Change WoW for EQ or UO or MUD/MUCK or IRC... WoW is not the 'evil' that people want to claim it is. If you look hard enough you can find a way to claim that everything is bad.
Assuming your math is accurate (and I'm too tired to look honestly) why were 5k systems used? Were the remaining 3740 used for control/coordination? If so that seems a little... sloppy in my mind. Or were these linked via a SETI-like configuration where nodes were coming on-/going off-line "at random"?
The area I'm living in the local power company is talking with land owners about renting some of their fields for putting in these towers. One person I know was offered 9k/year per tower and they're talking about possibly wanting to install 11 towers on their land.
It may not be currently feasable for the "average home owner" to do something like this, but at least some of the electric companies are looking into it to supplement their production.
How long before someone hacks up a device to wideband broadcast random code/garbage in an attempt to make guns discharge themselves before they should?
Imagine if world armies had this kind of hardware... load of fun I'd imagine. No need to drop 10t bombs on heavily fortified installations... Just drop one that has no explosive payload, just LOTS of EM/RF Gear in an attempt to make everyone shoot each other.
My guild has several French-speaking Canadians in it and they have very few problems making themselves understood, even over teamspeak where their accent comes into play. Players from the US who *should* be able to communicate via the written word do get made fun of to a certain degree, just like wankers on IRC and on forums. Usually in jest, but the point remains that they need to work on their ability to articulate.
And I don't see how that applies to point 1 which is "Please play the game on the servers for your country". Having friends in the US (or EU) and wanting to play with them I can understand, but it doesn't seem like they're playing with any "friends" when they're spamming up the cities with "WTS [Uber Sword of Death][Uber Sword of Death][Uber Sword of Death][Uber Sword of Death]" (and yes, they do multi-link the item for some reason).
Gold Farming is Gold Farming. Given that the guy wasn't contributing to the group, wanted the item *now* and was wearing all "Bind on Equip" gear (generally a pretty good sign it's a gold farmer. All items that are worth having at upper end are "Bind on Pick up" which means you have to kill and loot it yourself) tends to override his ability to form complete and coherent sentences and understand English. Just because someone DOES speak English doesn't mean they're NOT a Gold Farmer. Just because someone DOES NOT speak English (properly, at all or otherwise) doesn't mean they ARE a Gold Farmer.
So you have a level 1 mule with a name that's just you randomly hitting on the keyboard to get past the name creation phase? Something like Lbakkjadf or Vagjyasdf? These are the ones I'm talking about.
Personally, I'm not one for hiding behind an alt to sell crap. I see people abusing alts to "gouge" via the AH on things. If I'm going to sell something for X gold, I'm going to sell it for X gold. If no one wants to pay that much, then fine.. no one buys it. I don't see why I should have to log out to check and see if I've made any cash from selling something in the AH. I have to get somewhere, log to char select, choose the alt, log back in (and depending on how populated the AH is that could take a moment or 2) and then get to check and see. The hour delay for sending items doesn't help me much either.
And in the case of the "Company" owning the account(s), sure. The "Farmer" turns over items to the "Company" to sell. The "Company" "employs" a number of "fences" (L1 random named characters) to offload the merchandise. This frees up the "Farmer" to continue their work and keeps them from being able to "skim" profits. I see this being the most efficient use of resources. If the "Fence" accounts are busted they can be replaced. The time and energy lost (re)leveling Farmers is more expensive when they're busted.
Enforcement has never been selective. There has been enforcement when the number of complaints having to be processed outweighs the profits being made from the gold farmer account.
This is why most gold farmers have multiple accounts. Use one just for farming cash manually (grinding mobs), one for attempted ninja looting and selling item (disposable if necessary)
(1) They have localized servers. If they are wanting to "play the game" why are they not playing there?
(2) 9 times out of 10 the Gold Farmer (or as I refer to them "Foreign Language Virtual Asset Acquisition Agent") will screw things up in their greed-driven rush. Pull adds when we're not ready, have problems with Aggro Management, etc.
