history, technology, cyberculture and nostalgia find a place to meet and mix

Living the Football Dream

Football Manager (formerly known as Championship Manager), a creation of Sports Interactive, is amongst the best selling games in PC history. With the last version (Football Manager 2009) selling over a million legal copies, and this estimated to being only 10% of the actual number of copies in play, this computer game has been a phenomenon of historical proportions.

It is a game with minimal graphics and absolutely no built-in storyline. A "blue sky" scenario with no end, where you choose to stay until you find the real world slipping by. You climb the ranks to become the greatest Football Manager your small virtual world has ever encountered, living through the ups and downs of the world of football. The agony of losing a match at the last minute paired against the joy of winning the trophy you just gave up a few hours of life to battle for.

This game has been revolutionary ever since its early Championship Manager days. Like most managerial strategy games, it has limitless potential to mimic and extend the real world. And like all good games, it allows you to play a character who makes decisions that matter. There have been a lot of games which have attempted to do the same, but Football Manager's greatest assets are the untiring unpaid scouts who research almost every country in the world to bring the game as close to reality as possible and a match engine that is as realistic as anything we have watched in real life. All the drama is well simulated. What started out as text commentary around a decade ago has now been extended to a realistic 3-D simulations bundled with a lot of statistics. From the attributes of many thousands of players, each with their own unique likes and dislikes, to every aggregated piece information you might need about how a team and its players are playing.

Once it has submerged you in a world that looks vaguely familiar, in your journey through time, you will discover that this is a world that has been modeled to reflect only the simpler parts of reality. A sanitized virtual world where you can live out your fantasies of control and victory. It combines the passion of football with the power of being a decision-maker, yet gives you enough flexibility to choose the level of micro-management.

he world you play in is dynamic. It grows and changes, vibrant with random events you have no control over. The players grow old and quit, even as new ones are born. The fortunes of individual clubs rise and fall, while the players go through their own individual careers. There are young players you can watch and sometimes guide into becoming world-class superstars. There are other names that soon fall into obscurity. Amidst all of this, you are the only constancy as you plot your own rise through the ranks from relative obscurity to a name that is respected by all the virtual denizens in these few megabytes of reality.

It is an art, to be able to combine simplicity with realism. The real world is often off-putting because things just aren't simple enough, and many games in their attempt to be realistic attempt to simulate this component in the virtual world. Thus even our fantasies of control are as complex and irritating as reality (Case in point - Civilization 3). Football Manager has succeeded in giving us freedom to choose our own paths, along with a lot of data and depth, without ever overwhelming us or complicating our alternate gaming realities

This is an ode to the most addictive computer game I have ever played, one that has already taken a substantial part of my life and shall continue to do so. We create the stories in this world just like we do in another game I am a fan of - The Sims. For now, I will attempt to lead Aldershot to Champions League glory - it has been a heroic struggle as these underdogs have climbed the ranks to now go head-to-head against the giants of European football.


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An Endnote to Paper Books

Books made of paper will go extinct. It is the inevitability of creative destruction, the same road that saw LPs and gramophones become fixtures in antique shops. Inertia and economics are the only reason paper books still exist. It is awfully hard for the 500-year-old technology of the printing press to vanish overnight, with so many generations of baggage to get rid off. But the wheels have been set in motion. Now we just sit back and watch.

Like most fads of the past, paper and ink will expire its longevity, and be replaced by matters of convenience. The e-book readers have already made an entry. The prices are high, but they will drop soon. The Amazon Kindle has already sold out in over 100 countries. Vague figures by the CleanTech Group tell us that the the Kindle is more eco-friendly than buying books. And a dozen other companies are competing with the Kindle to ensnare the literate public. For now, they will attempt to mimic paper books as closely as they can, to allow smooth transition without the unnecessary hangovers and claims of the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it.

But the nostalgia will soon fade, and the e-book readers, so far shackled in the conservative nature of people to dwell in the "good times of the past", shall break free from all the constraints and pursue a path of efficiency and optimization. It is what engineers do, create new technologies and hope that people alter their behaviors to keep up with the added conveniences that the inventions provide. Keeping up with the times, reading habits will change. Slow changes but incremental over generations.

