Having actually bought Glider a long time ago and using it up until the the first expansion I can testify...it was better than a real player at it's job.
If you spent a few hours setting up tings such as sufficient waypoints, added in modifications to automatically discard low value items and picked low traffic areas it was brutally efficient at making gold. Once you set up the proper parameters it would work nonstop letting the hunter pet do a significant portion of the damage (saving on ammunition which conversely saved trips back and forth). It never got distracted by the sheer boredom of target-kill-run to next target tatics.
I ran it for several months nearly 24/7 and the account was never caught...and is still a valid account if I cared to reactivate it.
I'm unrepentant...I've used various bots to do tedious tasks better suited to a CPU since EverQuest. I see it as a design flaw in the game that was brilliant filled by a 3rd party developer.
To me it's no different than using a calculator in lieu of busting out the papyrus and doing my math that way.
I find the situation startling familiar. It's downright creepy to read this scenario.
Back in the late 90s I was the sysadmin of a moderately sized ISP. When we started out I was one of three network engineers hired to build the ISP; eventually I ended up in 'charge' of the system.
Like the article I also was very protective of my network, and as paranoid as this individual is made out to be. Granted I was in my 20s and suitably arrogant to boot, more on this in a moment.
As time went on first one, then the other guy quit after working 80 hours a week without the possibility of time off...things only got worse as people quit.
When it was down to me I made sure the owners knew the passwords to everything, but they lacked any knowledge of how to do anything. This came back to haunt me later as you'll see.
Eventually I too got fed up and went to work for another company that wasn't a direct competitor. Before I left I advised management on changing all passwords for both of our sakes. I tried to explain everything but nobody understood the technical aspects.
Two months later I got a visit from the FBI. 8 grueling hours of interrogation later from armed men I found out that the entire network had crashed, and I was under suspicion as having remotely logged in and crashing their system. It wasn't until later I found out they never hired a replacement, and my system simply collapsed due to lack of maintenance.
It's easy to be painted out as the bad guy when you intimately know the network while being managed by a bunch of clueless twits. I don't know if that's the case in this guy's case, but I can see it working either way.
Unfortunately it's damn hard.
No more attachments. Email isn't a file transfer protocol. There are many many many other safe ways to send files. Email was never meant to send binary attachments anyway. The RFC doesn't allow it. To comply, a dirty hack was created in which binary data is turned into plain text. But it's obvious email wasn't meant to be used in that fashion.
I'd love a pop3 proxy that I could install on a iptables box to strip 'em. Any suggestions out there?
a first for online role-playing games, which have previously only featured silent characters that interact with players by sending them text chat messages"
Excellent research there bosco, unfortunately it's wrong.
Earth and Beyond had many NPC characters that spoke to players. The only problem was with a MMOG bringing the voice actors back in every few months to re-do changing lines gets expensive.
My fiancee and I have played just about ever genre out there togther. She hands me my butt in FPSs (I used to be better, but she's more accurate now), I whip her in RTS and we have a blast in MMOGs togther.
I once asked her why she choses gender neutral names when the game offers only male character models, or choses male models 90% of the time when offered a choice.
It's all about attitude. Most young male gamers are sexist rude pigs towards women. Most of the remaining are more interested in harassing her than playing once they find out she's a 'chick'. They don't care about her aptitude (she's one of the highest characters in our current MMOG ; in FPSs she's always in the top 5% of the game at the moment, etc) they want to know about 'her boobz' and such.
Sha said it best once before "If I could strip their anonymonity away when acting like that I'd always play a female. Most guys act like assholes because they're anonymous on the internet so they feel they can get away with it."
And she's right. I'm ashamed at my fellow man (pun intended) when I see how they react. The first time in history gender is transparent we still act like male dogs in heat around a member of the opposite sex.
Female players who go out of their way to 'stand out' in my opinion are only one step above the male sexist pigs. I've seen the chatbars when she joined an all-girl clan once. I think both of us were equally disgusted at the attention whoring that went on.
Personally I'm looking forward to the point where this all blows over. It seems once every few months we hear about these 'rare' female gamers out there. There's more than you think folks, they're just playing under male names so they get treated like everybody else.
Preface: I'm an old gamer, not a political activist. I've placed several MMOGs (UO/EQ/DAOC/Earth and Beyond/Priston Tale/Savage Eden/AO/Eve/Horizons)
As was stated here before, MMOGs aren't a very good model to base real life on. Why?
