Do you accept the Daemon?

I recently finished listening to Daemon, a techno-thriller by Daniel Suarez. As a regular listener of several TWiT network shows, I have heard about the book regularly through Audible.com commercials. My catalyst for finally getting Daemon came this summer when Suarez released his latest book, Kill Decision. It seemed more than serendipitous coincidence that his newest book used my last job (signal processing on UAVs) for a topic, while his first book used my current job (blocking malware) for a topic. Thus I had to pick Daemon up, and once I picked it up I could not put it down.

Daemon begins with the death of Matthew Sobol, a fictional game designer. Sobol’s massively multiplayer online games brought his company wild success, and apparently left him with too much free time to think about the world order. He decided to change that order post-mortem by leaving behind a powerful internet daemon. The daemon intricates itself with the world’s information technology systems, obtaining immense power. The story follows many characters, some of which fight the daemon and some of which join the daemon. Both approaches provide thought provoking perspectives.

An interesting case study comes from the daemon’s takeover of Leland, a fictional multi-national financial company. Like many large corporations, Leland depends on a complex IT infrastructure. Recent cuts to the IT budget demonstrate the CEO and board view that infrastructure as an unfortunate operating expense rather than a core intellectual property resource. Those cuts produce vulnerable systems and disgruntled employees, which then facilitate the industrial espionage that introduces the daemon to the system. Once inside, the daemon moves laterally and vertically to compromise the entire system. The chiefs and board recognize the stranglehold too late, and the company becomes part of Daemon Inc. Fiction? Yes. Demonstrates real-world issues? Also yes.

Suarez makes several points through the book about technology and our society. Our world consists of largely monolithic monoculture of interconnected systems. We build layer upon layer on top of insecure technologies at the base. As we squeeze out each inefficiency, we make the entire system less flexible and more brittle. A relatively small number of us really know how the digital world works. Powerful people put their power into technology they do not understand or, even worse, misunderstand. Entire fortunes are made virtually and in the blink of an eye, without any produced good or service. All these set up an environment ripe for a cyber-parasite such as Sobol’s daemon.

Unfortunately, no silver bullet exists for dealing with these issues. Carnegie Mellon lead a study on ultra-large-scale (ULS) systems half-a-dozen years ago. Much excitement surrounded the initial release of the study, but it appears that the research area has languished since then. The study identified “security, trust, and resiliency” as a future topic of interest. Indeed. Those three compose a triumvirate for uptime, with each affecting the others. Any solution for one must consider the other two. Does your plan for server resiliency include security and trust? It should.

I really enjoyed Daemon, and highly recommend it. Many others feel the same way. A few complaints come from those who do not realize this first book only contains the the first half of the story. Picture reading Lord of the Rings and stopping midway through The Two Towers. Fortuitously, the rest of the Daemon story already exists in FreedomTM. I suggest getting both and then disappearing for a couple weeks to finish them. You will not regret it.

Need more info about Daniel Suarez and the ideas from his book? Check out these recent interviews for his Kill Decision book tour:

• Sword & Laser
• Triangulation
• Big Book Show
• Authors at Google

Day9's Starcraft 2 mechanics tips

Starcraft came out the year I started college. I spent a significant portion of my time as an undergraduate playing, particularly during my freshman year. A friend of mine that lived down the hall had such mad skills that he ranged toward the top of the ladder. I stunk, but still had a fun time. Flash forward to 2010, when Starcraft 2 came out. My time for playing is significantly more limited, but I still enjoy the game. I also still really stink. I mostly play the campaign and co-op with my brothers, but occasionally I swallow my pride for some ladder play in the bronze league.

I looked for a Starcraft podcast to listen to in an effort to improve my game a bit. I found Starcast. While the episodes do not maintain the production and host quality I expect from TWiT netcasts, it is a fun low-key show with good information spread here and there. The hosts pointed me at a gold-mine (or mineral-mine, if you will) of tips in Day[9]'s daily podcast. I do not particularly like the speaking style of Sean Plott (a.k.a. Day[9]), but the content is pure Starcraft gold (or mineral, if you will). Every player should watch his newbie mechanics episodes: 257 and 261.

This list contains a summary of the mechanics he emphasizes:

• Click on things instead of area select
• Don't scroll your screen with the mouse
• Use hotkeys, including groups
• Use screen hotkeys
• Click on minimap
• Watch the minimap, not your main screen
• No click spam, just accuracy
• Establish patterns and develop habits
• Tap (hotkeys without moving screen)
• Move slices of your army instead singles
• Always have building structures building things
• Never get ahead 500 minerals

So if you just started Starcraft: Good luck, have fun, and I hope that helps. If you have been playing a while, got any silver-bullet tips to share? Keep an eye out for me on battle.net as Zorgum.

Tron

My wife just purchased opening-day tickets for Tron Legacy on IMAX 3D. I have an awesome wife. I realize that some of you may not be familiar with Tron (hint: light cycles), so I have gathered some of the trailers in this post for you. Some are a bit redundant. All are awesome. Okay, fine, this first one is a cheesy product of the 80s:
The original movie is like that as well. However, it was the first movie to use CGI and it talks about computers and video games. It is right up my alley, even if it is a bit dated. This next trailer is what the trailer would be like, should they have edited it today:
So that is the original Tron. The big deal is that they are releasing a new Tron movie in two weeks. It will be awesome. Here is the trailer:
Didn't catch all that? Try the second trailer:
Doesn't that look awesome? Here is the third one:
Needless to say, I am very excited. The new movie should be great. It should have great special effects, great acting (Jeff Bridges won an Academy Award last year), and great geekiness. But that is not all. There are a few flavors of video games coming out at the same time which cover the story between the two movies:
I like this short trailer for the games (introducing the virus antagonist):
I am excited for Tron. Putting together this post makes me want to go play GLtron.

