I think your metaphor is off a bit because there's a layer between the guy ordering the cheeseburger and the store that's selling it.
The ISP would be like the truck delivering the cheeseburgers. The gov't passes a law saying that the stores needed to give their customers the option to not buy cheeseburgers (already implied), but then somehow enforcing that the delivery company have a way to give that option to the store's customers to opt out. (The customers already can though, same as in this case... not sure that the cheeseburger metaphor works at all) Anyhow, I'm glad you pointed it out though, as I now more fully understand what the ACLU's argument is. Before it sounded like BS.
Isn't this a similar situation to laws not allowing underage people viewing R rated movies? Or buying porn from the local service station? What about decency laws and things that set a minimum standard for a community? Why is that "censorship" OK and not this? If the ACLU wins this, where does it stop?
So let me get this straight... If (just for example) 8 out of 10 homes in Utah are concerned about internet porn, and these people get together, in oh, say, city/state government meetings and talk about this problem, and, say, they decide to push for (and get) an option to have someone appointed in the government to help them filter this at the ISP level, you're saying that's a bad thing? They have this option now. Instead of our example 8 out of 10 households doing all of this redundant work, they now centralize it. And it's also opt-in, so nobody gets it unless they ask. I don't see how this is a problem or a violation of rights. Maybe the right of the ISPs to do whatever they wannt, but I'm going to guess taht everyone will agree the government can (and should) step in when needed.
Yes I know it's not that simple, and yes, the above is my skew... but it all boils down to basically the above. The worst case scenario is that the legislator acted in bad faith, nobody opts in, and ISPs now have a little more work. And from what I understand, it's a very small amount of work. Okay, I take that back... It will be more work if a ton of people opt in. But then isn't that a good thing for all of those people? Isn't that what the lawmakers are supposed to do? Legislate for the good of the people?
I'm not seeing this side presented much in these comments, I'd really like to see this discussed more. I don't think it's as simple as group 1 is right and group 2 is wrong. If the ACLU is right does that make the vast majority of Utah wrong? And if so wrong on what level? A technicality or really, fundamentally wrong? Is it all in implementation? The idea of opt-in censorship? I'm not sure what most are saying in this topic adds up.
Wait a sec... I think you can look at this another way.
In my small town, none of the ISPs would implement high speed internet. The local populace got together and there's now a city run ISP that delivers high speed internet access to all people within it's borders. Business was courted and rejected the area, so the people did it themselves.
Why can't this be a similar situation? What if enough people in Utah wanted this option and none of the major players were offering? it sounds like (in a for instance like that) these people had a right to legislate an OPTION.
I don't know the entire situation, if this is really the case. But I don't think you can leave everything to the free market, it just doesn't work out every time.
p.s. Comcast and friends now want a piece of the high speed internet market in my area. Funny how that works.
It was a real bug. I had the same thing happen, and I noticed that steam went up and down as a whole a few times last night as well as all of the source games becoming unplayable for me. I looked for some crash logs, and found some memory dumps in the same folder as hl2.exe. Elsewhere these memory dumps have been associated with crashes. In the steam forums I also found out that people with this problem had a different size install than those who didn't. (22 megs IIRC was the small size) I re-updated this morning and everything was fine, including the downloaded size.
Re:Paypal's fake email looked real
on
Gone Phishing?
·
· Score: 1
I got this email today in fact, and it gave me quite a scare. In fact, I had to immediately cahnge my password on ebay because I got past their logon screen before realizing what was going on. (Yeah I know, after going back and looking at it it reads "Dear ebay" at the top... I missed that the first time through though.) This is the scariest one I've ever seen (entire email below):
Dear eBay,
We regret to inform you that your eBay account has been suspended due to the violation of our site policy below:
False or missing contact information - Falsifying or omitting your name, address, and/or telephone number (including use of fax machines pager numbers, modems or disconnected numbers).
Due to the suspension of this account, please be advised you are prohibited from using eBay in any way. This prohibition includes the registering of a new account.
Please note that any seller fees due to eBay will immediately become due and payable. eBay will charge any amounts you have not previously disputed to the billing method currently on file.
If you would like your account to be considered for reinstatement, please click on the link below, and provide us additional information.
