Sky7 Blog

Video gamers have been on the lookout to connect their passion of gaming to possible jobs with pay. A new rise of gaming career came from online video streaming service such as “twitch.tv”. They provide a streaming channel where the owner can proceed to stream their gaming content while getting paid by the amount of viewers they receive. Every subscribers they receive for the channel, and every time they play ads during their stream, they would earn certain amount of money as a result. Famous gamers have been known to earn up to 3000$ per month due to their profit from the stream. This is interesting as new types of self-sustaining jobs are appearing from the internet, as the internet proceed to expand to the world.

  Not only does the stream generate ads revenue, it also provides the gamer to connect with his/her fans through chat system. These streams also serve as an advertisement for the games the user chooses to stream during his time.   Currently this type of online service is still quite new, as it may started from gaming videos that were previously uploaded to youtube, now users can save time from editing and decide to stream instead. Even though it is a fairly new market, competitors such as twitch, azubu tv and others have begun to provide these streaming medium. This brings me to wonder what other new jobs the gamers could create to establish the need of this market.

 http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/03/13/twitch-tv-touts-record-breaking-growth-for-its-live-streaming-service-as-it-tops-28m-unique-viewers-in-february/

As most people should already know, EA games recently released a new game called “Sim City” which can also be called Sim City 4. Even before the release of the game, netizens online were worried about the DRM (Digital Rights Management) aspect of the game. Due to the growing population of pirating games, EA decided to set a rule where only internet connected users can play the game. This means that users need to be consistently connected to the internet to play the game. Even though previous titles of sim city has been single player games, EA decided to make this new title only online playable.  This strategy is to prevent people from cracking the games and provide free download of the game through mediums such as torrents or peer to peer file sharing. However by restricting a game that is more suitable as a single player to requiring internet to play, it greatly reduces the convenience of gamers and creates a large variety of gaming problems.

The game has been bombarded with lag, server overload, unable to connect to server, game saves not recorded properly and more. With these restrictions the rating of the game has hit an all-time low, with numerous gamers boycotting EA games as a result. To think that such a successful gaming franchise had resulted into a whirlwind of controversies, it shows how forcing gamers to follow restrictive rules that try to outlaw piracy can backfire on the company. There are always better ways to prevent piracy by establishing better security or by simply ignoring it, and allow the gamers to freely support the game. In the end, not only did EA gain bad reps, it also lost out on potential customers who were dissuaded from all the horrible reviews. What do you guys think of this controversy?

http://kotaku.com/5991077/your-complete-guide-to-the-simcity-disaster

http://www.rtsguru.com/article/2576/Understanding-the-SimCity-Always-on-Internet-Controversy-From-Both-Sides.html

Video game addiction is the extreme usage of computer and video games to the point that they directly interferes with daily life. There have been numerous cases where it causes the user to distance and isolate themselves from any social contacts with family and friends. The user would instead focus on in-game achievements instead of their current life events which would then cause severe drawbacks in their social life. This symptom is currently not under the “International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems” but is still classified as similar to psychological addictions, compulsive gambling and impulsive control disorder.  Studies have shown that there is around 10-15% of gamers that exhibits the sign of meeting the World Health Organization’s criteria for addiction.  

  Reasons that gaming has become close to addiction, are due to the advancement in the gaming technology. Graphics, gameplay, online social activities has improved to the point of being comparable to real life social activities. They provide as a form of entertainment, challenges and stress reliefs from the real world. Playing video games is always nice and fun with friends or by yourself as entertainment, so long as the gamer can control the time management as well as sort out the priority of their life. There have been issues of gamers playing well past 24hours in a row and stressed their body to the limit and dies due to gaming addictions. So it is always nice to take precautions and have rests in between sessions.

http://www.video-game-addiction.org/

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/01/12/what-makes-games-so-addictive/

Google search is the web search engine owned and provided by Google Inc. It is currently the most used search engine on the internet. It receives over several hundred million queries every day with its service. It uses “page rank” priority ranking results and allows the users to search through keywords and images. It is developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997. Now google search is not only a basic search engine, but it can now simultaneously provide weather, timezone, stock quotes, maps, flight tickets, movie time, translation, sports scoring, calculator and many other embedded functions. The search engine also provides instant search where the results would automatically display as users type out the keywords, as well as display recommended searches keywords that appear as you type.

