You are spreading misinformation and creating uncertainty and doubt.
As someone who until recently worked in Blizzard customer support, I can tell you there is absolutely no chance that your account details were leaked from within the company.
,
BULLSH*T. You are telling me that you personally know every single person you worked with and who has access to customer's account info is so fine and upstanding of a citizen that there is NO POSSIBLE WAY that they could ever have a side deal with gold farmers to make some extra cash on accounts that are no longer being used? I call ABSOLUTE BULLSH*T on that. ABSOLUTE. No big company has 100% saints. Much less one as money hungry as Blizzard.
If you are saying that there physically isn't any way for a compromised Blizzard employee to give someone else access to my account I also find that highly unlikely, but perhaps within the realm of possibility (I have no way of knowing what controls Blizzard actually has on accounts). It would be interesting to know which you mean, but perhaps you cannot say.
Gold sellers are in the business of selling gold for real money, they have a vested interest in compromising accounts in any way they possibly can. Most commonly, people are the victims of phishing scams, but gold sellers try exploit every weakness they can, including: use of malware, zero day software vulnerabilities, trying email passwords they got from hacked websites and forums, use of common passwords between, account sharing, etc. They are *very* determined since they get a paycheck from it at the end of the day.
At this point you are no doubt already thinking of your response in which you will endeavour to explain that it's impossible *you* were compromised in some way and that it *must* be through a fault of Blizzard. I am sorry, but even though you may be too ashamed or proud to admit it, you need to swallow your pride and accept that your account was *in fact* compromised due to a failure on your part with account security and you should carefully evaluate your account security practices or you will be compromised again in a similar way in the future, if not in WoW, then for some other service.
If you choose to believe it couldn't have been your fault, then you are simply in denial and although it may make you may sleep better at night, you are still as insecure as when your account got compromised in the first place.
My account was not compromised by me or my machine. Of that I am 95% positive (no way to be 100% positive in this world). It MAY just possibly have been compromised by the hack of a 3rd party since my password was a variation of a password on another site, but since that site has not reported any 'hacks', I somewhat doubt this as well. And my password was pretty unique and 10 characters, including specials.
And aside from the above, how would any hypothetical 'random gold farmer' JUST HAPPEN to reopen my account RIGHT AFTER I CLOSED IT! And I am not the only one this has happened to. I already mentioned my guildy (on the other side of the country and not my close friend). What are the ODDS OF THAT? Seriously. Without a Blizzard 'bad actor', WHAT ARE THE ODDS OF THAT?!?!?! VERY F*CKING low. VERY. F*CKING. LOW. And if that isn't enough look at the poor bleepard further down the page. He had it happen to him MULTIPLE TIMES ON CLOSED ACCOUNTS! Are you seriously claiming that this is just coincidence?
Blizzard also expends a significant amount of resources addressing compromised accounts and even worse, it's bad PR for them when people are victims, Blizzard has *every* interest in cutting down the number of compromised accounts. This is also demonstrated by them making the mobile authenticator a free download, or the physical token which is available for a nominal fee (less than $10 *including* shipping).
In regards to your account still having not been unbanned after 4 months, there are few explanations.
My case. Last year I decided I had finally played enough WoW. I had 2 characters at level 85 and 2 others at level 80. After thousands of hours of WoWing, the fun just wasn't there any more. So, I cancelled my account.
I cancelled my account on April 26th, 2011. As of May 1st, my account was supposedly no longer 'active'. On May 15th, 2011, I got an email from Blizzard indicating that my account had been banned for 'gold selling'. How in the f*** is that possible, I asked myself? I don't even have an active account any more! So of course I contacted Blizzard and told them the circumstances (as well as me being absolutely positive that my PC had no root kit and no viruses - and believe me I checked, long and well) and got a useless 'Your Account Has Been Hacked' form letter from them and them telling me to reset my password and follow this 'process'. So I did that and my ACCOUNT REMAINED BANNED for at least several weeks, which (very conveniently for Blizzard) kept me from posting this issue into their forums. Apparently Blizzard has some folks 'inside' who sell cancelled account details to gold farmers. I know this because this same exact thing happened to another guildy of mine. You'd think Blizzard would want to know that. You'd think they would take action. But they don't and they didn't.