People will find it easier to instantly download new books. With costs of distribution low, economies of scale will ensure that the costs of books fall, almost like in the music industry. A new generation of authors will evolve who don't require publishing houses and a new generation of interactive books evolve to cater to the entertainment needs of millions.

But then attention spans might fall too, because too much freedom can also be too much distraction. The internet has already conditioned users to read shorter blocks of text. Other effects would include complicated copyright issues. Piracy might take over the literary world in ways unimaginable before (but then some people will always argue that piracy is actually good for authors because it allows greater exposure to their readers).

Nevertheless in the future, the newer e-book readers will seem so normal and natural, that people would wonder about the backwardness of the times when trees were cut to create those cumbersome un-interactive visual mediums of information transcription. And people will shake their heads in pity at their technology-challenged ancestors. This is how it has always been - the future always pitying the past.

But of course this will too soon be replaced by newer technologies. My best bet is electrodes in the head that download information directly to the brains. Two hundred years from now is my uneducated, vague and random guess. And then we shall talk about the anticipated extinction of e-book readers.


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History of Software Cracking - Part X

Disclaimer : This article may not be completely accurate and is not extensive. It is based on my understanding of the topic, which in an ideal world, is kinda limited.

Software cracking uses reverse engineering. Reverse engineering involves taking a mechanical device, software program or electronic device apart, understanding its workings, and then attempt to create something out of that. It has been a common practice in the world of mechanics and electronics since a long time.

It has been the greatest challenge for most innovating tech companies (like Sony) for a very long time. The military has been using it for centuries, attempting to analyze the enemy's weapons and creating their own versions to combat them.

In the software industry, a very popular case was San Jose-based Phoenix Technologies Ltd. reverse engineering the IBM BIOS to create their own compatible version. (You can read about it in this great article by Mathew Schwartz, Reverse-Engineering, Computerworld, November 12, 2001)



Software Cracking

I need to first differentiate between software crackers and 'crackers', the latter referring to malicious hackers, while the former referring to programmers who used reverse engineering to remove copy protection from the software.

Now that I have made that distinction, let me move on to the history of software cracking. It began in the 1980s with disk-based software copy protection schemes on the Atari 800, Commodore and Apple II systems. The software manufacturers used hardware schemes to prevent people from making copies. Game developers had to use the most innovative of solutions to prevent any form of copying. (Some of the methods are listed on - Experiencefestival, Copy protection for computer software)

Circumventing such schemes was the biggest challenge out there, and it spawned the cracking scene. Soon software protection schemes would include hardware dongles, registration keys, keyfiles, internet activation, etc. Crackers were always one step ahead, and all for the glory and challenge.

As I have mentioned in an earlier post, the apparent disregard for laws to go one up against rivals in the cracking scene was interesting. It was the strive to possess the intangibles of social esteem and prestige, over any materialistic goods. It almost proved to the world that a coherent social structure is possible where materialism is not the reward. But moving on to the more technical aspects.



Methods

The most common software cracking involved altering the binary file to prevent a key branch from occuring. In assembly language, it often meant simply altering a je (jump on equal) command to a jne (jump on not equal) command. Finding the right branch was the challenge. But that was for the earlier simpler programs.

It has always been a race out there. The software industry trying to stay one step ahead, and for good reason. It is said that piracy has cost the software industry over 20 billion dollars in revenue, every year. That is more than the GDP of any developing country.



Reverse Engineering Tools

Some of the tools of the trade were -
FileMon - Monitors files
Regmon - Monitors the registry
W32Dasm - Windows Disassembler
SoftICE - Windows Debugger
Hiew - The coolest hex editor out there
Windows API Reference, etc.

Back in the late 90s, you started off with a disassembler and hex-editor. And then you moved on to SoftIce, a kernel mode debugger that ran underneath Windows. It was a tool so powerful it was used to crack itself.

