Not all manner of cheating, no. But very much can be done in advance, and a decent response time to discovered cheats would definitely help on the amount of active cheaters.
With online gaming what lacks is to simply make the servers more authoritative. A game client should as far as possible be considered untrusted, and not be given much more info than what the user should be in posession of. Doing this without letting lag have a violent negative effect on gameplay requires excellent predicition mechanisms, and is difficult to implement. So basically nothing will be done until customers demand it.
In online security communities, it's quite widely accepted that "Full Disclosure" is the only way to go. If you publish a vulnerability in some vendors application, the vendor will be forced to deal with it. Why so? In essence, because their sales and reputation will suffer if they dont deal with problems.
In gaming, when a cheat is made public, why dont the vendors feel the same need to fix it before their reputation and sales suffer? Why dont they value the trust of their customers more? Maybe because gamers are so used to cheats that it don't even occur to them to blame the vendor...
It's not by any means impossible to prevent cheats, but it costs the vendors money and time. Until it's economically more sensible for them to do something about it, there will be no changes in the amount of cheating going on. As the gaming industry expands rapidly, we'll see more competition and choice for users. In a few years it might be possible that you simply skip buying a new hyped game, because you know that coming from this and that vendor it'll be full of holes. You rather go buying some other game. Until this is the situation, live with cheats.
I guess my point is, yell at the game developers. They are the ones who made it possible to cheat, they are the one responsible.
I'm working as developer of a to-be mmorpg, and will probably be the person on our team that has the main responsibility for anti cheat.
Most of the current games have, IMNSHO, approached anti-cheat totally wrong, by assuming that the game clients are "trusted" and then patching/updating against specific cheats whenever one is found, always lagging behind the cheaters.
Our approach to prevent this is simple. "Trust noone", meaning dont ever assume the client send anything valid. Check it on all levels, then let the world simulator have the data and perform game logic related checks. Use external tools (on the server) watching for patterns and report to staff if thresholds are passed, this should catch most bots used to "train" a character. Make sure that things like e.g. "wallhacks" are impossible, simply by providing the client with only the info the server thinks it should "legally" be able to see. If you enter a dark cave, and use some cheat to get light, it's useless because the server knows the cave is dark and thus never told you about any items in it.
This can ofcourse be a bitch to actually implement, the amount of processing power required to do more or less fuzzy analysis of all data will be very noticable. But, the gain is simple, we will prevent simple cheats and catch the more advanced quickly. And, as or eula most likely will state, we catch you cheating your account is gone and you end up on our cheat statistics page. Since the gaming industry is about money, we will put a lot of effort into the parts of it that are important to make the customer base keep paying us money, and a gaming experience that isn't destroyed by cheaters and trolls we believe would be pretty high up on the wish list.
I'm not a cryptographer at all, but i'm familiar with the basics and quite interested in the logics behind cryptographic techniques. I wonder, if anyone here have any ideas on a scheme that would let us use the routes (assuming they're static) or the pingtimes (assuming they vary very little) to improve security of a communcation channel? Maybe in a setup with 5-6 different computers all working together in a model designed to do key exchange and validations, to let a new computer into the circle.
If you think in term of a small distributed network with all point to point secure connections established, how can this be utilized to verify the identity of a new participant?
Oks, here's a response to some points made in misc posts...
The Taliban is not the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
The Taliban runs most of Afghanistan, and since the ruler makes the rules be it "legitimate" or not, Taliban is currently the government of Afghanistan.
We are at war with the pig bin Laden
If US is at war with bin Laden, then bin Laden is at war with the US... That was my point earlier, in bin Laden's view he attacks people he considers himself in war with
we target terrorists (and their supporters) and hit innocents by mistake. Pigs like bin Laden targets innocents from the git-go
Again, seen from the opposite sides view, there are no innocent americans, just as US can see no innocent Taliban members.
Now, How much warning have we given the area? 3 weeks? How much warning were we given before the WTC attacks? none.
Did the US tell Taliban exactly where they would attack? bin Laden have declared "war" on US a long time ago, I'll try to dig up some references if needed.
So, everyone who didn't leave obviously didn't want to
So, a family decides to stay in the only place they know, because they, as and maybe more than most of us western people, love their home. They make that decision after receiving censored information (propaganda) on what is happening, maybe with no knowledge of where they could go, or no resources to travel. That makes it OK to kill them?
use "I" or "most people" or something insead of "you" ok??
I intended to use "You" as "One" there... "One don't give a damn...". I can do that in english (my 2nd language) afaik?;)
And don't try and say they didn't want to leave their homes
That's exactly what I'm going to say;)
Hell, if the US does something I don't agree w/ to canada and canada gets pissed off and says it's gonna attack us, hell yeah I'd put my money where my mouth is and leave the country!
