Or rather to sell an upmarket comic book (A Contract With God, reputedly) to a publisher's marketing men who felt they were above "comic books", and latched onto by a comics industry so deep in insecurity and self-loathing that it seemed like a good idea.
I'd guess the kind of puzzle games they're talking about are the arcade Tetris genre rather than anything more cerebral - it's the adrenaline rush they're after rather than emotional or intellectual involvement. Of course it's a bit suspect limiting the study to action genres in the first place on that assumption.
Firstly, writing viruses is a bad thing and shouldn't be done. Even to irk Microsoft. Secondly, say someone does do this. Everyone ends up sending a random user agent string instead of an accurate one. Or maybe just the IE users. Web pages can't trust the user agent string any more, so they code to a standard. Fair enough. Except that if they were going to code to the proper standard rather than IE they'd be doing that already. They'll ignore the string and assume everyone's using IE.
I'd have thought a Quake clan was more akin to a sports team than the sense of community formed in a MMORPG - someone is known mostly for how they play, and there isn't a lot of non-game talk going on in Quake. In an RPG, by contrast, whether it's a text MUD or a modern graphical type, players (at least ideally) spend quite a bit of time talking and getting to know each other rather than just shooting each other or the other team, and the conversation ranges beyond 'Ha ha, got you'. If I only knew someone from playing football with them (NB this is wholly hypothetical), however regularly, I probably wouldn't expect my death or disappearance to impact them as much as someone I regularly talked to, online or face to face.
This may well be a hoax. It may well be a wild speculation based on general public paranoia. But there's a fairly strong point to be made concerning 'security through obscurity' here - it only takes one Evil Infiltrator to compromise a lot of systems, and if this story was publicised enough the point would be made that this _could_ happen, even if in this case it almost certainly hasn't.
There's another downside to removing the codes though - I'd imagine besides testing there'd be bughunting advantages to including the cheat codes in the release version. As well as the general advisability of having the release version being the exact same one you've tested.
Only (?) problem with that is that if you don't check the headers you'll probably end up complaining at the wrong address - some of the spammers have been known to use the addresses of people who've complained at them in the past as sender/reply-to on the next bucketload of spam they send out. Hopefully the admin checking the abuse address would be clueful enough to check, but it'd save their time if you look.
To be fair though, there's a distinction to be drawn between "pulling one's punches" and "not asking to be sued" - I'd rather hear frank comments about anonymous (though probably identifiable) cases than know the names but have the criticism toned down.
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...implement LISP interpreter in your chosen language.
Or rather to sell an upmarket comic book (A Contract With God, reputedly) to a publisher's marketing men who felt they were above "comic books", and latched onto by a comics industry so deep in insecurity and self-loathing that it seemed like a good idea.
I'd guess the kind of puzzle games they're talking about are the arcade Tetris genre rather than anything more cerebral - it's the adrenaline rush they're after rather than emotional or intellectual involvement. Of course it's a bit suspect limiting the study to action genres in the first place on that assumption.
Firstly, writing viruses is a bad thing and shouldn't be done. Even to irk Microsoft.
Secondly, say someone does do this. Everyone ends up sending a random user agent string instead of an accurate one. Or maybe just the IE users. Web pages can't trust the user agent string any more, so they code to a standard. Fair enough.
Except that if they were going to code to the proper standard rather than IE they'd be doing that already. They'll ignore the string and assume everyone's using IE.
Surely the definition of redundancy is that if you can leave something out and still convey the same meaning the thing you left out was redundant?
I'd have thought a Quake clan was more akin to a sports team than the sense of community formed in a MMORPG - someone is known mostly for how they play, and there isn't a lot of non-game talk going on in Quake. In an RPG, by contrast, whether it's a text MUD or a modern graphical type, players (at least ideally) spend quite a bit of time talking and getting to know each other rather than just shooting each other or the other team, and the conversation ranges beyond 'Ha ha, got you'. If I only knew someone from playing football with them (NB this is wholly hypothetical), however regularly, I probably wouldn't expect my death or disappearance to impact them as much as someone I regularly talked to, online or face to face.
This may well be a hoax. It may well be a wild speculation based on general public paranoia. But there's a fairly strong point to be made concerning 'security through obscurity' here - it only takes one Evil Infiltrator to compromise a lot of systems, and if this story was publicised enough the point would be made that this _could_ happen, even if in this case it almost certainly hasn't.
There's another downside to removing the codes though - I'd imagine besides testing there'd be bughunting advantages to including the cheat codes in the release version. As well as the general advisability of having the release version being the exact same one you've tested.
Only (?) problem with that is that if you don't check the headers you'll probably end up complaining at the wrong address - some of the spammers have been known to use the addresses of people who've complained at them in the past as sender/reply-to on the next bucketload of spam they send out. Hopefully the admin checking the abuse address would be clueful enough to check, but it'd save their time if you look.
Mmm. Cut spam by up to 650% just by filtering out non-work addresses?
To be fair though, there's a distinction to be drawn between "pulling one's punches" and "not asking to be sued" - I'd rather hear frank comments about anonymous (though probably identifiable) cases than know the names but have the criticism toned down.