Exploiting, Spying, Hacking

[Endie]

Would love to see that proof. The way you describe the POS situation it might have just been the 11 BOB POS claiming Sov due to 11 of the 18 GS POS never being set up to claim sov. You'd never notice that a corp was sloppy in setting up the towers unless someone started to contest sov.

Again, not saying that's the case, but a bit more information would be nice.

How would you feel if it turns out to be true, and one of your allies did it and benefited from it?

[Comstar]

Um, huh? Outrage? Over cheating? Spying? You're kidding, right?

CCP has no obligation to change the Sov because someone manually unticked some boxes. It's not like it was apparently the result of a bug. There's no evidence anyone could provide CCP that CCP would be able to verify that anyone got "hacked". IP address? Not admissible. What would the logs say? That the account XXXX logged in, logged out. We already know CCP can't tell if sov is ticked or unticked, and even if they did, they can't say it was a spy on they spoil the spies gameplay. 


'Corse, I'm the only one who thinks the whole spy thing is bad for the game (and should be banned), but we've already established that CCP *wants* spying, scamming and double dealing to happen in game.

[IainC]

'Corse, I'm the only one who thinks the whole spy thing is bad for the game (and should be banned), but we've already established that CCP *wants* spying, scamming and double dealing to happen in game.

I would suspect that a more accurate statement would be that CCP does not want any CS overhead from spying and scamming and thus has a 'shit happens, get over it' approach in order to avoid getting entangled in murky social engineering stuff.

[setar]

How would you feel if it turns out to be true, and one of your allies did it and benefited from it?

Bad, as always -- given the MC history with BOB it's not exactly a new experience. Unfortunately it doesn't matter which side you are on. Switch to GS and you have PL/Kugu to justify who isn't only exploiting forums and servers to gain intel, but dragging the private lives of individual players out in public in an attempt to humiliate them.

Don't get me wrong, spying and meta-gaming are part of the game. Hacking into someone's account (e.g., by installing a trojan on a server) isn't.

[Jayce]

'Corse, I'm the only one who thinks the whole spy thing is bad for the game (and should be banned), but we've already established that CCP *wants* spying, scamming and double dealing to happen in game.

Spying yes, hacking/account theft no.

For the record, I'm not so partisan as to think it was an officially sanctioned GBC action.  Probably one overzealous and underprincipled member.

[Endie]

'Corse, I'm the only one who thinks the whole spy thing is bad for the game (and should be banned), but we've already established that CCP *wants* spying, scamming and double dealing to happen in game.

I don't believe that you are so obtuse as to believe that in-character spying, where one plays within the game and within the rules of the game (as well as within the fiction of the universe) to become trusted is the same as out-of-game hacking, which is a criminal offence (not that you will ever get a conviction against one of the thriving Russian hacker community, so long as they only hit western targets).

Doesn't matter in the long run: over-use it, and even CCP will take action.  We lost C9N to out-of-game reasons; we lost R2TJ to out-of-game reasons; now we'll lose DG- for a while for out-of-game reasons.  Who knows: maybe we'll even lose that whole sov 4 cluster for out-of-game reasons.  Sooner or later, however, someone will have to actually find a way to beat us in-game or we will win in-game.

[xorx]

Heh, I think it's where you draw the line Comstr, and we simply differ on that.
Anything that can be done in the client by game mechanics is fine with me. Anything outside of this (i.e. hacking accounts, forum passwords, etc) isn't.

If you spend time gaining someone's trust, just to abuse it, you may be a certain special snowflake of a character who'll never marry my as yet unborn daughter, but if that's your play style - go to it.

If you sniff a password, then use it to hack someone's forum to get their POS passwords (as an example); well, I think that's where my line is.

Although I understand the Kugu forum porn fetish and everything else, to be honest, it sort of scares me that anyone takes this game that seriously.

[Pezzle]

Shit like this is the reason I am so opposed to even spying in EVE.  Any advantage will be exploited and someone will go over the line.  CCP with the lax policy of not seeing anything combined with staff statements which in essence endorse bad behavior only makes for more trouble.  Yeah I know they do not want the expense of cleaning up the shit.  Not everything can be prevented, but statements against bad behavior help curb it.  Not that we should expect much, look how long it took them to get off their virtual asses and declare tower bowling an exploit.

