2011 was the year of the games industry, as a whole, getting hacked.

Dear games industry; huge international publishers and development studios: are you seriously going to tell me you didn’t see this coming?

For the last several years, the games industry has been been infested by a plague of account systems. EVERY company wanted their customers to sign up for THEIR unique account, marketplace, community and download central, preferably with separate accounts for each. And then another account for support requests, of course. And the more of these accounts can be associated with credit card information, the better. And of course, in true games industry fashion, as much as possible should be developed in-house.

Every games company wants me to create a unique account just for them. Every games company wants my password. And apparently, nearly as many let their security be handled by Joe the Intern who does their website on weekends.

It’s absurd. And not just because you are getting hacked en masse, and your users have their sensitive information leaked to hackers courtesy of you and your incompetence and your stubborn insistence on acquiring sensitive information that you have no need of, no business storing, and are not qualified to handle and safeguard.

It is also absurd because, even when you are not being hacked, it is infuriating your users. I don’t want to have to invest in your imaginary currency (which can only be bought in bulk, in quantities conveniently designed to force you to spend more money up front than the price of the item you wanted to buy), in order to purchase DLC for my games. I don’t want to have to remember 47 different account usernames and passwords. I don’t want to have to remember which email address I signed up with two years ago on the company you bought 6 months ago and whose account database you have now integrated into yours.

I don’t want to have to guess whether I am supposed to log in with my Bioware account or my EA account when unlocking stuff for my Bioware game (published by EA). I don’t want to have to log in to both Steam and GfWL to play a game. I don’t want to have to log in to Rockstar Games Social Club. Sega, was it worth it to make me sign up for a Sega Pass? Did you get enough value out of yet another username in your database to justify my password now being in the hands of hackers?

All of you, do you really need me to sign up for anything at all? Or is this just your vanity and your 20-year-old habit of prompting users to “please fill in your registration card while you wait for the installer”, updated to the internet era for no reason whatsoever?

The rest of the world has, by and large, learned a couple of important lessons over the last years:

• online security is hard, and
• users have plenty of accounts everywhere already, and they don’t want to have to sign up for your exclusive site any more than they want to sign up for the 400 other sites they visited recently.

Thus, quite a lot of serious websites now “outsource” the account security business to those who are qualified to handle it. We have Facebook Connect, relying on the assumption that Facebook, a site with 400 million users, and a very tempting target for hackers, is able to deal securely with authentication, and we have OpenID, relying on the assumption that users themselves will use a provider that they trust among the countless different ones available.

What these have in common is that they allow you, the company hosting a website and an online service, to provide all the benefits of a personal user account to your users, but without you ever seeing a password, and without you being able to lose quite as much sensitive data when you get hacked. It also provides the convenience benefit of allowing the user (without forcing the user to do so) to reuse the same user ID across multiple sites, and it even offers the potential for exchanging (with the users’ consent, of course) information between different game companies.

And you know what? Steam is an OpenID provider. You could implement OpenID-based authentication, and people would be able to log in with their Steam ID (or their GMail account, or any of the dozens of other OpenID providers, of course), and you wouldn’t have to worry about protecting their passwords.

You could, practically in your lunch break, write a login system which allows GMail users, Steam users and Facebook users to log in using their credentials from those services, handled securely by those services, where you get all the benefit of juicy direct and “exclusive” access to the user, without the headaches of “how do we store the users’ username and password, and without hassling the user with “please come up with a username and password for yet another site.

So, dear games industry. I’m sure that pretty much anyone who has played a game over the last decade has already had his username, password, pet name, address and credit card info leaked by now, thanks to you.

But how about putting a stop to it from now on? How about leaving security to the companies that actually invest in it, and who make it their business? How about, along the way, getting rid of the current account hell where every user has to, for every game, every development studio and every publisher, remember a unique combination of URL (where your “service” is hosted this month, after the latest relaunch, the latest merger or the latest “let’s just start over because our previous system sucked”), and username, password and email address to log in to said URL?

