Slashdot Mirror
How bnetd Developers Reverse Engineered Battle.net
battlebot writes: "O'Reilly's ONlamp.com is running an interview with the bnetd developers that goes into great detail about how exactly they reverse-engineered Battle.net. This is by the same guy who wrote the recent Salon article, though is far more technical. They talk a little bit about their legal troubles too, and even sheepishly admit that perhaps talking to a lawyer earlier in the process would have been a good idea. Has this project been successfully squashed?"
I already have copyrights on your above post. My lawyers will be in touch with you.
HANDS OFF MY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY@*(#(*!
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Although bnetd is up to its neck in legal troubles. Others have taken on the development tasks of the project and completely rewritten the server.
For your information, reverse engineering is not theft.
BNETD supports all the major features of battle.net, such as chat, channels, user icons, and gameplay! Well I'd sure hope it does!
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
The article says that they have made BNETD virtually indistinguishable from the real battlenet through reverse engineering. What I wanna know is, what function did they assign to the gem in the Diablo 2 client?
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Thing is, anyone with any kind of reasonable knowledge of law, patents, and copyright knows that the Blizzard lawsuit is, to be blunt, bullshit.
Blizzard has no chance, or interest, in winning on the merits of their case. They know that open source developers have limited resources and are unlikely to mount a decent legal defense. So why not sue? It's not a legal decision so much as a strategic one: given the chance to squash potential future competitors for free, why not?
It's a smart move on Blizzard's part. American IP laws favor corporations to such an incredibly laughable degree, it's amazing that Disney isn't suing everyone who uses a wheel (Steamboat Willie, 1928, and anyone who claims to have invented it before then had better have a notaraized motion picture).
Bottom line: disgusting on the USPTO's part, dispicable on Blizzard's part, par for the course for the good old USA. Oh, wait, this is *good* for consumers. I must have missed that edict somehow.
-b
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=323 08&cid=3487555
This guy managed to code an application that crashed bnetd servers. Apparently there is a feature in Battle.net that protects it from happening, but in bnetd it was unknown.
That's right. It only becomes theft when you use the reverse-engineered technology to create your own product.
OOPS!
"Whoever came up with this intellectual property stuff anyway?"
Lawyers - when they had one of their annual "How can we make even more money than we do now?" meetings. But seriously it dates back to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act in the UK and for the latest developments in intellectual property there's WIPO.
Video Game cheats, hints a
But information wants to be free, that's what RMS told me! I should be able to steal anything I want, it's free, right?
Unless it is specifically designated by congress, they don't own any "intellectual property". Just because some bastardized beauracratic bastion of unconstitutionality says they own it does not make it so. The constitution dictates the conditions one may obtain "intellectual property," those conditions have not been met so Blizzard owns nothing. If they try to shut bnet down then perhaps the bnet'rs should use one of their other rights, the one to bear arms, to defeat the tyrants that would seek to breach the contract that is the constitution. Live free or die.
Sure you can. What do you think the Internet was developed for? hehe, okay maybe not.
_
Windows users click here!.
They talk a little bit about their legal troubles too, and even sheepishly admit that perhaps talking to a lawyer earlier in the process would have been a good idea.
Damn, I should have known going to slashdot for legal advice was a bad idea!
Pack it in. OSS is well on the way to being killed by regulation, and RMS will be remembered for creating an OS used by subversives. Hmm, how long until CS majors will be required to be licensed and have to use trusted compilers?
ya, lets not have any gamers trying to run a blizzard game at a lan party. it's not enough to pay $50-70 for the game, if you want to play with your friends, you have to go through their servers. now we should also keep in mind that even once the game is obsolete, there still won't be any way to run your own bnet, because blizzard is a corporation, which can live forever, and thus copyright their game technology/source/ideas indefinately +75 years.
come'n what sort of company files a lawsuit against its fans ? next we'll see bands going after their fans for swapping rare tracks over the internet.
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
Sounds like a tough job.