[xorx]

I guess we'd all be 'OK' with a traitor. In the same way we'd be 'OK' with a traitor in the R2TJ case. It just turned out in that case there wasn't .. and in this case it seems like there isn't (it's currently all hearsay though) ... but as we all know, CCP have no logs ...

[Sir T]

Would love to see that proof. The way you describe the POS situation it might have just been the 11 BOB POS claiming Sov due to 11 of the 18 GS POS never being set up to claim sov. You'd never notice that a corp was sloppy in setting up the towers unless someone started to contest sov.

Again, not saying that's the case, but a bit more information would be nice.

Not a hope. Sorry

First we got C9n into contention due to retarded stront timing (Mea Culpa, Goons fucked up and we paid the price. No big deal) But then we failed to kill towers due to pos bugs

R2TJ - first thing that was checked was spies and poses were checked, including POS claim boxes

12703898 attempts at pos spamming all over Goon space in the war.

And now you are saying someone forgot to check poses in a sov 4 station system BOB started trying to Pos spam weeks ago? I'm sorry. goons may be terrible at this game but we are not that stupid. After multiple pos proddings the thought of everyone in authority not checking the claim boxes the second an enemy tower goes down is laughable. And it was all 11 OEG towers, and at least some had been claiming sov previous to BObs tower spam afaik

In any case, it gets worse. DB- was an LV station. I would imagine that theres a whole load of LV stuff that was still locked up in there. Finfleet was part of LV, as was Shinra and Chowdown. All that stuff just came right into the hands of BOB. Win win for the hackers.

[ Unfortunately it doesn't matter which side you are on. Switch to GS and you have PL/Kugu to justify who isn't only exploiting forums and servers to gain intel, but dragging the private lives of individual players out in public in an attempt to humiliate them.

Absalutly false. I challenge you to come up with examples of that.

Kugutsumen has a rule against that. He went into a rage when someone posted DBPreachers email address on his forums and no-one told him, instantly deleted it and warned everyone not to do things like that again. He deleted the petition dump from his website. The worst you can say regarding personal lives regarding Kug is exposing The Enslaver as a GM.

Certainly not up to the level of putting Kugs real name on CAOD, as Mollie did, and calling his workplace to try and get him fired, as BOB members did. (Thankfully Kugs boss also happens to be his wife)

[setar]

This seemed pretty personal to me.

Edit: Actually, screw that. Not sending traffic his way and linking to Kugo exposing personal information and stories of a friend. Sir T, you got a PM with the link.

[Predator Irl]

Its a sad state of affairs when people take spaceship games so seriously that they are prepared to break the law in an effort to gain advantage.
What is even worse, is that CCP will more than likely turn a blind eye, as proving someone hacked their system is quite difficult and a cost factor
they do not want to have to deal with, for various reasons.

[Endie]

I dunno, setar, if you were going to link to the sad affair (pun intended, I am afraid) of a former mc leader and his public shenanigans with a corp member other than his wife, but I thought that was (a) entirely public knowlegde (I found out way beforehand through former aegis militia mc members and they said there were whole threads devoted to it) and (b) kinda public.interest in the way that he dealt with it. vOv

[setar]

And posting _that_, then, is more acceptable than switching off the sov claim on a few POS in an internet space game? Or to put it differently, there's no need to feel bad for someone hacking into a server to get all those PMs and post them publicly, but it's a different ballpark if BOB does it on the account of a POS fueler (if that's what happened)?

My point is with Predator: it's a damn shame that so many people take the game so seriously and ruin parts of it for others.

[Jayce]

Or to put it differently, there's no need to feel bad for someone hacking into a server to get all those PMs and post them publicly, but it's a different ballpark if BOB does it on the account of a POS fueler (if that's what happened)?

TBH you have a good point there Setar.  Even though it does seem a little inconsistent, my viewpoint is in fact that hacking the game is bad, but hacking messageboards and other extra-game areas are fair game.

But consider: it has an analogue in real life.  During wars nations use spies to get information on the enemy by any means necessary, but it's physically impossible to become another person like it is in this case.

