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• Neutral net or neutered

  4 juin 2013, par Mans — Law and liberty

  In recent weeks, a number of high-profile events, in the UK and elsewhere, have been quickly seized upon to promote a variety of schemes for monitoring or filtering Internet access. These proposals, despite their good intentions of protecting children or fighting terrorism, pose a serious threat to fundamental liberties. Although at a glance the ideas may seem like a reasonable price to pay for the prevention of some truly hideous crimes, there is more than first meets the eye. Internet regulation in any form whatsoever is the thin end of a wedge at whose other end we find severely restricted freedom of expression of the kind usually associated with oppressive dictatorships. Where the Internet was once a novelty, it now forms an integrated part of modern society ; regulating the Internet means regulating our lives.

  Terrorism

  Following the brutal murder of British soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich, attempts were made in the UK to revive the controversial Communications Data Bill, also dubbed the snooper’s charter. The bill would give police and security services unfettered access to details (excluding content) of all digital communication in the UK without needing so much as a warrant.

  The powers afforded by the snooper’s charter would, the argument goes, enable police to prevent crimes such as the one witnessed in Woolwich. True or not, the proposal would, if implemented, also bring about infrastructure for snooping on anyone at any time for any purpose. Once available, the temptation may become strong to extend, little by little, the legal use of these abilities to cover ever more everyday activities, all in the name of crime prevention, of course.

  In the emotional aftermath of a gruesome act, anything with the promise of preventing it happening again may seem like a good idea. At times like these it is important, more than ever, to remain rational and carefully consider all the potential consequences of legislation, not only the intended ones.

  Hate speech

  Hand in hand with terrorism goes hate speech, preachings designed to inspire violence against people of some singled-out nation, race, or other group. Naturally, hate speech is often to be found on the Internet, where it can reach large audiences while the author remains relatively protected. Naturally, we would prefer for it not to exist.

  To fulfil the utopian desire of a clean Internet, some advocate mandatory filtering by Internet service providers and search engines to remove this unwanted content. Exactly how such censoring might be implemented is however rarely dwelt upon, much less the consequences inadvertent blocking of innocent material might have.

  Pornography

  Another common target of calls for filtering is pornography. While few object to the blocking of child pornography, at least in principle, the debate runs hotter when it comes to the legal variety. Pornography, it is claimed, promotes violence towards women and is immoral or generally offensive. As such it ought to be blocked in the name of the greater good.

  The conviction last week of paedophile Mark Bridger for the abduction and murder of five-year-old April Jones renewed the debate about filtering of pornography in the UK ; his laptop was found to contain child pornography. John Carr of the UK government’s Council on Child Internet Safety went so far as suggesting a default blocking of all pornography, access being granted to an Internet user only once he or she had registered with some unspecified entity. Registering people wishing only to access perfectly legal material is not something we do in a democracy.

  The reality is that Google and other major search engines already remove illegal images from search results and report them to the appropriate authorities. In the UK, the Internet Watch Foundation, a non-government organisation, maintains a blacklist of what it deems ‘potentially criminal’ content, and many Internet service providers block access based on this list.

  While well-intentioned, the IWF and its blacklist should raise some concerns. Firstly, a vigilante organisation operating in secret and with no government oversight acting as the nation’s morality police has serious implications for freedom of speech. Secondly, the blocks imposed are sometimes more far-reaching than intended. In one incident, an attempt to block the cover image of the Scorpions album Virgin Killer hosted by Wikipedia (in itself a dubious decision) rendered the entire related article inaccessible as well as interfered with editing.

  Net neutrality

  Content filtering, or more precisely the lack thereof, is central to the concept of net neutrality. Usually discussed in the context of Internet service providers, this is the principle that the user should have equal, unfiltered access to all content. As a consequence, ISPs should not be held responsible for the content they deliver. Compare this to how the postal system works.

  The current debate shows that the principle of net neutrality is important not only at the ISP level, but should also include providers of essential services on the Internet. This means search engines should not be responsible for or be required to filter results, email hosts should not be required to scan users’ messages, and so on. No mandatory censoring can be effective without infringing the essential liberties of freedom of speech and press.

  Social networks operate in a less well-defined space. They are clearly not part of the essential Internet infrastructure, and they require that users sign up and agree to their terms and conditions. Because of this, they can include restrictions that would be unacceptable for the Internet as a whole. At the same time, social networks are growing in importance as means of communication between people, and as such they have a moral obligation to act fairly and apply their rules in a transparent manner.

