8 ms·

So, what deceits do software makers call "mistakes"?

Gravityloss 11y ago
Graphics drivers can detect when a speed test is being run, and degrade the output quality to get a higher frame rate. I don't think anybody called that a mistake, it's just straight cheating. If anything, they've probably seen that and thought it was a great idea! http://techreport.com/review/3089/how-ati-drivers-optimize-quake-iii http://techreport.com/review/3089/how-ati-drivers-optimize-q...
- gambiting 11y ago
  As someone who works in games industry - we have a line to AMD and NVIDIA open all the time. They change their drivers to work with our game just as much as we change our games to work with their drivers. Each driver has thousands of profiles for different games, and that has nothing to do with cheating - it's because no one writes perfect, 100% standard-compliant shaders or other gpu related code. The article you linked is ancient, but this still happens - drivers know that in your specific game there's a problem with the textures so they will automatically reduce the fidelity of texture shaders, or do some other changes. If you changed the name of our game internally, the drivers would no longer pick it up and you would lose 10-20 fps depending on the situation. That's not "cheating".
  - MengerSponge 11y ago
    Optimizing the device's profile for a known input is generally celebrated. Deliberately misrepresenting the device's capabilities to deceive a test is what folks are generally upset about. It's a subtle distinction, but I'm happy to use Justice Stewart's "I know it when I see it" criterion. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/live-memory-test,1241-10.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/live-memory-test,1241-10... http://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/state-of-cheating-in-android-benchmarks http://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/state-of-cheating-in-andr...
  - ryandrake 11y ago
    To me, the line between cheating and ensuring good compatibility is drawn when you deceptively "optimize" for particular benchmark measurements at the expense of other qualitative un-measured or difficult-to-measure qualities. This undermines the purpose of the benchmark. There's a huge difference between "Game XYZ uses these inputs and shaders, let's make sure our driver works as well as possible when we see this pattern" and "When we detect the user is running Benchmark ABC, make everything look like shit so we come out with a high benchmark score that we can use in our marketing materials!" I'll admit, however, the line gets fuzzy when the game itself is used as a benchmark.
    - Gravityloss 11y ago
      Come to think of it, with computer proliferation this will permeate everything, and already has. Trying to buy airline or cruise tickets? Some kind of shenanigans are bound to happen. The system is trying to infer if you might be willing to pay a lot. Though, in the old times this haggling was done by real people.
ForHackernews 11y ago
How about Google hopping on personal wifi networks, slurping up and storing any data they could grab? http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-...
- baldfat 11y ago
  > In 2010, Google acknowledged that its Street View Wi-Fi collection was a mistake. “We screwed up, and I’m not making excuses about it,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said at the time. “We do have a lot of internal controls in place, but obviously they didn’t prevent this error from occurring.” That seems pretty upfront. Well you really got that opposite from what I saw. It wasn't slurping any data that was protected behind a wall of privacy that Google climbed over but was public broadcast. I have always tried to let friends know that if they have WiFi they need to have an understanding what they are broadcasting. One time my friend had no passwords on his wifi and his Documents were being shared. I got the last three years of tax records sitting next to me. I did ask want me to look at downloads, videos or pictures. He blushed said no and we put up a password on his wifi and stopped sharing his data.
  - ForHackernews 11y ago
    > That seems pretty upfront. Only in the exact way described by the parent: deceit couched as mistakes. Do you really honestly believe that they "accidentally" implemented a feature to associate with open wifi networks, grab any and all data they could, and store that data in their archive? Google is a big place. One or more people designed that feature, multiple people implemented it, probably dozens of others tested it, and managers signed off on it before it was deployed on their StreetView cars. It's not like "Whoops, someone left out a null check and it accidentally grabbed all your data!"
    - baldfat 11y ago
      It was one programmer that put in the code. Interesting read here but I still buy the one engineer theory. http://allthingsd.com/20120501/google-releases-fuller-fcc-wi-fi-data-report-but-it-actually-makes-google-look-worse/ http://allthingsd.com/20120501/google-releases-fuller-fcc-wi...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