  There are currently around 2 billion searches with around 300 million users every single day. The searches not only provide a convenient central for information to be indexed and displayed for users, but it also provide as a commercial medium for companies to display their services by appearing on the results. Some of the competitors of google search include Microsoft Bing, Naver, Baidu, yahoo, yandex and etc. Google search is the default search engine for chrome browser and Mozilla firefox. In my opinion, without a proper search engine the internet would be way too messy and complicated for users to navigate through internet. It would be difficult for users to find answers to questions, to discover new internet pages, and to find current information about the world. It would inhibit the ability for internet web services to expand as they would lose a medium for users to find their sites. In recent years, Google has also been improving its searches, by barring redundant searches, blocking malware sites, deleting piracy searches and many more. In the end, I am extremely grateful for such an useful convenient search engine with all the functionality to provide the basic needs of navigating through internet, and am looking forward to new innovations from google.

  http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

http://www.wearecube3.com/blog/article/bing-the-new-search-engine-from-microsoft-and-yahoo/

In recent years video rental stores has been on the downfall as the internet streaming began to rise. Video rental stores like blockbuster has been in trouble as many users these days prefers to watch directly from internet stream rather than renting the videos/movies physically; as they could always just pay the subscription fee to internet streaming to watch for the whole month instead of paying rental fees for each movie they decide to pick out. This eliminates the need of driving to a shop, picking out a video, bringing it back home and eventually driving back to return it. This also eliminates any issues with late rentals or lost video discs. With internet streaming it allows greater convenience and provides a wider range of movies and shows to the user with a lower price.  Since Netflix has a library of movies and tv shows, it can confidently take over the usage of tv cable as well as movie rentals. With a measly price of 7.99 per month it allows users to stream instantly from pc, xbox, mobile, tablet and many other platforms.

The only problem with this internet service would be the accessibility of its service, as it is currently more established in the usa by containing a lot more content in comparison to the Netflix Canada branch. This won’t always be the case, as Netflix and other internet streaming service eventually expand into a global service. What do you guys think about the condition of rental video stores versus the rising internet streaming service?

http://singularityhub.com/2011/06/07/the-rise-of-netflix-and-the-future-of-home-entertainment/

http://www.fastcompany.com/1690654/blockbuster-bankruptcy-decade-decline

Trolls, spammers and bots are found throughout the internet regardless of what content you are viewing. They plague the internet with their annoying attitudes, and irritating actions. The trolls intentionally provoke other people with either stupidity or outright arrogance in hopes of agitating the person. The victim who fights back and becomes agitated would be labeled as “feeding the troll”. The best way to prevent trolls would be to simply ignore them till the troll leaves due to boredom. Spammers and bots on the other hand are more dangerous to web services. They can overload the server, create chaos, render services unusable and generate gaming economic problems.

  Most bots are found in online games where bots are certain script that allows the user to replicate actions in the game. The bots can be used to “farm” monsters for exp, or to farm in game money to sell for real currency. These bots are harmful to the gaming services as they promote real currency trading while causing distraught in the gaming economy. To prevent bots and spammers, is to implement security that automatically checks for behaviors that can then identify the users as bots. Some of the security that are found on internet these days are security shield that detects if your computer system is running any botting program, or security in the game where it detects the players behavior and assigns task to identify if the user is responsive or not.

What other ways of prevention do you think will be more successful in catching these internet pests.

http://www.wikihow.com/Be-a-Troll

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/34011/How-to-Be-a-Spammer-in-20-Simple-Steps.aspx

It has only been a year since i joined reddit and began browsing, posting and commenting on the site. Reddit is a social news and entertainment website where people from from around the world can submit contents as a “post” where other users can vote “up” or vote “down” depending on their opinions. It was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in October 2006. The site is generally an online bulletin board with a nested tree-like commenting system for each post. The reddit is broken down further from the front page into subreddits, where it is organized by categories. Each categories has different moderators and layouts according to how the moderators organize it. The mods have the power to also ban certain users from these subreddits if they violate their rules. For every post, you can vote up or down and these points are referred as karma. These karma point are typically useless other than the satisfaction of online users approval.