So, Blizzard can and DOES ban people that do not deserve to be banned. Even customers who paid them monthly for over 4 years.
So they can burn in hell forever as far as I am concerned. I am DONE with Blizzard. Will never buy another game from them again. Heck, not even sure if I CAN buy it since I never bothered to continue to try past the 2nd or third time to get my account unbanned and you can't even BUY and download this idiot game without a Battlenet account.
There has to be another zero day hack out there because I know several people who had their Hotmail account hacked last year and in some cases they hadn't even logged in to Hotmail in months when they were hacked. They could have had weak passwords, but still. How do you manage to run thousands of password attempts against an online service like Hotmail without having some other hack (i.e. password Hotmail's hash file or such).
There has to be another zero day hack out there for sure or else M$ has the same problem I think Blizzard has (internal folks selling logins on unused accounts).
While I certainly agree with the HIGH probability of Dr. Jones dying in his flying refrigerator, it is worth noting that in the Hiroshima bombing, there is a documented case of a bank worker surviving the blast from less than 330m from the hypocenter. Now granted, she was inside, at the back of a concrete bank building, but she DID survive, and was not fatally injured. Assuming the bomb was at the low edge of the kilotonnage listed (i.e. similar to the Hiroshima bomb), and assuming that the distance was as far as it appears in that one shot (i.e. much greater than 330m), I think Dr. Jones would have quite a reasonable chance of surviving provided the blast wave was NOT enough to propel his refrigerator through the air (and frankly, from the movie shown distance it seems unlikely). If instead George Lucas had chosen to have the fridge knocked over in a pile of burning rubble, I think Dr. Jones's chance of survival, while not excellent, would be within the real of reasonable probability.
Reading between the lines, Sherman whines about how the 10,000 person recording 'industry' couldn't CRIPPLE the internet (and 20M plus American jobs) in order to force us all to give them more money. Well BOO HOO!
I wouldn't cross the street to p*ss on the RIAA and MPAA if they were on fire. Their actions over the last 20 years are absolutely, completely despicable. The sooner they go down into the dustbin of history the better off all of us will be.
Ha! I haven't worked 38.4 hours in a work week EVER... unless I was on vacation or took a day off during the week. Most weeks I have that many hours in before Thursday is over with.
My typical work week is 50 hours+, often 55 or 60 hours.
The most hours I ever worked in 1 week was 76 hours, although I am sure there are others on Slashdot who have that trounced.
Although at my company no one really gives you MUCH grief for taking vacation, but they DO give you a LOT of grief if you only work 40 hours a week. In fact, you are likely to find yourself looking for a new job if that keeps up.
I think Japan is worse. You are expected to take NO vacation (even though the company legally HAS to give you 10 working days off). So, other than national holidays that everyone else has off, you are expected to be at work. And for extra fun, you are expected to be at the office until your boss leaves. And most Japanese bosses are 50 year old men who are estranged from their wives and hence work til 8pm at night every night to avoid having to go home.
The only exceptions to this seem to be for getting married. Then you are typically expected to take 1-2 weeks off.
This is my understanding after working with different companies in Japan over the past 15+ years, although I haven't worked in Japan myself. Maybe someone in Japan can give their input.
Nobody likes to work. We do it to get a paycheck. It's the United States of America - one of the last places on earth that you can make as much money as you want if you work hard enough. We seem to have adopted the stance that making money is a bad thing. That "the man" is crushing us. You all sound like a bunchy of whiny babies. Move to France or Canada if you are so sick of the US. I'm proud to have started with nothing and worked myself in something. It was tough, but it was my choice. Now my tax dollars pay for people to be unemployed for years and, if they are employed, for them to whine about how hard it is to have a job where you have to call in on your vacation. Boo freaking hoo.