(3) 9 times out of 10 the FLVAAA will attempt to lie/cheat/steal in order to obtain something sellable. This includes claiming to "need" an item (using it to upgrade their character) and then instantly trying to sell it, attempting to "ninja-loot" an item (call it a "Snatch-n-Grab" in meat-space), or piss/whine/moan until the group just hands them something to shut them up. If the above fails they will attempt (typically via badly mangled English) to destroy the reputation of the group by calling them "Ninja-Looters" or something similar in open chat in Ironforge or Orgrimmar (where most of the bored higher level people hang out looking for something to do)
Why should I subject myself to this crap? If there is someone answering the LFM (Looking For More) call for a particular instance run and they can't say more than "me go" or "I want (insert Item name here). u give plz?" then I feel pretty justified in calling them a FLVAAA and adding them to my ignore list. If the person passes the "interview" but proves on the instance crawl that they're more interested in acquiring items, I'll boot them. I ran one instance crawl where the 3rd mob in dropped a decent "Bind On Equip" epic helm. 2 Hunters instantly voiced their desire for the helm and I explained that it would be dealt with at the end when we're deviding up the rest of the loot. It would be rolled for by Need basis and would have to be equipped on the spot. They both claimed the understood, but while Hunter 1 continued through the instance without further problems Hunter 2 was messaging me every 5 to 7 minutes asking for it to be rolled on *now*. After an hour of this I got sick and kicked Hunter 2 from the party. Hunter 2 was doing very little at all other than whining about the hat.
They've taken up the tatic of selling loot using "disposable characters". I see a level 1 Gnome named Jlsdkfj selling [Uber Sword] for 1250g, I know that's a Gold Farmer. I see the crap in the Auction House. They come up to me and shove Eternium and Thorium Lockboxes in my face without ASKING if I would mind opening it. 3 days later Jlsdkfj is gone and in his place spamming up IF (and now thanks to 1.9 Stormwind and Darnassus as well) selling the same items because no one BUT someone who bought the gold online would pay the inflated price they're asking.
I'm on the same page you are. This isn't Sony's "fault". I considered the same tactic with HackerDefender as a "work around" (not that I cheat, but more of a "I thought of this in 2 seconds, how long will it take the idiots who cheat to figure it out?") to get your leet sploits and bots working again.
Interesting twist. Now we're going to have "Music Piracy" by the "Chinese Gold Farmers" so they can make more "Phat Lewt" to sell for hard currency.
Not too sure on this point. I know that 7 of 9 didn't wear skirts and was one of the "hottest women in Star Trek" (at least per all the people I've heard discuss that subject) but I don't remember if T'Pol actually wore a skirt or not as I didn't watch that much of Enterprise. From what I remember though she wore pants and therefor only qualifies under the 'Alien' heading..
.... I can't believe I'm nit-picking over clothing and not acting like a rabid fanboi over said characters. I must be getting old or something.
I'm sure that works reasonably well, but once a system is comprimised, you never really know for sure. I find that the only surefire method, which incidentally often takes less time, is to wipe the drive and start fresh. The type of user that is going to get spyware probably doesn't have a complicated setup or do more than write documents and use iTunes, and backing up is as simple as looking for *.doc, *.xls, *.ppt, *.mp*, *.mov, *.wmv, and *.avi.
That works well till there's a sploit for Word or Excel or another one for WMP that allows you to embed a virus/spyware/rootkit in what appears to be an innocent Doc/Spreadsheet/pr0n vid.
It's a load of crap. The first page tells you this.
They're doing something that has been done manually by others (which automation of this would be helpful) which is to compare a dump of the drive's contents (dir/a/s/p > lie.txt or ls -laR > lie) with a dump of the same filesystem when the system is booted from secure media. If things (other than the expected "Known Microsoft Hidden Files") pop up, we can then examine those on a case-by-case basis and bingo, instant Rootkit on a pike.
The ONLY thing I'll give them credit for in this case is working on a way to automate the search. I've done this before by hand and it is QUITE a pain in the ass.
There was one poor bastard we kept pissing off because of his poor terminal software. Someone would toss out 'rz' in chat (even in the middle of a word) and it would invoke ZModem downloads. After a couple of hours he finally logged for the night.
