this is not true. Any copyright, patent, or trademark holder with a Windows computer may request such a seizure for any legitimate reason, and ICE will rapidly respond, taking the offending site offline with all due haste.

To request such a seizure, simply follow these easy steps:

1. Log onto your Windows computer with an account with administrator privileges (e.g. the Administrator account)
   
2. Open the Run dialog, either through the Start menu or by pressing WINKEY+R
3. Type in notepad "C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts". If your Windows directory is not "C:\Windows", you will need to substitute the correct path.
4. For each pirate site you wish to have seized, add the line "74.81.170.110 [site domain name]" to the bottom of the file. For example, to seize TechDirt, a notorious site dedicated to the promotion of piracy and the suppression of the free speech of congressmen and businesses, you would add "74.81.170.110 www.techdirt.com"
5. Save the file and close Notepad
6. Wait for your request to be processed by ICE. This typically varies from a few seconds to a day or so. If the sites are still online after several days, you should probably go back and make sure you did not make any mistakes in performing the above procedure.
   

That's all! Fast. Easy.

With you and ICE working together, we can all look forward to a piracy-free tomorrow!

This post inspired by tsavory.

& Twitter

Okay, I replaced the Twitter gadget from Blogger with the official Twitter one. It doesn't really visually match the blog, but all the ones that were available on Blogger had the same problem with links. This one doesn't.

Let me know if somebody knows one that matches visually without this problem.

& Bugs

Yikes. Somebody just made me aware that if you follow one of the links posted in my tweets on the sidebar, it opens the link in that little tweet frame. That's very buggy. I'll have to see if I can get Blogger (the one that created the Twitter thing) to fix that.

& Moral Panics

One topic that came up rather suddenly in IRC is the topic of the irrationality of humans when a person feels wronged. The particular topic in chat was that, I'm told, you should never, ever touch leaked materials, such as the Windows source or COFEE, because this tends to send companies (especially the one that produced said thing) into moral panics and refuse to ever hire you.

Think about this for a moment; a little bit of rational thought concludes that this is highly irrational behavior, reminiscent of the Pointy-Haired Boss (is there a Dilbert strip on this topic, I wonder?). If you were Microsoft, for instance, and you were looking to hire a programmer for the Windows team (although this could also apply to other parts as well), the #1 most desirable candidate for you is the one who has played extensively with the leaked Windows source, all other things being equal. Not only would categorically refusing to hire such a person result in no benefit, but it would materially harm you as a company, by refusing the candidate most beneficial to you. This is a case where moral outrage contradicts reason, and acting on that outrage results in self-destructive behavior that does more harm than good; or, as the saying goes, cutting off your nose to spite your face.

An alternate form of this is observed extensively in the copyright industries, who have a long history of various licensing and technology blunders with a detrimental effect to their own sales in the name of fighting piracy (and the goal of fighting piracy is, you know, to increase sales). In this case the moral outrage is provoked by a fixation on the amount of piracy; this is a fundamentally flawed measurement. The entire purpose of business is to maximize profit, and that is concerned (usually) solely with sales: reducing piracy (if you can even manage that) is of no benefit if doing so does not produce a net increase in sales at the same time; whatever the exact number of pirated copies may be is entirely irrelevant. And if you haven't managed to boost sales in the process, you're all the worse off because you're already out the money you spent trying to fight piracy.

(for those wondering, yes, the term "moral panics" is from Patry)

Random Fact of the Day

I just learned that some lizards (e.g. Gila Monsters, Komodo Dragons) are venomous.

MRI scans of a preserved skull showed the presence of two poison glands in the lower jaw. They extracted one of these glands from the head of a terminally ill specimen in the Singapore Zoological Gardens, and found that it secreted a venom containing several different toxic proteins. The known functions of these proteins include inhibition of blood clotting, lowering of blood pressure, muscle paralysis, and the induction of hypothermia, leading to shock and loss of consciousness in envenomated prey.

I'd always heard what had been previously believed - that they merely had toxic bacteria in their mouths that was transferred in bites.

The Story of Comcast

As companies like Comcast are increasingly in the news on technology-related news sources, some might wonder how the entire situation with Comcast came to be. Well, this abridged version of the actual shareholder delegate meetings in two acts might shed some light on the topic.

Act 1

Shareholder Delegate #1: Gentlemen, I propose that we advertise higher bandwidth, increase prices, and sign up more customers. Yay or nay?
Delegate #4: What is the business impact of this proposal?
Delegate #1: More money for us.
Delegate #4: Yay.
Delegate #3: Yay.
Delegate #5: Yay.
Delegate #2: Yay!
Delegate #5: I propose we increase network capacity to accommodate those additional customers.
Delegate #2: What is the business impact of this proposal?
Delegate #5: We'll need to spend some money in the short term to...
Delegate #2: Nay!
Delegate #4: Nay!
Delegate #3: Yay.
Delegate #1: Nay.

Repeat 37 times

Act 2

Delegate #2: Holy shit! We've got way more network traffic than the network can handle! It's strangling our network to death!
Delegate #4: This is a disaster! Quick, somebody find a scapegoat!
Network Technician: Well, it looks like BitTorrent is using up a fair amount of bandwidth.
Delegate #4: Kill it, quick!
Network Technician: BitTorrent traffic blocked. Network performance has returned to mediocre levels.
Delegate #2: Whew. Crisis averted.
Delegate #2: Now then, I propose we increase advertised bandwidth and sign up more users. Oh, and we can't forget to increase the price; we are selling a limited resource, after all.
Delegate #3: What is the business impact of this proposal?
Delegate #2: More money for us.
Delegate #2: Yay.
Delegate #5: Yay.
Delegate #4: Yay!
Delegate #3: Yay.
Delegate #5: I propose we upgrade our network to...
Delegate #2: I thought we voted you out months ago. Security!
*delegate #5 is dragged out of the room by security guards*

*cut to next business meeting*

Delegate #4: Gentlemen, I propose that we raise advertised bandwidth, increase prices, and sign up more customers.

*curtain*

This post inspired by Mac Chaos' various parodies over the years, which are probably better than mine.

Here Comes the Clue Train!

Poached from Slashdot Firehose:

Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.

"The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today," he said. "In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today."
...
"We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010," he said.

Clue train says: Change happens; growth happens; why the hell have you waited this long to upgrade your network infrastructure?

Of course he then goes on to straight-out lie:

...the Internet only exists thanks to the infrastructure provided by a group of mostly private companies. "There is nothing magic or ethereal about the Internet--it is no more ethereal than the highway system. It is not created by an act of God but upgraded and maintained by private investors," he said.

