XBox Spy

[Asguard]

What the hell is with the new Xbox

Tracks game disks to ban second hand market which will effectively reduce the pool of money for all games because without the ability to sell back there games those who buy day one, play them through and sell them straight back wont be able to buy as many

And then there is the spyect (kinect), which will be always watching you to make sure its the person who installed the game, not there child, not there partner playing the game, making sure that there aren't to many people watching the TV or making you pay for new licence, making sure you watch the ads

How could anyone think this is a good thing?????
How could anyone look at what has been announced and go "I MUST have this"?????

 

[Stryder]

It was said from an unconfirmed source that Microsofts moving away from DVD's to streaming more, this means that they don't have to pay any licensing for using that technology and any DRM is worked from the software that's either downloaded and installed or through encrypted streaming (similar to the HDMI method).

The problem with the secondhand market at the moment is "It's like robbing candy from a baby", in the sense that children (the prodominant drive in games purchasing) might craze their parents over a game which costs a full retail price of £40/$60 or more and then craze some more when a new game comes out. Their parents likely being the breadwinners don't necessarily have enough money for purchasing new games, so it results in "trade-ins", howevever the price is "drastically" dropped from the RRP which means at of "worth" is lost in the resell of a secondhand market. (They can get away with this on kids because they have no viable sense of the worth of money or product)

You just have to look at this system and understand that *if* nothing is done to try and maintain value in the secondhand market, then those kids will grow up to continue the ever spirally trait of being apart of collapsing economic models.

In some respects moving to using "always on" or "Cloud accounts" to identify what digital products your own creates a whole new licensing method, in the sense that "Your account has been giving the licence to use/play and not actually giving you any individual property rights over that digital/streamed product. This again causes concern because people that use such systems need to know that "redundancy systems" are in play, that should a company no longer be able to provide a service or suffers from economic recession so much that they fold, that the library of rights a person has can be transfered to a company to take over should that need be met.

As for Kinect, all it is is a smart webcamera, it's basically like having a webcamera with an inbuilt mic and mouse. Some of the software is used for biometrics, to identify the user on a stored pattern (As to whether this pattern is uploaded to a cloud or not, that something you'd have to query Microsoft support over) For the most part the software tracks changes in either sound or movement and on the current Xbox 360 it's "Easy enough to unplug if it becomes annoying". It's entirely up to a user as to whether they would use it or not, standardly most gamers that are using firstperson probably wont. (I tried a demo of the newer version of Fable and found it extremely difficult to actually use the kinect to make any progress)

I'd say the Kinect would appeal more to family orientated games rooms where games are played together. (Although the taster of the current progress of 'Ilumirooms', suggests that Kinect when used in combination with a projector and not just a screen output can allow for extension effects around the room with whatever you do)

As for good or bad, that's purely down to who uses it or how it's used.

 

[andy1033]

The reason they get people to buy, is that you have to buy if you want to play there games, or do those fantastic things they claim with kineact.

People will not buy things spying on them, unless its coated in ice cream and a flavour they like if you get me.

People will buy it, but you do not have too.

Like the cia boss last year, the public do there job for them, by buying the techs that spy on you. The gov do not need to go out and find people anymore, they just spy on everyone, and the tools are things you buy. As smart machines are everything you buy now.

So unless you plan on buying nothing new, they are already doing this to you in some way.

Plus the public have a thing as long as it does not effect me, so what. But maybe it is effecting you as they may be perving into your living room and monitoring everything your family says already. You have no idea that microsoft has research labs, and the amount of data they may collect on these things. Then what do they do with that. Will some company pay ms for using there kineact to perve into like a 1000 homes? You do not know.

 

[Asguard]

Stryder I think you are being a little too generous to microcrap there

Firstly the question is who actually asked to be given a "licence" at full price to BUY something? where is the added benefit for the user?

Secondly I don't trade, I have only ever traded in some phones I had no use for but the way EB works is that you get more credit if you trade to another item than if you take the cash and they give you even MORE credit if you trade towards a preorder so the whole second hand market is actually BENEFITING the greedy bloody publishers who rely on those first weeks sales to determine the worthiness of a game. Without the preowned market I doubt there will be much of a preorder market either because why bother when I can just wait till the price comes down

Thirdly there is 2 differences between a computer, a PS4 (and the current consoles) and an Spybox one, There is no demand that a PS4 (As far as we know) actually be hooked up to the internet, the current consoles certainly don't (take my PS3 to work all the time). The second difference is that you can disconnect the camera and they are pretty weak cameras anyway and when you turn the computer off its off. The spybox on the other hand has cameras which can see in the dark, software which can identify faces and a microphone sensitive enough to pick out heart beats and its ALWAYS on.

