So the government just have to say: we know that you harddrive contains X, and they force you to decrypt it.
Of course, when it is decrypted and it turns out that it didn't contain X, they will just say... sorry!
The view of Joel Spolsky regarding the issue.
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Suppose you have a little game company. Instead of making software, you knock out three or four clever games every few months. You can't invent all the games yourself. So you go out and hire a game designer to invent games. You are going to pay the game designer $6,000 a month to invent new games. Those games will be clever and novel. They are patentable. It is important to you, as a company, to own the patents on the games.
Your game designer works for a year and invents 7 games. At the end of the year, he sues you, claiming that he owns 4 of them, because those particular games were invented between 5pm and 9am, when he wasn't on duty.
Ooops. That's not what you meant. You wanted to pay him for all the games that he invents, and you recognize that the actual process of invention for which you are paying for him may happen at any time... on weekdays, weekends, in the office, in the cubicle, at home, in the shower, climbing a mountain on vacation.
So before you hire this guy, you agree, "hey listen, I know that inventing happens all the time, and it's impossible to prove whether you invented something while you were sitting in the chair I supplied in the cubicle I supplied or not. I don't just want to buy your 9-5 inventions. I want them all, and I'm going to pay you a nice salary to get them all," and he agrees to that, so now you want to sign something that says that all his inventions belong to the company as long as he is employed by the company.
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This is actually fairly common style with Korean MMO's and multiplayer games. It seems to work good there and players like it, so it's not a surprise companies want to try it on western markets too.
I agree. It is a game model I don't like, so I stay away from those kind of games.
When I started playing BFH, this was the main selling point for me. It was a very bold claim, but they said it everywhere. It is on the official trailer. It is on the official FAQ (now updated). They said it in several interviews. Now, I feel cheated.
The problem with EA/DICE right now is the dishonesty they have shown. They made this change without a warning. They did a BattleFunds sale and bundles offers in other equipment in the weeks prior to this change. Many people who spent BFs this weekend on these items have found now that they have to unexpectedly spend more money to use them.
And they completely continue to miss the point of all the complaining users. They say that the game is still free, and that you can still have fun without paying a penny. The point is that they destroyed the very core claim of not giving combat advantage to paying customers, and backstabbed the whole user community in the process. Still, no one in the dev/mods team has actually acknowledged it.
If you sell diamonds, you cannot expect to have many customers. But a diamond is a diamond even if there are no customers. -- Swami Prabhupada