The internet is paid for and maintained by the money of customers of those companies, who are the real "private investors", not the shareholders or executives like him. In some cases the internet infrastructure was even paid for directly by the government with taxpayer funds, then entrusted to private companies, who then go on to offer minimal service at maximum price by claiming they paid for what they're selling.

Q's pet peeve #5 (approximate number; lower numbers indicate higher hate): Companies who think that they can cope with the inevitable rise in demand for the internet simply by increasing overselling ratios (Comcast, etc.), blocking some types of traffic (Comcast, etc.), or charging for traffic (Rogers, etc.).

Oh, and while we're on the subject of greedy ISPs, I should note that this previous story has been recalled. The problem was found to be with a router device, not Comcast itself (this time).

Exercise for the Reader

Is it wrong to laugh at your own jokes?

So, tonight a friend asked me some hackingish-related questions, and what he was trying to do reminded me of a blog post I'd written a ways back. Looking back on the blog post, I thought it was amusing how many biology references/puns I used. Can you catch them all?

For the Love of Kaity...

Recently, it has been observed that Comcast is disrupting TCP connections using forged TCP reset (RST) packets [1]. These reset packets were originally targeted at TCP connections associated with the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol. However, Comcast has stated that they are transitioning to a more "protocol neutral" traffic shaping approach [2]. We have recently observed this shift in policy, and have collected network traffic traces to demonstrate the behavior of their traffic shaping. In particular, we are able (during peak usage times) to synthetically generate a relatively large number of TCP reset packets aimed at any new TCP connection regardless of the application-level protocol. Surprisingly, this traffic shaping even disrupts normal web browsing and e-mail applications.

New traffic shaping can disrupt a Comcast Internet connection

I think I hear the entire Comcast tech support department committing seppuku.

From a technical standpoint, there are few options that are more idiotic than sending reset packets to kill BitTorrent connections, as Comcast was doing previously. They just did one: killing ALL connections in that manner. This option is so bad, in fact, that it leads me to seriously consider the possibility that Comcast is doing this intentionally to teach the FCC a lesson: that its resetting BT connections wasn't so bad. What could/should Comcast have done differently? Let's look at a few possibilities.

The best option (excluding improving their infrastructure) would be to monitor the amount of traffic going through each modem, and if a disproportionately large amount is coming from one modem, tell the modem to limit traffic rate for that one modem. Unfortunately, I'm told Comcast modems do not have the ability to change maximum speed without a reboot, so this isn't really possible.

Failing that, there is an extremely simple yet efficient method: simply start randomly dropping packets when there's congestion. While this may sound like a sarcastic suggestion, it's not. The TCP protocol uses two pieces of information to determine how fast to send data: the amount of buffer space the receiver has (used to prevent the sender on a fast connection from flooding a receiver on a slow connection), and dropped packets. If a dropped packet is detected, TCP lowers its send rate. And if BT is a large proportion of traffic, randomly dropping traffic will result is a larger number of BT connections getting throttled than non-BT connections.

Thus this is a simple and easy way to effectively lower the amount of data being sent in a way biased against heavy bandwidth users, without interrupting any of the connections. This works even better if their Sandvine hardware can detect BT traffic and selectively drop packets only from BT traffic. As long as they weren't dropping so many packets that BT slowed to a crawl, I wouldn't mind my ISP doing this.

What's the Matter with MediaSentry?

Let me attempt to give a brief sketch of how P2P applications work, targeted toward non-comp-sci people, particularly with respect to the RIAA file sharing suits. This is taken from the general knowledge I have about P2P programs as a computer scientist, and in some cases I know specific things about specific applications.

Basic Architecture
In P2P applications, individual computers act as either clients or servers (or both at the same time), depending on whether they're downloading, uploading, or both at a given time. Somewhere there is a list of computers in a given P2P network - which users must join at some point. For eDonkey, you log into a large network when you start the program, and these large networks contain many peers who may never communicate with each other. With BitTorrent, you are logged into a small network - only containing the files you are downloading/uploading (e.g. MP3s of a single CD) - only while you are downloading/uploading, and you may be connected to many such networks at once.

Somewhere there is a directory of users. This may be stored on a single server (I believe eDonkey was this way), or a network where a computer asks another computer "who have you seen recently?", and then asks that question of all the computers that are returned from the query, etc.

In all cases (unless you've got some kind of file-sharing virus, which I'm actually surprised we haven't seen before), the user voluntarily logs into and out of the network(s) through various actions. As well, files which are shared must be "voluntarily" shared, either from a shared files folder or by tracking specific files that should be shared; however, most programs will automatically share any files you download from other users (and I've heard some programs, when installed, automatically search for and share files that the program thinks would be good to share).

Depending on the system, peer and/or the directory server may not know all the files a given computer has available for sharing. Similarly, if you ask a given computer what files they're sharing, it may or may not be a complete list. In torrents, it only shows the files in the particular torrent; I believe eDonkey lists all shared files. All P2P systems have a way of asking a particular computer what files they are sharing, although the completeness of the response varies.

Okay, getting to the specific legal issues.

Method of Obtaining an IP and File List
First, as there are standard and intended methods of asking a computer what files it's sharing, it's (probably) not true that MediaSentry had to do anything illegal to obtain this list, like hack into the computer. Likewise, they probably didn't have to do anything other users couldn't do (although they probably made a program to scan P2P networks and catalog all files, while the typical user would have to search for people with specific files; I wouldn't call this illegal).

The big question mark is how exactly MediaSentry verified (to the best of its knowledge) that the info they obtained is true, and without knowing this we can't give a good estimate of the false-positive rate (which is likely the reason MediaSentry won't say what their methods are; they're probably lying when they say that they have developed proprietary and novel methods of investigation that should be considered trade secrets), although previous cases have shown this rate to be > 0. There are lots of ways an investigation could go wrong (or become difficult), even if they did see what appears to be a computer sharing copyrighted files.

Outdated Cache Information
It's possible that the directory server or another computer has an outdated list of files shared by a certain computer, in which case they may say that a computer is sharing files that it isn't. One example of how this could happen is that a computer was sharing some files on some network then disconnected from the internet, and another computer logged on and was given the same IP. Such outdated data could indicate that the second computer is sharing files, even though it's not (it might not even be on the P2P network at all), and in fact NOBODY at that IP has been sharing files for some time. This goes directly to the issue of not being able to positively identify a person from an IP address even if you get an IP address that that computer has as the moment the IP address is obtained (although this is highly dependent on the P2P program). This risk of false positives (and the next one or two) can more or less be eliminated by verifying that the files can actually be downloaded at the time the IP is seen "sharing" files.