Also consider: from a practical viewpoint, with IP tracking and other methods, CCP can regulate, with some hope of success, hacking attempts on the game itself.  But it's beyond unreasonable to ask them to secure every out-of-game communication mechanism.  So a player takes their chances when discussing opsec things out of game.

[setar]

TBH you have a good point there Setar.  Even though it does seem a little inconsistent, my viewpoint is in fact that hacking the game is bad, but hacking messageboards and other extra-game areas are fair game.

I don't know, I'd rather not see any hacking done at all. Too many grey areas. If Kugu got the information from the BDCI server via a trojan (that's the working hypothesis) he affected quite a number of people as it was shared hosting; that server had to go down and cleaned, probably costing a number of people some business as well.

Likewise, I've received account information from friends via PM so that I could babysit their char for a while, set skill training etc. By your definition it would then be okay to use the information so obtained to log in the char, strip him of his assets, defuel POS and so on.. as the information was obtained from an extra-game area. Personally, I'd rather not go there. But then I'm also the kind of player who'd happily invite just about everyone I've ever been asked to shoot for a beer at the next fanfest ;)

[Goumindong]

I don't know, I'd rather not see any hacking done at all. Too many grey areas. If Kugu got the information from the BDCI server via a trojan (that's the working hypothesis) he affected quite a number of people as it was shared hosting; that server had to go down and cleaned, probably costing a number of people some business as well.

Likewise, I've received account information from friends via PM so that I could babysit their char for a while, set skill training etc. By your definition it would then be okay to use the information so obtained to log in the char, strip him of his assets, defuel POS and so on.. as the information was obtained from an extra-game area. Personally, I'd rather not go there. But then I'm also the kind of player who'd happily invite just about everyone I've ever been asked to shoot for a beer at the next fanfest ;)

Getting secondary forum access and/or dumps from a friend is not against the EULA.

logging in on an account that is not yours is.

[setar]

And the EULA trumps 'real life' incidents such as breaking into servers hosted by a company? Please, let's not split hairs here ;-)

[Jayce]

Likewise, I've received account information from friends via PM so that I could babysit their char for a while, set skill training etc. By your definition it would then be okay to use the information so obtained to log in the char, strip him of his assets, defuel POS and so on.. as the information was obtained from an extra-game area.

I did say that logging into anyone's account in an unauthorized manner also falls out of bounds, though I will add now that it doesn't matter where you got the info.  CCP can't prevent you getting the info if you find it on a messageboard, but they certainly can and should take action if you use it.

Information like opsec planning stuff, hidden assets, deals, CCP developer involvement ( ) is the fair game I'm talking about.

Regarding throwing trojans around, now that is definitely illegal territory and serious enough that even discussing their effect on intarnet spaceships is silly; it's eclipsed by its RL seriousness.  I don't really know anything about Kugutsumen, so I'm ill-equipped to defend his actions even if I wanted to, which I don't.

Incidentally, I'm right with you on the beer.  If I'm ever in rotten-shark-eating-land for fanfest, I'll take you up on that :)

[xorx]

It's actually quite a difficult one here; would you rather the whole BoB/T20 thing was left in the dark, or out in the open.
Would you be willing to deal with metagaming as the price for that?

[setar]

Pretty sure F-E is in TCF hands. Good point on the metagaming aspect to uncover stories like T20 or the Ferrogel production. I'm very much in favor of 'white hats', i.e., hacking to improve security, or to point out flaws in a system, so that's a bit of a dilemma. It certainly forced CCP to become somewhat more transparent, and that's a win for everyone.

[JoeTF]

Yawn, so do you actually have any proof or is it same bullshit as with goons screaming "bob cheatzorz" seconds after POS exploit was announced?
(and FYI, so far only pos exploiters we know about are NC allies and PL renters that were using profits from pos exploit to  supply PL with underpiced equipment)

I for one, have no feckin idea who did, why and how (s)he did.

[Sir T]

Edit: Also, where were Es & Whizz's exploiting towers set up?

Fountain, in BOB space.

Joe when I was scouting Delve Several months before the invasion last year I saw several towers that had one reactor and 8 silos. They had no special significance at the time (though I thought it was strange), and they were converted to deathstars before the invasion and blown up. But I would seriously drop the faux high and mighty angle as I just laugh every time you pull it. I saw the evidence with my own eyes. Just be thankful you were not chosen as the fall guy on this one.