Would you leave the country if you lived on the street, got little or no news, and didn't have money to anything but food? This war hits the weakest, and that is wrong
Sorry, I don't buy his bullshit. He's a pig and his views do NOT deserve equal time
Seriously? No free speech? No right to disagree? Isn't that part of what US is so eager to defend now?
As several other posts mention, the Taliban and bin Laden honestly believe they are right. And I have no doubt that the US govt honestly believe they are right. My claim is that they are both wrong, and that their IMO incorrect views will hurt a lot of innocent people.
According to the logics presented here, it is OK to attack the ones you are in war with.
bin Laden has been quoted saying ALL americans are guilty
I predict we'll do better on a percentage basis BY FAR than the Islamic extremists have so far
US can't... bin Laden is in war with all americans, whereas US is just in war with some of the Afghans. Every victim at WTC and Pentagon was people bin Laden is in war with, and I seriously doubt US can avoid killingh ANY of the Afghan people they're not in war with.
If you apply certain logics to your sides view, try applying them to the other sides view too and see if the reasoning still looks good. I'm not defending bin Laden, but I'm not going to defend the US military actions either. They're equally wrong IMO.
bin Laden has been quoted saying ALL americans are guilty
Yup, that's why I said hypotethically. My point was, would targeting a specific wrongdoer justify hurting ANY innocent bystanders?
Guess what - this is WAR
Yes, unfortunately it seems so. Meaning, both sides will keep on killing bystanders, to achieve what? When one of the countries is erased from the map, something is won?
If Afghanistan is in war with the US, why is it considered worse for Afghanistan to kill innocent US people than it is for US to kill innocent Afghan people? The world condemned the WTC attack, why shouldn't the US bombings also be condemned? I keep getting back to what I originally tried to say, I can't see how US actions are any more justifiable than bin Laden's actions. Some might mention "Intent" here, but you don't give a damn in the good intentions if your family was killed.
trying to kill as few ordinary Afghan people as possible
One is one too much. US is no better than Taliban the moment one "regular" Afghan is killed. Say, hypotethically, that bin laden targeted a specific person/group he knew were somewhere in WTC/Pentagon that day, a person/group that e.g. had attacked him once? Would that justify killing any innocent people? If not, how can US justify killing "as few ordinary people as possible" to get to a person/group that have attacked them?
A now -1 moderated post claimed "Windows doesn't need this kind of testing" so I merely pointed out it actually needs and obviously gets a lot of testing, and that this lab wasn't for end users but for developers.
Although I'm the first to agree Windows often appear rather, well, untested, I actually do believe that the MS developers at least boot their OSes on a few different setups before they put it on the CDs too many pay too much for.
The idea of that lab is, as the text you hopefully read claimed, to "allow developers to easily test their Linux kernel patches". Good Thing! (tm)
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Not all manner of cheating, no. But very much can be done in advance, and a decent response time to discovered cheats would definitely help on the amount of active cheaters.
With online gaming what lacks is to simply make the servers more authoritative. A game client should as far as possible be considered untrusted, and not be given much more info than what the user should be in posession of. Doing this without letting lag have a violent negative effect on gameplay requires excellent predicition mechanisms, and is difficult to implement. So basically nothing will be done until customers demand it.
--Erik
www.darkfallonline.com
In online security communities, it's quite widely accepted that "Full Disclosure" is the only way to go. If you publish a vulnerability in some vendors application, the vendor will be forced to deal with it. Why so? In essence, because their sales and reputation will suffer if they dont deal with problems.
In gaming, when a cheat is made public, why dont the vendors feel the same need to fix it before their reputation and sales suffer? Why dont they value the trust of their customers more? Maybe because gamers are so used to cheats that it don't even occur to them to blame the vendor...
It's not by any means impossible to prevent cheats, but it costs the vendors money and time. Until it's economically more sensible for them to do something about it, there will be no changes in the amount of cheating going on. As the gaming industry expands rapidly, we'll see more competition and choice for users. In a few years it might be possible that you simply skip buying a new hyped game, because you know that coming from this and that vendor it'll be full of holes. You rather go buying some other game. Until this is the situation, live with cheats.
I guess my point is, yell at the game developers. They are the ones who made it possible to cheat, they are the one responsible.
--Erik
www.darkfallonline.com
Most of the current games have, IMNSHO, approached anti-cheat totally wrong, by assuming that the game clients are "trusted" and then patching/updating against specific cheats whenever one is found, always lagging behind the cheaters.
Our approach to prevent this is simple. "Trust noone", meaning dont ever assume the client send anything valid. Check it on all levels, then let the world simulator have the data and perform game logic related checks. Use external tools (on the server) watching for patterns and report to staff if thresholds are passed, this should catch most bots used to "train" a character. Make sure that things like e.g. "wallhacks" are impossible, simply by providing the client with only the info the server thinks it should "legally" be able to see. If you enter a dark cave, and use some cheat to get light, it's useless because the server knows the cave is dark and thus never told you about any items in it.