>> link text: http://signin.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?SignIn &ssPageName=h:h:sin:US >> actual link: http://24.64.97.177/.cgi-bin/signin.ebay.com/aw-cg i/eBayISAPI.dllSignIn-ssPageName-hhsin.php
1 - Howabout conter-strike? Yes, I know it's cross-genre, but the point stands. They did "permanent" death in such a way that adds to gameplay and is fun for most players. MMO games can do this as well, if they change some fundamental gameplay issues. It is, as he says, a short term negative thing but (if implemented correctly) a long term benefit. Sure, any developer can jump in and slaughter a great idea, but that leads me to:
2 - instancing. He's arguing that you lose the point of being in a huge world if you can't get the interaction of the full online world. You may as well be hosting your own server for your friends when in an instanced dungeon. Now, I think instancing is a great concept, but it's being used as a solution for too many of the wrong problems.
I guess I'm not saying you're wrong here, as most of this is opinion based anyhow... but I think you're being a bit harsh in regards to these two topics in particular.
Assuming that people do turn off the preview pane, what makes you think that they won't just immediately double-click a message that they are unsure about? I think it's a far better idea to disable HTML and images (is that possible in outlook? I'm an OS X/web based e-mail user). As was mentioned above 99% of these are spam or related material anyhow. Further, I use the preview pane as the main reading point under OS X's mail app. Why should I have to double-click the mouse every time I read an e-mail instead of simply scrolling with the arrow keys?
As a mac programmer, I've got an 800 Mhz TiBook. I need to go on-site with some of our customers occasionally, among other things, and a laptop is a must. Our codebase compiles in around 10 minutes for me. We're getting a round of new G5's here shortly for the desktop crowd in office, and with the "prototype" machine, our codebase compiles in ~3 minutes as opposed to 15 minutes on the older (granted, somewhat dated) desktop machines. It very much makes a difference to some of us. For general web surfing and home use it's probably not a big deal, but there's definitely a push for it in other areas.
Unfortunately they are claiming that you DON'T OWN ANYTHING. They say that you click in the "I disagree" box then you have zero rights whatsoever. That you're just licensing the game and you don't own anything other than a license to use it. And only a license to use the game from the specific CD you purchased.
That's nuts, and it would be a very bad thing if this came out in their favor.
My wife got me one of these for my birthday when we were dating. It's been the best pocketknife/screwdriver I've ever owned.
http://www.computergear.com/swisarcybtoo.html
It's customized for tech work, so most of the time you never need to use a different screwdriver. Excellent stuff, and if you look around you should be able to get one well under $100.
iChat 2.0 supports audio only chat, at least mac to mac. This is probably an upgrade on the windows side to be compatible with this, and possibly enhance things a bit in both camps.
"Single income families have become double income families. How this is a bad thing I don't understand."
Financially it may look good, but as far as having a real living family, it sucks. Also this is ignoring the many single parents that are out there nowadays.
I personally am a programmer, in fear of being outsourced one day in the future. My wife doesn't work, she stays home. We've done both working and not for her and our overall quality of life is much BETTER with her not working, regardless of the financial difficulties, especially for our children. If she needed to get a job could she? Sure. Does that mean it's a good idea? Not necessarily.
The choice that we have to allow her to stay at home is dwindling. I'm grateful that I can continue to support our family on my income, but how long will it last? I'm one of the higher paid programmers at our (small) company, and I feel lucky to have broken the 50k barrier this past year. I hope I can hold on at least long enough for our children to get into school -- so that I don't have to have a day care raising my kids!
It scares me that so many people feel that money is the only factor in these things.
I'm not so sure they're marketing these features correctly then.
My wife agreed to get an xbox because of the DVD and mp3 capabilities. She now uses it more than I do...! It's been much more than a game console to us. I'd be surprised if they took away DVD, but the music potential has a lot of merit, particularly to non-techies. Who wouldn't like not having to swap out CD's all the time to listen to music?
Re:The replacement is already here
on
United Linux Dead
·
· Score: 1
I don't mind the plug at all, but sheesh. Nothing like kicking someone when they're down...
It's unfortuante that the silent majority of Americans get a bad rep by the (agreeably many) bad public examples you see in the news and media nowadays.
Sure Utah's gov't has it's problems, but so does everyone elses. I happen to live in that small town nearby that offers a cable modem as a utility. I pay $35 a month for high speed access (that's total, including ISP fees, though you can ask to be routed to a commercial ISP if you'd like). I think it's fantastic, and really, it works out very well as a utility. They've been one of the better ISPs I've been with, they're making a profit, and it's cheaper than any other solution out there.
