Nuclear Monster

  • Mike Isaac for the New York Times:

    Uber has for years engaged in a worldwide program to deceive the authorities in markets where its low-cost ride-hailing service was being resisted by law enforcement or, in some instances, had been outright banned.

    The program, involving a tool called Greyball, uses data collected from the Uber app and other techniques to identify and circumvent officials. Uber used these methods to evade the authorities in cities such as Boston, Paris and Las Vegas, and in countries like Australia, China, Italy and South Korea.

    […]

    If users were identified as being connected to law enforcement, Uber Greyballed them by tagging them with a small piece of code that read “Greyball” followed by a string of numbers.

    When someone tagged this way called a car, Uber could scramble a set of ghost cars inside a fake version of the app for that person to see, or show that no cars were available.

    Intentionally obstructing local authorities from using their service probably isn’t illegal, but it isn’t something you would have to do if you were proud of your product and thought it was defensible in a court of law.

    Could you imagine if Apple checked if users were government agents and shut off their laptop or desktop computers? Not that our government would worry, the president only uses devices that are designed in Korea.

  • When Valve’s anti-cheat system, VAC, detects a user has cheated in a multiplayer game they’re marked for seven years on their Steam profile page and blocked from VAC protected servers.

    Patrick Klepek interviewed cheaters who were branded:

    “When you have big red letters on your profile announcing everyone you have a ban, the experience is never going to be good,” said Oliveira. “If you don’t suck at a game, they will right away point a finger at you and accuse you of cheating. You get told so many times that ‘Once a cheater, always a cheater.’ I knew I did it, I knew I would never do it again, and I wanted to prove that that was not me. But how do you do that? How will they believe you? Yeah, no. It’s the biggest badge of shame a person can have in an online world.”

    Oliveira found himself taunted when playing games, years after his initial offense. He couldn’t shake the stink, and Valve offered no recourse. He was, for at least seven years, a cheater.

    Bizarre to me is that everyone interviewed agreed the policy was generally acceptable.

    This program lacks nuance. Policies against cheating are good, but without more granularity in enforcement it’s kind of ridiculous. Someone who cheats at Counter-Strike for ten minutes shouldn’t necessarily be punished the same as another person who cheats for a month.

    A few years ago I asked at a Valve GDC booth for job-seekers if they ever had room for online community managers. It’s not surprising the Valve employee thought the idea of them hiring an online community manager was ridiculous after reading this article from Patrick. The one-size-fits-all kind of anti-cheat enforcement has the stink of developers making community decisions all over it.

  • To me, 2016’s Hitman is this bizarre game about planning and murder, where you’re also trying to make your cloned assassin (Agent 47) dress up and act normal to the other NPCs in the game. They aren’t particularly concerned with anything going on around them, and generally won’t be upset if you walk into a room and walk out two moments later wearing a completely different outfit, or were the only person to walk out of a room alive. They do care if they see you change outfits, or if you have the same clothes as some other bald clone who they saw do something bad recently, so the rules are a little different than reality.

    Each level has new outfits for 47 because they allow him different kinds of access, into a guard post, or into a silent auction for evil billionaires who want to bid on people or state secrets.

    It gets completely ridiculous when Agent 47 is required to do things like get dressed up, put make up on, and walk a runway in France, nailing his pose as perfectly as he nails a drum solo when he’s trying to blend in during a mission in Thailand.

    IO Interactive’s Christian Elverdam in an interview with Matthew Pellett:

    One thing we learned pretty significantly is that some of our best moments aren’t assassination moments; it might be walking onto a catwalk, simply because it’s a cool experience. Isn’t that weird? In a game about assassination and silent assassins, one of the marquee experiences is: “Do you want to be a male model?” People were like: “YEAH!”

    Most modern character-driven games are either/or propositions. Either your avatar is perfectly capable of murdering hundreds of people without flinching, or it’s some kind of narrative exploration. Hitman’s Agent 47 can’t take much fire, doesn’t talk much, and can’t fight very well unless it’s planned out in advance and goes off without a hitch.

    The assassinations never go off without a hitch, it’s just not really possible for 47 to use a gun and clear out a room of more than three people without getting dropped by security guards.

    Last week I was playing one of the elusive target missions where you’ve only got one shot to complete the mission. No saving, no loading. It took over an hour to figure out how I was going to assassinate the target, and I did, but then I had to complete the second mission objective and use the key the target was carrying to open a safe and retrieve a flash drive with information the client wanted.

    One problem: The safe was in a hotel security office brimming with guards and military. All armed, and because there were two types of personnel I couldn’t just have an army costume on and open the safe. The regular Hotel guards would freak out and shoot me.

    Bewildered, I cheated a little bit and read on a forum for Hitman players that you could pull the fire alarm and the room would empty out. Great idea!

    Of course, no Hitman plan survives contact with the game.

    I had Agent 47 pull the fire alarm in the security room, and then everyone in the room immediately got their guns out and lit Agent 47 up. Hours down the drain because it was an Elusive Target mission I couldn’t replay, and I was laughing the entire time it happened because it was just so ridiculous. Who shoots somebody that pulls a fire alarm?

  • According to an update on their crowdfunding page, the new Mystery Science Theater 3000 series starts up on Netflix on the 14th of April.

  • If you’re like me you’re gonna spend a good long moment looking at the name of this game before clicking play on the trailer. It’s Full Metal Furies, not Full Metal Furries.

    Cellar Door Games created such fine games as Rogue Legacy, and my personal favorite, Don’t Shit Your Pants. This Full Metal Furies game doesn’t seem to involve any pants-shitting, but it looks like a few characters from Rogue Legacy are hidden in there, so that’s good.

    What kind of game is it? The door that leads to the basement describes it as an RPG-ified action brawler for four, or fewer, players. They emphasize that they have modernized the genre, we will find out more later this year when the game is released.

    The announcement notes mention Xbox and Windows 10 cross-platform purchasing and online support, so we’ve got those platforms. There’s also a Steam listing, but if you purchase it via Microsoft you will only get it via the Windows store. I’ve put out a question to Cellar Door asking after Linux and macOS, will update this post if they get back.

    Update 2/22/17:

    Ryan Lee of Cellar Door let me know that macOS support is a lock, either at launch or a few months after. Linux depends on how well the game does when it is released.