So, by that logic, the BIOS would never have been reverse-engineered, and all desktop computers would thus still be IBMs. Did I mention that IBM was purposefully lagging behind the desktops because they *could* be more powerufl than their big mainframes?
Now cut the stupid crap and learn something. Reverse engineering exists for a reason, and just because code is in a grey area (Which it is, think about it), doesn't mean that taking an iron fist, controlling approach is going to help. *Not* having one is what caused you to have that computer you helpfully trolled with. Not that you care, I suppose.
- Install packet sniffer on local network.
- Read lots of 1's and 0's into a huge dump file
- Familiarize yourself with UDP.
- Tear out clump of hair as stress relief.
- Create nifty diagrams that show the battlenet server as a black box with the game that you and your buddy have made online as the two other pieces.
- Look at the responses that the black box sends back to each of the machines.
- Ponder on whether or not a monkey would be a good programmer since a tail in addition to two hands that can hit those hard-to-reach keys.
- Create a prototype program that relays game packets from two client boxes.
- Play lots of StarCraft through this box.
- Debug lots and lots.
- Decide against implimenting cheats on the server box against your other cohorts that are helping you develop this
- Create a chat room interface.
- Do final testing on the program.
- Program into the server daemon random insult messages that will be sent to all of your friend programmers while testing, making them abandon the project out of anger.
- Profit.
That was easy enough!/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
It seems this project was completely innocent at first (just some guys in a dorm trying to play StarCraft together without dealing with the basically beta version of Battle.net), but 1337 warez leechers saw it as a way to play their pirated copies of SC, Diablo, Warcraft BNET, etc.. online.
I feel bad for these guys because they basically got used and now they're the ones in trouble. I'm sure they liked the 'fame' they got by creating and maintaining this software, and they kept pushing themselves to see how of programmers they really were.
Ohh well, goes to show all of us OS people that while our intentions may be innocent, the user's of our software may not be noble. In the end (because of the DMCA) we are the ones that are going to be held liable, not the end users.
Sux to be a [young] programmer right now...
-- D3X
If we assume for the moment that they had thought of consulting an attorney when they first embarked on this project, would it have made a difference? I mean, seeing as the DMCA didn't actually exist in '98, how could they have made some plan to defend themselves against prosecution under it. As for the straight up copyright issues, it's total hogwash, but at least they could have gotten the lawyerly advice of, "well they haven't got jack on you, but can you afford to fight it?"
I was thinking about this earlier, and the really frustrating thing is how much of computer related tinkering seems to need to be run by a lawyer. I mean if you have a hobby like building kit cars, or constructing furniture, you have no need for attorneys. But if you want to get deeply involved in tinkering with software, etc, you suddenly need a law degree. Companies talk a lot about the damage that piracy has on the software economy, but I have to wonder how much more damage has been caused by the chilling effect on independent developers by this legal morass we call intellectual property.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
warforge has been the team working on a warcraft 3 server (which caused all the problems with blizzard). they started with bnetd's code, but now the projects are basically separate.
shame blizzard didn't do some research before turning the lawyers lose. even if they get an injunction against bnetd, they'll be shutting down the wrong group.
_f
The WIPO Troll's dead Jim.
The BNETD developers say that BNETD was made as an alternative to Battle.net's oftentimes slow and buggy service. It was also meant to enable friends to play Battle.net-enabled games with each other on a private network, without having to deal with abusive strangers on Battle.net.
Sounds to me like a strange little occurence that happened back in the 18th century. Seems a bunch of colonists got tired of being taxed without representation, dealing with pricks, and in general wanting a place of their own to live their lives as they saw fit. I think it was called the American Revolution.
Maybe England can sue the U.S. and ask for back taxes with interest collected in arrears...
you don't have to outrun the bear, just the slowest person in your group.
You are really an idiot, aren't you? How the FUCK did you get a +1 bonus?
