Well, it is almost always how a DOS attack is made... computer from hacker have rarely the needed power for lauch a large scale attack... it is why trojan or virus exist... attack are planned long time before... virus or trojan propagate on the net, infecting plenty of personal computer... at a define time and date, trojan or virus activate and connect to the target... the hundred of thousand if not million of simultanous connection put the target server on his knee... a good example was the malware Mydoom...

Well, there is plenty of way to make a DOS attack... by example, the software DC++ ( a open source peer to peer software ) have some security hole who allow to redirect peer to some target... this will lead to thousand of computers who try to aggressively connect to a target website. A easy way to prevent these type of attack is simply to not allow any peer-to-peer protocol on the port 80...

Being responsible of the security from some big server is not a easy task... danger on the internet is more great that these in a real jungle !!!

I love stuff like this.  Calling that extensive, serious research cracks me up.  No studies showing sale trends in regards to piracy activity have ever shown significant rates of purchasing.  A few indie developers have actually bothered to look into it, and the numbers come out in the 10,000 to 1 range.  So yeah, a million plus people pirated Crysis, but odds are half of them just wanted to see if it would run, and maybe a thousand of them were actually going to buy the game if they couldn't get it for free.

PC developers have failed to understand their market.  Utterly.  They compare the glory days of PC gaming to the modern releases and get confused when the absurdly over stated market doesn't deliver on their generic crap game.  In the late 80's and early 90's, if you were a PC gamer, you were a PC enthusiast that had spent a fortune on this strange device most people couldn't see a point in having.  You had to actually learn shit to configure your system so it would run them.  The market was tiny as hell.

These days, grandpa has a "gaming" video card when he buys his $500 Dell.  My dad has three laptops that he carts around, they all have "gaming" video cards in them.  He's a programmer, and he couldn't care less about video games.  He has them because they're fast, and the faster they are, the smoother his environment runs.  The supposed market is huge, but most of it is fictitious.  A failure to understand their changing world.

The PC market has been shrunk down to zip because people are tired of buying a game and having to monkey with shit to get it running only to find a low quality, subpar product with zero innovation in it.  It's why I myself buy damn near nothing new these days.  I've been burned way too many times to get much before it hits bargain prices.  All the morons that can't use their routers are a lost market, they ditched it for the consoles.  The people that spend a week waiting for a patch to fix critical errors that prevent them from playing are a lost market too.  Why bother?

Piracy is a minor blip on the route to collapse, a non-issue.  The music industry is flourishing and has vastly higher piracy rates than PC games do.  The difference is the music industry didn't spend the last decade making you buy two thousand dollar machines so you could update your drivers fifty times a year and spend a few hours trying to figure out WTF is wrong with this or that installation all so you could play through it and discover a replay value of zero.  Running the cutting edge of graphics gave them lots of pretty pictures, and lots of pissed off customers.

Eventually, they'll get the picture, the casual game market is stomping the shit out of them in the profit area.  Marketing to enthusiasts just gets you an enthusiast market.  It's no surprise that console games do better when they have advertisements and ease of use that appeals more to the general market than the minor, freakishly devoted group of people that do crazy things like buy gaming magazines.

Sniff-sniff...thayut smayuls lahk kahmoonizm.

But I could hardly agree more with your general diagnosis of ego-bloat in the IT sector. To me, one of the worst things about it is that they roped the--what do you call them--mainstream media idiots into giving them a structural PR advantage by accepting the notion that the default meaning of "technology" was limited to computing-intensive applications.

The purportedly liberal New York Times joined that sad bandwagon over a decade ago, and to this day you can see what bullshit the language is when you see the three headlines under Business partially or completely duplicated under Technology, while all other interesting technology news is pushed off to the ghetto of Science. (And yes, I'm ignoring the Health section because our current health systems are at least as much a matter of the arts as they are of science.)

OK...assuming those baseless 'maybe's....that's STILL 1000 multiplied by whatever the game price was/is.

If that's trivial and irrelevant...what say YOU pay it....just to TOTALLY negate the lost sales through piracy?