How about making your jobs easier, while also treating your customers better and giving less information away to hackers?

How about growing up and catching up?

A common sentiment when these hacks really exploded this past summer was “these hackers need to be stopped”, but that’s missing the point. They’re only showing how absolutely trivial it is to hack a huge number of websites. Arresting them, torturing them for a few years at Gitmo or condemning them to the deepest pit of Hell doesn’t matter, because your websites are still vulnerable, and in a world of 7 billion people, someone is going to try to exploit it.

Yes, the hackers need to be held accountable, but so do you. You are the ones who chose to start hoarding user information, and you are the ones who didn’t even care enough about your users to do so securely. You are the ones who betrayed your users. You are the ones who failed to live up to the responsibility you wouldn’t even have had if you’d stuck to your actual business: making games, rather than collecting usernames and passwords.

Grow up. Start storing only the data you actually need, and make sure that what you do store is kept absolutely goddamn secure. If you ever even see my password, encrypted, hashed and salted or otherwise, you are doing it wrong.

They obviously went to a lot of trouble to design a new touch-based interface. But because they need backwards compatibility as well, they have a “traditional” apps isolated into a kind of “Windows 7 ghetto”, something that looks just like Windows 7, and with no visible trace of being integrated into the whole Win8/touch thing… And this is for traditional PC’s. On my PC, I’m apparently going to have to choose which environment I’m using currently, because there’s limited interaction between them. And both worlds are going to suffer from that.

But why did they do this? A traditional PC doesn’t benefit from a touch interface. So on a PC, they went to the trouble of providing a new, shiny-looking UI, which doesn’t integrate well with what a PC needs to do, or with the apps that already exist on a PC.

And on tablets? Well, they’re most likely going to use the infamous ARM port of Windows, aren’t they? And that means they won’t be able to run existing applications anyway. But they still get to drag around the entire legacy desktop “ghetto” UI. Why? So that they can run the PC versions of Excel or Visual Studio (assuming an ARM port exists)? Yeah, that’ll be hilarious to use.

From what we’ve seen so far, Microsoft has managed to produce a good touch-based UI — something that might actually give them a fighting chance in the tablet space. And they’ve got a good keyboard/mouse-based UI already. (A good command-line based UI is still MIA, of course) — and at the same time, Windows Phone makes no attempt at compatibility, and lives in its own little world.

I suspect that one of the keys to Apple’s success is that they’ve exploited each platform’s differences. They didn’t try to make OSX run on the iPhone or iPad. They wrote iOS for that (admittedly with a lot of code reuse, but as separate beasts with separate APIs and UIs). The result is that every iPad app is written for iOS and for touch. Every OSX app is written for OSX and for the “PC” platform, for mouse and keyboard.

Trying to make every device do everything, as Microsoft is seemingly doing, sounds like it will merely give us the “traditional” Windows experience, the feeling that every app is written in another era, for a very different platform, with no attempt at fitting in. So our mouse-based apps on our tablets will get a fresh brush of paint, and then they’ll be let loose on the WinTablet. We’ll get touch-based apps designed for tablets, running on PC Windows, and trying to coexist with Excel, Visual Studio, Minesweeper, Notepad and Outlook. And no matter where the user turns, he’ll be faced with apps designed for a completely different UI paradigm. But for what purpose? Does Microsoft seriously think people will buy their tablet over the iPad because it runs MS Word? And are people going to buy a Windows 8 PC just so they can, using a mouse, play a port of Angry Birds or another touch-based game?

I don’t understand the attempt to make both coexist on every device. Neither PC’s nor tablets need both. Do they? Both seem to be weakened by the presence of the other. Can you honestly say that you’d like your iPad more, if it allowed you to run OSX apps out of the box, without requiring the apps to be rewritten and redesigned for touch? I doubt it.

I don’t get it.