What is easier to sue, a well defined group with names and a good site that explains what they are doing; or a group that works over irc, never uses their real names, might not even have distributed their data over their own computers, and have a website that says nothing of their work (and just distributes it).
I mean, its a hell of a lot easier suing something somewhat established, which is what bnetd was. WarForge isn't exactly well established, they got a group, but who really knows who they really are? I can bet that blizzard doesn't know, and why find out when you can set an example with the established group?
This entire thing was enough to scare the shit out of the several other groups working on warcraft3 support (warforge isn't the only one). This is the main reason why warcraft3 bnetd modified servers are not in distribution (binary or source). Just the client side crack for the exe is given out. (This also is the reason for the insanely low amount of bnetd war3 servers)
Hey dipshit, you could always run any Blizzard game at a LAN party with IPX, and now you can do it with UDP LAN play. In fact, you could do that and still pirate all the Blizzard games that you want! Think next time, please fucktard?
Do you even know what WIPO is? The history of intellectual propery dates back much further than WIPO, which is a fairly recent international organization.
Ceci n'est pas un post
Not everyone finds my humour funny. As to the troll bit I think my karma of 47 proves I'm not. The WIPO is the World Intellectual Property Organization.
Video Game cheats, hints a
"You haven't made a single intelligent comment yet." - You mean you've read all 631 of my comments?
Video Game cheats, hints a
haha too bad my computer was never reverse engineered
First off, this is not an issue with DMCA.
The law suit has to do with "stealing code" and other non-DMCA type accusations.
Even if it did, there's an old lawsuit that covers acceptable reverse engineering.
Oh well.
I fully support the bnetd ideal. That is, supplying a different server then the blizzard one. You would be a lot less likely to find n00bs so to speak there. However.... I get sick of paying for the thousands of warez users that download the iso or image, then burn to cd, then are able to play fully on bnetd.
Unfortunately, blizzard's key remains the copy protection stopping that, and bnetd weren't able to support that at all. So it's back to the beginning.
Maybe if blizz could implement a central cd key verification server ie Half-Life's WON servers, it would be more beneficial. But still, the whole situation sucks. Blizzard aren't that bad, its more likely vivendi or just a complete miscommunication hogwash.
Though i have heard, that blizzard must prosecute now, or they aren't able to prosecute pirates/cd-key removal later on. This true?
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
Well, according to this article, reverse engineering IBM's BIOS had far to do with considering code 'a grey area.' Compaq had to pick virgin programmers that had no knowledge of IBM's code. I remember watching a documentary about this (can anyone remember the title) on, now that I mention it, PBS!
Hackers penetrate and ravage delicate private and publicly owned computer systems, infecting them with viruses and stealing sensitive materials for their own ends. These people, they're terrorists.
Help wanted, inquire within.
Several positions and openings available.
I have legimate copies of every game/expansion pack they've ever produced, on up to Diablo II. Full retail price, too, not bargain bin or second hand. They _were_ the one company that you could be sure I would buy a game from, maybe not the day it was released, but I'd get it eventually.
As I remember it, this news hit the very day that I couldn't hold out any longer for D2. Strangely, I'd never heard of bnetd until then. Being able to play on a server I could control though, would only have encouraged me even more, to buy their games. I had only played Diablo I on Battlenet once or twice, and not been at all happy... nice idea, but too many assholes. To think that I could fix that problem without extending several dozen ipxtunnels, etc... that is kickass.
They should have hired these guys, not sued them. That would have been a cheaper way to stall bnetd, they would have gotten more for their money, and they wouldn't have pissed people like me off.
Fuck you, Blizzard.
To everyone on the bnetd team, keep kicking ass, and the best of luck to you.
If someone with a userid as high as yours 0has made 600+ comments, I'd be inclined to agree with him.
Yes, BNETD is completely dead. The DMCA has prevailed.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
It's unfortunate that Blizzard is targeting BNETD. The problem that Blizzard is facing, is leaked copies of the Warcraft III beta being played all over the internet. Every beta tester got a unique CD-Key with their copy of the beta, to play on Battle.net you needed a unique key (i.e. one that was not being used).