Spoken like a true American Republican, with no sense of empathy for other people at all.
Yes sir, we are all just a bunch of whiny babies who deserve nothing better than to be the 21st century equivalent of slaves for you and your ilk.
If people like this sort of thinking, then vote GOP. If not, then vote anyone but them.
TEXTING on a cell phone is crazy, crazy dangerous, no doubt, but talking hands free on a cell phone is no worse than many, many other activities that take place in a car.
That's the dumbest thing I ever heard. How is allowing our Senators to be picked by a bunch of LOCALLY corrupt politicians any better than what we have now?
The US is one of the least taxed developed countries in the world and the federal government in the US spends much less as a % of GDP than any comparable developed country.
You are right that the rich tend to hide their wealth, but technology is making that more and more risky. Go ask the former customers of UBS how they feel about that.:)
The max tax rate under Kennedy was 90%!!!!!! It is one thing to talk about reducing a 90% rate and another thing to talk about reducing a 33% rate that often times winds up being 7%!
Wrong. You are correct that wealth naturally flows to the top in capitalism and even more so in American capitalism. However, the ONLY method of keeping that wealth in the hands of the middle class and poor is for the government to tax the super-rich at high rates. Otherwise the super-rich get super-richer every year and the middle class and poor get poorer. This can be shown empirically. Look at the last time the US had a growing middle class. What was the max tax income tax rate on the rich?
Reagan started the destruction of the middle class when he simultaneously cut the max tax rate from 70% to 35% and also reduced the max income to trigger the max tax rate from ~$1.1M in income to ~$330,000 in income back in the 80s. This was a brilliant move, because it grew the number of people affected by the max tax rate by an order of magnitude, and hence gave the super rich a bunch of allies in the upper middle class to help them fight any higher income tax.
Obama is just trying to reverse this, which makes LOT of sense. If we continue at the rate we are now, the middle class will continue to shrink while wealth continues to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands until we look (wealth-wise) like a 3rd world country.
I call bull***t on your defense of Big Oil. Aside from singlehandedly trying to kill every sustainable energy technology, Big oil ALSO gets BILLIONS (~$5B/year at this point) of dollars in government SUBSIDIES that basically mean that they pay close to zero taxes ($5.7B in taxes roughly).
All government IS evil... but the GOP is far, far more evil (if you aren't rich), than the Democrats are.
Peter needs to submit a complaint to the California bar, because the corporate counsel that signed off on these actions need to be disbarred for ethical malfeasance.
Actually, they need to be in jail, but disbarred is probably the best that can be done.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh they did ask me to do a virus scan etc., which of course I did do, as well as trojan scans, autoruns, malaware, you name it. Nada.
Name one AV product that picks up 0-day malware/viruses/trojans.
That's retarded. By that logic every computer in the world is infected. Get a clue.
You are spreading misinformation and creating uncertainty and doubt.
As someone who until recently worked in Blizzard customer support, I can tell you there is absolutely no chance that your account details were leaked from within the company.
,
BULLSH*T. You are telling me that you personally know every single person you worked with and who has access to customer's account info is so fine and upstanding of a citizen that there is NO POSSIBLE WAY that they could ever have a side deal with gold farmers to make some extra cash on accounts that are no longer being used? I call ABSOLUTE BULLSH*T on that. ABSOLUTE. No big company has 100% saints. Much less one as money hungry as Blizzard.
If you are saying that there physically isn't any way for a compromised Blizzard employee to give someone else access to my account I also find that highly unlikely, but perhaps within the realm of possibility (I have no way of knowing what controls Blizzard actually has on accounts). It would be interesting to know which you mean, but perhaps you cannot say.