Thats no longer a passive tech I control but rather active tech that Microcrap can do anything with and they can put anything they like in there agreement because once you have bought it you don't have a choice but to agree.

Its not the government I care about spying on me, the idea of Microcrap doing it is FAR worse

 

[wellwisher]

I have seen the Microsoft kinetic camera appear to come on by itself, on day, when my nephew was playing his X-box game. Is it possible to turn on the kinetic camera, remotely, and spy on the living room of a gamer?

 

[andy1033]

I have seen the Microsoft kinetic camera appear to come on by itself, on day, when my nephew was playing his X-box game. Is it possible to turn on the kinetic camera, remotely, and spy on the living room of a gamer?

Well hackers can turn on your webcam on your computer, or listen to your mic if they wanted too. Thats without you doing it yourself.

So who knows what xbox can do. I would think if the microsoft research labs where watching so many in there homes they could do it.

Who knows if microsoft do not sell this to other companies, i.e to lease there kineact use to other companies. You do not know.

 

[Stryder]

Well hackers can turn on your webcam on your computer, or listen to your mic if they wanted too. Thats without you doing it yourself.

So who knows what xbox can do. I would think if the microsoft research labs where watching so many in there homes they could do it.

Who knows if microsoft do not sell this to other companies, i.e to lease there kineact use to other companies. You do not know.

Hackers can only use a persons webcam if they have:

Managed to install a trojan on the target machine, or
exploit a misconfiguration/software bug in remote access management, or
gained access through another means.

To my knowledge, Microsoft doesn't collect any information unless you've allowed them to (In fact there was an "Opt-in" app for aiding in increasing the potential of Kinect that required you agreeing and downloading it.) it wouldn't be clever for a company to be caught outputting information without a users permission, and it would be easy to identify if it was going on by looking at the actual connection output. It would undermine the companies value if peoples trust was infringed.

Like I've said, you can "unplug" it when it's not in use (in fact if you are having a problem with a user account taking a long time to load up, it's a good idea to unplug the Kinect since the first part of the bootup process with it connected is attempting to load the drivers and identify [locally] which user is logging in within the room.)

 

[andy1033]

To my knowledge, Microsoft doesn't collect any information unless you've allowed them to

Those companies do not work like that.

You can bet all makers of tvs, have cameras in them today, and they watch a certain amount of people in there homes, to analyse them watching the box in the corner. They have been at it for ages. Its against the law, but when have companies cared about laws.

You can be sure all big makers of tvs, have watched a certain amount of people in there homes for years.

Microsoft and there secret labs, collecting info from kineact then selling that info, or renting out so many kineact homes to companies is not that far off. Once you bring those things into your home you have no idea.

Like the cia boss said last year, you public do there job for them in alot of ways by buying the goods that are made to surveil people. They just make the goods and rap it in candy so the public buy it. That way the people are doing it to themselves.

It was a fact that gov in america in 1990's caught the mafia people by using there mobiles without there knowledge to listen into there conversations.
Like i said they get you to buy toys rapped in candy and they do not have to spend any money building bugs or putting them into homes, as you do it already.

 

[Stryder]

Andy, that's nonsense. (And you're clearly letting your paranoia get the better of you)

You tend to neglct they are a large company that have stakeholders that invest money, if something dark like that was done by the company and "proof" was actually shown(people are always reverse engineering things to see how they work, the Kinect was one of those things), it could ruin a company by destroying their customer loyality.

Although saying that I doubt Google was particular effected by it's own publicly identify spying.

 

[Kittamaru]

As I've already said in other venues... if I had this, and discovered they were watching me via Webcam in the Kinect when I'm not using it... I'd simply tape a picture from Goatse or something else as equally terribly disgustingly scarring in front of the camera... if they want to look at that all day long, they can go ahead.

 

[Asguard]

Andy, that's nonsense. (And you're clearly letting your paranoia get the better of you)

You tend to neglct they are a large company that have stakeholders that invest money, if something dark like that was done by the company and "proof" was actually shown(people are always reverse engineering things to see how they work, the Kinect was one of those things), it could ruin a company by destroying their customer loyality.

Although saying that I doubt Google was particular effected by it's own publicly identify spying.