The people with pirated copies of the beta want to play too, and since there's no single player in the beta, they need a Battle.net server to connect to. Now, Blizzard isn't about to let 10,000 illegal copies on to their server so the people running stolen copies turned to BNET.D.
At this time, through some strange coincidence, BNET.D attracted the attention of Blizzard. BNET.D said "Ok, game pirates suck, we won't develop Warcraft III compatiblity", got sued, and pulled their code. A handful of the contributers of BNET.D wanted to keep pursuing WC3 and formed Warforge.
Granted, there is a point or two in favor of developing a BNET.D server for WC3:
[] Warcraft III doesn't allow for LAN play
[] I forgot the second one
They've been keeping up with Blizzards efforts to disallow use on non-battle.net servers very well (a patch is usually out in less than two days).
As for my opinion: People are going to find a way to play/use the latest and greatest software without paying for it. Period. The more attractive it is, the faster it will be cracked. Companies need to realize this and make software more available (public betas, lower prices, no prices (free)...) Even then, people will find ways to get products for free, but just like the music industry is starting to realize, people will take path of least resistance to the software they want.
That's my $0.03
--
dan
-- dan.sherman
Its getting to the point where the open source movement will move further and further underground. All the benefits of the open source would still remain if the lead developers remained anonymous (except maybe for ego purposes). Nobody ever has, and probably won't challenge the majority of open source software, but why risk it anymore. Let the software companies and the movie industry waste a large sum of money trying to silence the small insignificant factions. If those factions ever do rise to power and the power bases lose their market as a result, then in time, most of this won't even matter.
Take Microsoft and the northwest schools. It is not just ONE school district talking about mass migration here. If they do it, and pull it off, other districts will notice. They'll see that it actually CAN be done. They'll see that there really IS support available, and they'll see that it IS saving a lot of money, and they can safely tell the BSA to fuck off. They'll switch too. One at a time, one after another. Microsoft will lose them all. Now you have a whole bunch of high school students, ALL of them trained on linux or whatever open source suite appealed to the districts. They go off to college. You will now see the same movement there. And once that wave is done sweeping through, the corporate world is next. It really COULD start with one school district, and in 10 years, Microsoft will have completely lost their grip on the market, never to regain it.
The point is, after a few years of this, everyone will be using open source software to some degree. People will EXPECT software to be free. And when Blizzard, or the movie industry or anyone comes along and sends out letters saying "you can't use that software" a whole lot of regular non-geek people will turn around and say "up yours!" to the respective finger pointer and tell them where they can shove it and take their money elsewhere.
The music industry is already learning the hard way on this. They had their chance. They could have completely cornered the online market for years had they put in place a simple, inexpensive, non-intrusive music distribution system YEARS ago when they had the chance. But no, they were so concerned about rampant piracy and how it might affect their bottom line, they instead played stupid legal games to attempt to stifle the music trading. And for all the court cases, and all the laws that passed, trading has increased to massive proportions. They sue napster into the ground, 10 others pop up to take its place, only non-centralized and no way to easily shut them down. Who do you go after now? the programmers??
Well, you can't if you don't know who they are.
So undergound all this even potentially murky legal stuff. Wait a few years. All those who would threaten you will be overcome by the wave, and afterwards, they wouldn't dare.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
GOD I thought I was the only one.
;)
;)
This kid (actually he is not as old as I am) is a poster child for the mod-system's failing points.
I was feeling sorry for him, and didn't want to post his personal info (I setup a fake gaming site
just for him, with fake entries in my guest book,
and he came to spam his shitty site on my guest
book
Bottom line, kid was hosed
Look at my journal for some "nuggets" I have gathered about him.
I will post more if he continues his idoicy.
-- Spot idiocy, adopt a KarmaWhore.
so, you want to embark on a business enterprise? Better include LawyerCosts in your budget, thats a given these days.