This can ofcourse be a bitch to actually implement, the amount of processing power required to do more or less fuzzy analysis of all data will be very noticable. But, the gain is simple, we will prevent simple cheats and catch the more advanced quickly. And, as or eula most likely will state, we catch you cheating your account is gone and you end up on our cheat statistics page. Since the gaming industry is about money, we will put a lot of effort into the parts of it that are important to make the customer base keep paying us money, and a gaming experience that isn't destroyed by cheaters and trolls we believe would be pretty high up on the wish list.
--Erik
If you think in term of a small distributed network with all point to point secure connections established, how can this be utilized to verify the identity of a new participant?
The Taliban is not the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
The Taliban runs most of Afghanistan, and since the ruler makes the rules be it "legitimate" or not, Taliban is currently the government of Afghanistan.
We are at war with the pig bin Laden
If US is at war with bin Laden, then bin Laden is at war with the US... That was my point earlier, in bin Laden's view he attacks people he considers himself in war with
we target terrorists (and their supporters) and hit innocents by mistake. Pigs like bin Laden targets innocents from the git-go
Again, seen from the opposite sides view, there are no innocent americans, just as US can see no innocent Taliban members.
Now, How much warning have we given the area? 3 weeks? How much warning were we given before the WTC attacks? none.
Did the US tell Taliban exactly where they would attack? bin Laden have declared "war" on US a long time ago, I'll try to dig up some references if needed.
So, everyone who didn't leave obviously didn't want to
So, a family decides to stay in the only place they know, because they, as and maybe more than most of us western people, love their home. They make that decision after receiving censored information (propaganda) on what is happening, maybe with no knowledge of where they could go, or no resources to travel. That makes it OK to kill them?
use "I" or "most people" or something insead of "you" ok??
I intended to use "You" as "One" there... "One don't give a damn...". I can do that in english (my 2nd language) afaik? ;)
And don't try and say they didn't want to leave their homes
That's exactly what I'm going to say ;)
Hell, if the US does something I don't agree w/ to canada and canada gets pissed off and says it's gonna attack us, hell yeah I'd put my money where my mouth is and leave the country!
Would you leave the country if you lived on the street, got little or no news, and didn't have money to anything but food? This war hits the weakest, and that is wrong
Sorry, I don't buy his bullshit. He's a pig and his views do NOT deserve equal time
Seriously? No free speech? No right to disagree? Isn't that part of what US is so eager to defend now?
As several other posts mention, the Taliban and bin Laden honestly believe they are right. And I have no doubt that the US govt honestly believe they are right. My claim is that they are both wrong, and that their IMO incorrect views will hurt a lot of innocent people.
bin Laden has been quoted saying ALL americans are guilty
I predict we'll do better on a percentage basis BY FAR than the Islamic extremists have so far
US can't... bin Laden is in war with all americans, whereas US is just in war with some of the Afghans. Every victim at WTC and Pentagon was people bin Laden is in war with, and I seriously doubt US can avoid killingh ANY of the Afghan people they're not in war with.
If you apply certain logics to your sides view, try applying them to the other sides view too and see if the reasoning still looks good. I'm not defending bin Laden, but I'm not going to defend the US military actions either. They're equally wrong IMO.
Yup, that's why I said hypotethically. My point was, would targeting a specific wrongdoer justify hurting ANY innocent bystanders?
Guess what - this is WAR
Yes, unfortunately it seems so. Meaning, both sides will keep on killing bystanders, to achieve what? When one of the countries is erased from the map, something is won?
If Afghanistan is in war with the US, why is it considered worse for Afghanistan to kill innocent US people than it is for US to kill innocent Afghan people? The world condemned the WTC attack, why shouldn't the US bombings also be condemned? I keep getting back to what I originally tried to say, I can't see how US actions are any more justifiable than bin Laden's actions. Some might mention "Intent" here, but you don't give a damn in the good intentions if your family was killed.
One is one too much. US is no better than Taliban the moment one "regular" Afghan is killed. Say, hypotethically, that bin laden targeted a specific person/group he knew were somewhere in WTC/Pentagon that day, a person/group that e.g. had attacked him once? Would that justify killing any innocent people? If not, how can US justify killing "as few ordinary people as possible" to get to a person/group that have attacked them?
A now -1 moderated post claimed "Windows doesn't need this kind of testing" so I merely pointed out it actually needs and obviously gets a lot of testing, and that this lab wasn't for end users but for developers.
The idea of that lab is, as the text you hopefully read claimed, to "allow developers to easily test their Linux kernel patches". Good Thing! (tm)