Mr. R

I think RC4 is a stream cipher usually used with some sort of encryption while, as the name implies, streaming it (file, I/O or network stream). It should not be used only for encryption itself. It'd most likely be used with TLS/SSL on the server that hosts your PHP CGI scripts (if that's what you plan to do).

A stronger solution for encryption would be AES256 with SHA512crypt or bcrypt, but I'm not going to go into that...
I know PHP website has some documentation about an encryption function. No need to reinvent the wheel...

http://php.net/manua...ction.crypt.php

However implementing these things into Game Maker is a real challenge.... I suggest finding some pseudo-code relating to the hashing and encryption algorithms you want to use. Don't confuse hashing and encryption algorithms. Encryption is meant to be slow and incredibly hard to brute force, hashes are meant to be checked quickly with something already encrypted. They are more efficient, and therefore easier to attack, so always store them encrypted preferably with a different passphrase. Don't forget about implementing the salt function(s), too!

Of course you can choose the hashing algorithm you want with the crypt() function in PHP. Do NOT choose MD5 and NEVER choose DES unless you want trouble in the future.

So if you're just checking, for example, a password, then just hash the password and store the hash encrypted on your server or an encrypted DB (if that's what you plan to do.)

I'm definitely inexperienced with this whole cryptography thing, so if anyone can point out mistakes I'm making, thank you for that.

Of course, as the comment implies above, the entropy for the strings used in Game Maker is not 8-bits per character like UTF-8 provides, but rather something like only alphanumeric and numeric characters without certain symbols... It's less than 8-bits per character, so maybe translate your string down to Base64 and harden them with the salt so you don't suffer from the lack of the key space/entropy when using for GM strings.

[ ...] I'd like to briefly respond to the general sentiment of the post that "Making Money Off of Information = Bad".

Information is, and IMO should be, currently one of the most valuable things in existence. If people couldn't make money off of their ideas, society would not exist as it does today. In your world, all of our greatest minds would be laboring on a farm to support themselves instead of earning their keep with their ideas. Gah, you have no idea how hard I'm resisting the urge to go off on a rant about the agrarian revolution, how it freed up people to do exactly what you're against, and what a great thing that was.

Illustrating anecdote: I enjoy books by Terry Pratchett, a man who writes for a living. I'd love to get his books for free, but I realize that if I did not pay him to write these books then he would have to obtain work elsewhere to support himself, and would subsequently write much less or not at all. I do not want this to happen - take my money Terry Pratchett!

Quote: "If beautiful ideas aren’t worth more than the cardboard they’re printed on, we’re all in trouble." - Robert Florence

If you really like an author's work you should be able to support him with donations. If authors don't make a way for people to donate to them or support them, then that's their own fault. If they don't but ads on their side to support themselves (from people that view ads), that's also their fault.

But a bigger notion is that most Copyright laws do place a restriction on who can use, share, redistribute and copy information. GFDL and Creative Commons licences properly use Copyright law in such a way that it imposes reasonable restrictions on a work without taking away the most important one freedom: the freedom to share information.

If I couldn't read a book to a friend just because they had to pay for it, I guess that means I can't share an experiance or information with anyone. It would be libellious.

Now on the other hand, I don't think that publishers should be allowed to have more than a fair share of their own money (I think publishers of any media take advantage over the rights of authors and consumers way too often). The reason why books are so overpriced, at least to me, is because they have to be printed, processed, compiled, shipped and shelved, whereas, for many people who buy e-books, e-book publishers don't do that so it saves money and resources. Any poor author can publish a Webpage on the Internet with ads and still make more money getting it approved to publish it. They can also circumvent some censorship and other things that way, too. And I'm quite happy that e-books are easy to read on e-ink, too.

But don't get me started with e-books that have DRM....

I can just go to a thrift store and read or buy any book for the price they put on it. After all, who's going to use the same information for themselves more than once? People always seem to consume information. But how can they save money doing it?