Gold sellers are in the business of selling gold for real money, they have a vested interest in compromising accounts in any way they possibly can. Most commonly, people are the victims of phishing scams, but gold sellers try exploit every weakness they can, including: use of malware, zero day software vulnerabilities, trying email passwords they got from hacked websites and forums, use of common passwords between, account sharing, etc. They are *very* determined since they get a paycheck from it at the end of the day.
At this point you are no doubt already thinking of your response in which you will endeavour to explain that it's impossible *you* were compromised in some way and that it *must* be through a fault of Blizzard. I am sorry, but even though you may be too ashamed or proud to admit it, you need to swallow your pride and accept that your account was *in fact* compromised due to a failure on your part with account security and you should carefully evaluate your account security practices or you will be compromised again in a similar way in the future, if not in WoW, then for some other service.
If you choose to believe it couldn't have been your fault, then you are simply in denial and although it may make you may sleep better at night, you are still as insecure as when your account got compromised in the first place.
My account was not compromised by me or my machine. Of that I am 95% positive (no way to be 100% positive in this world). It MAY just possibly have been compromised by the hack of a 3rd party since my password was a variation of a password on another site, but since that site has not reported any 'hacks', I somewhat doubt this as well. And my password was pretty unique and 10 characters, including specials.
And aside from the above, how would any hypothetical 'random gold farmer' JUST HAPPEN to reopen my account RIGHT AFTER I CLOSED IT! And I am not the only one this has happened to. I already mentioned my guildy (on the other side of the country and not my close friend). What are the ODDS OF THAT? Seriously. Without a Blizzard 'bad actor', WHAT ARE THE ODDS OF THAT?!?!?! VERY F*CKING low. VERY. F*CKING. LOW. And if that isn't enough look at the poor bleepard further down the page. He had it happen to him MULTIPLE TIMES ON CLOSED ACCOUNTS! Are you seriously claiming that this is just coincidence?
Blizzard also expends a significant amount of resources addressing compromised accounts and even worse, it's bad PR for them when people are victims, Blizzard has *every* interest in cutting down the number of compromised accounts. This is also demonstrated by them making the mobile authenticator a free download, or the physical token which is available for a nominal fee (less than $10 *including* shipping).
In regards to your account still having not been unbanned after 4 months, there are few explanations.
You are full of excrement. Allow me to rebut.
My case. Last year I decided I had finally played enough WoW. I had 2 characters at level 85 and 2 others at level 80. After thousands of hours of WoWing, the fun just wasn't there any more. So, I cancelled my account.
I cancelled my account on April 26th, 2011. As of May 1st, my account was supposedly no longer 'active'. On May 15th, 2011, I got an email from Blizzard indicating that my account had been banned for 'gold selling'. How in the f*** is that possible, I asked myself? I don't even have an active account any more! So of course I contacted Blizzard and told them the circumstances (as well as me being absolutely positive that my PC had no root kit and no viruses - and believe me I checked, long and well) and got a useless 'Your Account Has Been Hacked' form letter from them and them telling me to reset my password and follow this 'process'. So I did that and my ACCOUNT REMAINED BANNED for at least several weeks, which (very conveniently for Blizzard) kept me from posting this issue into their forums. Apparently Blizzard has some folks 'inside' who sell cancelled account details to gold farmers. I know this because this same exact thing happened to another guildy of mine. You'd think Blizzard would want to know that. You'd think they would take action. But they don't and they didn't.
So, Blizzard can and DOES ban people that do not deserve to be banned. Even customers who paid them monthly for over 4 years.
So they can burn in hell forever as far as I am concerned. I am DONE with Blizzard. Will never buy another game from them again. Heck, not even sure if I CAN buy it since I never bothered to continue to try past the 2nd or third time to get my account unbanned and you can't even BUY and download this idiot game without a Battlenet account.
Which part of 'hadn't logged in for months' didn't you understand?
Keyloggers are unlikely since none of their other, more lucrative accounts were hacked or invaded.
