Microsoft formally bans emulators on Xbox, Windows 10 download shops
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
*Simplification, of course.
The majority of "computers" people own are already locked down, and it seems clear that things will only get worse -- hardware is increasingly opaque and designed to do things against the interest of the user (or, to say the least, without the consent of the user).
From my point of view, the parent is somewhat incorrect in that we've always had companies trying really hard to lock down what we can and cannot do - since the NES/SNES days Nintendo was doing copy protection and restriction of their hardware, I believe the other players at the time did as well.
Your comment is much more substantial in that it provides a point of discussion, despite the somewhat condescending "...perhaps they are too young to remember..." part. But ultimately entirely rhetorical comments usually are disapproved of, even if the consensus is that the idea behind it is agreed upon.
Perhaps the content of my post was implicit rather than explicit, and I would not harbor a grudge against anyone that downvoted out of a preference for the latter, but my comment was neither sarcastic nor rhetorical.
Dystopian reasoning in the 2 parent comments is slippery-slope fallacy.
Is there even a full open-source OS for the iPhone? If so, I have never once seen anybody using it. In practice, Apple has full control over the apps their users run, and they are not shy about using it. It has been 10 years, and this picture has been getting worse, not better.
Clearly other vendors have looked at that and said, "30% of tens of billions of dollars per year, plus the ability to screw over competitors? Yes please!"
This is definitely not the slippery-slope fallacy, because all he's really positing is that corporate control will continue to tighten at the current rate. If you want to demonstrate otherwise, you have to prove it. And I think the only thing you've proven so far is that there will always be a few greybeards willing to boot up an old Linux kernel on obsolete hardware, which does not sound like true freedom to me.
Heh, not officially, but this does exist:
https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/exclusive-dual-boot-andro...
> because all he's really positing is that corporate control will continue to tighten at the current rate.
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore) In this case, I argue you can replace "censorship" with "too much regulation" or "too many controls" or "too much DRM" or "too tight a walled garden" because what they all share, are being benefits to centralized control and profit at the expense of the convenience and joy of innocent users.
This was largely the promise (and threat) of Bitcoin, by the way. An Internet-native completely digital pseudonymous payment system that is nearly impossible to regulate. There is (or will be) a direct relationship between the stringency of capital controls and the below-the-radar usage of cryptocurrencies. If you expect capital controls of innocent people (which, disclaimer, I really effing abhor, as a person who once had their main bank account locked out for a month sans any evidence of criminality) to get worse/more onerous, and you want to make money off it, you should probably own some crypto.
But it definitely doesn't prove anything about software. If you want to claim that the currently slipping slope will stop at some point, you'll have to name that point and defend it.
We are at the mercy of hardware vendors to run open source OSes - they can giveth and they can taketh away.
Imagine a future where most hardware you can buy only loads signed kernels and bootloaders. That's not a totally theoretical outcome. It came pretty close to happening during the Windows 8 cycle.
"No problem," says I, "I'll just buy a USB adapter."
I have 802.11ac in my house, and it's pretty nice, so I thought I'd get an 802.11ac adapter. So I run down to the store, and pick up an adapter that says it works on Linux ON THE BOX. I look online, and it is using the RTL8812au, which people have reported working in Linux.
Turns out none of the drivers compile on Linux 4.4+. I managed to mess around with the makefiles and the code a bit to get most of the compile errors to go away, but it was still hanging on a few files that I couldn't make heads or tails of. So I went on Github and downloaded a version that had been updated to account for this device in the past 4 days. No dice.
All told, I probably spent 6 hours trying to get the stupid adapter to work. I would have returned it after hour 1 and bought a more expensive Atheros or Intel adapter, but they literally only make 802.11ac adapters in the mini-pcie form factor.
On one hand, the device was USB 3.0 instead of USB2, was made by Tenda (who kind of cut corners), and all the fixes were either for Ubuntu or Arch, and I'm using Fedora. On the other hand, it's 2017, 802.11ac has been out for a while now. I kind of expect to be able to find at least one 802.11AC adapter that works. Most of the 802.11ac adapters that other people had gotten working only worked in 2.4ghz mode, or only worked with 802.11n.
So that was pretty disappointing. It felt like it was 2006 all over again. (It really would have felt like 2006 if Xorg had broken during this process.) It's not like I bought "outdated" hardware either. The FCC approval is dated December 19, 2016. So you'd expect the driver to compile on a recent kernel.
I think I'm just going to buy an 802.11ac router, run it in client mode, and velcro it to the top of my case.