This was put in place by the city because the "competition" decided that there was no market for high speed internet in our area, while 20 miles away there are 3 companies pushing it. They wouldn't offer it, so the city did. I think it was a good decision. If It's done right, then it's definitely a Good Thing(TM).
Unfortuantely the majority of the "demo" code on this guy's site is directly related to the games, and (IIRC, I'm too lazy to re-read this) the parent I replied to among other people seemed to be talking about the games themselves. That's why I went off about that. I agree with a software project like GameSpy, this kind of exploit hanging around for extended periods is silly.
And no, I don't think it's excusable coding practice if you can help it, but I can see how it can (and probably often does) happen in a business environment with tight deadlines. Saying these kinds of problems shouldn't happen ever is unrealistic IMO.
If GameSpy is to be believed, the guy didn't tell them what the bug was, just that the bug was there and had a program (with no source) to exploit it.
It think both parties are at fault to some extent here, but I'd guess that GameSpy is doing a lot better than most of the people here are making them out to be.
Assuming you're using C strings and not the STL, you almost always have to make a few assumptions somewhere. Blame the C language, not the programmers. In an ideal world everyone would use the STL or other means of automatic allocation of memory, but get real -- I'm working with software that has literally millions of lines of 10+ year old code, and doing so every day. The STL didn't even EXIST for most of our product's life cycle. If our small company were to audit all possible buffer overflows with our team of 7 programmers, it'd take us months just to make sure we had gotten rid of the problem and (this is key) NOT MESSED ANYTHING ELSE UP in the process. Not to mention all of the deveolper time wasted.
Sure game companies have generally a larger staff and higher budget, and they can put themselves in a different situation... but come on people. Give them a little credit. It's not like they're creating a firewall or something, it's a GAME. They shouldn't have to worry so much about it. That they do at all is only because of how the gameplay might be impacted. Bleh. Slashdot is so one sided sometimes. Read the article and we're all experts. I can't believe that because we all heard about this guys side first, everyone thinks he's being repressed by the DMCA.
/rant off.
I actually did as another poster suggested after reading the article and dropped a line to gamespy about it. They gave me a canned reply, but at least they gave me a reply. IIRC the wording was different than it was in the updated headline here, so I'll post it:
Hi Slycrel,
This is from our Chairman and Founder Mark Surfas:
GameSpy welcomes any and all help finding genuine bugs and security breaches on our servers. What we don't welcome are people publishing security hacks that have the potential to hurt our products. GameSpy products are supposed to be about having fun, but hacks and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks take the fun out of it. It doesn't simply hurt GameSpy; it hurts every person playing games with our products.
What this person did was more than reverse engineer two of our products, RogerWilco and GameSpy3D-he was describing our backend services and publishing CDkey generation information without letting us know. At first we welcomed his bug alerts. We responded to him immediately and thanked him for his bug research, as we do with everyone who contacts us with bug information. We even sent him a thank you letter, which we have on file.
But then we found out he was also publishing how to brute force our RogerWilco CDkeys and had published hacks on other game CDkeys as well. He was doing more than reporting bugs; he was publishing game pirating techniques. He published how to attack our network. This is not the way ethical security researchers operate. It was at this point that we stopped our communication with him and asked him to remove the materials in question.
When we were first contacted, this person was associated with a small software security company. They asked if GameSpy wanted to pay a "consulting fee" to fix the hacks. However, these were not bugs; it was information about how our products work. When we brought this to the software security company's attention, they disavowed their relationship with that person and removed him from their servers.
Let me repeat-we welcome any bug alerts and will fix any and all security breaches that come to our attention. We find and fix nearly all of them before any external sources find them. It's all about playing games and having fun, people! That's why we do what we do! However, we won't pay "consulting fees" to people who create CDkey hacks of our proprietary software, then post the results if we don't pay them.
Gamers trust us. We have to protect them from any and all attacks on our network that affects gamers.
Slashdot Mirror
I think your metaphor is off a bit because there's a layer between the guy ordering the cheeseburger and the store that's selling it.
The ISP would be like the truck delivering the cheeseburgers. The gov't passes a law saying that the stores needed to give their customers the option to not buy cheeseburgers (already implied), but then somehow enforcing that the delivery company have a way to give that option to the store's customers to opt out. (The customers already can though, same as in this case... not sure that the cheeseburger metaphor works at all) Anyhow, I'm glad you pointed it out though, as I now more fully understand what the ACLU's argument is. Before it sounded like BS.