  Facebook was recently under fire, accused of not taking sufficient measures to curb ‘hate speech,’ particularly against women. Eventually they pledged to review their policies and methods, and reducing the proliferation of such content will surely make the web a better place. Nevertheless, one must ask how Facebook (or another social network) might react to similar pressure from, say, a religious group demanding removal of ‘blasphemous’ content. What about demands from a foreign government ? Only yesterday, the Turkish prime minister Erdogan branded Twitter ‘a plague’ in a TV interview.

  Rather than impose upon Internet companies the burden of law enforcement, we should provide them the latitude to set their own policies as well as the legal confidence to stand firm in the face of unreasonable demands. The usual market forces will promote those acting responsibly.

  Further reading

  • Tory-Labour pact could save data bill, says Lord Howard
  • Internet companies warn May over ‘snooper’s charter’
  • Snooper’s charter ‘should be replaced by strengthening of existing powers’
  • Exclusive : ‘Snooper’s charter’ would not have prevented Woolwich attack, says MI5
  • Search engines urged to block more online porn sites
  • Why technology must be the solution to child abuse material online
  • Google must take more action to police explicit content, says Vince Cable
  • Facebook bows to campaign groups over ‘hate speech’
  • Facebook sexism campaign attracts thousands online
  • Türkischer Ministerpräsident : Twitter ist eine Plage
  • Valls : « La traque sur Internet doit être une priorité pour nous »
  • La Cnil, futur juge d’Internet
  • “National security matter” : Third agency caught unilaterally blocking web sites

• Game Music Appreciation

  16 juillet 2012, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  A little over a year ago, I was prototyping a method to leverage Google Chrome’s Native Client technology in order to play old chiptunes (video game music) directly in a web browser. The last time I posted on the matter, I said that I might have something ready for public consumption by the time Google Chrome 21 rolled around. I thought I was being facetious but I wasn’t too far off. Chrome 20 is the current release version as I write this.

  Anyway, I did it : I created a chiptune music player in Native Client by leveraging existing C/C++ libraries such as Game Music Emu, Audio Overload SDK, and Vio2sf. Then I packaged up the player into into a Google Chrome extension and published it on the Chrome Web Store. Then I made a website cataloging as many chiptunes as I could find for 7 different systems :

  http://gamemusic.multimedia.cx/
  

  Check it out if you have any affinity for old game music or you want to hear how music was made using a limited range of bleeps and bloops. Thus far, the site catalogs NES, SNES, Game Boy, Nintendo DS, Genesis, Saturn, and Dreamcast songs. I’m hoping to add support and catalogs for many more systems, though, eventually bringing support in line with the Chipamp plugin for Winamp.

• Investigating Steam for Linux

  1er mars 2013, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  Valve recently released the final, public version of their Steam client for Linux, and the Linux world rejoiced. At least, it probably did. The announcement was 2 weeks ago on Valentine’s Day and I had other things on my mind, so I missed any fanfare. When framed in this manner, the announcement timing becomes suspect– it’s as though Linux enthusiasts would have plenty of time that day or something.

  
  
  

  Taming the Frontier
  Speculation about a Linux Steam client had been kicking around for nearly as long as Steam has existed. However, sometime last year, the rumors became more substantive.

  I naturally wondered how to port something like Steam to Linux. I have some experience with trying to make a necessarily binary-only program that runs on Linux. I’m fairly well-versed in the assorted technical challenges that one might face when attempting such a feat. Because of this, whenever I hear rumors that a company might be entertaining the notion of porting a major piece of proprietary software to Linux, my instinctive reflex is, “What ?! Why, you fools ?! Save yourselves !”

  At least, that’s how it used to be. The proposal of developing a proprietary binary for Linux has been rendered considerably less insane by a few developments, for example :

  1. The rise of Ubuntu Linux as a quasi de facto standard for desktop Linux computing
  2. The increasing homogeneity in personal desktop computing technology

  What I would like to know is how the Steam client runs on Linux. Does it rely on any libraries being present on the system ? Or does it bring its own ? The latter is a trick that proprietary programs can use– transport all of the shared libraries that the main program binary depends upon, install them someplace out of the way on the filesystem, probably in /opt, and then make the main program a shell script which sets a preload path to rely on the known quantity libraries instead of the copies already on the system.

