Code Wars: Clones, Consoles & Copyrights

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User Friendly 2.0 with host Bill Sikkens,

Technology Architect.

And this is user friendly.

As always I am your host Bill skins.

Welcome to this week's show Bill. Gretchen, welcome.

Hello. Hello.

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All right.

So what do we have in the news this week?

All right.

Past Sony exec criticizes

decision to end physical media.

Yeah.

So this is needless to say a controversy that has been brewing the past.

Sony exec is Sean Layton who was questioning Sony's decision.

In fact, his quote is if you can't own it, what are you buying?

And this relates to Sony's decision to kill disc.

So what's going on here is Sony is finding itself in the middle

of a growing controversy surrounding the PlayStation five.

The company has announced plans to discontinue physical game

effectively pushing gamers towards an old digital future.

The many consumers aren't happy about potentially losing the ability

to own, resell and preserve physical copies of their games.

And now things are getting more interesting.

Hackers and independent developers have been making significant

progress,

rather breaking through the PS5 software restrictions.

One project called

PS5 is working to make PlayStation games run natively on Windows

and Linux computers, potentially opening the door for better performance

and fewer restrictions.

Along with the technology

being out there being in its infancy.

It is really growing.

So in the second segment today,

we're going to be talking about this in depth, as well as software cloning

and some other things that are going on, a lot of it with the use of AI these days.

But needless to say, the field is changing

quite quickly and I think it's caught some off guard.

So stick around for the second segment and we'll talk about this some more.

French cyber

attack on supermarkets results in millions of euros of damages

attacking people.

Oh. I'm sorry. What was that?

Are the French attacking people because the witness is real?

No, no, it's the other way around. Oh,

era. In fact, France has been a great ally.

But what's going on here is something that anybody that has

technology infrastructure needs

to be concerned about, because these things can happen.

And it hasn't been publicly disclosed to the hack yet,

although those in the know can make a very educated guess.

But what happened is, is the hackers got into the control system

that runs the freezers and managed to turn them up to 130°F.

It's something like a couple thousand locations throughout France.

And in doing so, it caused all the food to spoil,

even caused fires, equipment meltdown and all that kind of a thing.

This was obviously a targeted attack, and this is just one of the examples of why

we need to really get our information technology,

cybersecurity and all of that a lot better than it already is.

I think we're going to see a lot more of this happening, unfortunately.

All right.

Russia's latest

Starlink rival satellites are falling out of orbit.

What's going on here?

All right, so this is coming from United 24 media.

And what's happening here is Russia has a planned rival to Starlink.

They want to have their own system.

The Roswell three satellites is what this is called.

And they fired two.

I actually think it was three satellites up into orbit.

And they've had some problems with their launch pad since then,

but they got the three satellites up, and it turns out that two of them

are falling out of orbit, and they are expected

to reenter Earth's atmosphere within the next few weeks.

So China has done this and actually has been more successful.

If Russia has also taken up the prospect of its own Starlink alternative.

These programs have been going on for a long time,

but earlier in the year, SpaceX cut off Russians access to Starlink

and they started pushing to get in and get these satellites launched.

But they haven't had a lot of success with this.

And it looks like, according to a study

from the study of or

the the Institute of the Study of War, there is where I'm going for that.

The constellation seem unlikely to be successful in the near future.

So, you know, I don't know if these are old Russian attitude of

if they can't build a better, build it bigger,

but that wouldn't look too well for satellites,

although we can't really say too much because they did get the first satellite

in orbit.

Of course, that was a long time ago, so things have changed.

Well, I mean, when your satellite just sits around and beeps, I mean.

This is true.

And what wasn't that satellite made by people who are actually from Ukraine?

Yeah.

Most of the technology of that era was made in Ukraine.

So, you know. Yeah.

They don't have access to that anymore, obviously.

Yeah.

Well, talking about more technology,

Amazon is keeping amazingly detailed records of its customers,

and they are downright insulting.

Yeah. So this is an interesting story that came in.

So I let's see here how do we do this? I'm going to get on Amazon.

Just see what this actually is what they're tracking.

So I actually went and tried to find mine.

And it was pretty boring really. Yes.

All right.

So let's see accounts of shopping preferences I assume it's there okay.

And about you. Okay.

So let's see what we got here.

So this is my account.

I'm just looking at this off the top of the thing.

And,

let's see here okay.

Product preferences prefers Japanese style prepared foods.

That's interesting.

Cat supplies maintains fitness regimen.

Oh, this is actually a little creepy.

It supposed to be insulting, according to the title.

Yeah, well, so according to the person that wrote the article on this,

that actually is where the story came from on Futurism.

She went in and she brought up and it said that she was

had a flat buttocks, and some other things like that, which.

Yeah, that would be a little insulting, actually.