Leeching
It's possible that the user is a "leecher" - somebody who downloads without allowing their computer to upload anything by messing with their system configuration. This may be done either intentionally (it's not extremely rare for people to leech so they don't have to use upstream bandwidth when all they want is to get something from someone else; such people fall under the "jackass" category) or unintentionally (P2P programs can be a huge pain to set up to work properly when you're behind a home or other type of local network, and even some ISPs block P2P uploading - but not downloading). Obviously if they're a leecher, they haven't so much as made available anything, despite the computer indicating that it's sharing stuff (although intent becomes a big question if they're not intentionally leeching). While some P2P networks will ban leechers, it's possible that leechers can report false info to the server for the explicit purpose of evading leecher banning; consequently, leeching must specifically be ruled out by successfully downloading the "shared" files.

Clock Synchronization
The issue of stale data comes up again at the ISP and organization (if there's a large network such as a school that the violating computer is on); though more importantly, there's no guarantee that the clocks on the MS computer (here I'm assuming they've actually downloaded the files from the sharer) are synchronized with the clocks on the ISP/organization. If these clocks aren't well synchronized, there's always the possibility that the account information they get from the ISP/organization isn't for the account that had the IP at the time the files were shared. This would require explicitly testing clock synchronization between everyone involved; I'd imagine it would be troublesome to get an ISP/other organization to put that kind of effort into a response to a subpoena. Although this possibility can alternately be reduced by the ISP/organization checking that there are no logons near the time sharing supposedly occurred; if there is a very large area where no logons occurred, the probability of a false positive is probably negligible, even if the clocks aren't precisely calibrated.

Network Address Translation
Next, NATs provide a major problem for identifying the offending computer, because it's entirely possible that that there are multiple computers using the same IP at the same time. In theory (and subject to the problem in the next paragraph) the router can distinguish which computer has which connection at what time (NATs assign unique port numbers to each computer sharing an IP address), but the probability of this information still being around by the time a suit is filed is low, even under normal (non-destruction-of-evidence-type) use. Whether an IP is a NAT or a single computer can be halfway reliably determined by investigators like MS using public info (I recall you got hung up on that point in one of the early trials of yours). If the IP is a NAT, it's going to be significantly harder to prove which computer shared the files, and requires forensic examination of the hard drives or someone on the network confessing (or the RIAA's preferred method: file a suit against the account holder and expect them to give up the person responsible rather than face court or settlement costs). However, this problem is short-circuited if the RIAA gets lucky enough that the P2P application uses user names (some do, some don't), and the name of the sharer is known to be used by a certain person (although I suppose someone could maliciously use the name of somebody they don't like).

IP Spoofing/ARP Poisoning
As well, I'm told by people more knowledgeable than me (I came up with the idea, and then asked them to verify that it could be done in real-world networks) that depending on the configuration of a network it's possible to operate under the IP address of somebody close to you (perhaps somebody in your dorm). This would very likely require intent to deceive, but it might be attractive for someone who wants to download stuff without getting in trouble. I don't know if there are tools out there that make this easy enough for your average user to do, but it's definitely technologically possible, given the right network. In fact, I have a friend who is a very skilled network "hacker" (he publishes articles in security journals) who had written a program to disconnect file sharers from his school network because they were hogging bandwidth and making his connection slow (and he did so without being a network administrator, as far as I'm aware; however, that was a simpler case than sustaining two-way communication); network hacking is outside my field of expertise, but I'm betting this involved what I'm describing in this paragraph. it would depend on how secure the network configuration is, but I'd reason (keeping in mind that I know some about networks but they aren't my specialty - I'm just highly inquisitive, and know a moderate amount about many topics) that wireless networks are especially vulnerable to this. Ruling this out requires knowledge of the physical layout of the network the sharing computer is connected to, and the network administration policies (I would guess that this is usually not done due to annoyance for the network administrators, but perhaps some would). This seems like a viable defense, but I'd recommend talking to a network expert about this directly (my friend isn't online at the moment, so the confirmation of feasibility didn't come from him).

Making Available
Finally (at least I think this is the end), there's the nebulous issue of making available. Even if MS knows for sure that this person was on this computer with this IP address at the time, and MS successfully downloaded a valid copy of a copyrighted file, there isn't a guarantee that this file was actually distributed to other people. In P2P applications with very large networks, it's very possible that simply nobody other than MS ever asked for a copy of a file from a specific computer, so there was no actual distribution. In such cases, it becomes very difficult to even estimate the probability of someone else downloading the file (as I've explained that it's not enough simply to ask other computers if they downloaded the file from that computer - even if the P2P application has a way of asking that - as the computer may be lying or propagating incorrect data (it could be that the "sharing" computer is a leecher and only says it uploaded the file). Obviously this is only an issue if making available is not ruled to be equivalent to distribution.

Questions, comments? Anything (or everything) I didn't explain well enough for laymen, or anybody technically apt want to know exactly what I'm referring to in some cases (it might not always be clear exactly what I was referring to, as I didn't explain the technical details behind that list of risks)?

And oops, I did it again - sat down to write something that was supposed to be fairly concise, and ended up writing something that looks like a judge's ruling document. But at least it made me forget about my flu for a couple hours, so that's a good thing.

& Intellectual Property

I just finished writing a mammoth post in the discussion of this Ars Technica article about copyright and history. This more or less serves as my thesis on copyright, intellectual property, and file sharing in general:

After reading Alfonse's posts, I thought I should provide an alternate perspective/rebuttal from an intellectual property creator. I produce works of fiction, I produce works of information (the majority of my blog, for instance, dealing with topics related to programming, linguistics, and philosophy), and I produce works of computer programming (though this list is not all-inclusive). I spend just about all of my time creating in some way, even if what I create doesn't leave my head. Given that, most of my work is done primarily for two different reasons, which apply in varying degrees to different works:
1. Because I love what I create, and I enjoy creating it. So much so, in fact, that I do it even when I never expect to profit from it. If I didn't love and enjoy it, I wouldn't spend the considerable effort to create it.
2. Because what I create has value to others - it's useful in some way to people other than myself. Now, I'm still selfish in my own way - if I'm going to create something that I don't enjoy creating, even if it benefits others, I better be getting some other kind of incentive, such as money. But most of the stuff I create for the benefit of others is also enjoyable for me.

Conspicuously absent from that list is to make money. To me, getting paid for creating something is the icing on the cake - the cake itself is the content I produce. I think that, as much as is possible (hold that thought), that's the ideal of creation - not professions and commercialization.I believe that work created for its own merit is superior to work created solely for the purpose of obtaining your next paycheck; so yes, I think a world of amateurs would be great.