1)Accountability. In MMOGs you can't get a punch in the face for making lewd comments to a member of the opposite sex for example. People are more 'loose' with their actions and statements without the imminent threat of physical pain or restrictions of their freedom. If the worst thing that can happen to you is a few days suspension or even a ban from the game....if you want to be counter-social there isn't much to stop you.
2)Input, and how it changes things. Every MMOG I've played to date provides lip service to user input for change, but it's false. As a gamer you can't really change anything the developer doesn't want you to. This may seem to be a parallel to real life until you realize that the chance is always there for revolution through the use of violence. I mean really, what are you going to do when something is changed hundreds (thousands?) don't like? Stamp your virtual feet and hold your character's breath till they turn blue? I suppose if you're wanting to model a dictatorship then it may be accurate. I know from personal experience at least one of these 'industry leaders' behaved more like Sadam or Adolf than Washington or Kennedy.
3) Don't like your elected officials? Vote them out! Don't like your developer? Here, have this nice can of Vaseline and a pack of Marlboros. It's either that or pack your toys and play in the other sandbox.
4) Freedom of Speech.
As of Tuesday, Sept. 9th at 2pm PST, the SWG community forums will only be accessible to active players of SWG.
For most of you, there will be no significant impact. The forums already required that you be an SWG player in order to post. The main change most of you should notice is that you will be required to log into the site before you can read any messages.
Thanks for your attention on this matter.
-Raph Koster,
Creative Director
Er, I was referring to the negativity, not the closed nature of the forum. Sorry you spent all that time hunting around...
-Raph Koster
Don't like what your 'community' has to say about you? Filter it! Castro would be proud. I'm sure if he was involved the first thing that would happen is you'd have to prove you're an American citizen to post on slashdot.gov (I mean Koster, not the other dictator).
"And maybe that's because the designers of virtual worlds like Star Wars Galaxies, Second Life and others face some of the same issues as the government types."
Hardly. In a game 'money' isn't a commodity that runs out. People don't starve to death because you made a bad policy decision in EQ. The last time I looked mothers weren't crying because their SWG babies were killed during the batte of Endor. And try as I might, I can't recall a single Jenquai in Earth & Beyond complaining about the developer's healthcare plan.
Your whole perspective on life is changed when you can just push a mouse button and you're back alive again.
Saying a MMOG is a good model for real life is like saying paper airplanes are good models for stealth fighters. MMOGs are without exception ran like miniature dictatorships.
I suppose I should quantify my statement. MMOGs are good models for tiny communist island nations, not large democracies.
I am writing concerning the piece entitled ""Linux cyber-battle turns nasty"".
I have been a IT systems engineer for the past 15 years, during that time I even freelanced as a technology journalist myself. It bothered me greatly to see a company such as the BBC (whom I as an American hold in high regard) publish such pure un-researched rubbish.
It may do well to inform Mr. Evans of a few facts, and maybe a little history.
The Virus has not, in fact, been proven to originate from "internet zealots who believe that code should be free to all". But first, a little history lesson. Around 1200 B.C. the Greeks were seeking to gain entrance into Troy during Trojan war. Clever Odysseus (some say with the aid of Athena) ordered a large wooden horse to be built. Its insides were to be hollow so that soldiers could hide within it. Once the artist Epeius had built the statue, a number of the Greek warriors, along with Odysseus, climbed inside. The rest of the Greek fleet sailed away, so as to deceive the Trojans. One man, Sinon, was left behind. When the Trojans came to marvel at the huge creation, Sinon pretended to be angry with the Greeks, stating that they had deserted him. He assured the Trojans that the wooden horse was safe and would bring luck to the Trojans. Only two people, Laocoon and Cassandra, spoke out against the horse, but they were ignored. The Trojans celebrated what they thought was their victory, and dragged the wooden horse into Troy. That night, after most of Troy was asleep or in a drunken stupor, Sinon let the Greek warriors out from the horse, and they slaughtered the Trojans. It's been widely theorized that the worm is actually using the SCO DoS as a diversion to deflect attention away from the real problem while the lone worm author, like Sinon, pretends to be angry with SCO. Nowhere in the article does he mention what most feel is the primary payload of the worm. The worm in fact also runs a backdoor component, which it drops as the file SHIMGAPI.DLL. The backdoor component opens port 3127 to 3198 to allow remote users to access and manipulate infected systems. Note that it allows remote access even after February 12, 2004. This will allow remote control of the infected PC to be used for much more nefarious schemes such as sending unsolicited email, illegal access attempts on other computers or a wide range of activated without the user even aware of the problem.