Without getting into all the painful details, I’ve spent most of the last month or two trying to find a new apartment, and this past weekend was spent moving out of our old apartment, painting it and fixing it up. It’s been stressful, and it hasn’t left much time for anything else.

Until July 1st, when I get to move into the new apartment, I’ll be living on a friend’s couch, so things aren’t quite back to normal yet. But the worst part is over, and hopefully I’ll be able to spend a bit of time now on interesting things, such as blogging, coding and blogging about coding.

Either that, or at my tendency to try to answer questions with a useful answer.

Or maybe they’re just bad at asking questions.

Personally, when I ask questions, I tend to prefer getting useful answers. I usually want an answer that tells me what I wanted to know, not just one which happens to be a valid answer to the specific phrase I used when asking the question. (if I ask you “should I go left or right here”, I don’t want you to answer “yes”, even though technically speaking, it is an entirely correct and valid answer. I wanted to know which of the two directions I should go, not whether or not the direction I should go is among the two listed)

Others take it as a personal affront, however, if you try to give them a useful answer. For example, a friend just asked me “how do I make a few blank lines in LaTeX?”

On the surface a very simple question, and the answer is almost certainly very simple too. Unfortunately, there are several different simple answers, depending on what those “few blank lines” are for. And rather than just giving a simple answer, I figured my friend would probably be more interested in the correct simple answer. The one that actually did what he needed, and not just one which fitted my interpretation of his vague question. Rather than just saying “yes, you need to go left or right”, I figured answering with the specific direction would be more useful. I guess I figured wrong.

If you merely want to separate two elements on the page by some vertical space, the \vspace{} command is probably a good suggestion.

If you want to insert a single line break (which, when combined with the spacing you might have between paragraphs, can turn into something very like “a few blank lines”), then \\ is the command you need. It also has an optional argument allowing you to specify how much extra space to insert.

You could probably do something with the margins too, which would solve the problem in some cases.

Maybe you want to change the amount of vertical space between paragraphs. Then the command would be \parskip

And maybe the blank space should be embedded in a custom command, so that you don’t just insert “vertical space”, but something semantically meaningful, like, say, “a figure”, which just so happens to include some vertical padding, or “a chapter title”, which incidentally should be separated from the rest of the page contents by some vertical space.

Instead of spending approximately 3 seconds telling me what the desired spacing is for, this person threw a hissy fit, saying “I didn’t think ‘a few blank lines’ was that hard to understand”, and then refused to say another word.

Is it really so unreasonable to ask for clarification so that you can offer the right answer? One which doesn’t just satisfy the 10 words that made up the question, but which solves his actual problem? Should I just have answered “just hit enter a few times”? That almost certainly wasn’t what he needed, but it would have inserted blank lines in his LaTeX document, so technically it answered his question.

Apparently that would have been better received.

Or maybe the problem is just my lack of psychic powers. Perhaps I was expected to read his mind and just know what he was trying to do. In which case I apologize. I seem to have been born without the ability to read people’s minds. I have to rely on spoken language instead. And now you’re warned. The next time you ask me a question, don’t count on me being able to read your mind, because I can’t. You’ll have to give me the information I need verbally. If you don’t do that, I try to be helpful by asking for the additional information that I need in order to give you an answer. If you answer that request for information, then I’ll probably be able to give you the answer you’re looking for.

If, for some reason, it is essential that I guess what you meant solely from the original description, then tell me that. Then, time permitting, I might be willing to play your guessing game with you. It just means you’ll get more complicated, less useful and less relevant answers. But if we’re in some kind of quiz show, I guess you have to follow the rules.

But if you’re just not willing to tell me what it is I’m supposed to answer, then you just wasted your own time and mine. I’d be grateful if you didn’t do that.

And if I ask for clarification or context, it is not because I want to annoy you. It is because I’d like to give you the answer you’re looking for, instead of either guessing and answering with something not useful to you, or trying to answer all possible meanings of your question, which is a lot of work, just to give you more information than you need.