Looking back, Linux was quite unfriendly regarding drivers and support, but I feel it's made a lot of progress for more popular systems. It's an innate problem of Linux itself. Maybe we should focus on the systems that are certified or well-supported by Linux out-of-box like the dell xps series, similar to how people perceive macOS as part of a hardware-software amalgamation, even though a hackintosh community exists.
Regarding drivers, it's always fun to plug something that is 20 years old in to my computer and have it work. I like showing off to my friends by using something that last had a supported driver for Windows 98. However it's a bit embarrassing when something that should work doesn't.
I'd love to contribute more, but I'm not capable of writing drivers from scratch, and a lot of drivers are just hacks built on top of hacks. I wish building drivers didn't involve hours of reverse engineering proprietary protocols.
For instance, I managed to get a dymo desktop label printer working, but only with one font size, and I can't actuate the cutter. I'd be more than happy to finish the driver if Dymo released the specs for their protocol, but as it stands I'm just happy I can get the minimum level of functionality out of it.
This entire conversation makes me realize why people think I'm a masochist for using Linux.
Not really:
- Just because some computational device is Turing-complete, that does not entail that it can perform the computations that you want in a practical manner. For example, my brain or even many biochemical mechanisms in my organism are Turing-complete. That does not mean that it is feasible for me to run some open-source emulator on them;
- In practice, modern computers are no longer Turing-complete in a strict sense. They come with opaque processors that can be commandeered by third parties to interrupt or interfere with computation that the users wishes to perform. Open-source software cannot solve that problem.
> Dystopian reasoning in the 2 parent comments is slippery-slope fallacy.
Arguing that a given bad situation is likely to get worse does not constitute, by itself, a slipper-slope fallacy. It that were the case, no argument that led one to conclude that something will become worse would be valid. This is obviously absurd.
In this case, there is strong empirical evidence that users are in fact losing control over their computational devices, when compared for example with the hardware commonly available in the 90s. This is objective fact. Conversely, you provide no counter-argument. Writing the scare word "dystopian" is not an argument.
While it is possible this is a slippery slope that leads to the case you are referring to. It's still not clear if it will ever reach that state.
Blocking of Win32 apps/apps not from the Windows Store already exists today [0], although who knows how long until it is not "voluntary" anymore. The text in the message from the linked article kind of gives one of the future "reasons" Microsoft will probably use in the future for this kind of shit away ("Limiting installations to apps from the Store helps to keep your PC safe and reliable").
This development presents a VERY slippery slope.
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/windo...
Edit: You could argue that the ChromeOS platform is an example of a completed locked ecosystem. I've never really considered Chromebooks to be a PCs, but I'm sure under some context they meet the classifications of a PC.
I also severely doubt they'll attempt to prevent installation of application binaries from sources other than the Windows store. If anyone were going to be dumb enough to attempt such a move, it'd have been Apple, years before now, and they never even came close. Microsoft isn't run by morons, either.
And they could trivially forbid loading file:// URLs or disable features for those since few people use those anyway, that way you would lose persistence and would be dependent on something to even host your software.
I'd argue it works better than sockets, especially for gaming, since there's no need to mess around with NAT.
With real sockets you can just send a multicast message to find all devices on the local network and talk to them directly.
There is no third party in charge. There is just a requirement to use some party anywhere.
And they still have to agree on the same server, that provides a certain lock-in or inertia. Ultimately it means you have less control over your network connections than with real sockets.
And for the purpose of discussion this about the freedom of running software on your computer and webcontent not being equivalent in that regard. With webrtc signalling servers you're just kicking the ball down the road because then you need to be able to run a server with access to real sockets on some other machine, just to use those poor imitations of sockets.
Set up your hosts file or edit the js to point at a local server.
Of course, if you're in China you'd get in trouble making connections to an outside STUN server but if you're in China you're in trouble making connections to the outside anyways, and the STUN connection is probably the least of your worries.
> just to use those poor imitations of sockets
... that work across NATs without issues, as opposed to real sockets...
---
In any case, WebRTC doesn't strictly speaking need discovery servers at all. See http://blog.printf.net/articles/2013/05/17/webrtc-without-a-... It still uses STUN for public-ip discovery, but comments indicate that can be bypassed by just configuring the connection to use a local IP for STUN. Unsurprisingly, not many people seem to actually care about that.
You say that as if stun didn't exist in the udp/tcp realm. bittorrent clients in fact engage in serverless stun by using mutually reachable peers. real sockets are strictly more powerful than webrtc, period. Also, that argument is becoming more and more obsolete as ipv6 adoption increases.
And again, this is not about utility, it's about control and freedom.