Information is valuable, but who's pricing it?

I'm all for open source software like Blender.. I had a choice to make a game in game maker (thus making it 2d) or make the game in blender (thus making it 3d) and chose blender.

Game maker is ok..
Blender is better
Unity3D is awesome

Oh yes. By the way I just want to say to clerify to other people, I don't think that Game Maker is bad at all, I loved using Game Maker. I just heven't been using it anymore after learning about FOSS, that's all. So it still feels awkward posting this topic in the GMC forums, but we'll see how it slides.

Now, I also love 3D Blender too, and it is even a really good alternative to Autodesk software like 3DS Max and Maya. Unfortunately I haven't used it much. I know it has especially good plugin support. One reason I use GIMP is because it also has a good plugin engine. And Unity3D is also a good choice with Blender.

Oh well, I wish I had the expertise to make 3D games. I am just looking at writing an online tank and drawing game in Qt. So Qt is a development framework/toolkit like GTK+ and Tcl/Tk.. Developers can write applications in C++ using the libraries it provides. Supposendly, it's supposed to be very easy, especially it you use Qt Creator. I'm still trying to reference all of its libraries. I'm familiar with the concept of programming, OOP, abstraction, pointers and such, but it has been really difficult for me to write more than basic applications with Qt.

I also wanted to try SDL, which are mostly just libraries instead of a whole framework, but it seems much more difficult for me to use, since I'd have to design all of the elements of the UI myself. But one can robustly integrate the UI graphics to look good with the application, so that's always a plus.

And since Digia recently bought out Qt from Nokia, we'll have to see how its overall support goes along.

EDIT:

As much as the OP extols some of the virtues of freedom of open source, you can tell from some of the things he says that he just doesn't want to pay for software. What is more important to him is not the freedom of software but that it must be free as in no cost.

Open source software is an excellent alternative to some proprietary software, but that doesn't make proprietary software evil, as he would have you believe. The fact of the matter is open source lacks a lot of monetization options to make it economically feasible.

As for support, open source advocates are quick to point out all the resources for support. Realistically the creators of open source have no obligation to solve problems. This is completely unacceptable from a business perspective. Companies are willing to pay good money for software and support, they are completely disinterested in the potential losses of business, money and customers that is result of problems with no resolution and creator unable or unwilling to solve software problems.

Yes, good points. I believe that developers have the right to get money for their software if they want it, and they can, it's a liberal right to property and prosperity. I prefer donations and crowd funding, but it doesn't always work reliably. Some people want to try and urge people to move away from abusing IP laws, and then there's also the idea that a computer is the "physical tool" and the software should define what the tool can do. Of course, it's really hard to write good software, so people want to get paid for their work, and I understand that. I was trying  omention that FOSS would have worked better if the economics of our world were different, but that's not the case. There's futurists out there who think that the world should change by using a "resource based economy", such as the people who made up the Venus Project. I heard about it in a documentery once. It sounds absolutely insane and against the nature of some people. But if it ever happens, I think FOSS would thrive in that environment. Meanwhile, we're stuck between Capitalism, Socialism and Communism...

Oh, and whoever says that proprietary software is "evil" is just someone who wants to be like RMS.

In my experience we have employed a lot of proprietary and open source systems and solutions. The biggest horror stories have always been because of open source and lack of accountability with it.

I'm not really sure about that. I hear more horror stories on proprietary software, and that's just because proprietary software hits the news moreso.

Hmmm, mods deleted it. Maybe because you are advertising for other software?

I don't want people to stray off the topic too much. But I will say that it's not intended as advertising or marketing.

I don't want to say that people should use free software just because it is better.
I will try to retain a neutral point of view. However, I am not biased on using free software. I use it for a good reason.

Even so, there are plenty of software development tools on Linux that other people can use and find on their own.

The whole point of this topic was to discuss what GM users thought about it.

I was just playing along. Way to clock me.

You're not allowed to troll others, they don't exist.