That'd be quite insulting.

The Amazon page said that one woman has no friends quote,

and a decision to describing her as a, quote, 50 year old man.

Yeah, that would be insulting to.

Oh, Oh, boy.

Another customers

page said that she hasn't, quote, worn a medium size in anything in years.

And, so it goes on.

So yeah, mine did mention that I liked a lot of Star Wars toys.

Yeah, well, that might not take an AI to figure out.

Gretchen, I hate to say it, but.

So check it out.

It's under you.

Log in to Amazon, you go to your account

and there's a drop down on there and it says Shopping Preferences.

And then scroll down to the bottom of that page.

And there's an About You button.

And that's where you can get into this

in my case includes brands I like interest in hobbies.

This is a I generated obviously, but some of the likely has a workshop set up.

Likely owns a Nissan rogue.

Has a cat, has a dog.

Two adults in the household.

Likely has an outdoor space.

Likely lives in the city I live in. That's interesting.

So, yeah.

All right.

Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development

for the Apollo program, dies at 90. Yes.

And she's had an amazing career to two decades at MIT.

She forged new paths in computer science and engineering.

And one of the biggest things in her work included leading the team that programed

the first computers that took humans onto the moon in the Apollo program.

She's been very much involved and very influential

in all kinds of different things.

She's authored over 130 publications

and helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline.

So, you know, this is kind of someone that really started

a lot of what we're doing now.

Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama.

And her CV enlist goes on and on.

So she died on September 30th and was 90.

She will be missed.

Yeah, very much so.

Michelangelo's handwriting became a Microsoft font.

Yeah.

So this is interesting.

And, Gretchen, this was a story you found.

Yeah. I just thought I should share that.

Just, you know, it's it's interesting so that we dive into it.

It's a

one of those things that kind of gives you an idea of where things originate.

I, I think when you think about this creative blog, publish this,

not only fear is the author,

and what we're talking about here is basically what the headline says,

that they've created a new font based on Michelangelo's handwriting,

and they were able to get that from Vatican records from Vatican City.

And this is interesting to think about.

You know, among handwriting fonts and that kind of a thing

that you would still be able to tell. It's a font,

of course, because every letter, the letter is going to be the same.

Yeah.

You know, so that's typical for a font, but it's kind of cool.

Goal here was not to recreate his hand, but to adapt it to

no modern, functional script that could appear on signage

and in the basilica initially, and then as a font.

You obviously can use it for anything.

You would use a font for your word God.

You must have had reasonably good

handwriting if they were able to turn it into a font.

Absolutely.

If you look at some of the examples, I mean his cursive.

Well, my cursive, nobody can read.

I've been accused of having it be as a good, you know,

encryption methodology, but it couldn't be d encrypted, right?

No, but his handwriting was, was amazing.

But that's not unusual for the era.

But if you look at it, it is quite beautiful.

The documents themselves are art.

Yeah.

Oh. HBO Max and Paramount will be combined

into one streaming app, which has me

a little worried because.

Are they going to make it expensive?

Well, is my time out written by Shane Weaver.

And, you know, it's an interesting thing now, I was looking at it from this thing.

I don't have HBO Max, but I have Paramount Plus,

and I get it for free as a thing on one of my credit cards.

So I'm looking at it from the standpoint of, oh, this is great.

I can watch, what it says.

Face fails to save the universe, fails to save the universe.

Yeah, but it doesn't look like it.

It looks like what they're doing.

So right now there's a thing called streaming saturation.

And in other words, there's too many streaming apps.

And it makes sense that some of this will consolidate.

I think at the end of the day, what we're going to see here

is a situation where initially probably it won't go up in price.

It in fact

looks like there could be a little bit of a reduction.

And at the end of the day, I think what we're going to see here

is the subscription would probably be something in between that for both.

I know Hulu's prices are going up again.

So yeah.

And by the way those prices are there ad free versions.

They do have ad funded versions that go for a lot less.

Yeah. Hulu.

I, I don't know exactly what's going on there.

I did see that their prices are going up again.

I don't use Hulu, so I'm not as on top of that anymore.

But, everything's going up.

I mean, that isn't a shock, but at the end of the day,

people are getting sick of subscriptions, which we'll be talking about

in the next segment and a little more detail, but it is definitely a thing

that is, I can streaming

things being put together.

Yeah.

The FCC I.D.

now required for selling electronics online. Yep.

And I'm going to pick on eBay with this one,

because it's where I've been working with this and kind of know the most.

But this applies to pretty much any online retailer in the United States.

So if you have an electronic item and you want to sell it

on the second hand market or even new, and you use a site like eBay

or equivalent Facebook Marketplace, whatever the case may be.

You now have to find the FCC ID on the device and enter into the listing.