And I always thought the ATH0 bug was an issue of the Terminal program, not the modem or it's drivers (should you be using windows at the time). I know on BBS's we had a few folks who threw MAJOR fits because someone(*cough*) had ATH0,ATA^M as a tagline on messages. It was throwing them off and it made it rather hard to read all the messages in your selected subs. After they were told to stop using crap terminal progs, the problems went away.
The last statement I read about the Threadsafe issues with PHP and Apache2 said that PHP *is* threadsafe, but they couldn't say the same for ALL the libs they link against.
If you compile PHP with *NO* extensions at all.. No MySQL support, no PCRE support, no pcntl support, etc, etc then it's safe to use, but MOST installs of PHP are needing access to MySQL, and probably a good number of the image functions (libpng, libjpeg, etc) so the warning is valid.
PHP challenging sendmail as the king of sploit apps? Please put the crack pipe down, that's a race between BIND and Sendmail.:p Also, blaming PHP for the issue of security holes in software written in PHP (like the latest worm that's killing boxes via a hole in PHPBB) is like blaming C for all the security holes in Windows. The language was used, and yes some implementations/versions do have internal security issues... but most of the "PHP Security" issues I've seen as of late are issues with someone coding an app badly in the language, not a direct exploit against the language.
Granted, it's early in the morning for me (who does work before 11am? Ugh!) and I haven't had my morning IV of caffeine so I could be forgetting something or a lot of somethings...
Except that odds are, they'll tell you that while THEY are thread-safe, the external libs you link against may not be, etc, etc, etc.
Same thing that PHP is doing, except PHP has gone an extra step and recommended against doing this for security reasons, which shows that they do understand that not everyone who's using their language is an actual geek who understands the security and system issues that could possibly arrise from this.
Imagine the poor SOB who comes in every morning to find his Windows server BSOD'ed.... All he has is a MCSE that's not worth the paper it's printed on and the how-to that told him how to setup Apache2 with one of these languages..
PHP to rewrite bzlib? zlib? OpenSSL? MySQL? MSSQL? Oracle?
I don't understand what you're getting at here. There are a TON of libs that PHP can be compiled to use/support that are completely 3rd party, and if the 3rd party lib isn't thread safe, it doesn't matter HOW locked down PHP is there are still going to be issues. If the thread gets destroyed or exploited outside of PHP in one of these other libs, HOW is that PHP's fault?
They made the statement that PHP on Apache2 was 'bad' because it would all roll back on them. This is mostly a CYA move on their part and one I don't blame them for taking. What I've read indicates that it works, but "Use At Your Own Risk" because they can't give a 100% guarantee that EVERYTHING is going to be safe. Look at it from the other end... different references for securing Apache2 have commented that if everything in your environment isn't thread-safe that there will be possible security and stability issues. The recommended approach is to ONLY use extension/modules/addons that are thread-safe. If we're saying that PHP is FUD'ing on Apache2 then almost all the securing Apache guides are FUD'ing all over ANYTHING that might not be 100% thread-safe that interfaces with Apache2.:p
This was the major reason that PHP has been said not to be used with Apache2. It has NOTHING to do with Apache, it's potential security issues with PHP and some non-thread-safe **EXTERNAL** libs. 95% of it is security related issues. If you're willing to pay attention to your server (like all good admins are supposed to do) there's no real problems that I've seen.
My understanding was the the NullSoft guys developed it but that it was in use in other areas of AOL giving pretty much anyone who wanted access to it, access... It seems to do a good number of things that WASTE did...
Slashdot Mirror
Change WoW for EQ or UO or MUD/MUCK or IRC... WoW is not the 'evil' that people want to claim it is. If you look hard enough you can find a way to claim that everything is bad.
Assuming your math is accurate (and I'm too tired to look honestly) why were 5k systems used? Were the remaining 3740 used for control/coordination? If so that seems a little... sloppy in my mind. Or were these linked via a SETI-like configuration where nodes were coming on-/going off-line "at random"?