Numega, the creator of SoftIce is now gone. The plug has been pulled from under Softice too. Most software vendors had anyway implemented measures to make it harder to use SoftIce as a tool.



Crack Groups

The most famous ones are International Network of Crackers, The Humble Guys (THG), PhrozenCrew, UCF, Core, ViRiLiTY, etc. I shall talk about each one in short articles soon.

I shall also talk about how the 'demo scene' came into existence. A spin-off from the actual cracking. Actually a lot more fun.



Old Resources

The resources are old and probably will not help anyone who intends to be a cracker nowadays. But it is history. And it needs to be read -

The best resource for tutorials on cracking Cracking 4 Newbies
The New2Cracking website download
Reverse Engineering Team
Reverse Engineering Resources
The Art of Assembly Language - The most comprehensive and famous guide in the history of software cracking.
CrackZ's Reverse Engineering Page
Methods to prevent cracking - Cracking, The Anti by Dorian Bugeja


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United Cracking Force

Cracking

For the uninitiated,
Software Cracking is the modification of software to remove protection methods: copy protection, trial/demo version, serial number, hardware key, date checks, CD check or software annoyances like nag screens and adware.
-Wikipedia

From what I understand, the legality of cracking or "reverse engineering" isn't really black or white if you did not act for commercial gain. Even if we assume it is proved illegal, it is a crime hard to prove and convict. Therefore most convictions so far have been done for the "illegal distribution of cracks".

In spite of the illegality in distribution of cracks, we've had a lot of groups throughout history competing to release them, for free. It was done for the challenge, and for the respect and honor. The underground world on the internet has mostly been about reputation, rather than money. But more about cracking in a later post.



It struck me now that the big players in the past, have all but disappeared nowadays. One of them was the United Cracking Force. I stumbled upon these groups through the artwork I often found. The logo designs for many of these underground groups were really cool. The demoscene, a direct spinoff from the crack scene was a significant component of cyberculture.





UNITED cRACKING FORCE (also known as uCF2000) were amongst the most renowned cracking groups to exist. Started in 1994 by mARQUIS dE sOIRE, they ruled the release scene for most part of the next decade.

They seem to have faded away now, but at their peak, along with PhrozenCrew, they went after most of the copy protection schemes out there. From anecdotal experience I know that uCF is credited for being the first to break the dongle protection scheme, though the claims have been doubted.

As a researcher, I have been interested in this underground world on the internet for a long time. uCF2000 were the first underground groups I stumbled upon, so I just had to write at least one paragraph about them.



Links

United Cracking Force Release History
Files from UCF2000 - Defacto2 Group Repository
Reality Check Network 22, "United Cracking Force", 14th July 1996
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Windows 3.1x





History

The ultimate operating system which would herald the modern age and make many of us eternal slaves to the great Microsoft. Released in March 1992, about when Silence of the Lambs had just won the Best Picture award at the Oscars (obscure trivia), Microsoft had mapped its way to dominating the computer industry in ways unlike ever known.

Windows 3.1 replaced Windows 3.0. Amongst the most significant changes was replacing Reversi with Minesweeper. Minesweeper would soon go on to become one of the greatest games of all times, thus vindicating Microsoft and all its strategies.

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Solitaire - The Card Game



It has been an integral part of all Windows' users' lives. It is a boring game, almost mind-numbing, but it has existed and thrived because we have often had nothing else to do. In a match-up between laziness and boredom, Solitaire was the perfect trade-off. And playing it usually tended towards an addiction-laced equilibrium state.

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IRC

IRC has existed for over two decades now. (August 1988. This is around the time the Iran-Iraq war was about to end after the death of over a million mortals.)

I will not go through IRC's history because there are enough links out there which have pieced together every fragment of time that has contributed to the invention of the IRC. I will instead talk about IRC and internet culture.