Isn't this a similar situation to laws not allowing underage people viewing R rated movies? Or buying porn from the local service station? What about decency laws and things that set a minimum standard for a community? Why is that "censorship" OK and not this? If the ACLU wins this, where does it stop?
So let me get this straight... If (just for example) 8 out of 10 homes in Utah are concerned about internet porn, and these people get together, in oh, say, city/state government meetings and talk about this problem, and, say, they decide to push for (and get) an option to have someone appointed in the government to help them filter this at the ISP level, you're saying that's a bad thing? They have this option now. Instead of our example 8 out of 10 households doing all of this redundant work, they now centralize it. And it's also opt-in, so nobody gets it unless they ask. I don't see how this is a problem or a violation of rights. Maybe the right of the ISPs to do whatever they wannt, but I'm going to guess taht everyone will agree the government can (and should) step in when needed.
Yes I know it's not that simple, and yes, the above is my skew... but it all boils down to basically the above. The worst case scenario is that the legislator acted in bad faith, nobody opts in, and ISPs now have a little more work. And from what I understand, it's a very small amount of work. Okay, I take that back... It will be more work if a ton of people opt in. But then isn't that a good thing for all of those people? Isn't that what the lawmakers are supposed to do? Legislate for the good of the people?
I'm not seeing this side presented much in these comments, I'd really like to see this discussed more. I don't think it's as simple as group 1 is right and group 2 is wrong. If the ACLU is right does that make the vast majority of Utah wrong? And if so wrong on what level? A technicality or really, fundamentally wrong? Is it all in implementation? The idea of opt-in censorship? I'm not sure what most are saying in this topic adds up.
Wait a sec... I think you can look at this another way.
In my small town, none of the ISPs would implement high speed internet. The local populace got together and there's now a city run ISP that delivers high speed internet access to all people within it's borders. Business was courted and rejected the area, so the people did it themselves.
Why can't this be a similar situation? What if enough people in Utah wanted this option and none of the major players were offering? it sounds like (in a for instance like that) these people had a right to legislate an OPTION.
I don't know the entire situation, if this is really the case. But I don't think you can leave everything to the free market, it just doesn't work out every time.
p.s. Comcast and friends now want a piece of the high speed internet market in my area. Funny how that works.
Yes, according to MacRumor (at keynote) reports.
I disagree. Others do as well. The game design for EQ especially was made to addict.
Check out this link:
http://www.nickyee.com/eqt/skinner.html
It was a real bug. I had the same thing happen, and I noticed that steam went up and down as a whole a few times last night as well as all of the source games becoming unplayable for me. I looked for some crash logs, and found some memory dumps in the same folder as hl2.exe. Elsewhere these memory dumps have been associated with crashes. In the steam forums I also found out that people with this problem had a different size install than those who didn't. (22 megs IIRC was the small size) I re-updated this morning and everything was fine, including the downloaded size.
I got this email today in fact, and it gave me quite a scare. In fact, I had to immediately cahnge my password on ebay because I got past their logon screen before realizing what was going on. (Yeah I know, after going back and looking at it it reads "Dear ebay" at the top... I missed that the first time through though.) This is the scariest one I've ever seen (entire email below):
n &ssPageName=h:h:sin:USg i/eBayISAPI.dllSignIn-ssPageName-hhsin.php
Dear eBay,
We regret to inform you that your eBay account has been suspended due to the violation of our site policy below:
False or missing contact information - Falsifying or omitting your name, address, and/or telephone number (including use of fax machines pager numbers, modems or disconnected numbers).
Due to the suspension of this account, please be advised you are prohibited from using eBay in any way. This prohibition includes the registering of a new account.
Please note that any seller fees due to eBay will immediately become due and payable.
eBay will charge any amounts you have not previously disputed to the billing method currently on file.
If you would like your account to be considered for reinstatement, please click on the link below, and provide us additional information.
>> link text: http://signin.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?SignI
>> actual link: http://24.64.97.177/.cgi-bin/signin.ebay.com/aw-c
Regards,
SafeHarbor Department
eBay Inc.
