Internet matters – Page 25 – a sibilant intake of breath

Starcraft II Mac installer crash fix

The following is a description of the problems I had installing Starcraft II on my 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo iMac, as well as the solution I found. I am running Mac OS 10.6.4.

The bug

Three times, I tried installing Starcraft II from the DVD I bought. Each time, the installer hung at 30% completion, on file 06748/37853. Each time it hung, the only thing I could do was manually turn off my computer. The same result occurred regardless of whether I used an administrator account or an ordinary user.

My fix

Insert the Starcraft II disc
Open the Disk Utility Program bundled with Mac OS X
Select the Starcraft II disc from the list on the left side of the window
Click ‘New Image’
Set ‘Image Format’ to ‘DVD/CD master’ and ‘Encryption’ to ‘none’.
Save the disc image to your desktop
Eject the Starcraft II DVD
Right click on the disc image and select ‘Open with’ and ‘Disk Utility’
From the list on the left hand side of the window, select the .cdr file you created earlier
Right click, and click ‘Open Disc Image’
Run the installer, out of the disc image
Once the game is installed, delete the disc image

Make sure nothing is running in the background while you are running the installer. I found that even such minor actions as muting and unmuting the sound were enough to crash the install program.

This may not solve your problem, but it worked for me! Another option is to download the game files from Battle.net, once you have created an account. Of course, downloading several gigabytes of data is likely to take a long time.

[Update: 24 August 2010] I finally got Starcraft II installed and working. I had to download the game from Blizzard and run the installer about six times, before it managed to get all the way through without crashing. Then, I had to download the 1.0.3 patch from a third party website (because the built-in updater always crashes). Even with the third party update file, it took about five tries before the game updated properly and could be played.

[Update: 14 October 2010] Starcraft II is an extremely frustrating game! It is mandatory for me to upgrade to version 1.1.2 in order to play, but the upgrade program fails every time I run it. It suggests erasing and re-installing Starcraft II, but it was such an ordeal to get it installed in the first place that I am reluctant.

I can’t find a direct download of the update file anywhere.

I don’t know why Blizzard installers are so picky, but I think it may have something to do with anti-cheating technology. They try to prevent users from altering the game’s files, but the protective systems that do that may cause install and upgrade errors.

[Update: 15 November 2010] I finally got the 1.1.3 patch installed, but it took a lot of work. I had to backup all my personal data to external drives, format the hard drive in my iMac, re-install OS X, re-install Starcraft II, and then install each patch.

The fact that it works now suggested that some sort of software problem was causing all the difficulties earlier. Mac users who are having the same problems should consider doing a ‘clean install’ of the kind described above. I tried simply over-writing the operating system files (an ‘archive and install’) but it did not work.

If you need them, the Starcraft II patches can be downloaded directly from Blizzard instead of by using the automatic updater.

Software behind Facebook

Given its massive scale, it isn’t surprising that Facebook has cooked up some custom software. What I just learned – which is encouraging – is that Facebook is sharing some of its technologies. One particularly interesting example is HipHop. This software takes the PHP code used by many modern websites (including those running on WordPress and MediaWiki) and compiles it into highly optimized C++ which servers process more quickly. While I don’t know much about it, it seems like something that WordPress might be able to usefully incorporate or reproduce in a future version.

Facebook also contributed to highly distributed database Cassandra, which Twitter also uses, as well as a number of other pieces of open source software.

It is nice to see Facebook providing potentially useful code to the wider web community.

Google and net neutrality

At Google headquarters recently about 100 people showed up to protest Google’s apparently eroding support for ‘net neutrality.’ Net neutrality is the idea that the internet should not restrict the modes of communication that can be used across it, nor the sorts of devices that can be connected to it.

Lots of companies oppose net neutrality because it means they should not discriminate between traffic from different sources. Data traversing the internet – broken up into pieces called packets – includes everything from pirated DVDs being passed around using peer-to-peer filesharing systems to corporate phone calls being routed though voice over internet protocol (VoIP) telephone systems to songs being downloaded for money from the iTunes store. Lots of companies would like to slow down or block file sharing, restrict services like VoIP, and allow people to pay more for faster paid downloads.