The internet has always been a place where no one could possibly ever feel left out. No loser is a loner out here and there are no misfits. The freaks can always find other freaks to make themselves feel less freakier, and talk or discourse about anything they wished to. And no matter what your interests were, you always have somewhere to be. For decades, vast millions of lonely souls have found solace on the internet, getting the interaction and exchange of ideas that they could never find in the real world. IRC has been amongst the largest social communities on the net for years. A live society, which unlike all the social networking sites, is not about projection of the real world.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a virtual world. Millions of computers connected to one another, from almost every country in the world. Thousands of channels in hundreds of networks. And over half a milion users at any instant. This is a large population. In real word terms, this would be like all the people of Bhutan deciding to collect at one time, in one large building.

But this world is different. Very different. Looks never mattered, words did. The witty were cool. Cruel biting sarcasm and a lot of explicit language. And you could be anything you wished to be. Live your wildest avatars out here, identified by only your handles. And yet there were rules, subtle but absolute. Social norms that have evolved over time. They were unwritten in most cases, but if you crossed the invisible lines, you would/could be ostracized by all.

IRC has never been owned by anyone. It is a free network. Free society. Free knowledge. Free sharing. It is a bastardized version of the internet.
And therefore has once become a battleground for the repressed to play with all that is taboo in the real world. Any fetish now has a channel. Add to that the illegal downloads and apparent lack of real-world social protocols, it is almost a haven for anarchism.

IRC. It is for those who wish to escape.



Links

Daniel's Page - History of IRC
IRC History by Jarkko Oikarinen
Jarkko Oikarinen Interview
Livinginternet - Internet Relay Chat (IRC) History
IRC History
IRC Junkie - Is IRC on the Decline?
COMMUNICATION AND COMMUNITY ON INTERNET RELAY CHAT


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Lesson 34 - How to extract audio from YouTube / any flv file

In the course of my last post, I was confronted with a video which had the sound I wished but a useless image I had no need for. (Not so useless. Depends on how you look at it. It was a picture of Bill Nye, The Science Guy. Childhood science experiments. Good memories revisited.)

Download this free tool called flv extractor. (FLV Extractor Download Link). Drag the downloaded flv file onto it and watch as the software magically creates a video .avi file and a sound .mp3 file.

(Digression - How to download the flv file?
Orbit Downloader seems ok.
For Mozilla, get a plug-in.)

Now enjoy the (often) copyrighted average-quality music without the annoying video mash ups.


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Modems and Getsmart

Remember the old days?

With those phone-based dial-up modems, which made a lot of noise and worked at annoyingly low speeds. I have extracted the sound for the listening pleasure of the few who sit around pretending to miss the good ol' days, when things were simpler and the stars were brighter.

The sound of the internet -



(Audio file ripped from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qtqz0bdq30Q)

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Netscape



The rise and fall of Netscape has been well documented. A little too well. Its kind of passé now. Yes. I know that Netscape was a thought leader on the internet. It created all things good. It was the reason why people stayed glued to their computers, navigating through the world wide web. Its IPO is considered the official start to the dotcom era. It was the reason the internet got popular and became what it became (an orgy of porn and meaningless rants). All before it was unethically crushed by Microsoft and a lethargic AOL.

In 2007, support for Netscape web browsers was officially discontinued. But no one really cared. Mozilla (which was a result of Netscape's efforts) was here. Opera was here. Hell! Even Internet Explorer was good enough. I felt no tinge of nostalgia for a software that by 2002 had become a garbled piece of one-upmanship (against Microsoft's IE). It was a symbol of failure. A symbol of Schumpeter's process of creative destruction.

The internet has changed over the past decade. The cause has been the intense competition that accompanied every single new idea. Netscape's failure only made me believe, like other trendsetters, you are only as good as your current product. History counts for nothing in the cut-throat, constantly innovating software industry. (Of course I hated Microsoft and capitalism for a little while, but life goes on.)



The Documentary

Code Rush is a 1998 documentary following the lives of a group of Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley. (Just prior to the AOL Merger.)