Easy peasy.....

Oh, you won't?

Then why the fuck should the Game Owner/distributor?

When you stop pretending no one that pirates ever leads to a sale, I'll start caring that you might be losing money from it.

An interesting set of stats just in:

"According to the web traffic measurement company, Alexa, MegaUpload.com received 10 percent of its user traffic from Internet users in France and 8.8 percent of traffic from Brazil, while only 7.3 percent of traffic came from the United States and 7.2 percent of traffic came from Spain. The majority of users were male, ages 18 to 34. Google Insights for Search and Google Trends also revealed that MegaUpload.com received a high concentration of search traffic from Europe and Latin America: the top 5 countries were Spain, France, Italy, Chile and Tunisia, with searches highly concentrated in the metro areas of Spain and France; the top five languages searches were conducted in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Polish." - http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/21/majority-of-megaupload-traffic-came-from-france-not-us/#ixzz1k9HMhGnC

Sorry, mate...you are the one with the 'maybes' of 1000 lost sales in 1000000 pirates....not me.

I'm not 'pretending' anything.

Either there are lost sales or there are not.

Kindly make up your mind....

Making up my mind is something I'll do when people like you actually bother to find out whether it hurts you or not.  To this day, I've never seen a consumer questionnaire that included piracy in the list of why I bought something, and I've never been able to find statistics from someone having done one I wasn't privy to.

I expect one was done at some point, and the results were problematic.  I am paranoid however, and cognizant of my issues, so I do recognize that publishers may just be unbelievably stupid and can't think to add it into their surveys.(Edit: Thinking everyone to be stupid is likely another one of my issues, just thought I should add this just in case the population really isn't.)  To that effect, I've suggested it when the opportunity arose.  I'll do so again here and now.  Put one out with the next game Stardock sells, and show me that nice big zero in the piracy column.

There are numerous studies that have shown the pirate crowd on average to be well above the norm in expenditures.  You conveniently ignore their implications, I do not.  I know for a fact that they do contribute, if only the sales I myself have given after being talked into wasting the time required to look beyond this or that absurdly boring demo.

What I don't know, and what you presume to be inconsequential when you blast piracy for robbing you of sales in your combative, one sided diatribes against anyone that dares to contradict your view that piracy is the bane of mankind, is how much it contributes.  Suppressed studies and historical trends imply that they far outweigh the losses.

Probably because the 'question' will be as successful os the one "Have you stopped beating your wife?"

In other words you either cannot answer or will not answer truthfully.

How many pirates are going to answer "yes, I pirate your software'?

Criminals do not tell the truth...it's a pre-requisite of their trade....

Oh, crap...that's the continued and predictable bleatings of the pirate attempting to justify his value to humanity.

The only benefit to society of 'theft' is the subsequent need for the security industry...[eg Locksmiths].

So...

Crime is a necessity otherwise poor little Locksmiths and Alarum manufacturers etc will be out of work.

Jolly good show...

Jafo, i hate you for saying that i don't tell the truth...

Seek in all my post and you will find a few times where i say that i have pirates SOASE at first... main reason being your game not available in Europe... have need to wait months before being capable to buy it via Kalypso...

Was the same problem with your Impulse thing... 90% of the games that i wish to buy was with the infamous "US only tag"... well, in these case, i have Steam for alternative... so, for these who complain that Steam become a monopol, simply don't shoot in your own foot by threating everything outside the US like second choice customer...

Trailer, review of game are available worldwide... it is like when you put a cake below the nose of a few children... but when the black one try to eat a portion of the cake, you reply that it is only for white kid...

Making worldwide release can only help to reduce piracy... in fact, i don't feel guilty because once the i am able to buy it, i buy it... in fact, in my case, if the pirate version have not be available, i will have maybe never buy the game because i will have forget about it waiting several month for a release...

Now that i thing about it, i am not the only one who have post that he have use a pirated version of soase at first...