Otherwise, you won't be able to sell it.

Your listing will be hidden.

So in into effect on October 13th.

And what it is, is it's part of the FCC

crackdown on unauthorized devices in the United States.

So when you have something that uses radio.

So whether that's in the olden days, Am, FM radio,

television receiver or modern Bluetooth, you know, that kind of thing.

All of these things emit radio waves.

And in the United States,

and this is not legal advice, but it's just my understanding of it.

You have a situation where to be sold.

It has to be reviewed.

It has to be set up.

So it's not going to interfere with other things, you know, that kind of stuff.

And when you have that certified, you're issued an FCC I.D..

So if you look on the back of devices that are legitimate,

you'll find that number usually along with the serial number

or somewhere else might be on the box, you know, or a place like that.

But the point of it is it'll have the number on the retro stuff,

even on the retro stuff.

Yeah.

Now, what that comes down to, though, is there are situations

where the sticker might be gone or, you know, something of that nature.

And what it's coming down to is you just can't sell it.

And eBay

and I do have to say one thing about it.

They only had a month to roll this out, so I do appreciate that,

but I had absolutely no way.

I've got 94 listings right now on eBay, and actually that's minimal.

A lot of the eBay stores are in the thousands.

And I look at that, and I had no way of knowing what required an FCC ID,

because there's no tool on there to say, hey, this is missing.

The idea just went hidden, did come up in the Resolution Center,

so I eventually figured it out that way,

but it was a matter

of having to go through each listing that had electronics to try to figure out

if this is required or not.

Not, and just because it's an electronic item doesn't necessarily mean

that this is required if it has communication capability,

but certainly on modern devices, most of them do.

Now, the idea here is that we've had a lot of hard work coming in

that is not supposed to work in the United States.

It's not set up to.

So it will interfere with things,

or we're start monitoring things and sending a signal back.

You know, it's designed to do this.

This goes along with them limiting what routers can come in

and all that kind of stuff.

And while it can be frustrating, there is actually a reason to do it.

But the problem is, like Gretchen, you say, there can be a lot of situations

where you may not have that number, and if you don't, it becomes a frustration.

And I remember a little bit of a tangent, but kind of on this topic,

I tried to sell a serious XM radio a few years

back, and I wasn't allowed to list it because of copyright violations.

Apparently you can't do that because Sirius XM has done something.

I don't know if this is still the case, but it was when I tried it

to where they're saying, well,

our technology is licensed and therefore it cannot be resold.

Which at that time was frustrating because it just had the listing.

And this is the same kind of thing for different reason.

So it's something you want to be aware of.

If you are selling electronics on an online marketplace, new or used,

you are going to need to check this out

because it may be that your listing has been hidden on eBay.

I don't know how the others are handling it, but it would mean that all of a sudden

that's not going to sell and you need to try to find that.

How do you find it? There's a couple of ways.

If you have it on the item, like we were just talking about,

that's the case on phones and stuff.

You can usually go into the about

the device screen, and the FCC ID will be there.

It's a long number.

One of the other things is I had one item that was retro electronics

that I'm selling, and I couldn't find it, so I took a picture of it, asked AI,

and it was able to go out and get the number for me.

So that was another way to look it up.

So you can do it online sometimes,

but the point of it being is it's just something to be aware of.

Because if you make your money

and a lot of people do on online stores, it's a good thing to do.

And if all of a sudden, you know,

things haven't been selling as well, but if it really drops and you don't know why,

eBay did send out an email, but it was somewhat ambiguous,

and it certainly doesn't tell you what you need to be worried about.

So it's just something to be aware of and something you want to check out.

And if you have something

that legitimately does not have an FCC ID, it can't be sold in the United States.

And you probably can't list it now,

All right.

Interesting. So Microsoft will.

Well, no. Go ahead.

Microsoft will mainly use its Maya chips for AI inference.

So what does that mean?

That means they're trying to get away from Nvidia's chips for AI.

So basically what it comes down to is they're using their own

a homegrown AI chip format silicon format

instead of Nvidia's graphical processing units,

which actually, I have to give a Microsoft kudos for this,

because it would be nice to not have all our electronic prices

going up so much, because the vendors are selling only to AI

and there's no other options on the market.

So we'll see if this works out.

I is using the Azure cloud, which is Microsoft's cloud,

and that is where they're going to be deploying this.

Let's hope this works.

So yeah we'll see how it works out. All right.

So let's move on to another topic.

Bill you are convention out.

Oh yeah.

Tell us about what you got into.

And I know it was two back to back.

So let's let's see what you think.

Oh yeah. Started last Friday.

I went snafu con here in Reno, Nevada.

And sadly it is the last year

for Snafu Con, but it was quite a year.

What it is, it's nephew is an anime con.

It's been going on for a while.