And since their passwds weren't changed, I dont think it was this 0 day exploit.
M$ security sux.
There has to be another zero day hack out there because I know several people who had their Hotmail account hacked last year and in some cases they hadn't even logged in to Hotmail in months when they were hacked. They could have had weak passwords, but still. How do you manage to run thousands of password attempts against an online service like Hotmail without having some other hack (i.e. password Hotmail's hash file or such).
There has to be another zero day hack out there for sure or else M$ has the same problem I think Blizzard has (internal folks selling logins on unused accounts).
By Keith Laumer. Also introduces you to Retief, who is like a James Bond/Clint Eastwood of the future.
Also the follow on Bolo books are good, but few if any are written by Laumer. The original is still the best.
Yes, great book! As was his entire Commonwealth series. Flinx and Pip. Nor Crystal Tears. MidWorld, etc.
And there were 2 other Icerigger books set on Tran ky ky. Mission to Moulokin and The Deluge Drivers if you are interested.
Yes, also by Julian May! Read her other series -the Galactic Milieu. It rocks!
One of the best series I have ever read and I've been reading SciFi for 35 years.
Intervention (sometimes two books as Surveillance & MetaConcert)
Jack the Bodiless
Diamond Mask
Magnificat
The Many Colored Land
The Golden Torc
The Nonborn King
The Adversary
It appears to be slashdotted :)
While I certainly agree with the HIGH probability of Dr. Jones dying in his flying refrigerator, it is worth noting that in the Hiroshima bombing, there is a documented case of a bank worker surviving the blast from less than 330m from the hypocenter. Now granted, she was inside, at the back of a concrete bank building, but she DID survive, and was not fatally injured. Assuming the bomb was at the low edge of the kilotonnage listed (i.e. similar to the Hiroshima bomb), and assuming that the distance was as far as it appears in that one shot (i.e. much greater than 330m), I think Dr. Jones would have quite a reasonable chance of surviving provided the blast wave was NOT enough to propel his refrigerator through the air (and frankly, from the movie shown distance it seems unlikely). If instead George Lucas had chosen to have the fridge knocked over in a pile of burning rubble, I think Dr. Jones's chance of survival, while not excellent, would be within the real of reasonable probability.
Reading between the lines, Sherman whines about how the 10,000 person recording 'industry' couldn't CRIPPLE the internet (and 20M plus American jobs) in order to force us all to give them more money. Well BOO HOO!
I wouldn't cross the street to p*ss on the RIAA and MPAA if they were on fire. Their actions over the last 20 years are absolutely, completely despicable. The sooner they go down into the dustbin of history the better off all of us will be.
You misunderstand. In Rome they had Bread and Circuses.
In America we have McDonalds and the NFL.
The ruling class messes with the circuses at their peril. They know the plebes need entertainment so that they remain docile and unwilling to rebel.
Ha! I haven't worked 38.4 hours in a work week EVER... unless I was on vacation or took a day off during the week. Most weeks I have that many hours in before Thursday is over with.
My typical work week is 50 hours+, often 55 or 60 hours.
The most hours I ever worked in 1 week was 76 hours, although I am sure there are others on Slashdot who have that trounced.
Although at my company no one really gives you MUCH grief for taking vacation, but they DO give you a LOT of grief if you only work 40 hours a week. In fact, you are likely to find yourself looking for a new job if that keeps up.
I think Japan is worse. You are expected to take NO vacation (even though the company legally HAS to give you 10 working days off). So, other than national holidays that everyone else has off, you are expected to be at work. And for extra fun, you are expected to be at the office until your boss leaves. And most Japanese bosses are 50 year old men who are estranged from their wives and hence work til 8pm at night every night to avoid having to go home.
The only exceptions to this seem to be for getting married. Then you are typically expected to take 1-2 weeks off.
This is my understanding after working with different companies in Japan over the past 15+ years, although I haven't worked in Japan myself. Maybe someone in Japan can give their input.