Of course, it's entirely possible that my beliefs are influenced by my own conditions - I have many skills, some of which can be used commercially, others not; so many, in fact, that I don't have time in my life to explore all of them (interestingly, writing is one of the less intellectual of my skills). If this is not the case for you, Alfonse, then that could certainly contribute to our difference of opinions.

Alternately (or perhaps additionally), perhaps our difference of perspective is due to different origins. When I read your posts, I can't get the image of a five year old throwing a temper tantrum when they can't get every single thing they want out of my head. I, on the other hand, have spent more than the last decade in an internet community based on free distribution of content. Content produced by others is freely used as the basis of derivation over thousands of hours of labor, and both derivative content and original content are given away without any expectation of (or request for) payment (some, such as myself, have even refused attempts by fans to pay for content that was intended to be free). In fact, I'm both a creator of derivative works and of original works.

On the other hand, creation of some things can be prohibitively expensive. You are absolutely correct in that big-budget movies (which I would love to see some of my stories made into, by the way), large computer programs, etc., would not be created unless the creators expected significant returns, because without those returns they would be impossible to produce. As well, some industries, such as the movie industry, cannot provide their work as a service, as you also pointed out.

Consequently, I'm (almost but not quite paradoxically) also a proponent of copyright (as well as patents, although that's an entirely different topic). Of course the copyright I'm a proponent of bears little resemblance to the copyright of today. I advocate copyright of 10-20 years, maybe 30 at most. Furthermore, there are going to have to be some changes in the nature of copyright, not just the duration, as well. This statement requires some explanation.

The world has changed. This is no longer the same world as when copyright law was established; it's not even the same world as twenty years ago. Personal computers and the internet have fundamentally changed the nature of information. I found Mark Twain's arguments in favor of copyright - specifically, that it's unfair for publishers to continue to make money off of his works when the copyright has expired and he no longer able to make money off of them - to be convincing... for the world at that time.

At the time, there was only one reasonable way to make a book: massive and expensive printing presses. As such things were well outside the reach of the common person, this gave publishers non-exclusive production rights even without enforcement of copyright. As they controlled the production, they also could set the prices people must pay for them. Furthermore, the books produced had an inherent value by nature of the cost of producing them. This was true even as recently as twenty years ago; recordable cassette tapes existed, but were inferior to the originals, and CDs could not yet be burned on a personal computer.

This is no longer the case. Personal computers and the internet have made it possible for a work to be duplicated an infinite number of times with absolutely 0 production costs (note that I'm referring to producing the copies themselves, not the content). Copies no longer have an inherent value, nor is there any limitation on who may produce these copies. Most computers now have CD and DVD burners, and information my be transferred over the internet without any special kind of hardware.

Twenty years ago, "theft" (I'm not even going to get into the debate of definition) of intellectual property was limited to those with large budgets - large-scale counterfeiter out for nothing more than profit - who could be reasonably attacked legally. Today, however, there are tens of millions (probably hundreds of millions if you count people outside the US) of IP "thieves", each wanting nothing more than to access the content themselves, with no exchange of money. Besides the fact that the fundamental nature of infringement has changed, it's quite literally impossible to target more than a small fraction of them with legal action, assuming they're even in a country you are on good terms with.

Under such conditions, copyright law enforcement will be, at best, sporadic, and at worst entirely unjust, as companies and governments are required to drastically lower accuracy of prosecution to be able to afford it at all (this is what the RIAA faces now, and it'll only get worse if personal infringement becomes criminal). Technological countermeasures (note that technology and computers are probably my #1 skill, and my current profession, so I hope you'll consider my words to carry some weight) are also doomed to failure without catastrophic side effects of the type that damage culture and invention more than piracy and counterfeiting ever could; though to be fair, such results would also occur if copyright continues to be strengthened as it has been over the last couple hundred years.

We are at the point where the morality of piracy is becoming irrelevant. Regardless of whether it's right or wrong, it's simply not possible to stop it, so you're going to have to get used to it. Even better, you could follow the lead of me and my community and thrive on it, both commercially and non-commercially. I have a job; how about you?

Conjecture & Reality

A bit ago I posted some of my own hypotheses about SBC/Yahoo! DSL BitTorrent behavior, and how their "network management" system (as Comcast likes to call it) might work. Now, in the FCC's current investigation of Comcast's network management, Comcast has finally given (some) details of how their system actually works.

The actual filing is available, and Ars Technica has a brief summary and discussion of the filing (I haven't read most of the filing myself, yet; only the Ars Technica commentary).

Public Service Announcement

It looks like the rumors about Geneon USA going out of business are true. Geneon USA is, among other things, an importer/translator of anime and music CDs from Japan. It also happens to be the only label that has (legally) brought any of the work of Yuki Kajiura, one of my favorite composers, to America (although as I prefer to pay the authors for music I like, I wish they'd brought more of it...).

Thus, Geneon going out of business means that these soundtracks will not be available anymore, which is bad. I already see at least two soundtracks that are no longer carried by Amazon.com, and several others that are down to 5 or less in stock. So, if you're looking to buy some good music, now is your last chance.

Here's a list of the Kajiura CDs by Geneon, ranked roughly by how good they are, with links to them on Amazon (if Amazon is out of them, you might be able to find some from other stores; but you're on your own for that - just make sure the ISBN number matches these here), along with some samples:

Madlax OST 1
Nowhere
The Story Begins
To Find Your Flower

Madlax OST 2
Fall on You
People Are People
Bank on Me

Noir OST 1
Romance
Salva Nos

Noir OST 2
Le Grand Retour
Indio

Elemental Gelade
Beauty and the Beast
The Bond - Reverie Metherlence
Wings

Fiction
Fiction
Vanity

Le Portrait de Petite Cossette
Moonflower
In a Beautiful Morning of May
Undertow

Aquarian Age: Sign for Evolution

Tweaking

Okay, I finally got around to tweaking the blog settings some (been needing to for a while). Among other things, I've made several modifications to the sidebar, including something pretty cool: a feed of my E Terra blog. I also finally got around to adding the links box back in.

Fiction & Fiction

Something I've been meaning to do for quite some time now, and haven't yet gotten around to actually doing it, is to write a blog post about some of the anime I've watched that either I started watching because the synopsis sounded a lot like one of my stories, or just things I happened to watch that turned out to be similar to my stories. Given that my recent posts have been even more random than usual, now seemed like a decent time to do it (furthermore, one new series was added to this list within the last week).

In this post I'm mainly going to talk about my own stories, how they resemble the anime series, and any notable ways in which the two differ. I'd recommend reading the linked synopses of the anime series before reading the parts about my stories.