> In any case, WebRTC doesn't strictly speaking need discovery servers at all.
Even if you don't use a server you need to exchange one-time connection tokens out of band. You can't re-establish connections at a later point either. And it does not support multicast either. So no, you can't just have devices talk to each other.
Anyway, you're not even responding to my central argument. Web content is not a substitute for unfettered native access because you need native access to things (e.g. running a server) to even be able to run web content.
> "no one can run nginx without authorization".
Your freedom does not end when the last person on earth who could run nginx cannot do so any longer. It ceases when you can't do it on the device you own on a whim of a 3rd party.
* Photoshop * Illustrator * Premier * Avid * Office * Visual Studio
etc. etc. Legacy applications are a huge reason for people to use Windows. Blocking themselves off from that rich ecosystem of applications is basically begging people to use a Chromebook.
Am I missing the part where they're taking away anything that was possible before?
The current problem* is not that there is absolutely no way to manage your own computer whatsoever, it's that the methods for doing so are becoming more and more a niche only for the computer-savvy. The larger public is becoming increasingly more comfortable with, and encouraging of, closed systems. So long as the majority are willing to pay for such systems, it is not irrational to envision manufacturers eliminating other options over time.
*And keep in mind that I wasn't criticizing the present but, but a possible future 10-20 years from now.
Yes I can appreciate that concern.
Still is the operative word.
When people complained about UEFI preventing people from running their OS of choice, Microsoft mandated that x86 OEMs make it possible for users to unlock their systems.
Fast forward to today, microsoft no longer mandates user control on x86-based systems.
It's a slippery slope I'd rather not ride.
I think what really needs to happen is someone develops and packages a Linux distribution as solid and as easy to install as windows. Honestly, it's nearly there and all it'll take is a few dedicated engineers creating a solid updating mechanic.
[1] https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/#supported_laptops_x86in...
/s
My response was "no way that'd get through", but they insisted on me trying anyway and said they could try to push it through. I didn't bother for a couple other reasons (the open source libretro core I was using would need to be reworked for their managed app environment, and HoloLens performance was actually pretty crap no matter what I did), but a few days later the other emulator controversy started.
I was expecting this outcome and really don't blame MS. Glad I didn't try to port my own app over (which would also work on Xbox and desktop).
Nintendo and other copyright holders want to act like you're licensing software (so they don't have to be beholden to first-sale doctrine, laws concerning the ability to make local backups and other consumer protections), but they also want to prevent you from using that licensed software on newer hardware and want you to pay for 35 year old game over and over and over and over again. It's downright absurd, how many times do you want us to pay for the same piece of Super Mario code?!
Purchases of their Virtual Console games for one console do not transfer across platforms. If you bought Mario 3 for Wii, you'll have to buy it again if you want to play it on the go for your 3DS. Furthermore, licenses for digital purchases on the 3DS (and maybe other consoles?) were tied to hardware IDs, resulting in a super-tedious license transfer process for anyone unlucky enough to need a repair or for those who had the nerve to voluntarily upgrade their system to one of Nintendo's hardware revisions.
So in some sense, they _do_ or, at least, reasonably _should_ have the infrastructure to manage digital purchases in a customer-friendly way, but instead settled for a system which forces people to re-purchase the same title for different platforms. Compare this to Sony and Microsoft, whose digital shops allow cross-platform purchases for many titles.
To add to all of this, Nintendo has a very confusing maze of different account systems for their different services and it is very tough to navigate which accounts serve which purpose. I have at least 3 accounts for Nintendo services at this point and it's still not clear to me what the deal is.
All of these factors combined make re-purchasing Zelda several times over a harder pill to swallow.
I'd really have to be a sucker to pay for movie tickets given all those reasons not to, right? I think I'll still do it, though.
e.g. I live in Canada. Pretty sure HBO Go doesn't support Canada, and I'm sure as hell not wasting my money on cable TV just to see Game of Thrones. I'd rather pirate it. But if I can watch something on Netflix, obviously I'd rather just do that and pay for the service.
And piracy is not the same thing is downloading something you already have a license to.
When I buy a game on my iPhone 6, it works on the new iPhone 7 and it works on my iPad. Apple isn't perfect either but at least they understand that once a consumer "buys" a digital product, they don't like being told they have to buy it again and again.
I had the opposite experience with Apple. My iPhone 3 got unacceptably slow when the next major version of the OS came out. There were games/apps I couldn't use anymore unless I wanted to do a factory reset to the older OS. That was after only 2 years. I got off the platform a long time ago and haven't had that problem since.