Graphics drivers can detect when a speed test is being run, and degrade the output quality to get a higher frame rate. I don't think anybody called that a mistake, it's just straight cheating. If anything, they've probably seen that and thought it was a great idea! http://techreport.com/review/3089/how-ati-drivers-optimize-quake-iii http://techreport.com/review/3089/how-ati-drivers-optimize-q...

gambiting 11y ago
As someone who works in games industry - we have a line to AMD and NVIDIA open all the time. They change their drivers to work with our game just as much as we change our games to work with their drivers. Each driver has thousands of profiles for different games, and that has nothing to do with cheating - it's because no one writes perfect, 100% standard-compliant shaders or other gpu related code. The article you linked is ancient, but this still happens - drivers know that in your specific game there's a problem with the textures so they will automatically reduce the fidelity of texture shaders, or do some other changes. If you changed the name of our game internally, the drivers would no longer pick it up and you would lose 10-20 fps depending on the situation. That's not "cheating".
- MengerSponge 11y ago
  Optimizing the device's profile for a known input is generally celebrated. Deliberately misrepresenting the device's capabilities to deceive a test is what folks are generally upset about. It's a subtle distinction, but I'm happy to use Justice Stewart's "I know it when I see it" criterion. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/live-memory-test,1241-10.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/live-memory-test,1241-10... http://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/state-of-cheating-in-android-benchmarks http://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/state-of-cheating-in-andr...
- ryandrake 11y ago
  To me, the line between cheating and ensuring good compatibility is drawn when you deceptively "optimize" for particular benchmark measurements at the expense of other qualitative un-measured or difficult-to-measure qualities. This undermines the purpose of the benchmark. There's a huge difference between "Game XYZ uses these inputs and shaders, let's make sure our driver works as well as possible when we see this pattern" and "When we detect the user is running Benchmark ABC, make everything look like shit so we come out with a high benchmark score that we can use in our marketing materials!" I'll admit, however, the line gets fuzzy when the game itself is used as a benchmark.
  - Gravityloss 11y ago
    Come to think of it, with computer proliferation this will permeate everything, and already has. Trying to buy airline or cruise tickets? Some kind of shenanigans are bound to happen. The system is trying to infer if you might be willing to pay a lot. Though, in the old times this haggling was done by real people.

ForHackernews 11y ago

How about Google hopping on personal wifi networks, slurping up and storing any data they could grab? http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-...

baldfat 11y ago
> In 2010, Google acknowledged that its Street View Wi-Fi collection was a mistake. “We screwed up, and I’m not making excuses about it,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said at the time. “We do have a lot of internal controls in place, but obviously they didn’t prevent this error from occurring.” That seems pretty upfront. Well you really got that opposite from what I saw. It wasn't slurping any data that was protected behind a wall of privacy that Google climbed over but was public broadcast. I have always tried to let friends know that if they have WiFi they need to have an understanding what they are broadcasting. One time my friend had no passwords on his wifi and his Documents were being shared. I got the last three years of tax records sitting next to me. I did ask want me to look at downloads, videos or pictures. He blushed said no and we put up a password on his wifi and stopped sharing his data.
- ForHackernews 11y ago
  > That seems pretty upfront. Only in the exact way described by the parent: deceit couched as mistakes. Do you really honestly believe that they "accidentally" implemented a feature to associate with open wifi networks, grab any and all data they could, and store that data in their archive? Google is a big place. One or more people designed that feature, multiple people implemented it, probably dozens of others tested it, and managers signed off on it before it was deployed on their StreetView cars. It's not like "Whoops, someone left out a null check and it accidentally grabbed all your data!"
  - baldfat 11y ago
    It was one programmer that put in the code. Interesting read here but I still buy the one engineer theory. http://allthingsd.com/20120501/google-releases-fuller-fcc-wi-fi-data-report-but-it-actually-makes-google-look-worse/ http://allthingsd.com/20120501/google-releases-fuller-fcc-wi...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]