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U.S. Army to d00dz - We're Coming for You
Thanks to cdagobah for mentioning a post up on the America's Army game site. Executive Producer Phil DeLuca posts a message updating the community on a recent anti-hacking campaign they've initiated, and has a clear message for would-be wrongdoers. From the post: "Allow me to speak directly to the bad guys for a moment: When you get banned, know that we know and have records showing you were doing something that's a violation of terms of service, breaks your EULA, and also happens to be against the law. We know who you are, and can track down where you play from. We have incontrovertible proof you did something illegal. The Army is angry, and we're coming for you. "
.... and we know you have weapons of mass destruction hidden somewhere! Come Clean!
We know who you are, and can track down...
The Army is angry, and we're coming for you.
Nice to see that the Army is doing something useful. I wouldn't want any of these teenagers walking around the streets.
First they break the EULA, next they're killing babies. Gotta stop this evil when it starts!
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
America's Army official servers all run unmoderated, relying on the automated PunkBuster system to weed out hackers. Unfortunately it just plain doesn't work. AA has been getting as bad as Red Faction was with hacks recently. I hope they do something effective, although threats may not be the best way to do it. They ought to look into something other than punkbuster, for example UT had quite a few independantly-developed anti-cheat mods which worked quite well, and AA runs on the UT engine anyway... I'm tired of rapid-fire 203s, dammit!
I've never played this game, and know little about it...but if I'm understanding this correctly, some people used some cheats in a video game, and a developer is insinuating criminal repercussions? Is it safe to assume that there were no real monetary losses?
Yeah. I'll believe that the federal government will actually prosecute when pigs fly.
Inmate 1: What are you in for?
Inmate 2: First degree murder, but I'll be out in 4 more years. What about you?
Inmate 1: I cheated in a video game, which was technically misusing US Army property. I'll be in here for a long time.
Inmate 2: Daaaaaaaaaaamn.
-Turkey
They dont know the extend of what we know, and moreover how we know it. They used up all the knowledge that could have been put towards proofreading.
My Xbox Live Gamer Card
That said, if they then ban you and you continue to play under a fake account or something similar, you are now illegally accessing a computer system, and that you will do time for (probably more than a rapist does on average too).
How we know is more important than what we know.
It's illegal? They're coming after you? What they really mean is if you try and join the army, the future will look like this.
And I, I walked over to the, to the bench there, and there is, Group W's where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after committing your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people on the bench there. Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me! And they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me. And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean 'n' ugly 'n' nasty 'n' horrible and all kind of things and he sat down next to me and said, "Kid, whad'ya get?" I said, "I didn't get nothing, I just got a temp ban from the official servers." He said, "What were you arrested for, kid?" And I said, "Wallhacking." And they all moved away from me on the bench there, and the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things, till I said, "And creating a nuisance." And they all came back, shook my hand, and we had a great time on the bench, talkin about crime, mother stabbing, father raping, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the bench.
Nobody except judiciary has the right to go after me when I've done wrong.
Everything else breaches separation of powers and / or is plain illegal. Like the RIAA paying retired police offers to play Gestapo. Or the army saying "The Army is angry, and we're coming for you".
Rather than threatening its own people, I'd prefer the army focusing on defense, and on respecting the law themselves. As a suggestion, they could start in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo.
Dear GI Joe,
wake up and smell the coffe, war is not about obeying rules. It's about winnning.
The US army is going to use lawyers because it cannot police it's own servers. I do so look forward to you explaining that to the press.
Given that once again the US Army cannot deal with problems in a rational, pragmnatic and effective manner I suggest you always do what the army does in this situation. Call for the marines.
Cause we all know that only terrorists cheat at online games...
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
c'mon guys, this is war! Play fair!
Throughout the article this guy keeps saying "bad guys" like he was fighting for something tangible and sacred. Get some perspective man, you're booting cheaters from a game server, not saving babies in 'Nam.
How about: Tampering with software and servers owned or used by the Army is cyber crime.
Oooooh, oh no! I'm not fully clear on what people are doing that's got General McNads' panties in a bunch, but I'm assuming it's a bit more annoying than just using a wall hack, perhaps people are trying to crash servers and the like, but that happens to every game/website/store on the web! But because it's happened to the army's game, now they're really serious and pissed. Hello, US Gub'ment, this is the sort of "cybercrime" that goes on daily and is ignored or completely fumbled by current law bodies. Now you know what Joe Developer has to deal with daily when he wakes up and his web-store has been hacked to shit. Did you care then? Nope, but apparently now that it's personal it matters. The guy writing this sounds almost surprised by the affront of the "bad guys": 'How dare they hack us! I mean we're the army for crissake!'
And the bit at the end saying "We're coming for you." Honestly, I think this guy actually believes someone's going to have their house stormed and shot up. At best they'll be sending a lawyer, there will be due process in court, and life will continue as usual. Someone, please, get this over-inflated self-important bastard away from his keyboard and someplace where his gung-ho attitude might actually affect change at the scale he hallucinates. It's a friggin game.
"My god Er, I can't believe we are standing in the presence of THE Moon Master!"
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
I really hope they fly at all these little idiots with the full weight of the US Army and everything that entails.
Spoken like someone who isn't paying enough taxes to care how his government spends his money.
Really now, do you want military-sized, wasteful, beurocratic budgets to spend time tracking down people who cheat in a video game?
"Thanks for exposing a hole in
-our- security.
We'll work hard to plug that hole
so that others won't be able to
crawl through it, in future."
I'm reminded of the Hacker Challenges
of other security conscious web sites.
As a long-jaded gamer and server admin, all I can say is hooray. Finally, an organisation with the resources to combat cheating kids. To draw an analogy, these guys are the script kiddies of the gaming world - most of them are just silly punks out to ruin the gaming experience for others and have no real idea of how many people they're affecting.