Anime: Ai Yori Aoshi (literally "Bluer than Indigo")
Story Title: Homecoming (working title - I'm hoping to come up with something better for the official title, but this is the best I have for now)
Length: Novel (note that these are equivalent measures; they don't necessarily represent the preferred medium). A stand-alone spin-off of Blood for Blood (working title), a story originally intended to be made into a role-playing game of size comparable to the Final Fantasies.
Universe: The Blood for Blood Universe

Synopsis:
After more than a decade of education at boarding school followed by the events of Blood for Blood with few brief intermediate visits to his home, Kain (probably the second-most major character in Blood for Blood) is finally able to return to his homeland to claim his position as land-owning nobleman. Homecoming is the story of his return as he both tries to return to an ordinary life and to grow accustomed to his responsibilities as he learns to manage his estate and manor, deal with the populace of his territory, and, most central to the story, deal with his fiancé, Alice.

Alice, the daughter of a successful merchant in the upper middle classes, was betrothed to Kain shortly after the two of them were born (they were born several months apart), and raised accordingly, and Kain raised with the expectation of marrying her. Neither of them, however, is fond of the concept of predetermined marriage to someone they barely know, without any say in the decision. As both are thoughtful and well-mannered, they independently adopt patient, diplomatic approaches to the matter as they get to know each other in the few weeks before their planned marriage, and attempt to reconcile their own desires and options.

Compare and Contrast:
I can't recall where exactly I saw it, but the synopsis of Ai Yori Aoshi I first saw sounded like it was closer to Homecoming than it actually was. In Ai Yori Aoshi, any ambivalence toward the somewhat archaic concept of arranged marriage is rather one-sided and fairly brief; as ambivalence about the arrangement is one of the central themes of Homecoming, this alone makes the general dynamics of the stories significantly different. Not to mention the fact that Homecoming is not really a comedy (apart from Kain's generally amusing personality), or that Ai Yori Aoshi throws in a bunch of ecchi and harem stuff totally missing in Homecoming (even if it were made into a visual medium). Nevertheless, somehow I managed to end up liking Ai Yori Aoshi, and ultimately watched/read all of it.

Title: Gunslinger Girl (season 2 download)
Story Title: Starfall (official title)
Length: Novel. The first story in a larger work as of yet without an official name. Prequel to Eve of Tomorrow (official title).
Universe: Real world, around 20 years in the future.

In the fairly near future, a secret society known as Falcata gathered a wide array of top scientists around the world to conduct biological engineering research toward a project to develop a drastically more combat-capable human than those naturally occurring in humanity. A 15 year old boy named Safir is one of the specimens created in this study. Genetically engineered to possess several remarkable brain features, then trained from birth to hone those features to perfection, Safir quickly became by far the most successful of the first generation trials, with his combat abilities exceeding the expectations of everyone involved in the experiment, having agility greater than a human, and accuracy greater than a computer.

During the story of Starfall, Safir is sent on a series of missions to test his combat abilities, leading in the end to his final test. While the activities are so varied as to include both terrorism and military combat, the most common are missions of assassination, in increasingly difficult circumstances.

However, despite combat being the backbone of the story, the real focus of Starfall is psychological and sociological: how Safir thinks, how he acts, and how he views and relates to the world around him in his unique position, and, ultimately, how he becomes the terrifying character in Eve of Tomorrow so different from that initially in Starfall (the title Starfall is a reference to Lucifer/Satan: the star that fell from heaven).

Compare and Contrast:
This was another that I watched specifically because I saw an ad for it, looked up the synopsis, and thought it sounded like one of my stories. Apart from the fact that the girls in Gunslinger Girl are cyborgs, these two are indeed quite similar. For me the most interesting part of Gunslinger Girl was always seeing how they behaved and interacted in a world where they were raised to kill - the very same thing that I think makes Starfall interesting. I still follow the Gunslinger Girl series (manga); unfortunately, I've read all six volumes that have been written so far, so it will be a while before there's any more for me to read (and I'm pretty sure even the second anime season just starting won't go past what I've already read).

Anime: Wolf and Spice ("Spice and Wolf" would be a more literal translation of the title, but the other way seems to make more sense; download)
Story Title: The Mission (candidate official title)
Length: Series of novels
Universe: Real world, modern day

Synopsis:
The Mission is one of my more secret projects; I don't think I've told anybody much about this story other than the fact that I was probably gonna rake up some controversy with it; so don't feel bad that I'm not gonna tell you much. :P

The Mission is the story of God, in the form of an apparently late teenage human named Simon, as he treks across the United States over quite a few months, for reasons which remain obscure until right at the end.

Compare and Contrast:
The most obvious difference between Simon and Horo is that Simon is a god, while Horo seems to me to be more of a 'great spirit' type thing. Other than that, Simon's demeanor is more passive than Horo's, preferring to deal out wisdom more subtly, and without the position of known superiority (that is, nobody knows who he is); though that is not to say that humor is not an intentional part of the story (it's actually a significant part of the story). Nevertheless, especially in the second episode of Wolf and Spice, there definitely seems to be some resemblance between their hearts (in fact, the similarity of the two series didn't really occur to me until then).

& Conjecture

Comcast has gotten in some pretty hot water lately over its blocking of peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols like BitTorrent (BT). I was fortunate enough to get off Comcast before this whole affair began. However, things aren't altogether different on my current ISP: SBC/Yahoo DSL. Though I haven't had much luck in the past finding others having the same problem, and while there have only been a handful (this is a word I've given my own definition to, meaning five or less) of cases, I've observed BT blocking on my current ISP as well.

In this post I'm going to talk about some theories I have about how this blocking system works on AT&T, based on my observations. It should be noted first of all that this is drawn from a very small number of observations; statistics 101 tells you that the smaller the sample size, the less accurate conclusions are expected to be. Nevertheless, I have observed behavior between these incidents that seems more or less consistent.

The system appears to consist of a stateful process which determines how to deal with traffic in several steps. In its normal mode of operation, there is no blocking or throttling of BT traffic. However, when a large volume of traffic is observed through one internet connection, the system enters an activated state, where it inspects the connection more carefully. However, it's still not blocking or throttling traffic. This state is relatively hard to get into, and from my experience requires multiple gigs of traffic over a period of time (exact amount unknown, but I tend to think a couple days; I believe I've only observed this when downloading one or more entire anime series at a time).

The second factor needed to trigger blocking/throttling is a smaller (but still substantial - on the order of dozens or hundreds of megs) amount of traffic on a single port (or maybe it's tracking individual TCP connections; I'm not certain at this point). I've typically observed this as taking several hours to activate.