You don't think data mining already happens? and is VERY sophisticated. Hell even the less sophisticated type has been flagged for this, the idea of expecting people to hold up a product during an ad. If the microphone is as sensitive as has been reported (able to hear a heart beat) its not that hard to imagine that it could be used with some fairly good voice recognition software to say scan for products mentioned, the camera could be used to scan for products in the room etc

That still ignores the already announced uses to scan the room to make sure that you don't have more people watching than should be and potentially to make sure the person playing the game (or whatever) is the person who installed it to stop families using the same account to play

Its funny that the longer I have had the 360 the more software updates there have been to increase the volume and frequency of ads to the point that its hard to find the actual GAME icons on there for all the ads

Compare this to Sony
No ads on the PS3 except a very small section if you are siting on one icon (the shop) which are all for games for sale on the PSN, not other stuff like Pepsi Max (which Microcrap did)
No online requirement at all, I can take it away with me if I want or never connect it to the internet at all
Ownership of the disc by the buyers, not Sony, we can do anything with them we like including loaning them to a friend to play and reselling them with no penalties
No Region locking on PS3 and everything I have seen is tipping that the same will go for PS4 meaning you can buy games where they are cheapest even if that is overseas which is a fundamental principle (Free trade) which was SUPPOSED to be imposed to help consumers but has been used to only help big corporations

Even ignoring the privacy implications (which are significant, in Australia we already have the privacy commissioner stating that the kinect 2 will probably fall under surveillance legislation and therefore all uses of it by microcrap must be stated to consumers up front before purchase and can't be changed down the track) there seems to be a fundamental difference between the outlook from Microcrap and Sony

Personally after watching the presentation by Sony it was clear to me that the focus was on players and what WE want and the small developers and making it easy for them

Microcrap on the other hand looked like there presentation got switched and was actually the advertising meant for companies like EA, the things they openly announced are those that they should have been trying to gloss over when they came out. Someone actually got paid to put together that presentation, there were probably focus groups it was market tested on and for the life of me I can't understand how they could make that big a blunder. When you have to make a special anoucement that the system has an OFF button, when your compeditors can take cheep shots like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kWSIFh8ICaA

when 4 slides by a competitor telling a consumer that they OWN what they buy gets a standing ovation, the way the actual new GAMES should then you know you have compleatly and utterly fucked up. When EA blundered, arguably LESS badly than this the head of the company got fired.

The other issue with the way microcrap is doing it is unlike EVERY OTHER CONSOLE there is a shelf life for the Xbone. The fact that it needs to "phone home" means that microcrap can decide to shut down your bought and paid for property for good at some stage down the track. That may not be on peoples minds right now but I look around my room and I have an Xbox, a 360, a PS1, PS2 and PS3, a Wii, a 64, a sega megadrive and the games for all of them. A SNS goes for up to $500 now and zelda on 64 goes for almost $100 now. Game systems are used WELL after they are stopped by the manufacturers and this is because they are self contained, they aren't MMOs which need to be online all the time connected to servers in another country and at the whim of the company as to weather or not you can play them

eg http://au.gamespot.com/news/ea-shutting-down-over-a-dozen-game-servers-6366856

After the 2 press conferences Gametraders put up a poll as to what system people were going to buy on Facebook, so far the poll is 395 votes for PS4 another 45 for PS4 and PC, 228 for PC, 62 for wii U and only 54 for the Xbone (and the initial question was only PS4 vs Xbox and these others were only added latter). Now sure that is no way a scientific poll but it does show something. 6 months ago if a poll was asked about the 360 vs the Ps3 the leader would be 360 by far, now I have seen a fair few people stating that they are xbox players but will be switching to PS4.

 

[andy1033]

Andy, that's nonsense. (And you're clearly letting your paranoia get the better of you)

I have lived being monitored all my adult life. So do not say its nonsense, as i have lived what these groups do.

There is no privacy in our home what so ever, and has been for along time, so do not claim you know something i do not. I have lived being monitored all my life.

Govs and police and companies do not give a toss about your privacy, and love violating it.

People have been watched in there homes for along time.

Take any big tv company, and you can bet they have watched alot of people in there homes using there products judging you and your responses without you knowing it for along time.

Its only going to get worse, and the people like former cia chief even commented on it. That the public buy the stuff they they get monitored with, as they covered it in candy. The govs and police and companies do not need to pay for bugs or cameras anymore, they just put them in products that you all buy. Then use them against you if they want.

So do not come here talking about paranoia, i have lived my whole adult life since 1992(when i was 17), being monitored by these so called groups. So do not claim you know more than me about it as i have lived it.