In fact, the criminal liars that i am have maybe buy more version of your soase game or extension that any other of your "good" customer... check your record to see how much entrenchment expansion that i have buy !!! Certainly 10 time more that the usual customer... i can prove it since i have take a screenshot of the purchase receipt !!!

And i can promise you, if rebellion is not available worldwide at release time, i will pirate it... and use the pirated version until i am able to find a legal one... Rebellion is the last planned release of Soase and i wish a boxed version that i can keep for very long time...

I don't really wish to pirate software/game, i have money for buy it... but when i don't find the product in local store, that online store say "US only", that my local computer magazine say that it is the best game/software ever made... what do i need to do... cry because in a time of worldwide economy, i am not able to buy something i like due to racist distributor who consider all who is outside US is not a worthy customer... and now these business cry because of the piracy problem that they have create themself...

Now that you have read these post... look at the DrJBhl stat post... it will maybe explain why piracy number outside US are so high...

And believe me, as customer, i make more effort that usual customer for try to pay thing that i want... by example, i use the proxy hidemyass.com for pay and use NetFlix ... all this because Europe is excluded... have two choice... wait 5-6 year until film/serie come to my local TV ( if they ever come ) or find not very clean way for pay and use a service today... for god sake, we live on the same planet, internet is a worldwide thing but a lot of business seem to ignore what is outside the US...

Maybe US business men are like these US blond ( this will explain a lot ) :

Interesting how some people associate freedom with being allowed to steal.

Some? Must agree, Fuzzy... the "freedom" is isn't being able to steal... it's being able to choose correctly between theft and acceptable, expected action.

Take a look here: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/megaupload.com

Go through the tabs at midpage. The stats are interesting and revealing.

It is not about "being allowed to steal" but more about explain why some of the "stealing" happen...

By the way, here, it is not illegal to download... but it is illegal to upload... so, at law level, i don't steal...

More, we pay tax on all blank media support ( tape, videotape, cd, dvd, etc )... money who go for the "author right" ( who in fact feed the big media business and not really the author )... these tax allow us to make a backup copy of media that we legally purchase... unfortunaly, in numerous case these right is denied due to copy protection...

If media/game/software business don't wish to know why some people are "stealing" their material, how in the hell they wish to correct/solve the problem...

Sure, hardcore pirate and people without money from so third African world will never buy the product pirated... because of lack of money or because of bad understanding of the word "free"... know the same problem in the open source world where plenty people think that "free" software mean "free of charge" when in fact it mean "freedom"...

Anyway, media/game/software business complain that they loose sales due to piracy... in the majority of the case, it is not true... these who think that "free" mean "free of charge" will continue to seek illegal version... these too much poor for pay ( plenty of people earn only 20$ month on these planet ) will not be able to pay for it... other like me, who was not able to buy the product will have buy it anyway when it will have become available and if pirated version have not existed, i have certainly choose a other product and never become a legit Stardock customer...

That Jafo use the "criminal do not tel the truth" for justify the lack of stat research about piracy is wrong... best to make comment based on multiple myth that seek a truth who will maybe not be the one truth that the media/game/software business claim to be the right one...

Hey, if tomorrow, people who pointy ear are not allowed to buy game anymore, don't you will feel that it hurt your freedom... if no legal alternative exist, will you not feel that business treat you like a second class citizen...

By the way, if you have take the time to read the 10 page article ( link in a JCRabbit post ), one of the solution proposed for fight piracy is :

Stop delaying releases by region. Releasing games earlier in some regions is probably the single biggest incentive for people to pirate a game and contribute to day-zero piracy... So release all games globally at approximately the same time, ... if you're serious about slowing down day-zero piracy.

I ask nothing more... when a product is released to have it available worldwide, so i can spend my hard earned money on the product in place of use a pirated copy during the waiting time... if media/game/software company can work together at the world level for hunt piracy, why they cannot work together for release their product everywhere ??? If some alien from Mars wish to buy your product, why make it difficult for them... what the hell, allow them to spend their space $$$ on your product in place to turn them to the illegal market called piracy...

Thoumsin....

You can hate me all you like...it's a free world, however I said nothing of the sort.