The Guild

This weekend the big new World of Warcraft expansion comes out: Cataclysm. I know somebody who is taking time off work next week to play. I am sure he will not be the only one doing this. I am intrigued by World of Warcraft (WoW). I played a fair amount of Starcraft in college and also went through Warcraft III. I enjoy the Warcraft mythology. However, I stay away from MMORPGs like WoW for reasons I discussed in my last post.

Even though I do not play, I have friends and co-workers that do. I also keep track of what is going on with the game in terms of storyline. Plus I'm a geek. All those reasons enable me to appreciate The Guild. It's an on-line show about a guild playing an unspecified MMORPG. The show isn't for everybody, but I think it is hilarious. They produced a couple of music videos to go with the last two seasons:

Do You Want To Date My Avatar

Game On

Check out The Guild or you can even purchase the DVDs (Seasons 1&2 or 3). Watching The Guild helps me stay strong in my resolve to not play MMORPGs

My escape from video game addiction

My guess is that half of you are saying "when were you ever a video game addict?" while the other half are saying "what do you mean 'escape?'" I like video games. I grew up on King's Quest and Space Quest from Sierra. My favorite games were/are the Final Fantasy series. In college I picked up Half-life and Starcraft. I eventually broke down and got a Wii in graduate school. The game flavor I currently enjoy is that of tower defense games such as Plants vs. Zombies.

One type of game I have religiously stayed away from is the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Strangely enough, I actually played the first one of these to come to the market: The Realm. Well, "first" depends on your definitions, but it was definitely groundbreaking and one of the first in the genre as we recognize it today. It was put out by Sierra. Since I enjoyed Kings Quest I decided to install the demo and see what it was all about. I played it for a while and then never played another MMORPG again. That was my escape from video game addiction.

At the time I did not think much of it. In fact, I think the decision was mostly financial (I didn't want to pay the subscription fee). I do remember noting that the game would be dangerous for me since it did not have a clear end point. The newest Final Fantasy game may take a while to beat, but eventually you have done pretty much everything. There are even a finite number of side quests. Those games also do not have any of the social compulsion found in MMORPGs. I have a personality that would get sucked into these MMORPGs and have a hard time coming out.

This is not to say that I do not play video games. I do play video games. However, I mostly play off-line. During my freshman year of college I played a bit of Starcraft and Half-life on-line, but I stunk. Although there can be some concept of teams in those games, that is primarily individual play so there are not the social pressures normally associated with MMORPGs. Not to say that those pressures do not exist outside MMORPGs. Counter Strike wasn't really big yet (Half-life had just barely come out), but I had a roommate during my senior year that played Ghost Recon nearly 24/7 as part of an elite team.

A "gaming" addiction can also form from much more benign "games." I have given up all fantasy sports other than Tournament Challenge for March Madness. I found that reading the stats, forming a team, and hands-off battles games felt very similar to a role-playing game. Although each season had an end, during the season there is no end to how often you can tweak your team. This meant I could endlessly crunch numbers and sink time into it. Not good, so I decided to stop playing. The difference with March Madness is that players just pick the brackets once and then the rest is hands-off.

Why bring all this up? I was listening to The Internet Safety Podcast a few weeks ago and the host, BYU's Dr. Knutson, interviewed Brad Dorrance of ExGamer.net. Brad's website has been down, but he is also affiliated with online gamers anonymous. They talked about game addiction and made a number of great points. I like Dr. Knutson's podcasts in general, although he sometimes interviews in order to solidify his positions instead of in order to gather information. You can get some idea about his positions from the Ensign article he co-wrote, Just a Game?. I find myself agreeing with him most/all of the time, and when I think I don't agree I often realize he's right when I think about it later. He seems to be in line with Elder Bednar's counsel. Can't go wrong with that.

Subscribe to The Internet Safety Podcast. Read about gaming addiction in social science, psychology, and theology. Chances are very good that you will have to deal with this at some time to some degree, either directly or indirectly. Now please excuse me while I try to get to some deeper dungeons in MAngband. j/k

So, about last week

Any loyal readers may have noticed my conspicuous absence from blogging this past week. I blame this on a number of things:

1. I played too much Cursed Treasure: Don't Touch My Gems. No, that isn't a TSA simulation game; it's a tower defense game. I finally finished it on Saturday.
2. I was sick. I started coming down with it on Monday and it just got worse and worse until about Saturday when I mostly came out of it. Having a cold made it hard to motivate myself to do things. I mostly just sat around, which is why I played too much Cursed Treasure.
3. It was Thanksgiving. Luckily, this year we weren't hosting the meal. It still meant that this week did not follow my normal weekly routine (insofar as I have a normal weekly routine).
4. I needed to break precedent. I had been going along at a three-posts-a-week clip for a month and felt some pressure to keep it up. That is bad for a number of reasons. I need to be able to not feel guilty about not blogging if I really do not have time for it. Breaking that routine (and the earth not ending because of it) helps me with that a bit.

Those are my excuses. They may be lame, but they are all I got.