Its kinda funny, I would love to see the impact of Internet laws implimentation on Legal firms bottom line.
You can play the game perfectly w/o a connection to battlenet. Go ahead and play with your friends at a lan party, choose LAN game in stead of Battlenet in the multiplayer menu in the game.
> Not everyone finds my humour funny.
*HINT*HINT*, that is telling you something.
I remember seeing a bumper sticker that read "trust your gut feelings, people don't like you."
I think it was speaking, directly, to you 56ker. For chrissake, do the obvious and pull the trigger on yourself.
-- Spot idiocy, adopt a KarmaWhore.
What if you want to play with your friend next door. and there is no lan.
I like continuous claims that bnetd is better than Battle.net because bnetd said so, in 1997 no less. Don't see any uptime comparisions or user load comparisons or anything to qualify such statements, but every article seems to feature this same theme.
;)
Crittenden goes on to say that figuring out that a modified SHA-1 was used for the password scheme was obvious by looking at the packets, which is complete crap. Latter Combs adds "Thankfully, the hash size was the same as SHA1 and [we were] sent an example hashing function". Sounds like clean room reverse engineering to me
Bnetd's developers certainly do wonders with those reverse engineering hack. The only drawback I can see is their limited ambition.
Why not implement an open protocol to offer a platform so that all the rest of the game developers can write networked games? It's certainly true that Blizzard has the advantage of popular games. But I doubt that those developers have enough resource to keep up with all the strange packets designed by Blizzard intentionally or unintentionally. I also doubt that other game companies will sit idly to let Blizzard grab all the share. Blizzard's lawsuit won't bear the results they expect. It is unthinkable that a gamer will sign up for a service just be able to play one or several games designed by Blizzard.
Wish Bnetd's developers good luck.
Why doesn't BNETD just implement piracy checking? Then blizzard wouldnt have a leg to stand on.
No one is suggesting that retyping a book wouldn't be theft.
Indeed... that's why appleheads still pay a premium for inferior products :-)
*dons flame suit*
That was my first reaction too. But after giving it some additional thought, I have come up with a reason the Blizzard/Vivendi legal team might be acting with more insight than it appears to at first blush.
There are several theories as to why Blizzard is taking action now. Possible movement of battle.net to a subscription service. Blizzard's announced future offering of World of Warcraft, certainly to be a subscription service. And the new release Warcraft III which is supported by the bnetd fork called Warforge. And there's the key. Warforge is a fork. A spinoff. Further development of a project that has been an annoyance to Blizzard since 1998.
If Blizzard managed to kill Warforge, what is to stop another group from retracing those footsteps and modifying bnetd again? What about fans who decide they don't wish to continue paying a subscription to World of Warcraft and use bnetd as a basis for a new, freely available alternative? What if battle.net goes pay-to-play and private and public bnetd servers offer a much more attractive alternative?
The fact is that bnetd makes a very sensible target to head off all these possible forks. And once the legal groundwork is laid in killing bnetd, it would be trivial to send out cease-and-desist letters to those whose work is based on bnetd.
Sure. It will be almost impossible to wipe bnetd off the face of the net. But development is going to slow down considerably if bnetd source code is just as illegal as a warez copy of Warcraft III.
People need to see the flip side of the coin.
Chris
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
AI think it is safe to assume more programmers are virgin.
Blizzard doesn't distribute a battle.net hub.
BNETD does.
Blizzard gets mad because BNETD doesn't check for warez copys.
Shouldn't Blizzard then have distributed an official hub?
Less users would then have been aware of warez friendly hubs. You can't stop the 10% who will do every thing they can to be warez puppies, but you can take steps to stop the 90%.
Stopping the 90% this way though is morally bankrupt. Someone stepped in and created a product which adds value to your product. You want CONTROL OVER ALL, so instead of providing BNETD with help to implement copy protection, you sue them to take them down!
Screwed.
Barto
I can't get very excited about a free server for a proprietary game running on a proprietary OS. Why not go all the way and design a free server and a free game?
