Warden anti-hack is back..

[Barabajagal]

Today I was in the Blizzard Tech Support channel (reporting a bot that was advertising a game and being annoying in general), and the user before me apparently asked the rep for help with a bot. The rep said they did not support third party clients, and that the user should contact the bot developer for help. Sounds to me like they're apathetic about chat bots

[Kp]

Look at it from their perspective.  Blizzard uses paid employees to police battle.net.  Since battle.net does not generate subscription revenue, there is no incentive to expend effort fighting issues which do not substantially bother the gaming users.  Bots can be annoying, but are generally easy to avoid.  However, cheaters are more difficult to avoid (how do you as a mere gamer tell when someone's cheating?) and tend to cause more annoyance.  Thus, given limited resources, Blizzard focuses on stopping cheating.  As we have seen, they are not averse to causing bot developers/users grief when it is a cheap or free side effect of fighting cheating, but it is not cost effective to spend employee time on a pursuit which will only hinder bots.

As for the remark about encryption: what good would that do?  Do you really think bots would have gotten this far if people were restricted to inspecting wire traffic to understand the protocol?  Once a user commits to reverse engineering the client to get the protocol details, an encrypted protocol just means some extra functions to take apart.  Also, encryption is not free.  Encrypting all the wire traffic going in and out of battle.net would require non-trivial resources for any good encryption algorithm.  I doubt Blizzard would even consider spending the CPU cycles to encrypt a couple hundred thousand connections (battle.net's user count during its heyday) when, as above, it is only a temporary hindrance to third party developers and does not earn any additional money.

[rabbit]

You haven't read Blizzard's TOS or EULA, have you?

I have. Why didn't they make something to prevent Diablo 2 bots connecting? Or warcraft 2? Hell, even their beloved warcraft 3? Why didn't they encrypt all of their packets. *Hint* They're not trying to "kill the botz"

Their TOS/EULA specifically prohibits emulation of their protocols.  That's pretty anti-bot to me.

[Barabajagal]

You haven't read Blizzard's TOS or EULA, have you?

I have. Why didn't they make something to prevent Diablo 2 bots connecting? Or warcraft 2? Hell, even their beloved warcraft 3? Why didn't they encrypt all of their packets. *Hint* They're not trying to "kill the botz"

Their TOS/EULA specifically prohibits emulation of their protocols.  That's pretty anti-bot to me.

As was previously mentioned, it's apparently only really there as leverage in case an incident arises.

[Camel]

Who said it was an algorithm

Anyone who has ever taken any kind of computer science course. Ever.

[Falcon[anti-yL]]

Who said it was an algorithm

Anyone who has ever taken any kind of computer science course. Ever.

Haha Camel +1

[rabbit]

I told that kid it was an algorithm weeks ago and everyone yelled at me "NO IT R TEH PORGAMZ" and now Camel says the same thing and he gets +1 and praise.  WTF?

[Camel]

An explicit step-by-step procedure for producing a solution to a given problem. Specifically, a mathematical equation typically executed using a computer program (or set of programs) that is designed to systematically solve a certain kind of problem.

[UserLoser]

Nobody can join Backstage unless they're @Blizzard accounts and are on the blizzard rep/admin database list.
And ya, there's ways of getting JSTR into channels it's not supposed to be in, but if you get caught doing it, you'll ruin it for everyone -.-
Plus, the only reason to use JSTR is cause its icon is better than any other icons

Isn't a admin database, just names tagged with specific flags are allowed access.  IIRC, years back you were able to see System\Flags for a user--I could be wrong about this though.  Obivously we would all have 0 for that value, while Blizzard reps would have 0x8 for example and admins have 0x1--or whatever the values are

[Barabajagal]

That sounds like a database to me <.<

[brew]

An explicit step-by-step procedure for producing a solution to a given problem. Specifically, a mathematical equation typically executed using a computer program (or set of programs) that is designed to systematically solve a certain kind of problem.

You're pushing that definition. Notice how I use everything except actual math for that algorithm. Just patch a few addresses, and send data through a winsock.

[Barabajagal]

An explicit step-by-step procedure for producing a solution to a given problem. Specifically, a mathematical equation typically executed using a computer program (or set of programs) that is designed to systematically solve a certain kind of problem.

You're pushing that definition. Notice how I use everything except actual math for that algorithm. Just patch a few addresses, and send data through a winsock.

Uhm... no, he's not pushing it. That's what an algorithm is.

[UserLoser]

That sounds like a database to me <.<

yeah, a database.  not an admin database

[Barabajagal]

Select * From `Users` where `Flags` AND FLAG_ADMIN

Sorry for using obscure terminology. By Admin Database, I mean a listing of data containing information about administrators.

[Camel]

An explicit step-by-step procedure for producing a solution to a given problem. Specifically, a mathematical equation typically executed using a computer program (or set of programs) that is designed to systematically solve a certain kind of problem.

You're pushing that definition. Notice how I use everything except actual math for that algorithm. Just patch a few addresses, and send data through a winsock.

Actually, I was quoting the result of a Google search for "define:algorithm"