This seemed pretty personal to me.

Edit: Actually, screw that. Not sending traffic his way and linking to Kugo exposing personal information and stories of a friend. Sir T, you got a PM with the link.

Oh come on. Is that the best you could pull.. Seriously?

First I don't need the link. I've read the thread, I've posted on it and... I had forgotten about it.

There was nothing surprising or embarrassing in that. The spurned party had been screaming about it to every one that would listen, and all that dirty laundry had been well and truly aired. At most that generated 10 minutes of conversion in eve and that's it. The private messages actually did the guy credit, as it showed a guy that was trying to make his marriage work and cared about his wife, which was a good contrast to the guy famous for threatening to shut down MC if the broken weapons he helped design were changed. At most it affected 3 people, one of which didn't care who knew about it and the other two had the knowledge that everyone already did and it was well after the fact. Everyone else quickly forgot about it

This was a breaking of the rules of the game of Eve. Knowingly and without question. This knowingly broke the agreement that every player signs with every other player the moment they hit connect. This is something that seriuosly effected hundreds, perhaps thousands of people and crapped on solid and successful weeks of hard defensive work. They cheated, rather than fight.

And it looks like you are making the choice to fly with them knowing that they cheat. If they decide to blob db- with 15 titans, you will know its because BOB cheated. And by your moral equivalency you are trying to justify it by saying the other side did something worse when in fact they didn't, and even if they did its completely irrelevent. You are flying with people that don't care about good fights no matter what they say. They only care about winning at any cost. And by grasping at straws and flimsy explications, and finally attacking the other side, you are showing that you are becoming the same. That's what Endie meant about those that fly with those that are dirty attracting flies.

Its possible to keep your soul in this but just realize that the people you will be Xing up to fight beside tomorrow are cheaters, bald faded and grinning. Whatever anyone else did is irrelevant to their choices. They chose to cheat. They could have attacked DG- and contested it like anyone else. They close not to and to steal an account, grab their gear and disrupt their enemy by cheating, and with the grinning arrogance of knowing they will probably never be punished for it. Case closed.

*shrug*

[setar]

I've got to admit you sure have some very twisted ethics. I could go into a long and epic rant on how it's always the other side who consists of dirty EBayers and the own side simply 'runs the plexes'; we could compare notes on whether a Sabre BPO produced more ISK than months of running broken plexes, and whether breaking into private servers is justifiable. Point is, it wouldn't change a thing. You keep spinning away, and I'll keep x'ing up with the bald, grinning cheaters (new teeth, new flat, new everything!) who just happen to exhibit more decency and respect for other players than most.

Case closed, indeed.

[Sir T]

I've got to admit you sure have some very twisted ethics. I could go into a long and epic rant on how it's always the other side who consists of dirty EBayers and the own side simply 'runs the plexes'; we could compare notes on whether a Sabre BPO produced more ISK than months of running broken plexes, and whether breaking into private servers is justifiable. Point is, it wouldn't change a thing. You keep spinning away, and I'll keep x'ing up with the bald, grinning cheaters (new teeth, new flat, new everything!) who just happen to exhibit more decency and respect for other players than most.

Case closed, indeed.

Broken complexes? You mean the ones that Spat out faction loot every hour? The ones in Delve? The ones run for years that ensured that BOB had entire fleets of faction fit battleships? The ones that were only deleted when Dark Shikari posted publicly about them on eveo? Those ones? And its odd you bring that up really, considering the entire war started so ROL could keep a complex (and it was the complex running faction of RA that split off and became ROL, and that you are now allied with, so you can twist that one to your hearts content)

As for respect for other players, how about the "vermin" that Luckyduck said they should "Kick into Fountian" to fight PL. Oh yes he was speaking about his pets/allies that BOB sent to be massacred in Fountain! Your Xing up with him? And Evil Thug was banned from Russian Eve-o for the unacceptable crap he was saying about Goonswarm, which sent him into a rage when mods started deleting the posts with his vile accusations and he got himself banned. And horrifically, despite the horrible disrespectful attitude to Russians you seem to believe in, how come there are more Russians on my side than yours?