How is S. Korea worse?
Nobody likes to work. We do it to get a paycheck. It's the United States of America - one of the last places on earth that you can make as much money as you want if you work hard enough. We seem to have adopted the stance that making money is a bad thing. That "the man" is crushing us. You all sound like a bunchy of whiny babies. Move to France or Canada if you are so sick of the US. I'm proud to have started with nothing and worked myself in something. It was tough, but it was my choice. Now my tax dollars pay for people to be unemployed for years and, if they are employed, for them to whine about how hard it is to have a job where you have to call in on your vacation. Boo freaking hoo.
Spoken like a true American Republican, with no sense of empathy for other people at all.
Yes sir, we are all just a bunch of whiny babies who deserve nothing better than to be the 21st century equivalent of slaves for you and your ilk.
If people like this sort of thinking, then vote GOP. If not, then vote anyone but them.
Where do you live? Maybe I want to move there. :)
You mean crap a$$ studies like the one this just proved are BS?
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/13/uk-health-cellphones-crashes-idUSLNE7BC01G20111213
TEXTING on a cell phone is crazy, crazy dangerous, no doubt, but talking hands free on a cell phone is no worse than many, many other activities that take place in a car.
That's the dumbest thing I ever heard. How is allowing our Senators to be picked by a bunch of LOCALLY corrupt politicians any better than what we have now?
You couldn't be more wrong if you tried.
The US is one of the least taxed developed countries in the world and the federal government in the US spends much less as a % of GDP than any comparable developed country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_around_the_world
You are right that the rich tend to hide their wealth, but technology is making that more and more risky. Go ask the former customers of UBS how they feel about that. :)
The max tax rate under Kennedy was 90%!!!!!! It is one thing to talk about reducing a 90% rate and another thing to talk about reducing a 33% rate that often times winds up being 7%!
Wrong. You are correct that wealth naturally flows to the top in capitalism and even more so in American capitalism. However, the ONLY method of keeping that wealth in the hands of the middle class and poor is for the government to tax the super-rich at high rates. Otherwise the super-rich get super-richer every year and the middle class and poor get poorer. This can be shown empirically. Look at the last time the US had a growing middle class. What was the max tax income tax rate on the rich?
Reagan started the destruction of the middle class when he simultaneously cut the max tax rate from 70% to 35% and also reduced the max income to trigger the max tax rate from ~$1.1M in income to ~$330,000 in income back in the 80s. This was a brilliant move, because it grew the number of people affected by the max tax rate by an order of magnitude, and hence gave the super rich a bunch of allies in the upper middle class to help them fight any higher income tax.
Obama is just trying to reverse this, which makes LOT of sense. If we continue at the rate we are now, the middle class will continue to shrink while wealth continues to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands until we look (wealth-wise) like a 3rd world country.
I call bull***t on your defense of Big Oil. Aside from singlehandedly trying to kill every sustainable energy technology, Big oil ALSO gets BILLIONS (~$5B/year at this point) of dollars in government SUBSIDIES that basically mean that they pay close to zero taxes ($5.7B in taxes roughly).
All government IS evil... but the GOP is far, far more evil (if you aren't rich), than the Democrats are.
Amen. If I wanted to switch from T-mobile to AT&T, I'd do it myself.
You can't reduce the # of nationwide GSM carriers in this country from 2 to 1 and try to pretend that somehow 'improves competition'.
Peter needs to submit a complaint to the California bar, because the corporate counsel that signed off on these actions need to be disbarred for ethical malfeasance.
Actually, they need to be in jail, but disbarred is probably the best that can be done.
I know that I, and I hope that everyone else on this board, will never buy a Cisco product again.
EVER.
In fact, I will go out of my way to make sure that all of my friends in the tech industry NEVER EVER BUY their stuff AGAIN.
And I know a lot of folks who buy a lot of network equipment.
Cisco, you are evil with a capital E.