  Reddit earns money through traffic, ads and reddit gold subscription fees. The reddit gold subscription costs US$3.99/month or US$29.99/year for new features such as turning off ads, saving comments, access to reddit lounge and etc. What makes reddit really shine in my opinion is the amount of attention it can generate through these posts. They have AMA (ask me anything) post of famous people, a few example would be President Obama, MythBusters Adam Savage, Jamie Hyneman, Bill Nye, Snoop Dog, Bill Gates and etc. This allows the fans and the general public to ask questions directly without the influence of the media. Another interesting aspect of these publicity is how it can be used to help achieve awareness in donating programs and controversial issues. A year ago, reddit helped protest against GoDaddy, forcing members of congress to come out against SOPA and participated in blackout day to prevent SOPA from taking place.   It is nice to see how an online bulletin board can become influential enough to unite online people against issues that concern the society.

http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/10/14/a-rundown-of-reddits-history-and-community-infographic/

http://www.reddit.com/gold/about

http://gamepolitics.com/2012/01/11/reddit-plans-sopa-039blackout039-protest-jan-18

MMORPG stands for “Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game” which is a genre of role-playing games where players can interact with a large community of other players in a virtual game. It is like other rpg where the player takes on a role of a character and plays in a virtual world to level up and progress through the game. Instead of a rpg that focus on single player element, MMORPG focus more on dungeons and fights that players can do together. MMORPG pricing are separated into freemium, subscriptions, and buy to play. Freemium means that the game is free to play for everyone and it incorporates an online cash shop to allow players to buy premium items with real currency. Subscriptions are where players have to pay a monthly subscription fee to continue playing the game. Some of the subscription mmorpg may change their business model back to freemium, when the budget doesn’t meet their goal. These games can then apply special limits to the free players while providing additional benefits to ongoing subscribers as can be seen in games like Tera.

In Tera they allow the subscribers to obtain an “Elite” status that grants them better dungeon rewards, faster queue time and free consumables every month. Another format would be the “buy once and play forever” option where players are required to purchase a copy of the game and are allowed to play the game indefinitely. This causes the company to rely on the initial amount of money to further develop and maintain the game. The game can also incorporate the cash shop model or to publish expansions packs to help pay for the costs. It is interesting to note that the business model has been evolving from subscription games like WOW to freemium mmorpgs throughout the years. As freemium provides the most amount of player’s interest and can easily tempt players who normally doesn’t buy games with cash shop items.  In my opinion, I feel that future mmorpg would either be freemium or buy to play, as monthly subscription games are being labeled as pressuring players to play more to get their money’s worth. In the end, all these business models work, but games these days are incorporating all the different models into one to assure the best profit while keeping the players satisfied.

  http://massively.joystiq.com/2009/07/19/does-an-mmo-have-to-cost-money-to-deliver-fun/

In recent years piracy has grown at an increasing rate, from peer to peer sharing like torrents, to file sharing website like the newly resurrected MEGA. They allow users to easily upload ripped music, ripped movies, and cracked games. They offer the price of 0$, fast download, and potential user support if someone is lost on how to crack a game. Piracy has given the internet users an easy access to illegally free softwares at a convenience. A well known software called LimeWire began as far as 2000, where it allows P2P sharing through Digital Audio Access Protocol (DAAP). Instead of wasting time buying the game at a local shop, they can instead download the game first, play it, and if they really like the game, they can buy it as a supportive act. Piracy gives convenience in comparison to itunes or other music purchasing stores, where they even limit you from having the ability to burn the music on a cd to play on your car. Facing such limitations, it would be way more convenient to just simply download the music, burn the music and play it on your car whenever you want.