The area I'm living in the local power company is talking with land owners about renting some of their fields for putting in these towers. One person I know was offered 9k/year per tower and they're talking about possibly wanting to install 11 towers on their land.
It may not be currently feasable for the "average home owner" to do something like this, but at least some of the electric companies are looking into it to supplement their production.
CMF.... Cubic Meters/Fortnight?
~0.0161 Cubic Meters/Minute?
~16.1 Cubic Milimeters/Minute?
~0.0009824 Cubic Inches/Minute?
I dunno. Converting those wacky units of measure always give me decimal problems.
At least give credit to Simon for the origial EtherKiller design. :p
"Show me a network with a collision and I'll show you a network that needs one less user."
Gee.... TOE Offloading is an option on several of the Gig Nics I've seen. What else really needs to be moved from the CPU/OS to the NIC?
How long before someone hacks up a device to wideband broadcast random code/garbage in an attempt to make guns discharge themselves before they should?
Imagine if world armies had this kind of hardware... load of fun I'd imagine. No need to drop 10t bombs on heavily fortified installations... Just drop one that has no explosive payload, just LOTS of EM/RF Gear in an attempt to make everyone shoot each other.
Remember Kids! Friendly Fire, Isn't.
Whoever penned this article CLEARLY does not play World of Warcraft.
"You're a Rogue, stand there and keep that little doodad on the floor while we fight over here and kill this dragon."
My guild has several French-speaking Canadians in it and they have very few problems making themselves understood, even over teamspeak where their accent comes into play. Players from the US who *should* be able to communicate via the written word do get made fun of to a certain degree, just like wankers on IRC and on forums. Usually in jest, but the point remains that they need to work on their ability to articulate.
And I don't see how that applies to point 1 which is "Please play the game on the servers for your country". Having friends in the US (or EU) and wanting to play with them I can understand, but it doesn't seem like they're playing with any "friends" when they're spamming up the cities with "WTS [Uber Sword of Death][Uber Sword of Death][Uber Sword of Death][Uber Sword of Death]" (and yes, they do multi-link the item for some reason).
Gold Farming is Gold Farming. Given that the guy wasn't contributing to the group, wanted the item *now* and was wearing all "Bind on Equip" gear (generally a pretty good sign it's a gold farmer. All items that are worth having at upper end are "Bind on Pick up" which means you have to kill and loot it yourself) tends to override his ability to form complete and coherent sentences and understand English. Just because someone DOES speak English doesn't mean they're NOT a Gold Farmer. Just because someone DOES NOT speak English (properly, at all or otherwise) doesn't mean they ARE a Gold Farmer.
So you have a level 1 mule with a name that's just you randomly hitting on the keyboard to get past the name creation phase? Something like Lbakkjadf or Vagjyasdf? These are the ones I'm talking about.
Personally, I'm not one for hiding behind an alt to sell crap. I see people abusing alts to "gouge" via the AH on things. If I'm going to sell something for X gold, I'm going to sell it for X gold. If no one wants to pay that much, then fine.. no one buys it. I don't see why I should have to log out to check and see if I've made any cash from selling something in the AH. I have to get somewhere, log to char select, choose the alt, log back in (and depending on how populated the AH is that could take a moment or 2) and then get to check and see. The hour delay for sending items doesn't help me much either.
And in the case of the "Company" owning the account(s), sure. The "Farmer" turns over items to the "Company" to sell. The "Company" "employs" a number of "fences" (L1 random named characters) to offload the merchandise. This frees up the "Farmer" to continue their work and keeps them from being able to "skim" profits. I see this being the most efficient use of resources. If the "Fence" accounts are busted they can be replaced. The time and energy lost (re)leveling Farmers is more expensive when they're busted.
After multiple bad relationships I'll just stay happy being single with a harem of computers.
:p hehe
At least when I turn them off it's intentional.
Enforcement has never been selective. There has been enforcement when the number of complaints having to be processed outweighs the profits being made from the gold farmer account.
This is why most gold farmers have multiple accounts. Use one just for farming cash manually (grinding mobs), one for attempted ninja looting and selling item (disposable if necessary)
(1) They have localized servers. If they are wanting to "play the game" why are they not playing there?