1 - Howabout conter-strike? Yes, I know it's cross-genre, but the point stands. They did "permanent" death in such a way that adds to gameplay and is fun for most players. MMO games can do this as well, if they change some fundamental gameplay issues. It is, as he says, a short term negative thing but (if implemented correctly) a long term benefit. Sure, any developer can jump in and slaughter a great idea, but that leads me to:
2 - instancing. He's arguing that you lose the point of being in a huge world if you can't get the interaction of the full online world. You may as well be hosting your own server for your friends when in an instanced dungeon. Now, I think instancing is a great concept, but it's being used as a solution for too many of the wrong problems.
I guess I'm not saying you're wrong here, as most of this is opinion based anyhow... but I think you're being a bit harsh in regards to these two topics in particular.
It might already be able to. I don't have an iPod, but what you describe has been standard for quite some time with iTunes.
http://www.zophar.net
http://www.emuunlim.com
between these two sites I can almost always find a viable alternative to any platform that I've been interested in.
Howabout looking for a new job? I'd love it if I were paid to find my next place of employment...
Assuming that people do turn off the preview pane, what makes you think that they won't just immediately double-click a message that they are unsure about? I think it's a far better idea to disable HTML and images (is that possible in outlook? I'm an OS X/web based e-mail user). As was mentioned above 99% of these are spam or related material anyhow. Further, I use the preview pane as the main reading point under OS X's mail app. Why should I have to double-click the mouse every time I read an e-mail instead of simply scrolling with the arrow keys?
As a mac programmer, I've got an 800 Mhz TiBook. I need to go on-site with some of our customers occasionally, among other things, and a laptop is a must. Our codebase compiles in around 10 minutes for me. We're getting a round of new G5's here shortly for the desktop crowd in office, and with the "prototype" machine, our codebase compiles in ~3 minutes as opposed to 15 minutes on the older (granted, somewhat dated) desktop machines. It very much makes a difference to some of us. For general web surfing and home use it's probably not a big deal, but there's definitely a push for it in other areas.
Unfortunately they are claiming that you DON'T OWN ANYTHING. They say that you click in the "I disagree" box then you have zero rights whatsoever. That you're just licensing the game and you don't own anything other than a license to use it. And only a license to use the game from the specific CD you purchased.
That's nuts, and it would be a very bad thing if this came out in their favor.
Why should it be different, or why IS it different?
I believe it IS different because cable TV is not (yet?) a utility, and is not government regulated. As far as I know, anyhow.
No, it shouldn't be different.
If you like the leatherman idea...
My wife got me one of these for my birthday when we were dating. It's been the best pocketknife/screwdriver I've ever owned.
http://www.computergear.com/swisarcybtoo.html
It's customized for tech work, so most of the time you never need to use a different screwdriver. Excellent stuff, and if you look around you should be able to get one well under $100.
Good luck!
iChat 2.0 supports audio only chat, at least mac to mac. This is probably an upgrade on the windows side to be compatible with this, and possibly enhance things a bit in both camps.
"Single income families have become double income families. How this is a bad thing I don't understand."
Financially it may look good, but as far as having a real living family, it sucks. Also this is ignoring the many single parents that are out there nowadays.
I personally am a programmer, in fear of being outsourced one day in the future. My wife doesn't work, she stays home. We've done both working and not for her and our overall quality of life is much BETTER with her not working, regardless of the financial difficulties, especially for our children. If she needed to get a job could she? Sure. Does that mean it's a good idea? Not necessarily.
The choice that we have to allow her to stay at home is dwindling. I'm grateful that I can continue to support our family on my income, but how long will it last? I'm one of the higher paid programmers at our (small) company, and I feel lucky to have broken the 50k barrier this past year. I hope I can hold on at least long enough for our children to get into school -- so that I don't have to have a day care raising my kids!
It scares me that so many people feel that money is the only factor in these things.
I'm not so sure they're marketing these features correctly then.
My wife agreed to get an xbox because of the DVD and mp3 capabilities. She now uses it more than I do...! It's been much more than a game console to us. I'd be surprised if they took away DVD, but the music potential has a lot of merit, particularly to non-techies. Who wouldn't like not having to swap out CD's all the time to listen to music?
I don't mind the plug at all, but sheesh. Nothing like kicking someone when they're down...
There are plenty of us in Utah valley who are sick to death of SCO.
And, ironically, Novell is also based just a few miles away and are one of the major players in this, on the other side.
It's unfortuante that the silent majority of Americans get a bad rep by the (agreeably many) bad public examples you see in the news and media nowadays.
Uhm...