It is true that piracy may damage industries,as it de-motivates gaming company to continue developing new games when people can just download it for free. However piracy isn't all bad, where in the music industry it is quite different. By allowing music to be spread freely online, it promotes the popularity of the singer at a larger scale in comparison to the minimized market of people who would buy albums. As most people who downloads music wouldn't buy music albums even if piracy was non-existent. With the increase of people who were exposed to the songs sang by the singers, there will be a higher amount of people who would attend their concerts and buy their merchandise. In my opinion, instead of focusing on fighting against piracy, the industries should focus on establishing new ways of using it as a free international popularity promotion. Since no matter how they try to block the content from being pirated, all it take is 1 person to crack the security and 1 person to find a loophole to the copyright law, for it to be available online.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/sunday-review/internet-pirates-will-always-win.html?_r=0

http://ca.ign.com/articles/2011/07/27/is-piracy-good

Anonymous is a hacktivist group that originated in 2003 from the imageboard 4chan. The group opposes internet censorship, governmental internet privacy acts, governement corruption, scientology, hate groups and unfair treatment of civilians. It started small as a decentralized online community but slowly it growed into an international hactivism force. They go on protests, hacking governemental sites, ddosing websites, hacking private information and spreading them as a threat toward the target. The group is unique in that, there is no membership where a personnel can officailly join the group as the group has no leadership, ranking nor direct means of communication. Instead they can simply join by claiming to be part of Anonymous. This prevents the opposing target from easily capturing the leaders/hackers and arresting the core of the group.

There is also a low orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) where people can register their computer as part of a bot net used by the Anonymous to DDOS their targets. I feel that it is great to see people around the world acting together to bring corruption into the light so everyone can see and judge the corruptor. The anonymous group can act simply as a media coverage where they can dig out the deep dark secrets of the current society through illegal means like hacking. They have the power to ddos websites, spread company secrets and gain media coverage over corrupted actions. However one problem with Anonymous is that, it is easy to spin out of control due to the fact that there is no direct leadership; thus allowing random people to use the name for any of their own actions no matter if it is truly beneficial to the world. So all in all, I am happy that anonymous exist to deliver the voice of the general public, bring worrying issues to the media, and having the power to actually make a change for once; so long as they don't lose sight of their original purpose and act as a tyrant.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/08/anonymous-taking-down-government-websites

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/02/201121321487750509.html

Apple won a legal victory where it defeats Samsung by suing them for copying certain features from their iphone and Ipad where they received $1.05 billion dollar in damages.  The patent “pinch to zoom” was one of their patent used to sue Samsung in which the jury rules 6/7 infringement.  In November apple even patented a geometric shape known as the “rounded square”. This in my opinion is absurd as this can further defer future developers from ever improving upon convenient concepts.  Sadly apple modified their business model of producing innovations to patent wars. This brings up the issue in how patents and copyrights are in a way deferring their original purpose. A patent’s purpose was for the inventor to have a set of exclusive rights such that they can limit others from potentially “stealing” their ideas and gain profit out of it. However this is not the case recently, as massive business companies are abusing patents to stop smaller companies from ever competing with them.  

By limiting these competitions it greatly reduces the rate of our technology growth. As competition is what drives companies to improve and upgrade their product to attract sales. One example can be the isp companies in north america, where they purposely set absurdly high price for internet service  for low download speeds. Only recently when google started offering fiber optics with 1 gbps internet speed in kansas, did the other isp start to lower their price. In summary, i would like the patent laws to be modified so that it would prohibit companies from patenting common ideas for their own usage. This may be the only way for our technology to continue producing new innovations.

  Bibliography:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent

Computer image privacy is one of the most controversial issues across the internet. For example, if i were to post an embarrassing picture of myself on platforms like flickr or Facebook, the photo can then be accessed by the general public.

I will then have the choice to choose the privacy level of the picture. However if I were to regret my decision and decide to delete the picture off Facebook, then too bad, cause the photo will still exist inside the Facebook server. There have been issues with deleted photos that still exist inside Facebook servers even after 3 years. People can then continue browsing the photo if they saved the exact image url of that deleted photo regardless the fact that the owner wants it gone from the internet.

Another issue comes up when I want to prevent this photo from been downloaded from public viewers. This is proven to be extremely difficult to do as there are quite a few ways of bypassing the download block. An example would be how some professional photographers who posts their photo on Flickr and made sure that user online can't download the original size of that photograph. However if I were to access the page source option and look through the code, i can then easily find the source url of the original picture and save it from there. Another way would be to simply screenshot then paste into an image viewing software. So remember to always be aware of what photo you want to upload and think twice before posting your next picture.

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/1241/url-hack-view-and-save-original-photos-on-flickr/