Sure, non-gamers say "but its just a game", but (to draw another analogy) imagine if every social sports game you played had streakers, people doped up on horse steroids, and people that just walked up to you and started screaming abuse. It would quickly become annoying.
Of course, in the real world, doing that sort of thing quickly has repercussions (ie, someone smacks your bitch ass up) but online, its a real pain in the ass (especially in a free game with no real mechanism to ban users - like Steam, but that's another kettle of fish) to stop these users from ruining the online experience of others.
Personally, the thought of Delta Force guys kicking in some random hackers door at 3am and throwing in a couple of flashbangs makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Hell, they could record it on video and put it on the America's Army website and people would PAY MONEY to see it.
..how about making the system more hack-proof?
the line between a 'hack' and a non hack on a online game is very slim anyhow.
is turning up the contrast a hack? or using 1920*1400 resolution and a maginifying glass on the centre for insta sniping? or using a lightgun to pinpoint the mouse to the enemy, friend sitting next to you with the gun(a little work and it's doable, you just run around and your frind picks up enemies).
is buying a better mouse a hack?
is having a crappy internet connection a hack?
or is it hack if you're just _really_, _really_ good? you hear that being called a hack all the time.
these problems can only be combated with novel game element design really... of course, you'd have none of these problems if you played seriously face to face on the same table.
or just didn't give a rats ass if someone shot you.
but this "we're coming for you!!!" is a bit extreme crap, especially coming from the fucking army(especially hacks being outside of usa probably, too).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I don't know how many people play AA, but if you don't, let me explain how this works to you.
The primary hacks are: full auto 203s. Imagine a grenade launcher, add unlimited ammo, and a firing rate of 700 RPM. Imagine maps where there is almost nowhere that cannot be hit. It becomes impossible to deal with. This can also be applied to rocket launchers, sniper rifles, just about any gun in the game can benefit from full auto. Then there are the speed hacks which allow players to run to the objs in about 4 seconds, the obj hacks, where players can take the obj without even being near it, or maybe the respawn hacks, where even if you kill the hacker, he comes right back from the dead. And don't forget a hack that adjusts for the game-physics and run speed, so literally there is no safe thing to do. And don't forget the standard set of aim-bots no fog hacks, etc. All there, and in more numbers than most games, and even more than CS. Almost every server had a blatant hacker on them at anytime, and most had a couple of covert hackers.
Then there is the problem with the server company having a monopoly on honor servers.(honor is a number displayed by your screen that is a rough indicator of skill, but only kinda) The servers crashed non-stop, the support tickets went unanswered, and generally SCI was a pain in the ass. It went so far as there were Freedom of Information Act requests put on the Army and SCI's contract. There was no response. It took SCI repeated requests to allows us access to PB screenshots, which take a picture of whatever your screen is, and them send them off to the server. But this was hacked too, allowing the hacker to send any image he wants, so on many PBSS it was a picture of tub girl. CVAR checks didn't work because after every crash(usually 3-4 times a day) it resets all server scripts. Every AA player who has played since 1.9 remembers the good 'ole days of HomeLan and admins, who were utterly ruthless.
Recently Speakeasy's gamefire division has been allowed to rent honor servers, but they currenty don't have PB enabled, so no-one plays on them anyway. But this just started the 10th, so we will need to wait and see.
There have also been numerous bugs including the "critical error" or "General Protection Faults". In 2.0-2.2 a critical errors would happen non-stop meaning that no AA session lasted for much more than an hour.
And for people who have been bashing Phil Deluca or [Dev]Skippy, recently a large number of hackers were banned, and that caused a notable improvement in the quality of gaming. Under his control, they also released 2.2.1 which has cut down on the critical errors. Things under skippy are looking up, so I really wouldn't be suprised if you see on CNN in a couple of weeks that "the Army has sued several internet sites for hosting hacks for the Army's free recruiting tool video game, Americas Army".
We've been through hell, but for some reason AA just has me coming back for more. Some of the 1.9 era maps are brilliantly done(Bridge SE is possibly one of the best maps ever in an online video game) AA is also the only game to have realistic long range combat. Not just twitch shootin, but tactics will almost always win in AA. Don't bash AA if you havn't been in the community for a long time.
If what Skippy says happens, we are going to be a very happy bunch of gamers.
Mod Wisely.
In the early 1940's, Japan learned an important lesson - "let the sleeping giant lie." We may not react swiftly, but when we do it's with unstoppable force.
Wow, this guy has some balls to be comparing a bit of video game hacking to pearl harbor.
Player and Army Privacy
"Finally privacy is a big concern for us. Players register under a userid and gameplay information cannot be traced to an individual's real identity."
Obviously, anything online can track all sorts of information about a user (duh), I guess I just find it funny they offer the warm and fuzzy privacy gurantees on one page, and then threaten(?) "naughty" users elsewhere on the site, after they get a mad-on.
Anyone whoe remembers the whole Kesmai/EA/Aol Multiplayer battletech fiasco knows this well. The problems is his cures are often worse than the disease. In MPBT he used players that volunteered as helpers to police the game. Unfortunately MPBT being divided into five very large teams more than a few of these "Helpers" became their teams ultimate weapons.
The problem was further aggravated by the political nature of the game. As accusations against the "Volunteer Police" Grew they had to defend themselves. Back and Forth it went, the simple message that having people who had invested years into their various team being refs was a very bad idea, never got the respect it deserve
I don't play Americas Army but for Phills sake and the games sake, I hope he has payed help this time and some effective means to actually identify the hackers and deal with them. The last time he had none of these and it was a disaster.