  Downloading and Installing the Client
  For this exercise, I installed x86_64 desktop Ubuntu 12.04 Linux on a l33t gaming rig that was totally top of the line about 5 years ago, and that someone didn’t want anymore and handed down to me recently. So it should be ideal for this project.

  At first, I was blown away– the Linux client is in a .deb package that is less than 2 MB large. I unpacked the steam.deb file and found a bunch of support libraries — mostly X11 and standard C/C++ runtimes. Just as I suspected. Still, I can’t believe how small the thing is. However, my amazement quickly abated when I actually ran Steam and saw this :

  
  
  

  So it turns out steam.db is just the installer program which immediately proceeds to download an additional 160+ MB of data. So there’s actually a lot more information to possibly sift through.
  
  Another component of the installation is to basically run a big ‘apt-get install’ command to make sure a bunch of required packages are installed :

  
  
  

  After all these installation steps, the client was ready to run. However, whenever I tried to do so, I got this dialog which would cause Steam to close when the dialog was dismissed.

  
  
  

  Not a huge deal ; later NVIDIA drivers are fairly straightforward to install on Ubuntu Linux. After a few minutes of downloading, installing and restarting X, Steam ran with minimal complaint (it still had some issue regarding the video drivers but didn’t seem to consider it a deal-breaker).

  Using Steam on Linux

  So here’s Steam running on Linux :

  
  
  

  If you have experience with using Steam on Windows or Mac, you might observe that it looks exactly the same. I don’t have a very expansive library of games (I only started using Steam because purchasing a few computer components a few years ago entitled me to some free Steam downloads of some of the games on the list in the screenshot). I didn’t really expect any of the games to have Linux versions yet, but it turns out that the indie darling FTL : Faster Than Light has been ported to Linux. FTL was a much-heralded Kickstarter success story and sounded like something I wanted to support. I purchased this from Steam shortly after its release last year and was able to download the Linux version at no additional cost with a single click.

  It runs natively on Linux (note the Ubuntu desktop window decorations) :

  
  
  

  You might notice from the main Steam client that, despite purchasing FTL about a 1/2 year ago and starting it up at least a 1/2 dozen times, I haven’t really invested a whole lot of time into it. I only managed to get about 2 minutes further this time :

  
  
  

  What can I say ? This game just bores me to tears. It’s frustrating because I know that this is one of the cool games that all real gamers are supposed to like, but I practically catch myself nodding off every time I try to run through the tutorial. It’s strange to think that I’ve invested far more time into games that offer considerably less stimulation. That’s probably because I had far more free time compared to gaming options during those times.

  But that’s neither here nor there. We’ll file this under “games that aren’t for me.” I’m glad that people like FTL and a little indie underdog has met with such success. And I’m pleased that Steam on Linux works. It’s native and the games are also native, which is all quite laudable (there was speculation that everything would just be running on top of a Wine layer).

  Deeper Analysis
  So I set out wondering how Steam was able to create a proprietary program that would satisfy a large enough cross-section of Linux users (i.e., on different platforms and distros). Answer : well, they didn’t, per the stated requirements. The installation is only tuned to work on Ubuntu 12.04. However, it works on both 32- and 64-bit platforms, the only 2 desktop CPU platforms that matter these days (unless ARM somehow makes inroads on the desktop). The Steam client is quite clearly an x86_32 binary– look at the terminal screenshot above and observe that it’s downloading all :i386 support libraries.

  The file /usr/bin/steam isn’t a binary but a launcher shell script (something you’ll also see if you investigate /usr/bin/firefox on a Linux system). Here’s an interesting tidbit :

  function detect_platform()
  
    # Maybe be smarter someday
    # Right now this is the only platform we have a bootstrap for, so hard-code it.
    echo ubuntu12_32
  
  

  I wager that it’s possible to get Steam running on other distributions, it probably just takes a little more effort (assuming that Steam doesn’t put too much effort into thwarting such attempts).

  As for the FTL game, it comes with binaries and libraries for both x86_32 and x86_64. So, good work to the dev team for creating and testing both versions. FTL also distributes versions of the libraries it expects to work with.

  I suspect that the Steam client overall is largely a WWW rendering engine underneath the covers. That would help explain how Valve is able to achieve such a consistent look and feel, not only across OS platforms, but also through a web browser. When I browse the Steam store through Google Chrome, it looks and feels exactly like the native desktop client. When I first thought of how someone could port Steam to Linux, I immediately wondered about how they would do the UI.

  A little Googling for “steam uses webkit” (just a hunch) confirms my hypothesis.