Links

 Internet Wars -- Microsoft Vs. Netscape: Goliath Takes On David -- Navigator Still Ahead - But Losing Ground (Year 1997)
ZDnet - The Rise and Fall of Netscape
Berkeley - Strategic Computing and Communications Technology Project - Rise and Fall of Netscape Browsers
Living Internet - Netscape History
A Visual Browser History, from Netscape 4 to Mozilla Firefox
Andrew Turnbull Network - Netscape Navigator Version 1
Killer Products : Netscape Navigator 1.0


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ICQ



ICQ was amongst the first instant messengers I ever used. Right along with AIM. It was weird twist of fate that led me to use these 2 softwares. They were the only chat softwares at the time which supported HTTP proxy servers, and I was stuck behind an oppressive firewall. (Academic firewalls on a dial-up connection. Those were the days.) My quest back in those days was to find softwares that could log me through those pesky firewalls. The late 20th century was a hard place to be. Yeah, we did have Sock2HTTP (the only way I could use IRC) and a HTTP tunneling software that I just couldn't get to work, but nevertheless ICQ was discovered.

Since its inception, ICQ had spread via word of mouth. And had gone on to become really popular. It was filled with features. A million of them. It supported offline messages, had a searchable people's directory. Multiplayer games. Multi-user chats. And many others I cannot recall. It seemed cute at the time. Cluttered, overloaded but it worked. It already had a large user base when I joined. You got to chat with people. With strangers. Hell, even with spambots.

You got a UIN (a sequential number) when you registered, and henceforth you could give yourself any chatname you wished. It was  a flexible idea. I do find it tiring to keep having to choose a unique username, which eventually becomes a mix of numbers and symbols that mean nothing to you or anybody.

ICQ was a homonym for 'I Seek You'. It was started way back in 1996 by a company called Mirabilis, a small startup from Israel. In 1998, it was bought over by the great AOL. The company that seems to buy a LOT of good things for a LOT of money and then push them slowly off the edge in an act of induced tough love.



Decline

I could blame its takeover by AOL as the reason why it failed. But that wouldn't be true. Because even at its height of popularity, it was still an AOL product. AOL, of course was on a mission to takeover the chatting world, with a combination of AIM, ICQ and techniques to prevent other chat softwares for communicating with them.(See AOL's Proposal Fails To Placate Messaging Rivals). During the takeover, ICQ had 11.4 million users, AIM had a 20 million users. ICQ was growing at a rate of 57000 users a day. A large advertising base for AOL. Now during the takeover of ICQ, there was a lot of discontentment. (See ICQ Fans Rage Against AOL), but AOL did keep ICQ a separate brand for quite some time. Only in 2002 did the 2 networks meet. That was around the time ICQ stopped being advertisement-free.

The rivals were working there way into the IM market. Microsoft did what it always does, a quiet-slow-stuffing-down-the-throat-of-newbies approach to getting its own messenger popular. And while AOL resisted the attempts at universal chat clients, the bandwagon effect couldn't hold people to AOL and ICQ for too long. Not when you had a lot of efficient and simpler softwares out there.

I think the failure of ICQ was the reason why it got famous in the first place. There were way too many features. And they went on a crazed rampage, adding new features every version, but not removing the bugs from before. The tool was soon bloated and took a good amount of memory. Spammers found the perfect tool with its offline directory list to target. (AOL really has no clue how to take care of good pieces of software.)

So with all the features that ICQ seemed to boast off, the future of the internet has always seemed to be minimalist, or so I think. (Think of all the new trends out there.)



Links
A Take on the ICQ vs AIM debate, and a look at chat culture itself - Instantaneity - A Brief and Uninformed History
People do wonder - What happened to ICQ?
Time Magazine looks at the controversy of universal chat clients - All Together Now
David Lawrence talks why the merger makes sense to the music industry - ICQ vs. AIM vs. AIMster
The fears of an ICQ takeover revisited - AOL/ICQ Acquisition Revisited


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Winamp





Winamp was the first music player I ever used, way back in 1998. It took very little system resources and it was free. Excellent sound reproduction, a variety of skins and a great visualization plugin . (As uncool teenage geeks, skins were definitely a way for us to feel cooler. Winamp also allowed the creation of plugins, which resonated with all the programmer geeks out there.) The mp3 culture was just starting and this product was right in the middle of it all.