Once this occurs, the system goes into throttle mode for that specific port. While I'm still not sure of the details of the mechanisms involved, I'll describe the symptoms I've observed when this mode is activated. Effective bandwidth in uploading through that port gradually decreases, until no TCP connection is able to pass more than a few dozen KB before being strangled to death (I'm not sure of the exact mechanism by which connections are strangled and killed).

As throttling mode is activated per port, other ports are unaffected. If you change BT to use a different port, BT will be able to resume full use of bandwidth. However, the system is still in an activated state and watching, and will strangle that port as well if it observes too much traffic flowing through it.

I've not done experiments to determine how long it takes for a port to leave throttle mode. I have, however, observed it to take a considerable amount of time (days) to return from activated mode to normal mode. Presumably it's watching how long it's been since the last port left throttle mode.

I would hypothesize that the reason for the two levels of activation is due to the cost of tracking per-port bandwidth, and the system does not wish to allocate that kind of computing resources for something which isn't considered to be a serious problem. But this is just conjecture - I don't know for certain that it only tracks port bandwidth when in an activated state; I'm merely attempting to fit a curve to a handful of points.

If you find any more information on the matter, I'd be interested to hear it.

Musings on the MoPaQ Format

So, Q survived finals and term papers, though not unscathed. Now for something completely different, and pseudo-random.

A couple weeks ago, BahamutZero and I were talking about the MPQ file format. I can't remember exactly what we were talking about, but he mentioned that it didn't seem all that good. It occurred to me that while I'm probably the most knowledgeable person on the format outside Blizzard (excluding, of course, the author of the format, who no longer works for Blizzard), I'd never really formed an opinion on how good or bad it was in general. That gave me the idea to write a critique of the format - at least, of the more interesting things in the format - on my blog.

Hashing

One of the more distinctive features of MPQs is the way in which files are located within the archives. The standard method of finding files in databases and file systems is the B-tree or B+-tree. For databases, there is one tree for each index in each table; for file systems, each directory has its own tree. This allows for efficient searching (O(log N) disk accesses per lookup) and the ability to keep only part of the index in memory at any time. However, archive files are generally concerned more about optimizing size than speed (ACE being the extreme example), they may use something simpler, such as a sorted or unsorted array of filenames (and if unsorted, then it is possible to just store the filenames along with the file data, itself).

The MPQ format, however, opted for something more industrial-strength: hashing. Each MPQ archive has a single large hash table (an O(1) structure), containing entries for all (readable) files in the archive. Files are identified by two 32-bit hashes of the filename, a language code, and a platform code (what exactly this is remains to be seen, as it's still unused); the index is derived from a third hash of the filename. Note that nowhere is the filename itself.

You really can't do any better than this for the original purpose MPQs were designed for: to store read-only game data in a compact form that is both fast to access and fast to load. The use of fixed-size hashes (rather than the actual filenames) makes the size of archive data in memory optimal, and the hash table structure makes file lookups optimal. The format of the hash table (specifically, how unused entries are encoded) means that the size on disc could be further reduced by compressing the hash table (it isn't compressed on disc); presumably this was not done to make opening archives faster. Apart from that, the hash table has no real weaknesses for the originally intended purpose.

However, the hash table proves to be a pain for modders because of the lack of absolute filenames in the archives. This apparently became a pain for Blizzard as well, indicated by the fact that in Starcraft: Brood War (the third game/expansion to use MPQs), Blizzard added a separate mechanism not integrated with the hash table for storing the names of files in the archive.

These two things taken together, however, suggest one way in which the MPQ format could have been improved (besides a minor alteration that would have allowed the hash table to be resized; presumably Blizzard didn't see a need for this ability when creating the MPQ format). Rather than including the hash table in the archive format itself, Blizzard could have made the hash table a global, separate entity. That is, store the filenames in some simple structure in the archives, and have the installer/patcher code create a global hash table (containing files of all archives) which would be used by the archive accessing code; this could even be specialized, such as only indexing files of the correct language. This would reduce the in-memory overhead (although increase the total size on disc) as well as potentially decrease the search time for finding a file in multiple archives. It has the added benefit of removing that complexity from the format itself, and moving it to support code. If memory serves, Neverwinter Nights took this approach.

Language/Platform Codes

Another interesting design decision in MPQs was the choice of including support for different languages/platforms in the archive format itself. As briefly mentioned previously, files in MPQs are identified, rather than by filenames, by three hashes derived from the filename, a language code, and a platform code. When a game runs, it sets the language and platform currently running. The MPQ access code then looks through the archives for a file matching that description. If no such file exists, it performs a second search, using the same hashes, but using default language and platform codes (in practice, files identified by these codes are generally American English files).

While it's nice that Blizzard put some thought into internationalization, I tend to think this was something that could have been better implemented outside the archive format itself. It would have been just as easy to use a prefix or suffix on the filename for this purpose (e.g. "platform\language\filename" or "filename.platform.language"). Both of these could have been implemented completely in code.

Alternatively, had they used a global index, they could have simply included only files of the proper language/platform (or the neutral language/platform, if no specific version exists) in the index when it is built by the installer/patcher, without the need to modify the filenames at all.

Separate Hash and Block Tables

One detail about the hash table that wasn't previously mentioned was the fact that the hash table stores only some information about each file (specifically, only that already mentioned). Additional information, such as the file size and offset, as well as file modes and flags, is stored in the block/file table ('block' is more technically accurate, but 'file' better describes its intended purpose). The hash table then stores an index into the file table for each entry in the hash table.

This is something that is common in file systems - you typically have a file table, containing the basic info about each file's data, and an index (often B/B+-tree) of filenames that index into the file table. The obvious benefit of this is that the file table can be modified less frequently, and doesn't need to be completely rewritten every time there's a change in the directory structure. A second benefit is that it's possible to create hard links - multiple 'files' in multiple directories (or in the same directory with different names) that refer to the same physical file.

File Data Blocking

Another feature of the MPQ format that resembles a file system more than an archive format is the way it structures file data. It's generally beneficial, from a compression ratio perspective, to compress a data set as a whole (though compression libraries typically feature a mechanism to indicate when it's necessary to read more data or write out compressed data, so that you don't have to load the entire file into memory at once). However, file systems that support compression don't do that. As file systems must read and write entire sectors of data, file data is broken into chunks of some number of sectors, compressed as a single block, then written out, padding out to the nearest sector; if at least one sector cannot be saved by the compression, the compressed data is discarded, and the uncompressed data is used, instead (there no point having to decompress something when compression doesn't even reduce the size).