Tell us a little,

just really quickly what it is for anybody that hasn't heard of it.

Well, it was called Sierra Nevada Anime Fans United, and it started

at the University of Nevada, Reno and expanded into being a full convention.

And it has been a event

for pretty much everything except for the dreaded plague times. And.

And it's been a

staple for around here for, I don't know, over a decade now.

And I've been to most of them other than the ones when they were college,

because I didn't know about it at the time.

Right.

And they've had some wonderful guests like Chris Escalante,

who is a known voice actor for Aphmau and other anime.

And they've had panels, they've had guests,

they've just really tried their best to have a really nice little convention.

And I say little, it fits inside like one convention

hall here at the Reno Tahoe Convention Center, right, with panels at other rooms.

But you know what I mean.

It's doesn't matter.

I remember they had board gaming and stuff like that at all.

They do? Yeah.

I was going to say it's been a while since I got to go to.

And it was held at the Nugget Casino in Sparks the last time I did.

But you met some cool people,

and the smaller size did make it a little more intimate.

You could actually talk to people

and you weren't so inundated, so it's too bad that they're going away.

Supposedly they're coming back with something new

that that is the rumor.

So we'll see what they have in the future.

But for now, snafu has reached its final year.

Yeah, I really did enjoy them as a small convention.

It you know, I was talking to some of the guests and they had been

to play like Anime Expo, and they said that was just a nightmare.

Wow. Because of how big they are.

It's like San Diego, right? Yeah. Okay.

I can only wait for that. So massive.

Yeah, like one of them was showing me a video of a opening day

for the vendor booths, and people were running to get to whichever vendor

they wanted to get to first, and it looked like a Black Friday sale.

All right.

Well, hopefully it'll come up with kind of a reboot.

It sounds like what you're talking about.

So we'll keep our eyes on that and let everybody know about that.

So what was your other convention?

Well that's BLC or biggest little Furqan.

And I know you know some viewers are going to have some things about furries.

But I will say furries are very fun to hang out with.

Yeah I and I'm going to say it's a giant boy people.

Yeah I got to that one too.

And you know going into it I didn't know what we were going to get with.

But I have to say, the year that I went, it was

well produced, it was very professionally done.

And it was a lot of fun.

And and it wasn't weird, you know, just to put that out there,

it was actually very much you could bring your family.

There was no problem like that.

That seems to be a,

preconception of these things that really isn't, isn't out there.

So so, you know, I'm, I, of course, don't have a fursuit.

I am a Wookie when I put my costume on.

And those are completely different things.

So, you know, but tell us a little bit about what you saw there.

Oh, it's been great.

One of the things I was always say is that they have their

queuing for registration down to a science.

We got there late Monday and we were through within 20 minutes.

And I mean, the line was wow room.

But yeah, wow. They're great.

But otherwise they've had gaming.

They have electronic gaming.

They bring in like a full arcade,

and plus PC and other consoles.

I mean, like Nintendo and all that.

They have those kind of consoles, plus Dance Dance Revolution

and those kind of console are big, big, you know, ones.

Panels galore on all kinds of subjects.

There's one for blood on the clock tower, which I'm hoping to go to today, maybe.

Which is a game that, for those who know, it's a game of deduction

where you're sleuthing out who the criminal is of the group.

Okay.

Yeah, I know that.

It's a whodunit.

Like a dinner,

a dinner, a murder dinner or dinner party, whatever those are called.

You'll have to let us see how that goes. But, yeah.

No, it's cool to hear that.

You got to go to both of them,

and we'll keep you updated on what's going on with Snafu.

Hopefully something will be coming up in the works.

Stay on for our next segment.

We're going to be deep diving into the whole Sony thing.

This is user friendly. 2.0.

We'll be back after the break.

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Check out everything user friendly at User Friendly.

So this is your one stop for submitting your questions, your comments,

getting back

episodes, checking out our flash briefing and everything else user friendly.

And to that end, it is your questions that we are going to try

to answer in this second segment today.

We're not doing a Q&A exactly, but there's been a lot of information,

questions, comments, suggestions, intense suggestions

dealing with what's going on with the PlayStation five.

And I thought, you know,

it'd be a good time to have an open conversation about that.

And in a little broader situation here, what is actually the deal?

I'm getting the distinct impression, let's just say, to put it

mildly, that a lot of people are not happy with Sony right now.

Bill, are you happy with Sony right now?

Well, yeah, that's about what?

Things here.

But I did find a use for my $60 PS5 that we'll get into detail on all of this.

I got it about a year ago because it was banned from the PlayStation network.

Apparently, that's no longer a problem.

So, with no further ado, let's go ahead and jump into this.

So software ownership, reverse engineering, AI generated

software, intellectual property, the future of digital rights.