And it wasn't just "A sabre BPO" it was in fact 10 t2 BPOs (and rumored bugged infinite run Faction BPCs), so quit minimizing the stuff created and given to BOB for free, including NOL station that T20 had marked in the database "Tis mine biatches." Another little thing discovered by Dark Shikari, as it happens, by examining the CCP data dump.

Etc etc. Twisted ethics indeed... *shrug*

And for the record I respect AAA, such that I am in the happy position of fighting one of the forces in Eve I truly respect and fear. Stain are first class players, and aside from one corp in them I like Atlas's spirit. That does not mean I am going to minimize, deflect or dismiss when I think they do something crap. You should have read the posts of mine on Kugutsumen when AAA attacked KOS, and they were bloody scathing. And AAA were my allies at the time.

[MahrinSkel]

What you cannot escape, you must accommodate.  There are going to be spies, there are three ways to accommodate to that reality:

1) Pretend there's a gentlemen's agreement not to engage in spy activities.  Be outraged when this agreement is broken.  This results in defeat.

2) Engage in paranoia and witch-hunts trying to entrap and use the spies, including creating your own spying service and trying to turn spies among your own ranks into double agents.  This way lies madness.

3) Accept that there are spies, try to limit access to assets and sensitive knowledge to the most trustworthy, and compartmentalize so that when the inevitable betrayals occur, the damage is limited.

Forums are not secure.  Closed "leadership" forums are only slightly better.  It's a reality, deal with it.

--Dave

[Simond]

2) Engage in paranoia and witch-hunts trying to entrap and use the spies, including creating your own spying service and trying to turn spies among your own ranks into double agents.  This way lies madness.

That sounds like the sort of thing a spy would say! 

[Phildo]

I applaud you, our moderators!

[Predator Irl]

What you cannot escape, you must accommodate.  There are going to be spies, there are three ways to accommodate to that reality:

1) Pretend there's a gentlemen's agreement not to engage in spy activities.  Be outraged when this agreement is broken.  This results in defeat.

2) Engage in paranoia and witch-hunts trying to entrap and use the spies, including creating your own spying service and trying to turn spies among your own ranks into double agents.  This way lies madness.

3) Accept that there are spies, try to limit access to assets and sensitive knowledge to the most trustworthy, and compartmentalize so that when the inevitable betrayals occur, the damage is limited.

Forums are not secure.  Closed "leadership" forums are only slightly better.  It's a reality, deal with it.

--Dave

Spying is one thing, which we all accept as part of the game and its inevitable. I think its safe to assume most alliances have spies, even among their allies. There is a very clear line between spying with trust and access given to you by others and forcefully accessing other peoples accounts or data that clearly don't belong to you.

The issue of cheating is what is in question here and Bob don't have the cleanest of records in the past. When it comes to ethics, we only have to look at the POS exploit recently to see that Goons were not one of the cheating alliances.

Play a game to win - yes by all means! Play dirty - ok if thats your style, but cheating & hacking...

[tmp]

2) Engage in paranoia and witch-hunts trying to entrap and use the spies, including creating your own spying service and trying to turn spies among your own ranks into double agents.  This way lies madness.

We are talking of hacking and shit to get upper hand at game of internet spaceships. I'm fairly certain the point of madness lies way, way earlier here.

[Phildo]

For me, the point of madness hit right around the time a huge intergalactic war broke out because some allies wouldn't share an isk-making asset that they had previously agreed to share.

[Thrawn]

For me, the point of madness hit right around the time a huge intergalactic war broke out because some allies wouldn't share an isk-making asset that they had previously agreed to share.

Yeah, it is kind of weird to stop and realize that is what set off this entire conflict.

[Predator Irl]

For me, the point of madness hit right around the time a huge intergalactic war broke out because some allies wouldn't share an isk-making asset that they had previously agreed to share.

Yeah, it is kind of weird to stop and realize that is what set off this entire conflict.

Seriously yeah, when you look at it for what it is that sparked off the biggest war Eve has seen, greed! Weigh up how much this war has cost both sides versus what it would have cost to just share the asset and work together.

[xorx]

Seriously yeah, when you look at what sparked off every war ever seen, greed!

Fixed that for you - well, and religion.

Discuss ... 

[Amarr HM]

Take it to the politics forums jaysus.