However, the MPQ format also does this, despite the fact that it does not pad out disc sectors. The reason is that there's a second benefit of blocking data in this way. When a block of data is compressed as a stream (a single entity), it can generally only be read likewise - as a stream, from beginning to end. That is, you cannot seek in compressed data. As seeking is an essential function in general file systems (and similarly in game archive formats), this constraint is unacceptable. Blocking is thus used to reduce the size of the blocks that must be accessed atomically. To read from an arbitrary point, you find the block containing the position desired and decompress it.

One last point unique to the MPQ format is that when files are blocked, each block may use a different compression algorithm, indicated by a byte prefix with the compression algorithm.

Single Block Files

Nevertheless, as mentioned previously, it's better from a compression (and possibly performance, as well) standpoint to compress files as a single unit. In most cases this would work for arbitrary data (the type that might appear in an MPQ), as many file types will be read once and then kept in memory. To take advantage of this, the MPQ format has a second mode of file storage (I can't recall off the top of my head when this was added. Possibly in World of Warcraft): single block compression. This is basically exactly what it sounds like: the entire file is treated exactly as a single block of data - compressed in a single go, and prefixed with a byte indicating the compression algorithm, just like each block normally is.

In theory (and at the level of the file format), this isn't any different from normal, non-blocked archive formats. The problem is really with the implementation (the code, to be precise). The implementor wanted an easy way to take advantage of improved compression by not blocking data, when seeking is not necessary, so decided to use exactly the same block decompression code as for blocked files - blocks are loaded into memory whole, decrypted, and decompressed all at once. The problem here is that it requires two buffers, and requires the entire compressed block to be read before anything can be decrypted or uncompressed.

ADPCM Compression

As mentioned, the MPQ format supports multiple compression algorithms. Currently, the PKWare Implode, Zip Deflate, BZip2, and Huffman encoding algorithms are supported. There's also one more that's more unexpected: the ADPCM algorithm. I briefly discussed ADPCM compression on the E Terra blog. It's a lossy format that compresses 16-bit audio samples down to 4 bits, giving 4:1 compression ratio, at a non-negligible loss of quality.

This is used for a compression mode typically referred to as "WAV compression". This mode is used for compressing sound effects and music prior to Warcraft III. The MPQ editor scans the WAV to import, and distinguishes blocks that contain only PCM data from blocks that contain anything else. Blocks containing only PCM data are compressed with ADPCM, the others are compressed with one of the lossless compression algorithms. This way, the game sees only a PCM-encoded WAV, though it had actually been converted transparently to ADPCM and back.

This is a pretty strange feature for an archive file format - at least, as a basic compression type. Especially considering that there are better formats for this that have higher compression ratios and higher quality (MP3 comes readily to mind), without requiring an alteration to the basic archive format.

I suspect the real reason for this design decision was historical. WAV compression first appeared in Starcraft (the same time support for different compression algorithms for each block appeared, by the way). Diablo, the only game to use MPQs before that, used uncompressed WAVs, played through several Storm.dll APIs. I suspect ADPCM was used to allow the existing Storm.dll streaming code to continue to work using the new compression algorithm. Though again, it's not a particularly good solution, I think.

Extended Attributes

The last feature worth noting is a system for adding new metadata attributes to files in MPQ archives that weren't included in the original format, which I've dubbed extended attributes. Extended attributes are stored as a file (conveniently named "(attributes)") in the archive consisting of parallel arrays of the extended attributes, each array containing one entry for each entry in the block table. The extended attributes in use at present (as of World of Warcraft) are CRC32, FILETIME, and MD5; an archive may contain any combination of these. Oddly, when Storm loads these extended attributes, it merges them with the rest of the fields in the block table, creating a single large table in memory.

This design decision has both advantages and disadvantages. Storing these in parallel arrays makes it, in theory, efficient to store, load, and access them when present, and ignore them when absent; however, the implementation peculiarity mentioned previously makes it slower to load them, with the benefit to slightly improve access (as it doesn't have to check whether they're all present each time you access them).

There are a couple disadvantages, however. First, as extended attributes are stored in arrays parallel to the block table, it isn't possible to exclude entries for files where you don't need that attribute, requiring more space if only some files need certain attributes. I suppose this is only an issue for the tables when loaded in memory, as, as the attributes file is compressed in the archive, unused entries can (have have been observed to) be zeroed, allowing them to take almost no disk space after compression.

The other disadvantage is that this system is not readily extensible. Because new attributes must be known by the MPQ library (for size calculations when processing the attributes file), it's cumbersome to add new attributes, as the MPQ library must also be updated to support them. This is even worse with regard to the fact that the block table mixing code and data must be updated correspondingly. It also doesn't allow for custom metadata at all.

Writing Systems and...

As with most of my posts, this post is written on a whim. Specifically, I just happened to be talking with someone on an IM about this topic earlier today, and I had the whim to write a post about it.

There are four major types of writing systems: alphabets, abjads, syllabaries, and ideographic/logographic systems (those two are not the same thing, but for our purposes they're in the same category). You should be very familiar with alphabets. Alphabets are writing systems in which, more or less, each character corresponds to a single spoken sound, though the nature of language change makes it impossible for there to be a 1:1 relationship between sounds and letters indefinitely (some alphabets originally did have a 1:1 relationship). Some common examples are the Roman and Greek alphabets, Roman being perhaps the most widely used writing system in the world.

Next are the abjads. I believe I mentioned these a few posts ago. These are incomplete alphabets - that is, only some sounds (typically consonants) are written, and the rest are omitted. Sometimes additional characters may be represented by diacritic marks. Arabic, Hebrew, and Tengwar are examples of this. Arabic may, depending on the writer and the application, either omit short vowels (long vowels have characters just like consonants), or represent short vowels with diacritic marks (these marks are what give Arabic its distinctive glittery appearance, in cases where short vowels are written). Some writing systems may have an implied vowel after each consonant, and diacritics are only written when the vowel differs from the implied vowel; some may even have characters for all sounds, but omit some at the discretion of the writer.

Syllabaries, also mentioned previously, consist of one character for each syllable possible in the language (though they are also subject to loss of 1:1 correspondence due to language change). The syllabaries most familiar to me are the Japanese hiragana and katakana, although there are others.

Finally, we have a class that I don't know of a single name for, and include systems of ideographs and logographs. Logographs are when a single character represents an entire word - that is, there is a (near) 1:1 relationship between words and characters; the most well known logographic system, and the other contender for most used writing system in the world, is the Chinese writing system. Ideographs are similar, but in this case each character represents some idea or abstract concept. Contrary to common misconception, Chinese is not an ideographic system; however, the Japanese use of Chinese characters bears some resemblance to an ideographic system, where words frequently use multiple kanji (which is part of what makes the Japanese writing system harder than the Chinese system, as I mentioned in the distant past). For example, the Japanese word for goat (山羊) is written mountain (山) + sheep (羊).