I use a plethora of operating systems, including Linux. I do not consider myself a zealot, but simply an informed computer user. The less informed turn to people like myself, and to the press for information about things such as this latest worm attack. It does neither the consumer nor the press any good to spread such false accusations masquerading as facts. I expect such poor yellow journalism from The Enquirer or The Sun, not from the BBC. I've always respected the journalistic integrity of the BBC until now and I'm feel somewhat diminished for it. It's a shame when even British news sources publish such tripe I've come to expect from American news.
It the blasted browser wasn't built into the OS.
The number one problem I've had in converting people to Firebird/Opera (I don't care witch personally, just get OFF IE) has been:
But it starts up so much slower than IE
No matter how much I try to explain it to people they just don't get it. It's the old "security v/s convience" problem we've always faced.
If IE wasn't so tightly wound up in Windows it wouldn't have that advantage. Of course we all realize M$ isn't going to undo it and until a viable alternative is available on the desktop for the "unwashed masses" this kind of thing will keep coming back over and over unfortunately.
" The spammers don't have to link to the original image, they can just copy it and serve it from the porn site. If done correctly, the free email server would never see anything out of the ordinary."...except for a large number of request for accounts from a single IP address.
*Preface: I'm not a hax0r or even a programmer. Just a crusty old sysadmin*
It's plausable. If spammers run the pr0n site they then whip up a script to initate the "signup" of free email when somebody agrees to see their site. Something keeps the webpage loading while in the background a session to yahoo/hotmail is spawned getting up to the Captcha part. It retrieves the image, presents it to the human. Access is granted to pornsite, solution to Captcha handed off to background process.
Even given my limited cgi/perl knowledge I believe I could make it work. It'd be kludgy, but as long as I had a steady stream of pervs looking at the site it'd work.
I've been using the Focus FK series for years. They have good "clicky" keys, a built-in calculator, and 12 programmable keys. Those are handy for anytime you have a repetetive keystroke series you have to type in. My current one is about 8 years old (FK8200) and still works well.
I highly suggest them to anyone who hates these "mushy" keyboards that PCs ship with nowadays.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember seeing his receipt years ago.
I don't see western audiences paying for that particular game. It's so rife with cheating there's no point to upgrading your character.
Having actually bought Glider a long time ago and using it up until the the first expansion I can testify...it was better than a real player at it's job. If you spent a few hours setting up tings such as sufficient waypoints, added in modifications to automatically discard low value items and picked low traffic areas it was brutally efficient at making gold. Once you set up the proper parameters it would work nonstop letting the hunter pet do a significant portion of the damage (saving on ammunition which conversely saved trips back and forth). It never got distracted by the sheer boredom of target-kill-run to next target tatics. I ran it for several months nearly 24/7 and the account was never caught...and is still a valid account if I cared to reactivate it. I'm unrepentant...I've used various bots to do tedious tasks better suited to a CPU since EverQuest. I see it as a design flaw in the game that was brilliant filled by a 3rd party developer. To me it's no different than using a calculator in lieu of busting out the papyrus and doing my math that way.
I find the situation startling familiar. It's downright creepy to read this scenario. Back in the late 90s I was the sysadmin of a moderately sized ISP. When we started out I was one of three network engineers hired to build the ISP; eventually I ended up in 'charge' of the system. Like the article I also was very protective of my network, and as paranoid as this individual is made out to be. Granted I was in my 20s and suitably arrogant to boot, more on this in a moment. As time went on first one, then the other guy quit after working 80 hours a week without the possibility of time off...things only got worse as people quit. When it was down to me I made sure the owners knew the passwords to everything, but they lacked any knowledge of how to do anything. This came back to haunt me later as you'll see. Eventually I too got fed up and went to work for another company that wasn't a direct competitor. Before I left I advised management on changing all passwords for both of our sakes. I tried to explain everything but nobody understood the technical aspects. Two months later I got a visit from the FBI. 8 grueling hours of interrogation later from armed men I found out that the entire network had crashed, and I was under suspicion as having remotely logged in and crashing their system. It wasn't until later I found out they never hired a replacement, and my system simply collapsed due to lack of maintenance. It's easy to be painted out as the bad guy when you intimately know the network while being managed by a bunch of clueless twits. I don't know if that's the case in this guy's case, but I can see it working either way.