Thanks for trolling, made me laugh!
Don't try to take control from Blizzard by letting people use their client with your server. Blizzard sees it necessary for keeping their business to have that control exclusive to them, and you may not like it, or agree with it, but you need to respect it. Especially if you decide to play their games. This isn't an operating system we're talking about. Where an operating system is just a middleman, something to build upon, there is (usually) nothing more to a game than itself. You take it as it is, or not at all. Some game developers choose to give the user further liberties through game editors and programming interfaces, and that's great, but those liberties should be given, not taken by force.
I'm sure this is going to be a very unpopular opinion with many of you, all I'm asking for is if you disagree with me, explain why instead of flaming, so that I can take your opinion seriously.
Thanks, Nir
-- Classism is the new racism
If Blizzard is so worried that the bnetd folks will need access to their CD-Key algorithms, simply create a new server that exposes the CD-Key checking routines through SOAP, etc. that the bnetd folks can then *blindly* pass the CD-Key to Blizzard, and upon a return value allow the user to play or not?
Blizzard still keeps their IP, and bnetd can still live on,
Of course, with it being open-source, there's nothing stopping someone from running a copy that bypasses those routines, but I would say that those that *do* bypass the game-checking routines should be more of a target to Blizzard than the current bnetd folks.
From reading the article, it's clear that the developers and maintainers of the bnetd project are Blizzard supporters. They are doing for free what Blizzard had to pay programmers to develop, and from the looks of the article, their paid programmers did it somewhat suboptimally.
Blizzard has a great resource at their disposal. The community that developed around their games has reached a point where they have started writing code to correct the flaws in Blizzard's system. How many companies can only dream of having such a devoted fanbase?
Unfortunately, depressingly, Blizzard's response to this is not an enlightened response that embraces such a community for mutual gain, but one which aims to lobotomize it. There will be no winners from this course of action. bnetd will always exist (potentially with consequences for the original author) and Blizzard will only harm a community that for the most part supports them.
Blizzard chooses to hide behind legislation to defend a business model that cannot naturally work , rather than innovate and develop one that benefits all, including themselves.
Blizzard is a company that wants to earn money, right? The only way to really hurt them is to boycott them. And I don't mean that you should copy it illegaly. That way Blizzard would also get no money but you would still support them just by playing and therefor promoting the game. And it doesn't work if everyone says here on slashdot: They'll get no money from me. Do what you say!!!! If they sell 10 copies less, they don't even recognize it. They must sell 50000 less, that will show them that it is wrong what they did to bnetd.
If Blizzard wants to make continued claims of "circumvention" and "piracy", then bnetd must also make accusations using "keywords" designed to upset the general population.
So, therefore, Blizzard provides a service which is much more graphically violent than "DOOM", which we all know was resonsible for many teenager deaths around the country.
They continue to push violence and killing upon the youth of America by releasing games which postively reward players [youth of America] for acts such as stealing, killing, misconception and deception of others.
Don't try to take control from me by dictating the usage of my computer. I see it necessary for keeping my liberty to have that control exclusive to me, and Blizzard may not like it, or agree with it, but they need to respect it. Especially if they decide to sell me games.
Well, to them I say sock it. Soulseek has it right - it's their game, and I can totally understand them wanting to try and keep piracy down. Instead of bitching about it, write your own damn games.
You have paid for it, therefore you are free to do whatever you want with it within the bounds of copyright law. If you want to write a replacement for some service that they would like you to use, there is nothing, legally or morally, stopping you from doing so.
Don't try to take control from Blizzard by letting people use their client with your server.
The problem is that blizzard doesn't have control to begin with. Once that piece of software is bought and paid for, they have no control over what you do with it. If I want to alter that program in any way I like, I am free to do so as long as I'm not distributing copies.
Blizzard sees it necessary for keeping their business to have that control exclusive to them, and you may not like it, or agree with it, but you need to respect it.
