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Comment What we need.... (Score 2) 286

by frostfreek (#45462901) Attached to: User Alleges LG TVs Phone Home With Your Viewing Habits

For now, it's filenames. Next will be screenshots. After that, reverse-netflix?

What we need is for the protocol to be reverse-engineered, and then just start posting all sorts of randomized information to the servers, effectively making it useless. Advertisers won't pay for garbage data.

Of course, once LG notices, the protocol will be encrypted...
The Almighty Buck

Integer Overflow Bug Leads To Diablo III Gold Duping 160

Posted by Soulskill from the many-foreheads-were-slapped dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "Online economies come with their own issues. Case in point is the Auction House for Diablo III, a massively multiplayer game in which players can pay for items in either in-game gold or real-world dollars. Thanks to a bug in the game's latest patch, players could generate massive amounts of virtual gold with little effort, which threatened to throw the in-game economy seriously out of whack. Diablo series publisher Blizzard took corrective steps, but the bug has already attracted a fair share of buzz on gaming and tech-news forums. 'We're still in the process of auditing Auction House and gold trade transactions,' read Blizzard's note on the Battle.net forums. 'We realize this is an inconvenience for many of our players, and we sincerely apologize for the interruption of the service. We hope to have everything back up as soon as possible.' Blizzard was unable to offer an ETA for when the Auction House would come back. 'We'll continue to provide updates in this thread as they become available.' Diablo's gold issue brings up (however tangentially) some broader issues with virtual currencies, namely the bugs and workarounds that can throw an entire micro-economy out of whack. But then again, 'real world' markets have their own software-related problems: witness Wall Street's periodic 'flash crashes' (caused, many believe, by the rise of ultra-high-speed computer trading)." It seems likely the gold duping was due to a simple integer overflow bug. A late change added to the patch allowed users to sell gold on the Real Money Auction House in stacks of 10 million rather than stacks of 1 million. On the RMAH, there exists both a cap ($250) and a floor ($0.25) for the value of auctions. With stacks of 1 million and a floor of $0.25, a seller could only enter 1 billion gold (1,000 stacks) while staying under the $250 cap. When the gold stack size increased, the value of gold dropped significantly. At $0.39 per 10 million, a user could enter values of up to 6.4 billion gold at a time. Unfortunately, the RMAH wasn't designed to handle gold numbers above 2^31, or 2,147,483,648 gold. Creating the auction wouldn't remove enough gold, but canceling it would return the full amount.

Comment Re:Video (Score 1) 287

by frostfreek (#42129939) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Which OSS Database Project To Help?

I am using an admittedly older MythDora (umm, 10?) system with MythWelcome set up to use the alarm to wake it up when it needs to record something, and power it off when idle.

It usually decides to act up when I am away for a week on business or something, and then everyone's mad at me when I get back!
So I finally added a "mysqlcheck --autorepair" to the bootup sequence.

As a complete aside, I just ran out of disk space while still having 100GB free... ran out of inodes. Some cron job was periodically sending emails, and I had over 500,000 unsent emails in /var/spool. Took a good while to delete all those emails.

Comment Re:Video (Score 2) 287

by frostfreek (#42123243) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Which OSS Database Project To Help?

The video shows a number of ways that MySQL seems to insert questionable data; ignoring NOT NULL, inserting default values when no default is specified, etc...

There are two databases that I have had to repair... Hypersonic and MySQL. MySQL I have to repair regularly in my MythTV box. Hypersonic states it should not be used in a production system. I have never had to repair Postgres, MSSQL, or Oracle.

Comment Re:Is there enough data (Score 1) 623

by frostfreek (#42055989) Attached to: Report Says Climate Change Already Evident, Emissions Gap Growing

There is no way to gather a significant amount of data to suggest that we're doing anything "bad"

The amount of carbon (and pollution) we sending into the atmosphere is staggering, and currently accelerating.
Do you like the earth's atmosphere as it is now? Do you think we can just carry on going in this direction, without adversely affecting it?

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