(2) 9 times out of 10 the Gold Farmer (or as I refer to them "Foreign Language Virtual Asset Acquisition Agent") will screw things up in their greed-driven rush. Pull adds when we're not ready, have problems with Aggro Management, etc.
(3) 9 times out of 10 the FLVAAA will attempt to lie/cheat/steal in order to obtain something sellable. This includes claiming to "need" an item (using it to upgrade their character) and then instantly trying to sell it, attempting to "ninja-loot" an item (call it a "Snatch-n-Grab" in meat-space), or piss/whine/moan until the group just hands them something to shut them up. If the above fails they will attempt (typically via badly mangled English) to destroy the reputation of the group by calling them "Ninja-Looters" or something similar in open chat in Ironforge or Orgrimmar (where most of the bored higher level people hang out looking for something to do)
Why should I subject myself to this crap? If there is someone answering the LFM (Looking For More) call for a particular instance run and they can't say more than "me go" or "I want (insert Item name here). u give plz?" then I feel pretty justified in calling them a FLVAAA and adding them to my ignore list. If the person passes the "interview" but proves on the instance crawl that they're more interested in acquiring items, I'll boot them. I ran one instance crawl where the 3rd mob in dropped a decent "Bind On Equip" epic helm. 2 Hunters instantly voiced their desire for the helm and I explained that it would be dealt with at the end when we're deviding up the rest of the loot. It would be rolled for by Need basis and would have to be equipped on the spot. They both claimed the understood, but while Hunter 1 continued through the instance without further problems Hunter 2 was messaging me every 5 to 7 minutes asking for it to be rolled on *now*. After an hour of this I got sick and kicked Hunter 2 from the party. Hunter 2 was doing very little at all other than whining about the hat.
They've taken up the tatic of selling loot using "disposable characters". I see a level 1 Gnome named Jlsdkfj selling [Uber Sword] for 1250g, I know that's a Gold Farmer. I see the crap in the Auction House. They come up to me and shove Eternium and Thorium Lockboxes in my face without ASKING if I would mind opening it. 3 days later Jlsdkfj is gone and in his place spamming up IF (and now thanks to 1.9 Stormwind and Darnassus as well) selling the same items because no one BUT someone who bought the gold online would pay the inflated price they're asking.
I'm on the same page you are. This isn't Sony's "fault". I considered the same tactic with HackerDefender as a "work around" (not that I cheat, but more of a "I thought of this in 2 seconds, how long will it take the idiots who cheat to figure it out?") to get your leet sploits and bots working again.
Interesting twist. Now we're going to have "Music Piracy" by the "Chinese Gold Farmers" so they can make more "Phat Lewt" to sell for hard currency.
Not too sure on this point. I know that 7 of 9 didn't wear skirts and was one of the "hottest women in Star Trek" (at least per all the people I've heard discuss that subject) but I don't remember if T'Pol actually wore a skirt or not as I didn't watch that much of Enterprise. From what I remember though she wore pants and therefor only qualifies under the 'Alien' heading..
.... I can't believe I'm nit-picking over clothing and not acting like a rabid fanboi over said characters. I must be getting old or something.
"whereas in Star Trek, all the women were either aliens or wore short skirts."
And some were both.
I'm sure that works reasonably well, but once a system is comprimised, you never really know for sure. I find that the only surefire method, which incidentally often takes less time, is to wipe the drive and start fresh. The type of user that is going to get spyware probably doesn't have a complicated setup or do more than write documents and use iTunes, and backing up is as simple as looking for *.doc, *.xls, *.ppt, *.mp*, *.mov, *.wmv, and *.avi.
That works well till there's a sploit for Word or Excel or another one for WMP that allows you to embed a virus/spyware/rootkit in what appears to be an innocent Doc/Spreadsheet/pr0n vid.
It's a load of crap. The first page tells you this.
/a /s /p > lie.txt or ls -laR > lie) with a dump of the same filesystem when the system is booted from secure media. If things (other than the expected "Known Microsoft Hidden Files") pop up, we can then examine those on a case-by-case basis and bingo, instant Rootkit on a pike.