No you don't. Just because some company wants something doesn't mean I have to do anything to make sure it happens.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
That is exactly what I was suggesting. Theft is when you steal something, which means that you have some good that was stolen -- i.e., taken not copied. My point is that I think it is a really sloppy use of language to say that copying is theft. Copying is copying; theft is theft.
Why does it matter? Well, when we start being sloppy with words, we get sloppy with our thoughts, and are no longer able to think about an issue rationally.
I would argue that you can't steal intellectual property, and you can't steal code (unless you copy and deprive somebody of the original code). I'm not saying it's not wrong, just that it's not theft and we should be more careful with our words.
Remember about a year or so ago, Blizzard filed suit over the next Vin Diesel movie "El Diablo" because they said that it infringed upon their "Diablo" trademark?
Think about that. There you are, starting a little project so you and your buddies can play a game over your network. Things are looking good, the code is working, and suddenly you realise what a good idea it would be to expand the project to do what the commercial/proprietary software does.
Why on earth would you even think about legal consultation? It's a small project, a hobby, and when you're working on stuff like that legal implications generally don't cross your mind. Why would they? For one thing, what these guys are doing is perfectly legal, everyone knows that. When this project started, I don't think there was even a thought that it might be slightly illegal.
I remember when Napster first came out, and me and some buddies reverse engineered the protocol to make our own Linux client and server. Just for fun, something to do, y'know. It was interesting for me because I was learning how to reverse engineer a protocol. Something I had never done. Legal implications never once crossed our minds.
It just comes down to Blizzard being a bunch of rotten eggs, afraid of a little competiton.
Personally, I won't be buying a Blizzard product ever again.
-kidlinux.
All Blizzard has to do is make all its new games use REAL encryption and worse come to worse hard code the servers by IP or domain (yes with some work domains could be faked but most users will not do this). If they use some sort of real encryption, then their games will most likely not be usable without some sort of patching, and if bnetd released a patch of some kind to a blizzard game, I'm sure legally they could put a stop to it.
What this is really about is Warcraft III beta, they didn't think people would use Bnetd to use pirated versions of it, and so now they are trying to kill bnetd until Warcraft III comes out. After that don't expect them to make that mistake with DIII or whatever their next game is. There will be encryption.
Gnuyen
Gnuyen
They removed the source from their home page, but you can still get it over at debian's site if you want to see what their talking about.
So this is like saying if I didn't like the long distance service that came with my phone, I shouldn't be able to switch to another provider? Or I should only use sony media with my sony products? Or maybe I should only be allowed to go to the car dealer to get parts for my car. I'm sorry but if I don't like the way a piece of software works and it is because of the crappy server it is pointing to, I see no moral problem with giving my money or attention to someone else who will supply what it is I want.
The funny thing is that this is the essence capitalism and free market enterprise systems. Something the corporate barons tends to use as an excuse for their behavior.
Cat
It's amazing how much disk space I recovered after uninstalling diablo, starcraft and everything else including other companies titles affiliated with Blizzards parent company after reading about bnetd getting the boot from Blizzard. Battlenet sux and this would have been a very welcome alternative. Warcraft 3? Not on my hard drives.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
I hope that everyone who keeps saying they'll boycott blizzard and never buy/play their games again sticks to it.
A lot of people seem to think they are entitled to free service. "battle.net is a right, not a privilege! I spent my $50, I should play free until the end of time!"
I'm sure they all own legitimate copies...but all the contempt seems aimed at blizzard instead of the parasites that use bnetd to steal the games and play for free (not even a $50 investment!). Morality seems skewed here.
I think we need to take a trip back to 80's, where every video game cost a quarter at the arcade. that's 200 games of starcraft, or whatever. if you've played more than that..cough up.
-buzz
1) How old do you think I am then?
Video Game cheats, hints a
What the heck are you talking about? It's awesome that you don't have to pay for battle.net, and seeing as how it is the only on-line service that supports Starcraft and Diablo, you should be happy it even exists!