Gold farming

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Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Gold farming is one of the worst plagues of online games. Gold farming is the generic name for techniques used to generate real money from services or sales of virtual goods in metaverses and online games such as World Of Warcraft (WoW).

An example of services is eastern players who foster a player’s character in order to increase his/her experience. This allows the characters to grow even when his actual “owner” is not connected.

For most online games, the rules of conduct do ban these practices. Nevertheless, a very active ecosystem has grown around these games.

Why is gold farming forbidden? Several reasons:

  • Some people worry about the possibility to use it for money laundering.
  • Some countries are nervous about the importance of a unregulated virtual currency that would compete with real currency. This is the case for instance for China.
  • It is unfair for players. It is considered as a form of cheating. If you can purchase a valuable artifact for real money, you twist the game.
  • It consumes many resources. As an illustration, in June Eve online cut off 2% of the accounts that were participating to gold farming. It resulted in a drop of 30% of the server resources. The automatic tools behind the accounts were not anymore active.

Gold farming has a strong impact on the future of an online game. Too much gold farming may increase the feeling that the game was not anymore fair (thus making it less attractive), and clogging the servers (thus reducing the quality of user experience). This may drastically reduce the profitability of the game. Thus, the game providers will fight it by all means.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of money at stake. Thus gold farmers will be creative to “survive”. Money is a strong incentive for piracy. Furthermore, I’m not sure that it is illegal (excepted as a violation of rules of conduct).

VC2 and AMEX

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The Visual Cryptogram 2 (VC2) was created by VISA in 2005 to protect against online fraud. The VC2 code is the three-digit number printed at the back of your credit card. The rationale of VC2 is that to access this code, you need to have the card insight. I always thought that the rationales to print it at the back was to avoid camera capture used with card skimmers (see for instance http://www.darknet.o … ut-atm-hacking-tips/).

It seems I was wrong, or at least that AMEX does not fear this type of skimmers. AMEX uses also a visual cryptogram. But AMEX’s VC is four-digit long and printed on the front side of credit card. I do not understand the rationale for using a different scheme (Different size, different location). In fact, I learned it the hard way. When using the first time my AMEX online, I used the three digit at the back of the card. There was one! And of course, it did not work. :Sad:

Has somebody a clue?

Ustream sued by boxing star

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The live streaming site Ustream has been sued by Black Ring Inc, the company owned by boxer Roy Jones Jr. Black Ring claims that Ustream allowed about 2,377 person to view a boxing event free of charge. The event was available in live as pay per view event. Furthermore, Black Ring complains that Ustream did not collaborate to collect information about claimed infringement.

According to Techcruch, Ustream believes that it makes the right effort to comply to copyright rules.

Detecting in real time, live rebroadcast of live events is a tough work. To be efficient, it requires several elements:

  • 1- A way to monitor most of the live streaming sites and also P2P streaming torrents
  • 2 – A way to detect the infringing content
  • 3 – A way to notify in real time a take down notice to the site
  • 4 – A procedure at the streaming site to quickly check the legitimacy of the take down notice
  • 5 – Take down the stream

Element 2 is a tough issue. Watermarking may be a solution if the watermark is unique for the event. But you cannot expect to pass the detector on all currently streaming events. You have to make a first selection.

Element 4 is also tough. As an operator you’d rather be sure not to take down legitimate streams.

But the worst is that what prevents the pirate to start a new stream once the first one has been took down and notify the viewers of the new “coordinates”. For instance, Indian pirates play that cat and mouse game during broadcast of cricket games. Pirates have several Set Top Boxes ready. They use a first one to illegally rebroadcast. Once the broadcaster identified the box, displaying the ID of every box and blacklisting the infringing one, the pirates switch to a new set top box. It is a nice business.

Thus, stopping in real time, rebroadcast of live events may be a tough challenge.

Amazon apologies

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In July, Amazon erased some instances of Orwell’s books for copyright issues. Immediately after, the CEO apologized. One step further in mea culpa, Amazon is offering to download a new version of the erased books (which this time proper copyrights) or refund 30$. The people who had their book erased received the following mail:

As you were one of the customers impacted by the removal of ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’ from your Kindle device in July of this year, we would like to offer you the option to have us re-deliver this book to your Kindle along with any annotations you made,” read an e-mail letter to affected Kindle users late last week. “You will not be charged for the book. If you do not wish to have us re-deliver the book to your Kindle, you can instead choose to receive an Amazon.com electronic gift certificate or check for $30.

Two persons are already suing Amazon for this deletion. They claimed that they will not drop the case.

Amazon has just done the right smart thing. Nevertheless, I have no doubts that this event will often illustrate the grievances of DRM opponents.

Storm on The Pirate Bay (2)

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The story continues. Here are some news since last report in August.

On 24th, a Swedish Court ordered Black Internet, one of FAIs of The Pirate Bay (TPB), to cut the connection, which it did. Nevertheless, TPB uses many FAIs.

On 27th August, the shareholders of Global gaming factory approved the purchase of TPB. Now, the company has just to provide the money (which seems not as obvious)

Meanwhile the obvious next move occurred. Somebody packaged the list of more than 800,000 torrents as a torrent. BTARENA has put on line this list, thus cloning TPB.

My favorite Anti Virus (at least the one I use at home), Avast! did also strike. For some time, it declared TPB site has a malicious site. Avast! has removed this categorization claiming it was a human error.

The Pirate Bay is still online and offering trackers.

SF: The Black Company

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During this summer, I read the three first books of Glen Cooks’s “Chronicles of the Black Company”.

Tne books tell the story of a free company of mercenaries. In fact, the narrator is the doctor of this company. Of course, the black company is hired by evil forces. Once a contract accepted, the honor of the Company requires to obey. Although the members of the company are not people you’d like to meet, they are not inherently bad. This generates some problems. And there is evil, and even more evil. Thus, is it not better to fight with evil to stop more evil?

A small regret for the 3rd book. There are some obvious tricks (very Hollywood movie style) that you anticipate too easily.

Good chronicles for light summer reading.

Trust no one

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Law 4 is “Trust no One”. Often when I present the ten laws, when arriving at this one, there are laughter and of course the inevitable question: “Even not you?”

Obviously, security cannot be build without trust. Trust is the foundation of security. Unfortunately, trusting people is the most difficult part of the design.

In an article for the Wall Street Journal, Bruce Schneier proposed five heuristics to deal with trusted people:

1. Limit the number of trusted people…

2. Ensure that trusted people are also trustworthy…

3. Limit the amount of trust each person has…

4. Give people overlapping spheres of trust…

5. Detect breaches of trust after the fact and prosecute the guilty…

In other words, trust people until a given limit. Build some safeguards around trusted people. My preferred one is number 2. it is also the most difficult to enforce.