Unfortunately it's damn hard. No more attachments. Email isn't a file transfer protocol. There are many many many other safe ways to send files. Email was never meant to send binary attachments anyway. The RFC doesn't allow it. To comply, a dirty hack was created in which binary data is turned into plain text. But it's obvious email wasn't meant to be used in that fashion. I'd love a pop3 proxy that I could install on a iptables box to strip 'em. Any suggestions out there?
a first for online role-playing games, which have previously only featured silent characters that interact with players by sending them text chat messages" Excellent research there bosco, unfortunately it's wrong. Earth and Beyond had many NPC characters that spoke to players. The only problem was with a MMOG bringing the voice actors back in every few months to re-do changing lines gets expensive.
My fiancee and I have played just about ever genre out there togther. She hands me my butt in FPSs (I used to be better, but she's more accurate now), I whip her in RTS and we have a blast in MMOGs togther.
I once asked her why she choses gender neutral names when the game offers only male character models, or choses male models 90% of the time when offered a choice.
It's all about attitude. Most young male gamers are sexist rude pigs towards women. Most of the remaining are more interested in harassing her than playing once they find out she's a 'chick'. They don't care about her aptitude (she's one of the highest characters in our current MMOG ; in FPSs she's always in the top 5% of the game at the moment, etc) they want to know about 'her boobz' and such.
Sha said it best once before "If I could strip their anonymonity away when acting like that I'd always play a female. Most guys act like assholes because they're anonymous on the internet so they feel they can get away with it."
And she's right. I'm ashamed at my fellow man (pun intended) when I see how they react. The first time in history gender is transparent we still act like male dogs in heat around a member of the opposite sex.
Female players who go out of their way to 'stand out' in my opinion are only one step above the male sexist pigs. I've seen the chatbars when she joined an all-girl clan once. I think both of us were equally disgusted at the attention whoring that went on.
Personally I'm looking forward to the point where this all blows over. It seems once every few months we hear about these 'rare' female gamers out there. There's more than you think folks, they're just playing under male names so they get treated like everybody else.
As was stated here before, MMOGs aren't a very good model to base real life on. Why?
1)Accountability. In MMOGs you can't get a punch in the face for making lewd comments to a member of the opposite sex for example. People are more 'loose' with their actions and statements without the imminent threat of physical pain or restrictions of their freedom. If the worst thing that can happen to you is a few days suspension or even a ban from the game....if you want to be counter-social there isn't much to stop you.
2)Input, and how it changes things. Every MMOG I've played to date provides lip service to user input for change, but it's false. As a gamer you can't really change anything the developer doesn't want you to. This may seem to be a parallel to real life until you realize that the chance is always there for revolution through the use of violence. I mean really, what are you going to do when something is changed hundreds (thousands?) don't like? Stamp your virtual feet and hold your character's breath till they turn blue? I suppose if you're wanting to model a dictatorship then it may be accurate. I know from personal experience at least one of these 'industry leaders' behaved more like Sadam or Adolf than Washington or Kennedy.
3) Don't like your elected officials? Vote them out! Don't like your developer? Here, have this nice can of Vaseline and a pack of Marlboros. It's either that or pack your toys and play in the other sandbox.
4) Freedom of Speech.
-Raph Koster
Don't like what your 'community' has to say about you? Filter it! Castro would be proud. I'm sure if he was involved the first thing that would happen is you'd have to prove you're an American citizen to post on slashdot.gov (I mean Koster, not the other dictator).
Hardly. In a game 'money' isn't a commodity that runs out. People don't starve to death because you made a bad policy decision in EQ. The last time I looked mothers weren't crying because their SWG babies were killed during the batte of Endor. And try as I might, I can't recall a single Jenquai in Earth & Beyond complaining about the developer's healthcare plan.
Your whole perspective on life is changed when you can just push a mouse button and you're back alive again.
Saying a MMOG is a good model for real life is like saying paper airplanes are good models for stealth fighters. MMOGs are without exception ran like miniature dictatorships.