This is all what this kind of plays into.

So that's our broad pretty broad.

That's a that's a lot of things. Yeah.

Let's drill down a little bit.

Imagine purchasing a $70 PlayStation game, only to discover

that someone has figured out how to run it

on a regular computer without using Sony's console.

Now imagine someone recreating Adobe Photoshop

or Microsoft Office using artificial intelligence,

offering comparable functionality without the subscription.

We don't have to imagine, because all of this has happened in the last month,

and so we're going to be talking a little bit about that going on here.

So traditionally, software companies control their products through proprietary

code licensing, hardware restrictions and intellectual property laws.

The whole cat and mouse game

of pirating software and all of that stuff has been going on since back.

There's actually,

if you go back to the 70s and byte magazine,

there's an article complaining about people making paper copies

of the punch cards for Alter Basic, written by Bill gates.

So this has been an issue for a long time.

And reverse engineering

another topic that's existed for decades.

But what's going on now is you can actually take

a piece of software and with AI recreate it.

So I'm going to do a shout out to Dave Plummer, Dave's garage.

He's a past engineer for Microsoft.

He worked for him back in the windows

95 DOS days, and he just did an episode on this.

The deep dives into it if you want to get some more stuff where he took Microsoft

Calculator, used AI to look at the software.

No source code or anything like that.

Use the software, recreate it in the rust programing language and recompile it.

And it worked perfectly.

Okay, so now calculator you can do

legally they've released that open source, but it still is.

The idea of that is it's not limited to that.

So what's happening is AI coding

assistance are changing the economics of recreating software,

and the distinction between copying software

and independently recreating its functionality is critically important.

So copying software would mean I buy commercial software, defeat

the digital rights management should they exist, and then put it out,

give it to somebody else. That's pirating software.

But what we're talking about here now is like

we just talked about with the calculator taking an existing piece of software,

analyzing it, creating new source code,

recompiling it and then distributing it.

They are two different things.

And yeah, consumers increasingly question

what it means to own software when access depends on subscriptions,

online accounts for hardware, and all of the other things.

So should purchasing software

give you the right to run it on whatever hardware you choose? What do you think?

I think it would be a good idea,

you know.

All right, so let's talk about what's actually going on here.

There's three different approaches to what's happened with the PlayStation five.

So first 10,000ft view stuff Sony announced earlier in the year

So in other words, any game made

for your PlayStation after that date will not have the ability to get a disc.

Okay.

You can only do it as a digital download.

Well, a certain portion, roughly 30 to 40% of the market.

It seems like from some of the research that's been done, still

buys their software on digital or on physical media.

But that's really not what is pushing this.

What is pushing this is the fact

that Sony has also come out and said, hey, when you're buying a digital

download, you're buying a license, which we can revoke at any time.

You cannot sell it.

You cannot move it to another piece of hardware

unless we give you permission to do that.

It's locked to your account on and on and on.

And it's about the same price as the physical copy.

And then the question comes up is who owns it?

That's exactly the question here. You know.

Yeah, you're paying for something.

You've exchanged a currency for something.

And what are you actually buying.

Yeah.

And with this what would be considered anti consumer

approaches from Sony in regard to this.

It's created a situation where you have like this perfect storm going on.

You have the gaming community

of which most gamers are tech savvy to some extent some more than others.

But that's just part of it.

And you have a tools that are enabling people that previously couldn't code or,

you know, that type of a thing to be able to do a lot more.

And they've basically kind

of defeated the copy stuff on the PlayStation five.

So dig into that in a little bit here.

But let's talk about the technology first that's going on here.

You've got three different approaches when it comes to this type of thing.

One is emulation. This is nothing new.

An emulator

recreates enough of the original consoles hardware and software behavior

to allow you to execute software games, in this case on another system.

So of this include dolphin, which emulates Nintendo Gamecube,

and we hardware PC two, which emulates PlayStation two.

PC. S3, which emulates PlayStation three emulation

itself, is not automatically illegal.

However, obtaining copyrighted games, firmware,

or encryption keys without authorization can create legal problems.

So that's something that you get an emulator.

These things exist all over the place, and it's something that we've

seen out there.

A lot of you have probably used this.

Then you have compatibility layers.

I was about to say the emulator didn't.

You sometimes need an emulator so that as a programmer,

that you could test software that you're making for

different like, computer systems. Yeah.

Computer platforms, that would be an example.

But another one is when I repair arcade cabinets, there's a thing called meme.

And you can download the ROMs and stuff from the older cabinets

and some of the newer ones,

and run it on the computer so I can see what it's supposed to do,

so I can see if mine's doing what it's supposed to do, you know, things like that.

It's out there.

It's it's a thing, you know, that's that's in there.

So then you have something called compatibility layers.