Finally, there are complications/impurities in all of these. For example, some writing systems, such as Devanagari (an abjad with implied vowels), has one character for each consonant/syllable, but also has some characters which represent combinations of consonants/syllables; in other words, some characters may be combined to form entirely new compound characters in nontrivial ways.

Next post, resolve willing, I'll get to where I'm going with this (and why I've written this post so briefly and hastily - it's only background for the main topic).

Everything Coming Up Roses

So, I've arrived back at home, after spending the summer at my job from last summer (the place Skywing works, and invited me to). Fortunately, the trip home was very uneventful (no jet engines falling off, getting flown into major landmarks, or anything). So, one of the first things I have to do is catch up on the stuff I've neglected over the summer, for the reason that it would have been difficult to do them away from home.

First, I checked what manga came out over the summer. But did that surprise me (and in a good way). It appears that two series I really liked (Gunslinger Girl and Yotsuba&!), and I thought had been discontinued (the last releases were over two years ago), have been resumed. Also, House season 3 is coming out very shortly, and a few other things that were expected also came out, as well. I guess my birthday came exactly 1 month early, this year :P All together, I'm ordering the following (and I'd recommend all of these series, with the possible exception of GTO: Early Years):
- Crest of the Stars novel (the manga based on the novel) part 3
- Death Note volume 12
- Gunslinger Girl volume 4
- GTO: The Early Years volume 4
- School Rumble volume 6
- Yotsuba&! volume 4

Also, as I've got more money (not that I didn't have money before; I was just too cheap to spend it), I'm gonna get some soundtracks I'd been putting off for various reasons. Lo and behold, it appears that there's a new Wild Arms 1 soundtrack from last year. The original "OST" of Wild Arms 1 was released with the game, in 1997 (that's actually more recent than I was thinking). However, there were a number of problems with it. If memory serves, it used different arrangements and synthesis than the original music from the game; as well, it only included about half the tracks. This new one has all tracks and is at least close enough to the game version that I can't tell it apart from memory (I had no problem telling the "OST" from the game). So, I'm buying:
- Final Fantasy XII OST. Had downloaded this and really liked it, but put off buying it due to laziness.
- Wild Arms Complete Tracks
- Xenogears OST. I never bought this because I ripped all the music straight from the console; but I suppose I should buy it as a token gesture at some point.
- Xenosaga I OST. Part of the same series as Xenogears, and by the same composer. Downloaded this to try it; while I'm not as fond of it as some others, I suppose it's worth the money, at least.

Lastly, I should list the various anime I've been watching/manga I've been reading over the summer. Describing each one would be too involved for my laziness, so I'll just let Anime News Network do the talking.
- Bleach
- Bokurano
- Busou Renkin
- Code Geass. Only got this one from Squid; haven't watched it, yet.
- D.Gray-Man. Don't ask me what's up with the format of the name.
- Death Note
- Lucky Star
- Negima
- Pumpkin Scissors. Strangely endearing.
- Skip Beat. *shrug*
- So Long, Mr. Despair

And now I need to go send in my two mice for warranty replacement. One as a tendency to fall asleep at inappropriate times, and the other tends to wander.

& Debates - Quantum Physics

So, I had a random thought that started a debate thread on Star Alliance (remember that from way, way back?). And boy is it a whopper. Registration on the forum is required to participate, so I'll copy some of the bigger posts in the debate here.

The opening post:

So, I had a random thought; that's, of course, rarely a good thing. Now, let's see if this can turn into a full debate. *ahem* Have you ever considered that some of the most puzzling aspects of quantum physics could be logically explained by the universe being a computer simulation? Let's go over a couple examples.

- As best we can tell, mass, distance, and time all appear to be quantized; that is, they're integer values. Any computer constructed by a physics system remotely like ours is only capable of representing quantized values.
- One of the hardest to grasp concepts in quantum physics is that variables associated with things, particularly subatomic particles, don't appear to have values assigned until that variable is actually used, and values can even be lost once they are assigned. When those variables do not have values assigned, they are represented simply by probability distributions, with the actual value chosen randomly when it is needed. There's a saying in computer science (one of those things that you should be careful not to take too absolutely) - never store anything you can recalculate later; quantum physics appears to take this one step further, not bothering to store anything that you don't need at the moment. The point, of course, to massively reduce the amount of memory required for the simulation by only storing essential values.

Input?

My most recent post:

Quote from: Xenon on Today at 02:32:19 PM

I myself have considered that the Planck length and Planck time could be a limit to the universe's "resolution".

Of course. As far as we know at the moment, the Planck constants are the resolution of the universe.

Quote from: Warbringer87 on Today at 12:55:29 PM

If the universe was a huge simulation, would everyone else be part of the simulation, or separate entities within the simulation, or all we all part of the simulation without any free will.

Unknown. There does appear to be full simulation of individual units (unknown exactly what that is; protons/neutrons/electrons/photons, quarks, etc.) in some cases, but it's possible there are optimizations to process clusters of those as a group. Perhaps the fact that particles also behave like waves is a trick to allow the behavior of particles to be calculated in bulk at once, using simpler computations. There are other examples, as well. Like some things cells do seem odd, in that it doesn't entirely seem like all the atoms in a cell are working independently; that in some things the cell or part of a cell seems like it's acting as an single unit.

Of course there are counter-examples, as well. If the simulation was abstracting as much as possible, it's strange that Brownian motion would exist, as it indicates individual atoms are being processed in a case where it would be logical to abstract them into a group.

Quote

Are we all bots on a counterstrike server, is just one of us a bot, or are there no bots?

There would be at least three basic possibilities, which could be combined:
- We are being controlled by players, either directly (e.g. an FPS or RPG), or indirectly (the player is able to manipulate things like basic predispositions, though actual actions are a result of physical processes using those basic predispositions; think like Populus). Possible, but seems less likely to me than the other two.
- We are entirely naturalistic constructions. That is, there is nothing different about us than anything else in the simulated universe; we are nothing more than a result of the laws of physics being simulated. This is the atheist/naturalist world view.
- We are programmed constructs - AIs. We have programs which operate independently but within the constraints of the laws of physics.

But holy crap. Now THAT is an interesting idea. Obviously you could call the programmer(s) God (in the monotheistic, omnipotent sense). But it's also possible that different programmers and/or players (if such a thing exists) could form an entire pantheon. In that case, it's entirely possible that every god that has ever been worshiped throughout history actual does exist (or existed at one time; it's possible gods "die off" as players/programmers lose interest in playing them).