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Comment Re:Third Party Content. (Score 1) 179

Not every game allows modding, but a lot of them make very interesting attack vectors. Imagine WoW having an exploitable angle. Aside of the obvious target (getting access to the WoW account and stripping it), what do you think would happen if there was a way to infect machines running WoW by, say, slipping an infected version of a popular mod into one of the download areas?

There almost is, actually. Look up what "Warden" is. The game server sends a binary blob to the client which is then loaded into the game and can communicate with the server to check for cheats.

If the modules weren't encrypted with Blizzard's private key then anyone who plays on a private server could potentially get owned. If you want to run a private server and take advantage of the system, you need to use Blizzard's modules in their already-encrypted form because it isn't possible to sign your own modules and use them with a non-modded client.

Comment Re:Killed because it wasn't a revenue generator (Score 1) 118

Are you asserting that people shouldn't complain when they are annoyed? Because that's what it sounds like.

People shouldn't complain when they are annoyed by Google, because everything Google does is Awesome (TM). In fact, I'm glad they dropped this service out-of-the-blue, because now we know who the unbelievers are.

If Apple (or, less so, Microsoft) does something that annoys you, then you are allowed to whine on Slashdot.

Comment Re:This is an ok idea, definitely not a great one (Score 1) 110

To make it work, you have to have a second DB listing all the passwords, and some sort of marker indicating which ones are real and which are fakes. You can't put this in the main DB, because then the hackers would have stolen this info too, and can tell which passwords are real. So you have a second, more secure system for this. Aside from the problems in maintaining a separate parallel system, one might ask the question, "why isn't your primary DB as secure as the secondary DB?". If attackers can breach your main defenses how do you know they cannot breach your backup network? What happens if your secondary system goes down?

You don't necessarily need a second DB. Just make which-one-is-the-right-one be a function of some other data, like the username.

Comment Re:Teaching kids... (Score 1) 265

Debugging quirks in the language? I don't know about Pascal, but it could be a lot worse than Java. At least the ints are always 32-bit.

Personally I would teach Lua, because of the dead simple syntax and good but not complicated feature set (the most complicated it gets is co-routines and meta-tables). Plus it's actually useful in the real world and is used in a number of apps.

Comment Re:Programmer ethics? (Score 1) 119

Yeah, whenever I see I story like this I wonder to myself "How the hell can anyone work on this stuff and still sleep at night?" Either A. they don't realize that they're an active part of making the US a hellish dystopia, or B. really don't give a fuck about the world tomorrow and just want to get paid today.

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