Things that should be done to break the piracy debate.

[Loyal]

If you literally have to live in fear of every leet-speaking idiot actually hacking your computer, there is something gravely wrong with the system.

What the hell kind of Battle.net have you been playing on?

[bluestarultor]

Originally Posted by Loyal

What the hell kind of Battle.net have you been playing on?

Not me, but someone I know actually was online with a friend and some leet-speaker told them to give him some rare and wonderful item the friend had or he'd hack him and wipe his hard drive. They told him where to put it and kept playing, but the friend blipped out and was gone for quite a while. When he came back, it turned out the little bugger had actually started to follow through on his threat and the friend had to kill his power to stop the wipe and performed some recovery and cleanup.

[Loyal]

Originally Posted by bluestarultor

Not me, but someone I know actually was online with a friend and some leet-speaker told them to give him some rare and wonderful item the friend had or he'd hack him and wipe his hard drive. They told him where to put it and kept playing, but the friend blipped out and was gone for quite a while. When he came back, it turned out the little bugger had actually started to follow through on his threat and the friend had to kill his power to stop the wipe and performed some recovery and cleanup.

That would be the one and only case I've ever heard of such an event, and I'd hesitate to correlate it to BNet itself.

Actually, my Diablo II accounts have been hacked several times. It's the only account I've had on the Internet, EVER, to get hacked. So battlenet 0, rest of internet 1.

Par for the course, but Blues mentioned having your computer itself hacked.

Some people have been mentioning in half-jest that the best way to get Blizzard to patch their old games is to come up with a new hack for it to force them to respond, and hope they include some content for the game itself.

[bluestarultor]

Originally Posted by Azisien

Ah yes, Yahtzee, the practical pronounciation guru of gaming terminology!

See Seil's post. He's not the only one.

Originally Posted by Loyal

That would be the one and only case I've ever heard of such an event, and I'd hesitate to correlate it to BNet itself.

Fair enough, but

Par for the course, but Blues mentioned having your computer itself hacked.

still doesn't lend itself to me calling it a very secure system.

[Azisien]

Originally Posted by bluestarultor

See Seil's post. He's not the only one.

Actually the way he pronounced it, I would still call it a typo?

[bluestarultor]

Originally Posted by Azisien

Actually the way he pronounced it, I would still call it a typo?

I heard the consonantal "Y" sound, but we're getting way off topic.


It has occurred to me that an interesting way to prevent piracy is to embed a CD key in an image using stenography corresponding to the CD key provided for the player. What initially looks like nothing more than promotional art could actually hold an encrypted copy of the CD key for verification after a registration process, so that if a key is faked or somehow doesn't match, or the picture is not included, the game will have some sort of impaired function. Or if not a picture, possibly the game icon file, since nobody would intentionally delete that.