One big reason why this is worrisome is that it could prevent the emergence of new technologies. VoIP seems like a good example. Routing telephone calls through the internet challenges the monopoly of fixed-line telephone companies. Low cost VoIP calls have been a source of competition for them, and have probably produced improved services at lower prices for consumers. A future version of the web where companies can slow down or block traffic of undesirable types could be a version where new such technologies get strangled at birth.

That said, abandoning net neutrality could have some advantages, by improving network performance for those who use relatively low-bandwidth services like email and text websites. It could also facilitate the emergence of interesting new technologies, which are not viable on the internet as it exists now. For instance, the sometimes slow and clunky load times were one of the reasons why Google Wave proved to be a failure.

Given their enormous influence on the content and structure of the internet, the position of Google on net neutrality is of considerable public importance. The full details of their deal with Verizon – which is rumoured to allow special treatment of certain sorts of traffic – have not yet been publicly announced. When they are, there will surely be a lot of scrutiny and interest from the geekier components of the general public, as well as those with a particular interest on how technology policies affect societal change.

In Canada, Bell is probably the most vocal opponent of net neutrality, while Michael Geist may be the most prominent defender. I wrote a bit about net neutrality earlier, as well as about the related technology of deep packet inspection.

Single player and multiplayer

I have always preferred the single player modes in games like Half Life and Warcraft III to the multiplayer modes. The latter strike me as excessively hectic, with everybody racing to destroy their enemies, generating a lot of chaos in the process. Single player games allow you to take your time and execute things perfectly, in a much more controlled way.

It has occurred to me that the two options might appeal to rather different sorts of people. Multiplayer fans may be the sort who are thrilled by immediate engagement and happy to come out on top, even when the process for doing so is risky and disorderly. If they lose 90% of their army but end up victorious, they are happy. Single player may appeal to the sort of obsessive individual who wants to find a way to beat the enemy without losing a single unit, or suffering a major setback. It is well suited to the risk averse.

In life, it does seem that the kind of skills required in multiplayer are generally of more use than those required in single player. While there are areas of life where developing a plan methodically and them implementing it is possible and a good strategy, there seem to be many more where a capacity for improvisation and a willingness to not reflect on losses and failures are more valuable. Is there any way, I wonder, to make a natural single player fan into a more engaged multiplayer user?

How important is Facebook?

Facebook now has over 500 million users – a larger population than that of all but two nation states – as well as an upcoming movie. Perspectives on the site differ sharply, from those who see it as a successor to MySpace, and similarly doomed to eventual irrelevance, to those who see it as a key part of the future of the internet.

I think two things fundamentally distinguish Facebook from the rest of the web, and are important in combination. Firstly, there is the degree to which it is almost universally used. The great majority of my friends and co-workers have Facebook profiles. That creates powerful network effects. As with the telephone and other communication technologies, Facebook has become more useful and captivating as a larger and larger share of the population signs up. Secondly, there is the way in which the site imposes simplicity and standards. The internet is often a jumbled, confusing, technical place. By restricting the scope of what people can do, Facebook ensures that it will remain comprehensible, even to people without a great deal of technical knowledge.

Maybe the biggest thing Facebook has done is increased the level of social transparency in society. It has made the high school and college reunion largely irrelevant, since it is now easy to check what any particular former classmate is up to. Indeed, you probably don’t need to do any active research: their latest travel, relationship changes, photos, employment decisions, and more are likely to be displayed to you automatically if you sign in often enough. Suddenly, ambiguous romantic situations are perceptible to anyone who cares to investigate, and a much wider swathe of personal information has become readily accessible to future employers, co-workers, romantic partners, and friends.

Before the internet really emerged, I think a lot of people imagined that it would end up being much like Facebook – a centralized location for interpersonal interaction, in which physical location is not important. Clearly, the wider internet has developed to play many other roles, such as serving as a mechanism to gain access to specialized and niche products and information. That said, it does seem like Facebook is now a core part of what the internet does, taken all in all, and that the economic and social consequences of that could be significant.