They're doing something that has been done manually by others (which automation of this would be helpful) which is to compare a dump of the drive's contents (dir
The ONLY thing I'll give them credit for in this case is working on a way to automate the search. I've done this before by hand and it is QUITE a pain in the ass.
There was one poor bastard we kept pissing off because of his poor terminal software. Someone would toss out 'rz' in chat (even in the middle of a word) and it would invoke ZModem downloads. After a couple of hours he finally logged for the night.
And I always thought the ATH0 bug was an issue of the Terminal program, not the modem or it's drivers (should you be using windows at the time). I know on BBS's we had a few folks who threw MAJOR fits because someone(*cough*) had ATH0,ATA^M as a tagline on messages. It was throwing them off and it made it rather hard to read all the messages in your selected subs. After they were told to stop using crap terminal progs, the problems went away.
The last statement I read about the Threadsafe issues with PHP and Apache2 said that PHP *is* threadsafe, but they couldn't say the same for ALL the libs they link against.
:p Also, blaming PHP for the issue of security holes in software written in PHP (like the latest worm that's killing boxes via a hole in PHPBB) is like blaming C for all the security holes in Windows. The language was used, and yes some implementations/versions do have internal security issues... but most of the "PHP Security" issues I've seen as of late are issues with someone coding an app badly in the language, not a direct exploit against the language.
If you compile PHP with *NO* extensions at all.. No MySQL support, no PCRE support, no pcntl support, etc, etc then it's safe to use, but MOST installs of PHP are needing access to MySQL, and probably a good number of the image functions (libpng, libjpeg, etc) so the warning is valid.
PHP challenging sendmail as the king of sploit apps? Please put the crack pipe down, that's a race between BIND and Sendmail.
Granted, it's early in the morning for me (who does work before 11am? Ugh!) and I haven't had my morning IV of caffeine so I could be forgetting something or a lot of somethings...
Except that odds are, they'll tell you that while THEY are thread-safe, the external libs you link against may not be, etc, etc, etc.
Same thing that PHP is doing, except PHP has gone an extra step and recommended against doing this for security reasons, which shows that they do understand that not everyone who's using their language is an actual geek who understands the security and system issues that could possibly arrise from this.
Imagine the poor SOB who comes in every morning to find his Windows server BSOD'ed.... All he has is a MCSE that's not worth the paper it's printed on and the how-to that told him how to setup Apache2 with one of these languages..
PHP to rewrite bzlib? zlib? OpenSSL? MySQL? MSSQL? Oracle?
:p
I don't understand what you're getting at here. There are a TON of libs that PHP can be compiled to use/support that are completely 3rd party, and if the 3rd party lib isn't thread safe, it doesn't matter HOW locked down PHP is there are still going to be issues. If the thread gets destroyed or exploited outside of PHP in one of these other libs, HOW is that PHP's fault?
They made the statement that PHP on Apache2 was 'bad' because it would all roll back on them. This is mostly a CYA move on their part and one I don't blame them for taking. What I've read indicates that it works, but "Use At Your Own Risk" because they can't give a 100% guarantee that EVERYTHING is going to be safe. Look at it from the other end... different references for securing Apache2 have commented that if everything in your environment isn't thread-safe that there will be possible security and stability issues. The recommended approach is to ONLY use extension/modules/addons that are thread-safe. If we're saying that PHP is FUD'ing on Apache2 then almost all the securing Apache guides are FUD'ing all over ANYTHING that might not be 100% thread-safe that interfaces with Apache2.
This was the major reason that PHP has been said not to be used with Apache2. It has NOTHING to do with Apache, it's potential security issues with PHP and some non-thread-safe **EXTERNAL** libs. 95% of it is security related issues. If you're willing to pay attention to your server (like all good admins are supposed to do) there's no real problems that I've seen.
My understanding was the the NullSoft guys developed it but that it was in use in other areas of AOL giving pretty much anyone who wanted access to it, access... It seems to do a good number of things that WASTE did...
Wouldn't this be a cleaned up and repackaged version of WASTE?