So instead of emulating every component,

a compatibility layer translates or recreate software interfaces

so programs can execute on another operating system.

Wine and proton or excellent examples.

In the PC gaming world, wine is something on Linux that runs PC software,

basically rates a windows environment, and now the one where these things

are becoming interesting and this is what's happening is native recompilation.

So a developer may analyze an existing games executable and attempt

to reconstruct a program that runs natively on different hardware.

Modern reverse engineering tools and AI assistant development

can potentially make parts of this process easier.

However, recompiling a game doesn't

automatically eliminate copyright concerns.

Obviously, the resulting program may still reproduce

protected code or other copyrighted elements.

Okay, so there's your 10,000ft view description.

So what's happening with the PS5?

Well, there's emerging projects and claims involving PS5

compatibility, reverse engineering and running PlayStation software on PCs.

So why does this matter to Sony?

Well,

let's think about that.

What is Sony's business model module?

That model not module model

telling PlayStation hardware obviously number one, your console

licensing games and collecting platform fees, maintaining its digital storefront,

controlling aspects of the software ecosystem,

and offering subscription systems such as PlayStation plus.

Now, this is something where this gets dicey,

because the whole subscription thing has gotten kind of out of hand,

and they're pushing where you buy a subscription

because it's reoccurring income.

I kind of had a meltdown on this with what was a D and D beyond

where I've just decided I am not using subscriptions for tabletop gaming anymore.

Period. And a story.

I don't want to buy my stuff more than once, you know,

especially when role at the table and can have a book.

Yeah, but.

And the books are beautiful.

Yeah, but what happens with this kind of a thing is

in the case of Sony, I'll give one example here.

Sony said it was absolutely impossible to run older version

media on the PlayStation five.

So your PlayStation two DVDs, your PlayStation three Blu rays can't do it.

Well, obviously Sony has not been completely upfront with that

because yes, you can.

And that's one of the things that's been figured out here.

And I'll get into that a little bit here.

But why don't they do it?

Because they want you to buy PlayStation plus so that you can stream these games

or buy them again for the new format,

as opposed to using your own media library that you already have, you know.

So Sony has released selected PlayStation titles on the PC.

This is another thing where you don't have to use their console,

but they're really drawing back on that too.

So if you purchase a legitimate PS5 game, should Sony be able

to prevent that person from playing it on other hardware like the PC?

Yeah, question that's out there.

So what has happened here

is there's a number of different things approaches.

One is one where they have done what's called jailbreaking the PS5.

And I was alluding to this a little earlier, about a year ago.

I don't have a PS5 that I use, but I got one for $60 off of eBay,

you know, not knowing what I was going to get.

And it turned out to be a real one.

But what had happened is the Sony had decided

to ban it from the PlayStation network.

So the unit still works just fine, but it can't go on the PlayStation network.

It's just not allowed.

So it's sat on the shelf

and I've done some stuff with it and things just to see what it was.

So when this whole jailbreaking thing came out, I decided, okay, I'm

not going to screw up my console anymore than it is to see what it does.

And it worked perfectly. Now it works.

There's no longer this restriction, you know?

And just for testing purposes, I also was able to run titles like Halo,

which is a Microsoft exclusive on the PlayStation, Mario Kart from Nintendo.

They've opened this thing wide up,

and there's even a digital storefront, which I'm sure is completely illegal.

It looks like Sony Store, but everything's free.

So DLC games on and on, right?

So needless to say, somebody or somebody

is are really, really pissed. Yeah.

I don't think this has started since the announcement.

I think some of these projects were worked on before, but the combination

of a lot more people being involved in the AI tools and everything else.

Yeah.

You know, I, I kind of see where everybody's coming from.

Like, I have an Oculus that had some kind of,

problem with it, and, I've lost the games.

Yeah, there are some games that I actually paid for,

and now we're having problems because we had to have it.

Did you reformat it or what?

Did you.

Yeah, I had to reset it and reloaded to set it back up.

And now I can't get now we can't get my games made for those.

There's another issue here too. And this also affects Sony.

But it's happened with Microsoft and others in the past is in addition

to buying games,

you can usually buy movies and stuff like that through these platforms.

Yeah, and they had a thing where people had bought,

a specific title or set of titles from a distributor,

paid for them for perpetual use when they can run them whenever they want.

Sony lost

a license, just removed access to it, wouldn't refund the money that was paid.

So that's also something that has upset people.

You know, so,

well, let's talk about this

a little bit further, because this doesn't just stop at the PlayStation five,

because Adobe and Microsoft are involved in this, and not just with the X-Box.

So again, we talked about earlier the difference between copying software.

Copying means I make a copy of it, try to defeat the doctor.

It's pirated.

Okay, nothing new there.

Cloning means I'm reverse engineering it and creating

basically my own thing that does the same functionality, right?

