sunnuntai 30. lokakuuta 2016

EA Games and Origin quietly bans an entire country - or, why you shouldn't take digital distribution for granted.

I live in Myanmar, and I own about 20 games on Origin, and have spent hundreds of dollars on the platform. I've bought the full editions of all of the Battlefield games up to this point, with their season passes. I was trying to log into Origin a few days ago, and got a bizarre "Access Denied" message. I googled it, and found that "Origin is no longer available in Myanmar."

http://bit.ly/2dT3VOQ

http://bit.ly/2eosOhE

Supposedly EA is blaming this on complying with US sanctions against Myanmar (which is total crap, considering Steam, GOG, and every single other content distribution network is just fine). Additionally, sanctions were lifted on October 7th. The response from the Origin Champion was: "with the Origin 10 update, US laws (which is where EA is based) forced them to block certain countries. Unfortunately you live in one of those countries. I'm sorry but there is nothing we ca do here to allow you access again." Still no access to our games that we bought. EDIT: Evidently I confused an EA champion with a random person chipping in inside the thread. We don't know why Myanmar has been terminated. Just that we have no access anymore and that according to the champion, Origin is no longer supported in Myanmar. Edit Edit: Nevermind, it's the second link. They said "...with the Origin 10 update, US laws (which is where EA is based) forced them to block certain countries. Unfortunately you live in one of those countries. I'm sorry but there is nothing we ca do here to allow you access again." So I'm making a (hopefully pretty safe) assumption that it's because of sanctions.

None of us has been offered a refund - not even a "sorry, all your games are gone."

Remember, if they do it to me, they can do it to you too. Don't use or buy games from Origin or DRM services. They can take your content away without offering a refund.

Edit: I feel like this is something that the entire gaming community needs to know about - I don't think that revoking access to an entire country's worth of people's paid content is something that should happen quietly. PLEASE spread the word about this. We in Myanmar need your help to get our games back!

Edit edit: Wow, this blew up to #1 on the frontpage. Although I probably shouldn't be surprised since EA + DRM + getting games pulled is a Reddit recipe for success. Since it's blown up so much, I feel the need to clarify a few things that I now realize are not clear from the comments.

  1. I live in Myanmar, but I am not from Myanmar.
  2. My account was not started in Myanmar (though several of my friends' accounts were, and they are having the same problem).
  3. Origin is kicking an "Access Denied" message to all of us. You can't access ANY games or even see the store. Click the links above for examples. If we use VPNs, we can circumvent this and access our games (although we can't play online due to insane ping - baseline here is 100ms; you use a VPN you go to 350+).
  4. Myanmar's sanctions were lifted on October 7th. For those of you that say EA has no choice, they do.
  5. We were all able to access Origin in early September. Obama announced that the sanctions were being lifted from Myanmar. Right around the time of the announcement, EA terminates all Myanmar access to Origin.

This is a much, MUCH bigger problem than just a few gamers in Myanmar. This highlights a crucial element of the TOS of big game companies - the money that you pay them gives you essentially nothing in return, except for an empty promise that the game company may let you play their game until they decide you can't.

Edit edit edit: I'm waiting on the "Thank you for contacting EA" screen. My wait time is under 5 minutes!

Edit edit edit edit: It's been 20 minutes. But the good news is my wait time is STILL under 5 minutes!

Edit5: No "experts" available, so they can't give me a definitive answer today. They'll have to get back to me tomorrow.

submitted by /u/trivial_sublime to /r/gaming
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Kotlin: How to Make Your Java Code Base Cleaner and More Readable

submitted by /u/Crush_xC to /r/programming
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lauantai 29. lokakuuta 2016

Beer and Concurrent HTTP Pipelines

submitted by /u/MoneyWorthington to /r/programming
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"What was it like programming Skyrim?" - Stream with former Bethesda Lead programmer Brett Douville

submitted by /u/RockyBullboa to /r/programming
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Nostalgia - Xi Graphics Accelerated X review from 1998

submitted by /u/demerit5 to /r/linux
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Did you know java 8 HashMap automatically converts to use a red black tree (like TreeMap) when the hash bucket gets over used?

submitted by /u/redditfooo to /r/programming
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It’s official: Oracle will appeal its “fair use” loss against Google

submitted by /u/speckz to /r/programming
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[Note-Taking App] Laverna - An excellent browser-based (with Offline Support), Open Source Note taking App with Markdown support

submitted by /u/linuxode to /r/linux
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keskiviikko 19. lokakuuta 2016

