It’s ALIVE! ALIVE!

Yes indeed, it’s a blog post. I hope I can remember how to write one of these damn things. Sorry, blog…I have neglected you unfairly. I haven’t even filled you with ‘compelling’ blatherings about fantasy sports leagues! If you’ll just take me back baby, things can be like they was before…like Paris baby. Remember Paris? They was the good times, baby.

So, I’ve been hinting at and mentioning stuff that I’ve been working on at Reclaim Your Game that has been soaking up so damn much of my time lately (It’s a website, baby…it’s not another blog! That TOTALLY doesn’t count! I’m FAITHFUL, baby!) and it’s time to actually get in to detail! Holy crap! A REAL post about something…errr…REAL.

I should warn you that this is likely to be fairly lengthy as it’s going to require a fair bit of back story to properly explain everything. Ready? Well, you think you are, anyway…

Some time ago, I posted about some FTC panel discussions about DRM. Well, one of our other forum admins was able to make it there…even getting some (horribly stunted and awkward) airtime. The FTC had invited every DRM vendor around to show up and get a seat at one of the discussions. Aside from an arrogant jackass of a lawyer who had all the technical knowhow of a retarded rock, the only vendor to actually show up was Jan Samzelius, the CEO of ByteShield. He kind of caught everyone’s attention by showing the startling ability to both speak out AND actually make rational sense. Any way, our admin (a guy named Craig) and Jan got to talking between sessions, Craig invited Jan to the forum, Jan liked what he saw and a 6 part interview was the result.

We were all quite impressed with the way that ByteShield was purported to function, then Jan offered to let us actually test it out. So a few of us got to.

The way that ByteShield functions is this :

-The first time you log in to the game, you either create a ByteShield account or create one with a Username and your email address.

-Now you enter your DAC (which is basically just a serial key).

-It goes online and checks it against the activation server…if it checks out, it downloads a Security Module.

-After a certain number of times running the game, a new Module is downloaded.

And that’s basically it. We tried all kinds of things to send it over the edge…things that make other DRM systems have heart attacks and refuse to let anything run. Running burners and virtual drives while playing the game ByteShield was wrapped around, cutting off firewall access (it actually allows a certain number of offline runs before it needs a new Module), actively downloading a torrent while playing it (there was something deliciously ironic about this one)…anyway, there were a lot more but this is already verging on the sort of sentences the infamous Tim Brown used to write in essays.

It passed everything we did to it with flying colors. So we gave it an approval, Jan was happy and that was that. All in all kind of a neat experience, and I think we all pretty much figured that was that.

Fast forward to the most recent E3 show, and ByteShield is planning to make an appearance. Jan asks if they can put our approval of their product on their advertising. I know I was a bit shocked that he thought he would even matter at this point, but sure…go ahead. Within a couple of weeks of that event the Admin Email box received two messages from parties interested in doing something similar to what we had done with ByteShield. Those two were StarForce, who are trying to make a return to the Western market with a new product, and Sony DADC, the Sony unit responsible for development of SecuROM.

Now, the Sony thing unfortunately fell through and was frankly handled horribly from the get go, which is too bad. However, the talks with StarForce are still going on. And part of those talks centers around having a few people on the forum test their product similarly to the way a few of us initially tested ByteShield. I’m sorta kinda helping out with that mainly because I’ve dived in to one other project that’s been tying up A LOT of my time with a second one that I’m doing partnered up with Qikdraw that we’re hoping to start relatively soon.

Part of our original agreement with ByteShield in return for getting approval (which they are in turn putting on their website, the boxes of any retail copies of a game they do the protection for, and the front end ByteShield sign in app) was that we get to continue testing their system to make sure it’s working properly. If hitches come up, we work with their techs (who also have access to the hidden sub forum where all of this takes place) to figure out what might be causing the problems so they can fix it. Anyway, I’m heading that up. It’s taken a lot of time to get ready to go. First up was finding people besides myself who can test, and I wanted a good cross-section of people…everyone from fellow ubergamers to people who are very casual PC users…which worked out well. When Jan spoke to some of the publishers they have contracts with, they were actually very open to the whole idea…but they wondered about protection of their software from a legal standpoint. After all, we’re frequently getting Beta versions and early releases of games that might not hit the market for months. Publishers always have a level of protection in the form of an NDA between themselves and any Beta testers or game reviewers, and they wanted the same with us. Makes sense, but created a ton of headaches.

There are seven of us doing testing of games. Getting NDAs set up between all seven people and each publisher as they come on the scene would have been a colossal pain in the ass. Instead, what we ended up doing was getting an NDA set up between those of us testing and ByteShield themselves, and ByteShield is writing the testing we’re doing in to the contracts they sign with publishers. We’re still free to talk about their software and everything, we just can’t get in to nitty gritty coding details or give access to anyone else or something like that. With THAT finally worked out, no a few of us are getting in to setting up a more detailed test ‘program’ and what it should/will entail.

The second project is trying to establish some sort of contact between RYG and some of the consumer lobby groups out there, preferably the ones with more of a focus on electronic and online products. The A#1 target it going to be the Electronic Consumers Association, specifically the division they just recently created focusing on gaming. Their Gamers for Digital Rights sub-group is the first of its kind amongst consumer lobbies. I would love to have a chance to work with some of these guys, as they have the sort of backing and legal/political pull that we can’t even pretend to have. At the very least, some sort of a chance to chat with these guys would at least prove a common cause.

So yeah, busy stuff. There’s more on the drawing board, but I’m pretty much full up right now…to the point that I’m dropping working on monthly newsletters. I enjoyed writing them, but I was getting increasingly frustrated by the fact that all the feedback I was getting seemed to be suggestions for even more shit that I should do…by myself. Yeah. Also, the site has been an absolute anarchic mess too often in the past with everyone flailing around and working on all sorts of scattered shit that really had no cohesive theme. That seems to have stopped and there actually seems to be both a direction (focusing more on DRM and Gamers issues than sixty three other things that have nothing in common) and HOPEFULLY more drive to start moving forward with things. Part of that stems from a change at the top. The woman who previously owned the site was nice enough, but she wanted to be ‘the decider’ (thanks, Dubya) and also make no decisions. That doesn’t tend to foster much in the way of anything actually happening. IT all bogged down in a morass of ‘group discussions’ that never led to anything. Eventually, people just said fuck it and started doing stuff on their own, but that of course has its own problems. Anyway, she is handing the site over to someone else, and we actually seem to make some of those weird ‘decision’ things these days.

So there we go, 1400 words down on my beloved bloggy. Hopefully this won’t be a lonely little post for long, though I must warn that a LOT of future content is probably going to be of the fantasy sports/’Holy shit is this game I’m playing awesome/horrid’ variety. Suck on it.