I suppose I should quantify my statement. MMOGs are good models for tiny communist island nations, not large democracies.
I put in my bit as well:
I am writing concerning the piece entitled ""Linux cyber-battle turns nasty"".
I have been a IT systems engineer for the past 15 years, during that time I even freelanced as a technology journalist myself. It bothered me greatly to see a company such as the BBC (whom I as an American hold in high regard) publish such pure un-researched rubbish.
It may do well to inform Mr. Evans of a few facts, and maybe a little history.
The Virus has not, in fact, been proven to originate from "internet zealots who believe that code should be free to all". But first, a little history lesson.
Around 1200 B.C. the Greeks were seeking to gain entrance into Troy during Trojan war. Clever Odysseus (some say with the aid of Athena) ordered a large wooden horse to be built. Its insides were to be hollow so that soldiers could hide within it.
Once the artist Epeius had built the statue, a number of the Greek warriors, along with Odysseus, climbed inside. The rest of the Greek fleet sailed away, so as to deceive the Trojans. One man, Sinon, was left behind. When the Trojans came to marvel at the huge creation, Sinon pretended to be angry with the Greeks, stating that they had deserted him. He assured the Trojans that the wooden horse was safe and would bring luck to the Trojans. Only two people, Laocoon and Cassandra, spoke out against the horse, but they were ignored. The Trojans celebrated what they thought was their victory, and dragged the wooden horse into Troy.
That night, after most of Troy was asleep or in a drunken stupor, Sinon let the Greek warriors out from the horse, and they slaughtered the Trojans.
It's been widely theorized that the worm is actually using the SCO DoS as a diversion to deflect attention away from the real problem while the lone worm author, like Sinon, pretends to be angry with SCO.
Nowhere in the article does he mention what most feel is the primary payload of the worm. The worm in fact also runs a backdoor component, which it drops as the file SHIMGAPI.DLL. The backdoor component opens port 3127 to 3198 to allow remote users to access and manipulate infected systems. Note that it allows remote access even after February 12, 2004. This will allow remote control of the infected PC to be used for much more nefarious schemes such as sending unsolicited email, illegal access attempts on other computers or a wide range of activated without the user even aware of the problem.
I use a plethora of operating systems, including Linux. I do not consider myself a zealot, but simply an informed computer user. The less informed turn to people like myself, and to the press for information about things such as this latest worm attack. It does neither the consumer nor the press any good to spread such false accusations masquerading as facts. I expect such poor yellow journalism from The Enquirer or The Sun, not from the BBC. I've always respected the journalistic integrity of the BBC until now and I'm feel somewhat diminished for it. It's a shame when even British news sources publish such tripe I've come to expect from American news.
It the blasted browser wasn't built into the OS.
The number one problem I've had in converting people to Firebird/Opera (I don't care witch personally, just get OFF IE) has been:
But it starts up so much slower than IE
No matter how much I try to explain it to people they just don't get it. It's the old "security v/s convience" problem we've always faced.
If IE wasn't so tightly wound up in Windows it wouldn't have that advantage. Of course we all realize M$ isn't going to undo it and until a viable alternative is available on the desktop for the "unwashed masses" this kind of thing will keep coming back over and over unfortunately.
" The spammers don't have to link to the original image, they can just copy it and serve it from the porn site. If done correctly, the free email server would never see anything out of the ordinary." ...except for a large number of request for accounts from a single IP address.
*Preface: I'm not a hax0r or even a programmer. Just a crusty old sysadmin* It's plausable. If spammers run the pr0n site they then whip up a script to initate the "signup" of free email when somebody agrees to see their site. Something keeps the webpage loading while in the background a session to yahoo/hotmail is spawned getting up to the Captcha part. It retrieves the image, presents it to the human. Access is granted to pornsite, solution to Captcha handed off to background process. Even given my limited cgi/perl knowledge I believe I could make it work. It'd be kludgy, but as long as I had a steady stream of pervs looking at the site it'd work.
I've been using the Focus FK series for years. They have good "clicky" keys, a built-in calculator, and 12 programmable keys. Those are handy for anytime you have a repetetive keystroke series you have to type in. My current one is about 8 years old (FK8200) and still works well. I highly suggest them to anyone who hates these "mushy" keyboards that PCs ship with nowadays.