And this has happened with the Microsoft Office

suite and the Adobe Creative Cloud suite,

where it's been completely reverse engineered, and Microsoft Office,

I think you can still buy a license that you can just use.

But in both cases here, they offer subscriptions.

That's what they're pushing. Adobe.

You can only get their stuff like Photoshop through a subscription

if you and it's fairly expensive.

And if you stop paying for it,

you lose access to the work you created, that kind of thing, you know? So

what's

happened here is they have been cloned.

Okay.

So there have been alternatives

to especially the Adobe stuff, which is legitimately other software

that's been making Adobe Photoshop has one called

Gimp is a, for example, that runs on Linux and the PC, and I think of it,

Adobe Illustrator has one called Inkscape.

Okay.

And the list goes on to other things.

It's Microsoft Word, libraries which used to be open

office writer, Excel calc, you know, that kind of a thing.

These type of things have been out there.

But what has happened is in order to do something like the Gimp as a, for example,

with Photoshop and creating this, there's a lot of work involved in that.

To be able to look at what the functionality is, build your own piece

of software, shading, graphic manipulation.

Some of this stuff is patented and copyrighted,

so you would have to do your own thing on and on and on.

And figuring out those algorithms, even in a base,

whether or not you can use them, and then dealing with things like file

format compatibility, GPU acceleration,

the user interface, all this kind of stuff

can take years for a team of people to put together and put out.

And Gimp has been around for a long time.

Yeah, because Jeremy had and even tried using it so.

Exactly.

And looking at these things and producing a polished, secure,

reliable alternative to something like Photoshop or Office

is a substantial engineering challenge, except inner AI.

Okay, that's what's going on here.

And we talked about in the top of this in the opening,

a little bit about the idea of being able to take a piece of software,

analyze it and then recreate it.

And what does that actually end up meaning?

So if an AI generated program offers the same functionality

as a $60 per month application for free, would you switch?

That's a question.

That's a general.

They now out there to a lot of people.

And the answer a lot of people would give you is well, yeah.

You know, and at the end of the day

we you know, what are we talking about here.

Well without competition.

Companies like Adobe in this situation can basically charge whatever they want.

There aren't a lot of alternatives.

So now all of a sudden there is, you know, so there's it's like the same thing

with Sony in the PlayStation five.

There's a lot of people that are saying, hey, you know, this is great.

You know, knock it to the man kind of thing.

Well, here's the thing.

If you are able to do that,

let's talk about something coming up this fall, which is one of the most

anticipated game releases ever, which is Grand Theft Auto six, okay.

And Grand Theft Auto six

is coming out as an exclusive for the PlayStation five.

And from my understanding, as you can,

if they're not releasing it as a physical media,

I don't know if that's changed recently, but that's what I understand.

Electronic download only exclusive to the PS5.

So if the PS5 being jailbroken and reverse engineered and that kind of thing, it's

very likely that this piece of software, Grand Theft Auto

six will be able to be, you know, pirated,

which is an area that usually hasn't been such a big deal.

In light of this, Sony has upgraded their system to OS 14 point

X, whatever the latest one is, which, prevents the jailbreak, at least for now,

doesn't mean it's permanent, but that does tend to secure it a little bit more.

Now, here's the thing.

The manufacturing, development, engineering, programing cost of

Grand Theft Auto six is around 2 billion with a B dollars.

Wow. It takes a lot of money to build games.

that created something called the great North American video game crash.

It's what took out Calico Vision and Television.

Another a number of other titles in that Atari survived, but not very well.

And in that era they had a situation where your game console was not secured,

anybody could make games, and a lot of companies started putting out slop,

and since stuff could be copied very easily, they wouldn't make the $2

billion investment to create these titles and that type of a thing.

And the whole thing ended up that it went from in $1,980, I believe it was

a $2 billion per year industry in 81,

82 to 50 million in 83, something like that.

It could be a little off on those numbers, but it was a huge collapse.

And later Nintendo came back into the thing.

That's why it's the Nintendo Entertainment System, not a video game console.

That's why it came with a robot initially, because it was marketed as a toy,

because the store simply wouldn't carry game

consoles anymore because of what had happened.

And in that system, they introduced a thing called the lockout chip,

where the cartridge had to have a key to unlock the system,

and the idea was to prevent these kind of things from happening.

Now, of course, it went the other way

where it tendo got a complete monopoly on what could be played on their system.

And, you know, there's all kinds of stuff that went along with that.

But you have to balance it from these type of situations.

If Adobe can't make money making Photoshop,

they're not going to make it anymore. Yeah.

And just because you can clone it doesn't mean there's going to be

some other group with AI that can produce from scratch something like that,

because it still takes engineering and work to do it.