I'm glad you don't run my local government. =)
Sure Utah's gov't has it's problems, but so does everyone elses. I happen to live in that small town nearby that offers a cable modem as a utility. I pay $35 a month for high speed access (that's total, including ISP fees, though you can ask to be routed to a commercial ISP if you'd like). I think it's fantastic, and really, it works out very well as a utility. They've been one of the better ISPs I've been with, they're making a profit, and it's cheaper than any other solution out there.
This was put in place by the city because the "competition" decided that there was no market for high speed internet in our area, while 20 miles away there are 3 companies pushing it. They wouldn't offer it, so the city did. I think it was a good decision. If It's done right, then it's definitely a Good Thing(TM).
Don't knock it 'til you try it.
Check out http://www.sfcn.org
Unfortuantely the majority of the "demo" code on this guy's site is directly related to the games, and (IIRC, I'm too lazy to re-read this) the parent I replied to among other people seemed to be talking about the games themselves. That's why I went off about that. I agree with a software project like GameSpy, this kind of exploit hanging around for extended periods is silly.
And no, I don't think it's excusable coding practice if you can help it, but I can see how it can (and probably often does) happen in a business environment with tight deadlines. Saying these kinds of problems shouldn't happen ever is unrealistic IMO.
If GameSpy is to be believed, the guy didn't tell them what the bug was, just that the bug was there and had a program (with no source) to exploit it.
It think both parties are at fault to some extent here, but I'd guess that GameSpy is doing a lot better than most of the people here are making them out to be.
WTH?
Are any of you guys developers?
Assuming you're using C strings and not the STL, you almost always have to make a few assumptions somewhere. Blame the C language, not the programmers. In an ideal world everyone would use the STL or other means of automatic allocation of memory, but get real -- I'm working with software that has literally millions of lines of 10+ year old code, and doing so every day. The STL didn't even EXIST for most of our product's life cycle. If our small company were to audit all possible buffer overflows with our team of 7 programmers, it'd take us months just to make sure we had gotten rid of the problem and (this is key) NOT MESSED ANYTHING ELSE UP in the process. Not to mention all of the deveolper time wasted.
Sure game companies have generally a larger staff and higher budget, and they can put themselves in a different situation... but come on people. Give them a little credit. It's not like they're creating a firewall or something, it's a GAME. They shouldn't have to worry so much about it. That they do at all is only because of how the gameplay might be impacted. Bleh. Slashdot is so one sided sometimes. Read the article and we're all experts. I can't believe that because we all heard about this guys side first, everyone thinks he's being repressed by the DMCA.
/rant off.
I actually did as another poster suggested after reading the article and dropped a line to gamespy about it. They gave me a canned reply, but at least they gave me a reply. IIRC the wording was different than it was in the updated headline here, so I'll post it:
Hi Slycrel,
This is from our Chairman and Founder Mark Surfas:
GameSpy welcomes any and all help finding genuine bugs and security breaches on our servers. What we don't welcome are people publishing security hacks that have the potential to hurt our products. GameSpy products are supposed to be about having fun, but hacks and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks take the fun out of it. It doesn't simply hurt GameSpy; it hurts every person playing games with our products.
What this person did was more than reverse engineer two of our products, RogerWilco and GameSpy3D-he was describing our backend services and publishing CDkey generation information without letting us know. At first we welcomed his bug alerts. We responded to him immediately and thanked him for his bug research, as we do with everyone who contacts us with bug information. We even sent him a thank you letter, which we have on file.
But then we found out he was also publishing how to brute force our RogerWilco CDkeys and had published hacks on other game CDkeys as well. He was doing more than reporting bugs; he was publishing game pirating techniques. He published how to attack our network. This is not the way ethical security researchers operate. It was at this point that we stopped our communication with him and asked him to remove the materials in question.
When we were first contacted, this person was associated with a small software security company. They asked if GameSpy wanted to pay a "consulting fee" to fix the hacks. However, these were not bugs; it was information about how our products work. When we brought this to the software security company's attention, they disavowed their relationship with that person and removed him from their servers.
Let me repeat-we welcome any bug alerts and will fix any and all security breaches that come to our attention. We find and fix nearly all of them before any external sources find them. It's all about playing games and having fun, people! That's why we do what we do! However, we won't pay "consulting fees" to people who create CDkey hacks of our proprietary software, then post the results if we don't pay them.
Gamers trust us. We have to protect them from any and all attacks on our network that affects gamers.
Mark Surfas
Chairman & Founder
GameSpy