GSM encryption cracking demo

I have written before about how the encryption used by GSM cell phones is not secure. At the upcoming Defcon conference, Chris Paget is planning to demonstrate how the cryptoscheme in GSM can be circumvented completely, using a man-in-the-middle attack, based around a device called an ‘IMSI catcher.’ Specifically, he is planning to “intercept and record cellular calls made by [his] attendees, live on-stage, no user-input required.”

This is a good illustration of some of the limitations of cryptography. Even very sound encryption algorithms are often used in ways that make them vulnerable to attack, including man-in-the-middle attacks where legitimate senders and receivers don’t realize their communications are being routed through a third party. The take-home message is: just because something is encrypted, don’t assume that other people won’t be able to access it.

The internet and confirmation bias

The issue of confirmation bias has come up repeatedly here before. Basically, people evaluate new information in a way that is far from impartial; new information that seems to confirm pre-existing beliefs is generally filed as evidence for the appropriateness of those beliefs, while contradictory information is downplayed or ignored. While this phenomenon is ancient, there does seem to be good reason to think that it may be especially acute now, as the media becomes more personalized and segmented.

That danger is highlighted by Harvard academic Ethan Zuckerman, who gave a TED talk on how social networks mislead us. Because we are exposed to the thoughts of people who are already much like us, we are at risk of being convinced that we are more typically than we really are, and our views are more mainstream and justified than may actually be the case.

How much of a problem would people say this is, both from the perspective of being well-informed citizens and in the context of being effective in promoting particular policies? Is there any way either social networks or individuals can combat this entrenching of confirmation bias? For my own sake, I have been trying to incorporate more articles from newspapers I disagree with into my daily reading.

Recovering keystrokes from audio recordings

Those trying to compromise the integrity of computer systems have a large variety of attack options to work with: everything from mathematical approaches to breaking cryptography, to TEMPEST attacks based on unintentional signal radiation, to social engineering methods designed to trick people into granting them access. A recent Economist article highlights a danger likely to be unfamiliar to most, namely how it is possible to convert audio recordings of typing back into text:

Such snooping is possible because each key produces a characteristic click, shaped by its position on the keyboard, the vigour and hand position of the typist, and the type of keyboard used…

That said, the method does have one limitation: in order to apply the language model, at least five minutes of the recorded typing had to be in standard English (though in principle any systematic language or alphabet would work). But once those requirements are met, the program can decode anything from epic prose to randomised, ten-character passwords.

The software being employed seems fairly clever. It augments the audio data with frequency analysis, based on how often individual letters and specific pairs of letters come up in English text. With refinements, it seems plausible that it could be made to work with a smaller sample.

Making a computer system secure against a capable and resourceful attacker is extremely difficult. That said, the basic principles of security continue to hold. For instance, using defence in depth can reduce the severity of any breach – for instance, by keeping critical files encrypted. Also, it must always be remembered that security involves trade-offs. Increasing security against these audio attacks is no different, and it will always be accompanied by some cost, in terms of finances, convenience, or security of a different type.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

While I am sure it will be old news to some of you, I recently came across this web comic and found it amusing and geeky, though sometimes crude.

Here are some of the strips I found funny. Note – many of these may be considered offensive by some people:

The strip is nearly always cynical, and sometimes horrifying, but amusing when one is in the right frame of mind.

David Mitchell on climate change

A couple of years ago, the issue of the consequences of climate change being very depressing came up here, given how dealing with the problem means giving up some excellent things, like being able to visit China or Hawaii on a whim and being able to concentrate our scientific efforts on neat things like space travel.

More recently, David Mitchell (of Mitchell and Webb) produced a funny video with a similar message:

David discusses why tackling climate change is always presented to us by people who either tell us off or patronisingly try to convince us that tackling it is “cool” or “fun”, when actually it’s just something we have to do, because of facts.

I don’t entirely agree with him – since I do see moving to renewable forms of energy as an opportunity. That said, I do like the delivery of his message.