So what’s going on here? Freak coincidence? Supernatural powers? At a first glance, both sound ridiculous to me.

But I want to think about the more “interesting” explanation a bit: perhaps Paul really is psychic. Perhaps Paul can tell the future.

And then what? What does that really tell us? Does it answer our problem? Say we have a psychic octopus. It could show us anything. It could’ve predicted the financial crisis, it could have predicted the death of Michael Jackson, it could have given us next week’s lottery numbers. And yet this psychic octopus chose to show us the World Cup results of all things.

Why? Was there some significance behind this? Is God telling us that the World Cup is important? That we should forget about oil leaks and bank bailouts and climate change, and instead focus on who won the World Cup? That seems unlikely. Why would God, or anyone else, care about that? Or are we back where we started, that it’s just a freak coincidence that they chose to predict the World Cup, rather than the hundreds of other sporting events?

Does it mean that our lives are predetermined, that Spain had to win, that we have no free will? Or does it mean that Paul was able to control events? Perhaps Spain could have lost, but Paul exerted his mighty Psychic will and gave them the victory. (Is that cheating? Does it count as doping perhaps?)

How did Paul know the results? Reading people’s thoughts wouldn’t help, unless someone else also knew the results. Perhaps he can simply see into the future. But is he intelligent? Is he able to choose what to report back to us? Could he have chosen to instead arrange stones at the bottom of his aquarium into the shape of the next week’s lottery numbers? How did he know what it was we were asking him to predict? All Paul saw from us were two boxes with food in them, and a different flag on the top of each. How did Paul figure out “they must be asking about who will win the World Cup”? For that matter, how did he determine that we would interpret it as “the box I open indicates the winning team”? He could just as well have meant it was the team that was going to lose (he’s taking their food, after all)

The problem is that in order to explain anything, it is not enough to say that Paul has psychic abilities. We have to assume that Paul is an intelligent psychic octopus, that we live our lives along predetermined paths (unless Paul is able to control us) and that Paul has an interest in soccer specifically, and figures that of all the things he could reveal to us, the results of each World Cup match is what matters. And we’re still not able to say anything about how he manages to make these predictions.

Taken together, those assumptions makes the “supernatural” explanation sound at least as unlikely as calling it a pure statistical coincidence.

I’m generally a pretty skeptical person. I don’t believe in Gods, magic, ghosts, spirits or anything supernatural. Not because I’m sure none of it exists, but because it seems so absurdly unlikely for those specific beliefs to be true. Let’s say there really is something to the belief in ghosts. How do we know what it is? When you hear weird noises in an old house, how do you know it is the ghosts of dead people specifically? Perhaps instead the house itself is alive. Perhaps it’s the people who live in it in some alternate dimension? Perhaps it’s the Martians remote-controlling little dust clouds to mess with us. Believing in the supernatural isn’t an easy way to dodge the questions we can’t answer. Instead it just makes the problems bigger. Instead of explaining “Last night, I heard someone breathing even though I was home alone”, we now have to explain why somehow dead people are able to walk around here with us, and they’re able to make noises and for some reason they can think of nothing better to do than breathing heavily in my house. We have to explain how dead people come to be here (and that means we have to explain what happens to us when we die), and we have to explain how they can manipulate the world of the living. Somehow, they’re simultaneously insubstantial and invisible, and at the same time, able to make noises, or flick light switches or throw small objects around?

I think it was a lot simpler to explain back when it was just “I heard a weird breathing noise and I have no clue what it was”

Just like I’d rather have to come up with a plausible explanation for an octopus through random chance managing to predict World Cup matches, than having to do the same for the idea that the octopus can tell the future, is intelligent, cares about soccer, and cares about letting us know the result of soccer matches. Oh, and that the future is fixed and we can do nothing to change it.

Correctly guessing the outcome of 8 matches is pretty unlikely. Assuming it has a 50/50 percent chance of correctly guessing the outcome of each match (which sounds likely, given that octopuses probably don’t know much about soccer), the odds of this are 0.39%.