There was a specific effort to include hardware from the previous generation in the next, for at least one step of backward compatibility. The GBA had a separate Z80 in addition to the ARM7TDMI to do that. The DS and DS Lite had dual processors and dual cartridge slots, but the DSi ditched the GBA slot. Thus, those were technically capable of running ROM images of GBA games if you found a way to load them and start the ARM7 processor in the correct mode. The 3DS can, of course, play DS and DSi cartridges, having both ARM11 and ARM9 processors.
So it is apparent that Nintendo has supported backward compatibility by essentially packaging two hardware systems into one box. That isn't what I would do, but that's what they did.
They burned goodwill with me for not writing decent SDKs for their hardware, such that about every game has to do a roll-your-own reach into the hardware. Which doesn't translate to the next generation of hardware. Stupid. Just write a damned SDK, and make the 3rd party dev shops hate you less.
I always keep my old cartridges, even though most of my old hardware is no longer capable. It's my proof of license, for when I download the ROMs to play on emulators.
It's true Nintendo had to spend effort creating a port of Zelda. But they didn't do it for the sake of customers who have both consoles. They did it for the sake of customers who only have a Switch. For customers that have both consoles, the effort of porting the game was already wasted. So they are not losing value by offering those customers a new license, except the minor value gained by being able to use either console and having access to any minor improvements in the newer edition of the game. That is not worth the price of the full game.
Who is supposed to pay the salaries of the development team that wrote the Switch version?
So all digital assets are supposed to be pay one take two model?
They don't make a meaningful amount of money by requiring some people to buy two copies on the same account. They make a marginal amount of money as a tradeoff for being visibly customer-hostile.
> So all digital assets are supposed to be pay one take two model?
This is already a buy one take one hundred model, in that you can redownload it as many times as you like on as many sequential devices as you like. The only difference is that the downloads are restricted to one flavor of device.
What I do expect is for it to be available anywhere a Steam client is, and indeed almost every game for which a port exists can be used on any Windows, Mac, or Linux computer (with different processors, GPUs, etc.) for no additional cost.
Valve has set a standard for the behavior of downloadable games across platforms, and it's totally understandable that customers would feel "ripped off" by Nintendo's approach.
No thanks, ill stick to the latest versions I can actually get games im interested in for.
One of the reasons they wouldn't do it is because emulators and ROMs are already rampant on PC and mobile (less so). So the idea of all of a sudden releasing a bunch of classic games in your pocket is heavily diminished.
Then why do many other game developers and publish make PC ports of their old titles which use emulators?
Why is Nintendo different?
That you can emulate old titles for free isn't stopping people paying for them, clearly.
So to answer your question - because those businesses have looked at the financials and decided that the lost potential sales due to people who use emulators are worth the effort do develop games. Nintendo has decided differently. It's possible that the other publishers weren't simultaneously pushing a hardware platform which also comes into play.
I never said emulation prevents all people from paying for virtual consoles. I simply was pointing out that it diminishes the value. For example, if Nintendo released virtual console on PC today, I wouldn't buy it when I've already got emulators and raspberry pi's running arcades. If there was no way for me to technically play emulated games and VC was released on PC - I'd buy it immediately.
So there ya go. One lost potential sale, how many more?
Good original games sell consoles, the PSP had PS2 ports with worse graphics.
I think my favorite Windows Store app is KeePassReader* though, which adds Windows Hello authentication to my KeePass database. It's a very simple app, and isn't exactly easy on the eyes, but I like being able to swipe my finger or just look at my camera whenever I need to open my KeePass database.
* https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/keepassreader/9nblgg...
I also own a couple of WP, so I now get to use those apps on the desktop as well.
i don't hate the windows store, i nothing it.
Seeing as "discomfort" was not specified in any way, it COULD mean the horror game you potentially want to release on the Windows Store could be denied a listing, because it could cause some players/people psychological "discomfort".
To be clear, I would be mostly fine with this rule if "discomfort" was specified as "physical discomfort".
But then again I guess it shows how often people actually use the App Store, I never looked at it, and I don't think anyone I know has either
when there was a rumor or intention to make the xbox one require a net connection (a not so unreasonable requirement) most people took it negatively
anything that give the perception of limiting your freedom and choices, will be viewed negatively, even if those limits wont really hurt you
and i think you are correct, most people wont use emulators, most people dont even know what emulators are, so why ban them .. it is just bad publicity
Me.
Compared to the Xbox side and its costs, the App Store app review is a walk in the park.
I might understand this for AAA titles, but for indies this must be a nightmare.
http://kotaku.com/5884842/wait-it-costs-40000-to-patch-a-con...