Nullsoft was the company. It reflected the culture at the time. They seemed rebellious and independent. Unlike all the humongous monolithic companies out there which produced products like the dry and boring Windows Media Player, or advertisement loaded Real Player.



Just to give you an idea about how the product felt at that time, the credits in the Winamp 2 player included -
Stunt coordinator, Stunts, Puppeteer, Llama wrangler, Animal trainer, Assistant to Fifi, Watching anime, Karate scene coordinator, Topless dancer, Prime numbers, Pyrotechnics, Beer, Catering, Elevator music, Gaffer, Often annoying public manipulation, Genetic engineering, Breast examination, Translator, Warfare tech, Shipbuilding, Bad humor, Plasterer, Carpentry, Extras, Stand-ins, etc.

They ended it by thanking Dallas Square-dancing Hall of fame and San Diego Zoo amongst others.
Filmed in amazing Technicolor.
Soundtrack available on Fuckit Records

Btw, Elevator music was credited to 'The Robies'. They are an obscure band about which I could get no information but for this youtube video - Superman - The Robies. Sounds like Greenday.



The Sellout
It has changed a lot over the years including the one time it decided to sell itself out to the cold evil corporate world. 80 Million $ is A LOT of money. It made Justin Frankel, the creator of Winamp and Nullsoft a rich man but all of us moaned at the prospect of Winamp losing its independence. The free creative world which spawned all good things on the internet replaced by the cold corporate world, passionless, where innovation would be replaced by plain old manipulation, and we would soon have bad products stuffed down our throat till we puked and moved over to the next new thing.
(This article is just after the sellout happened - Winamp wins big )

I did come across articles which talked about how the old Winamp team could not gel with the new corporate culture and slowly left, one by one. (Read Death Knell Sounds for Nullsoft, Winamp)
The last of the original team left by 2004, disillusioned by the AOL work culture (Steve Gedekian to Apple. See Nullsoft's future in a void).

Winamp3 was released in August 2002. It was to be the next best thing in music. But it was bad for those day's standards. It took a lot of system resources and just wasn't worth the effort of switching. It forced Winamp to continue developing the Winamp 2 series. A step back during the height of media player competition. (See AOL admits failure of Winamp revamp)

It soon fused the Winamp 2 and Winamp3 branches of development to create the Winamp 5. (2 + 3 = 5). This was in December 2003. It was around now that I moved on from Winamp to other alternatives. It just wasn't the same old simple player. It had become into a complete media suite, and was now just like any other product out there. Nothing new or unique. People had feared that it might go the Sonique way and completely vanish but it seems to have held on.

Update
After years of infidelity and sleeping around, I moved back to Winamp this year. Maybe it was the nostalgia or the familiar interface which they have retained even after so many years. Its still a pretty good product, though not revolutionary or cool any more. I now use it to catalog my music while using VLC Media Player or Media Player Classic for quickly playing files.



Llamas

Winamp always had a llama story about it. (Picture on the left is from the Winamp site. Its says "Justin Frankel (right), in mid 1997, in his hometown of Sedona, AZ."
In the faqs, they answer about the llama :
What's up with the Llama?

There have been many rumors and myths about Mike the Llama. This is just one of the universe's questions that will never get answered... ;)

The iconic Wesley Willis inspired "Winamp - it really whips the Llama's ass."





The Transition



To download old versions of Winamp, head over to A Winamp Heaven or Oldversions - Winamp





Extras
How to make two llamas headbang to the beats in Winamp 5 :

With the default (Modern) skin chosen, stretch the main window until the Beat Analyzer appears; it says "BEAT" under it. Hold down Ctrl+Alt+Shift and click exactly at the center of the Beat Analyzer, then play a song with fast beats and loud bass.



Links
The fall of Winamp - Google Trends - Winamp
Winamp - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Experience Festival - Winamp History
A Brief Look at the history Winamp | Webby's World


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