That’s low, very low, but not impossible. Statistically, one out of 256 octopuses should manage such a 8/8 success rate. Pretty lucky then that it happened to be Paul who got it right.

But that’s not quite right. Statistics don’t work like that. Paul made a number of predictions before he got famous, which were what brought him to our attention in the first place. The miracle here isn’t that he predicted 8 matches. Paul only really became famous when he predicted that Germany would beat England. If he can keep guessing correctly, we might start wondering if there’s something going on. But of course it’s going to look miraculous if we include past results. If you roll a die long enough, you’re going to get, say, four 6’es in a row. It’s bound to happen sooner or later. And once that happens, it’s hardly a miracle if you roll another 6. There’s a 16.6% chance that it’ll happen. We can’t include the first 4 rolls and say “I rolled five 6’es in a row! The odds of this happening are 0.013%,! It’s a miracle! This die is magical!”, because you cheated: you waited until you’d got the first four rolls right. The real coincidence is just that the final die roll came up a 6 as well.

So we only really started wondering about Paul’s predictive abilities after England’s defeat. Since then he’s made four predictions: the odds of that are much better. Even by a random coin toss, you’d have a 12.5% chance to get 4 matches right.

So now it’s no longer a supernatural phenomenon, but “just” a curious coincidence. But there’s another interesting thing to note: take a look at the results¹ listed on Paul’s Wikipedia page. In particular, take a quick look at the flags.

Notice anything?

They don’t look very random. If you don’t look carefully, you won’t even notice that the flag in the “prediction” column varied in a few matches. They’re generally dominated by yellow and red. Nearly all the losers had flags with a lot of blue in them. Perhaps Paul just likes red and yellow better than blue. Serbia is really the only oddity then.

The trend is even more pronounced if we look at the results from 2008: Paul guessed that Germany would win every single match, regardless of the outcome of the actual match.

So perhaps Paul just likes the colors. Or perhaps he’s just realizing that whenever people show him a German flag, there’s food underneath it.

As a LaTeX user, I’d love to see this take off. Imagine that, not having to scour Google and random newsgroup archives and forum posts just to figure out why [X] isn’t working in your LaTeX document, or how to do [Y].

Imagine having a site based on the StackOverflow software, where knowledgeable users are actually going to see your question, and answer it, and even rate the answers so you know which ones are of the highest quality.

I wish we had a site like that when I was a student.

So go and commit to using the site:. The site won’t be launched until it has gathered a critical mass of supporters.

I graduated. My thesis defense went well and I’m no longer a student. Just thought I’d let you know

So what happens now? No clue, but I suppose it involves finding a job.

On monday the 12th of April, I’m going to defend my master’s thesis. If you’re in the area, and are geeky enough to find it interesting, feel free to drop by.

The precise place and time is: 15:00, April 12, 2010

Room S125 / 3–1-25 DIKU (Datalogisk Institut) Universitetsparken 1 København Ø

Looks like I’m going to be busy the next couple of days preparing my presentation.

That is all.

Here is what I’ve previously written about my thesis on the blog, here is what Wikipedia has to say on the subject, and here is the thesis itself, including source code.

I’ve been meaning to write this post pretty much for the last month. The reason I’m finally doing it is that I also wanted to drop a quick line on a cute aprils fool joke that should be of interest to a lot of gamers:

Rock, Paper, Shotgun dedicated the entire day to perfectly ordinary PC game reporting/blogging as if it’d been April 1st, 1993. Cute and intelligent, and served as a fun trip down memory lane. Nice idea, and a nice change from the usual fare of everyone trying to pull off outrageous or absurd stories ad nauseam. Especially as there seemed to be practically no worthwhile pranks to be found anywhere this year (even Google had some pretty tame ones), your up to the minute coverage of PC gaming news as of 17 years ago really made the day.