Groundswell Fights DRM in Spore Video Game

News of what appears to be a distributed, spontaneous action against the new video game “Spore” because of the DRM included with the game has been spreading around the web since yesterday (when I first heard about it from Fred Benson of Free Culture) , and the action seems to be growing. Here is the background: Spore is a wildly anticipated video game from the makers of the Sims. They decided to include some nasty DRM called SecuROM. Besides preventing someone from installing the game on more than 3 computers it also disables some of your computer’s features or attached devices and sends information back to the game makers, and you don’t know what is included in that information, and can’t stop it. The DRM was cracked within a day and pirates copies are now available on the internet. What is interesting here, though, is the use of the rating and review system on Amazon to spread the word about the DRM. Hundreds, if not thousands of Amazon users at this point, have given a 1 star rating to the game because of the DRM, and some have written detailed reviews about it. Hundreds more have added the tags “drm”, “drm infected”, “defectivebydesign”, and “malware” as well as “cusomer abuse” and variations on the above. More of the tags are negative than positive. This action echoes similar ones we helped to organize against the iPod, the Zune and other devices and products crippled with DRM a year ago as part of the DefectiveByDesign.org campaign of the Free Software Foundation. The interesting thing here is that there doesn’t seem to...

Creating A View To Display a Users Buddies to Other Users

I’m working on a site that will launch soon that features some social networking functionality, including friend lists. We are using the Buddylist2 module and while there are some default blocks for things like “My Buddies” that show a user their buddies, there was not a similar block that would show one user another user’s buddies. We were able to create a custom view with the argument “Buddylist2: Nodes author is buddy of UID” that used the following custom argument handling code: This worked for us because the view, which creates a block, is only displayed when you are looking at a user’s profile, which is a nodeprofile node authored by the...

Social Networks VS Social Networking

A recent study on social networking came to my attention yesterday and it sparked a discussing with Bevan that we vowed to continue on the blog. The study which surveyed 13,000 adults between 18 and 65 in 17 developed nations found that 58% did not know what social networking is (30% in the US). Of those who said they participated in social networks, about a 3rd said they were losing interest, with 45% of American social networking participants answering they are losing interest. Some interesting stats from the study: 40% of Americans participate in social networks though across the 17 markets surveyed the number was 26%. The US is still lead by the Netherlands, UAE and Canada. Reading about the study I found myself wondering “What is the half life of social networks?” by which I mean, how long do you have to be engaged in the activity before you loose interest? I myself am not particularly interested in the traditional social networking technology anymore, I’m among the 45% of people in the US that are losing interest. At the same time, I am more interested than ever in what has come to be called “Social Media”. And this is where the lively discussing started with Bevan. There are “social networks,” websites with the explicit purpose of finding and connecting to friends and staying up to date in some way or other with those friends — think Friendster, MySpace, Facebook. These sites offer an array of technology that could be called “social networking technology” that enable activities that we could call “social networking.” The activity of social networking, which...