While AI tools may make it easier to program it,

and they do, and I can speak to that from a personal experience.

It's one thing to use AI to make it make it look better, or something of that

nature, or figure something out than it is to take someone else's work

and make it completely open.

So what you could end up happening here

have happening here, and it's looking like this may be the case is a second

So basically saying that the

that the the companies are about to shoot themselves in the foot.

Yeah. Because.

Yeah.

And that's happening because again, I noticed something very interesting

to the PC release of Grand Theft Auto six,

which was sort of out there but never talked about.

Now all of a sudden they've announced it for the beginning of next year.

And I think what they're trying to do is what is it, Bill?

Rock star I think that produces that. Rockstar.

Rockstar.

Yeah.

Rockstar is kind of looking at the writing on the wall

going, okay, don't pirate it.

We're going to get you a PC version of it because it's,

you know, it's a matter of not not even just a situation of buying it.

But if you don't release it for other things, then people can't get it.

It's electronic only, so you don't have a disc.

So you have to buy the PlayStation five if you want to play that game.

And a lot of people love Grand Theft Auto,

you know, whether you like it or not is a totally separate thing,

but it is a game that took a lot to put together.

It's incredibly violent, but it is very much an open world game,

and it is something that has a lot of

artwork, programing and all the rest of it in there

and a mass following, yet a mass following and that mass following

is a lot of people that are going, hey, we don't want to,

you know, use Sony system anymore.

You're not going to release anything else.

Well, we'll already get it out there.

In fact, there are some people that purportedly have it and are,

you know, doing different things and trying to prove it.

I don't know if they're trying

to blackmail somebody or what, but saying, well, here's how the game concludes,

which you wouldn't be able to know

because it hasn't been released yet unless you've played it.

Right.

And what they're saying is accurate,

I don't know, what do you guys think about that?

We have a few more minutes here.

Is this just a result of the big, you know, game houses

kind of Gretchen, you put it shooting them in the foot

by restricting things and making it so expensive that you can't afford it.

And, you know, the next generations of consoles

will probably be over $1,000 to buy and all the rest of this.

Or do you think it's good to have it on the other end of this,

or do you think this is going to force

rethinking of this a little bit to where they maybe won't have the monopoly?

I think they need to rethink things now

before the the who hits the fan.

I think it's kind of just part of the environment

that's going on right now is, you know, AI is enabling situations that are,

you know, allowing for cloning and things like that.

I think there needs to be restrictions on AI.

But as we've also said, companies

like Adobe and Microsoft and Sony have

grown too big for their britches sometimes I think.

Right, right.

I think they are forcing people's hands more than allowing it.

There was a game that was released here

last year, I think her earlier this year where the developers were like,

yeah, we're charging you 20 bucks for it because we don't want you to pirate it.

But if you do pirate it, I guess we can't really stop you.

And people paid for it, and it became one of the biggest indie

games of the year, right?

Because they understood that it was like, hey, this is going to happen.

But we also realized that the digital game and it doesn't

cost as much, you know, to produce as like Sony does.

I mean, I'm the game we've been talking about, Grand Theft Auto six.

Yeah, it's

supposed to be coming out at almost 70, 80, $100 supposedly, or something.

Yeah, just the one for the delay.

Yes. Yeah.

And then you don't get any way you don't get anything physical

that if

something screws up in your machine that you have this thing and you can

put it back in and re reinstall it, you have nothing you'd have to do.

You're paying 100 and some dollars.

This is crazy when you hope your account doesn't get banned.

Yeah. See that's the whole thing too.

If they lock your account out, all of that's gone now.

Like, here's a for example, cyberpunk, when I bought it,

had a digital download code, but it came in a box.

It actually had CDs with music on it that I kind of like,

but it's not locked to anything.

I can go and download it again if I need to, you know, and I can understand that

because trying to put that game on, you know, CDs would be a massive thing.

They'd have to put it on a flash drive

or something, I would think, to be able to do that.

But even so, it's still it's not physical media, but it's not locked to like,

you know, my PlayStation gets banned, so now I can't use it anymore or something.

And, I also can take that,

even though it's a digital download code and say, hey, Bill,

you want to build by cyberpunk for me, I'll sell it to you or loan it to you

as long as I take it off my computer and deregister it, I can sell it.

It's a physical thing and you can buy it and install it.

That's how they have it set up.

Now, one other thing I will say, just in closing here,

we're about out of time is it isn't just electronic media.

I think it's the way they're treating their gamers.

Because if you look at Valve and Steam, that's electronic download,

they do not have this problem.

People are very happy with the way that things are distributed

because they don't try to, you know, pull this kind of stuff.

All right. Well, anyway, let us know what you think.

User friendly dot show.

Give us your questions or comments. Check us out on YouTube. Until next week.

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