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Sims 2 Hacks Spread Like Viruses
jowens writes "SecurityFocus reports that players sharing house designs through Electronic Arts' Sims 2 Exchange are finding their game behaving oddly: espresso machines mysteriously satisfy all the Sims needs, Sims are suddenly comfortable with open relationships, and the social worker no longer cares how they treat their children. It turns out hacks were spreading invisibly with Sims 2 lots, infecting thousands of downloadable homes, and catching Electronic Arts by surprise. The hackers, who never intended their hacks to be viruses, have even written their own AV scanner to find and control the outbreak."
The actual virus like behaviour is due to the way EA's site works.
Basically - you create the house using your copy of the game, with whatever tiles you have installed and loaded. Once you're happy with the results, you upload them to the server inside the game. The game then compares the objects to those in the standard game, as well as those in the game database (every object is given a unique ID and checksum from what I've seen so far), and variants are uploaded as well as part of the upload. The more unique objects your house has, the bigger it is.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
Essentially, everything behaves like viruses in the game, but people didn't realize this in advance. It makes sense that when you import a house, the things in it come along, but people didn't realize that a number of game mechanics were treated as things in houses. People also didn't realize that, if you modified "the espresso machine", the change would apply not just to one item, but to all items like that one, so importing the house with the weird espresso machine imports and applies the weirdness to your espresso machines, which you then pass on when you export your house.
Similarly, Populous, a much better game. (old school)
By Stephenson. ISBN 0-553-38095-8
I'm assuming your clients are running Windows: try creating a "Sims" group, adding the limited user accounts to it, and giving it at least "Write" access on the Sims directory under "Program Files" AND go into the registry under HKLM\Computer, find the Sims-related keys and grant the "Sims" group Full Control over them. That usually works for me with games (which tend to be less good about keeping user data in places where user data should be).
If you're feeling especially masochistic, you can download a utility like Sysinternal's "Filemon" and watch what files/directories the Sims fails writing to so that you can then set the appropriate permissions.
I believe EA has alot of developers in Austin TX ? Pflugerville is one of the yuppie suburbs.