Airbnb’s main webapp uses Rails, Java, and MySQL. This article covers how they operate it at scale.

submitted by /u/friendlytuna to /r/programming
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Valtion yhteisten tieto- ja viestintätekniikkapalveluiden käytöstä valtava lasku Museovirastolle

submitted by /u/eras to /r/Suomi
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Hajime: A decentralized IoT worm

submitted by /u/alexskiing to /r/programming
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Server is being attacked

Hey, guys. I SSHed into my server today to try fix some things I've been working on and noticed in my logs that I somewhere something is trying to SSH into my machine. Coming from: 116.31.116.11 which is a Chinese address. I am running an Eero mesh network in my house, so I can not blacklist the address from the outside, but have blocked it in my server. What else should/can I do?

Also, root is disabled, and thats the user they're trying to brute. So they aren't getting anywhere. Its just annoying

http://bit.ly/2ek7RZZ

submitted by /u/Tpayne174 to /r/linux
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Is there a book format of the Linux Kernel out there?

So for my second job, I don't have a computer or anything to do so I have been printing out the linux kernel to read while I am bored. I am just wondering if there is a book out there with it all? Sorry this is hard to google.

submitted by /u/1ySNbiVsH7Pd to /r/linux
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maanantai 17. lokakuuta 2016

The VeraCrypt Audit Results

submitted by /u/johnmountain to /r/linux
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Linux - Torn between Nvidia 1060 vs ATI RX480

I'm kind of torn. I'm on an old iMac 2011, thinking about building my next PC vs a new Mac, and Windows vs Linux. For the time being, I'm back on Linux to see if I can get by and enjoy it, I used it as my only desktop OS for a decade almost before switching to OSX in 2011.

In Windows, the 1060 ends up maybe 10 or 15% faster in many cases. The RX480 runs slightly hotter, slightly less power efficient, and the price roughly the same as the 1060.

In Linux - however - a lot more interesting stuff is going on with the ATI drivers.

Behind the scenes, a ton has happened with GPU drivers and video cards over the past decade.

XAA -> EXA or UXA used by XRENDER, used by Cairo, which is used by GTK

Now that whole chain is probably going to get replaced by Glamor, which replaces the need to write 2d GPU acceleration for drivers.

Gallium3d has also been adopted by some driver writers, a common framework for writing 3d drivers.

The ATI open driver runs on Gallium3d, and folks have also ported d3d9 to the actual mesa driver layer. There are patches out there to make Wine use it. It can drastically help with performance and features but only the open ATI drivers have gone that far.

  • Does the Nvidia binary driver support Glamor, or, are 2d apps at least snappy, last I knew, they used their own XAA or EXA implementation?

  • All that cool stuff going on in the ATI driver might not even matter - the 1060 has very fast OGL performance with the binary blob, the wine developers are making the command pipeline multithreaded, it still wastes CPU cycles vs Gallium-Nine, but, CPU no longer becomes a bottleneck.

  • Folks may or may not ever write Gallium DX 10 or 11 code.

  • Super unfortunate, Wine already rejected patches to enable support as too esoteric, even though the hooks are a small amount of code. They are being maintained by a third party as a set of patches that gets updated when needed. I sort of wish though that doing this at the Gallium layer was more of the standard, I think it's more in line with how other OSs do it.

  • I might consider GPU passthrough and windows in a VM, my understanding is the RX480 is better supported for that? Could also dual boot.

Anyway - the RX480 seems to have a lot of options for tinkering, and trying out new frameworks that are being developed for Linux. The 1060 will probably mostly "just work" as a blob. I like the idea of open drivers, though?

I am very happy with the open source radeon driver right now, but I am using an old card, ATI 6970M

It's still funny to see all these standards constantly changing, and Nvidia throwing the middle finger to it all and doing their own thing that works mostly.

In my experience with binary blobs - it works or it doesn't. With open drivers, you're more likely to get something working as you have the option to pull and install the latest patches from GIT, and the developers are often very responsive to issues and have tools to report information.

To me, it seems the ATI driver is progressing towards a pretty interesting future, adopting the latest standards, with significant benefits, provided it continues. The Nvidia driver is what it is.

submitted by /u/d13f00l to /r/linux
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Do you know some weird obscure software from standard Ubuntu repos?

Sometimes it is fun exploring the repos. What funny/weird/bad software have you stumbled upon in standard repos?

submitted by /u/louigi_verona to /r/linux
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