Punkbuster? ohh no

[Vagabond]

Originally Posted by EVILoHOMER

I think they should use VAC2 and have the game as a Steamworks game. Imagine the threat of having both your Steam and your SOE account being banned...... I don't know many people who would risk it then.

Nothing is stopping people from making new, separate accounts.

In the end, there is no easy solution to hacking. However, I have always wondered if devs ever downloaded or used hacks themselves to see how they function and thus removing them somehow.

[Noivad]

In most games people buy the game. The game is made then distributed by a business. Money is given to the company that produces the game. And there is sometimes no other monthly transaction.

Suscription is nothing more then buying a licence to play the game for a length of time.

But FTP is different. You play for free. And there are business transactions that are made by consumers of the game and SONY on a regular, petentially daily basis. Different laws apply to this type of commerse. The game itself becomes the business.

Hackers disrupting these types of games are interfearing with commerse.

All Sony has to do is to continue to prosecute hacking offenders, and make it publicly known that they are doing it. They have done it once already that I know of - case listed below.

Parents of minors who hack should be directly responsible for the actions their children take on computers. It is their failure as a parrent that has led to this intolerable behavior, that will only escalate into deeper crimes.

Hacking Games is called Jailbreaking and is Priviledge escalation. Privilege escalation is the act of exploiting a bug, design flaw or configuration oversight in an operating system or software application to gain elevated access to resources that are normally protected from an application or user. The result is that an application with more privileges than intended by the application developer or system administrator can perform unauthorized actions. Unauthorized actions would be Cone of Fire hacks, or any type of hacking.

Sony Computer Entertainment America v. George Hotz and Hotz v. SCEA, 2011. SCEA sued 'Geohot' and others for jailbreaking the PlayStation 3 system. The lawsuit alleged, among other things, that Hotz violated 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2)(c)

Sony the business refers to the value creating activites (The Gamining Industry) of an organization for profit. It practices commerce which includes all activites, functions, and institutions involved in transfering goods from producer to consumer. Since it involves more then one country, it is considered an International Business conducting International Commerce, which is done through banks, credit card companies, or other pay services like paypal.

A gaming hacker is any indivual or organization that disrupts, gameplay, whereby others playing the game leave it because they are upset at the cheating. The action of hacking thereby stops monetary flow from the consumer to Sony interupting Commerse. A regulated act of business by governments.

Since Forge Light is a proprietary Game Engine and only Sony has it. Hacking into this engine, and putting it on a website to give to others so they can hack, could be construed as theft of Trade Secrets, since orginal code would be needed to complete the hack.

United States v Sergey Aleynikov, 2011. Aleynikov was a programmer at Goldman Sachs accused of copying code, like high-frequency trading code, allegedly in violation of 1030(a)(2)(c) and 1030(c)(2)(B)i-iii and 2. This charge was later dropped, and he was instead charged with theft of trade secrets and transporting stolen property.[21][22]

There is no other MMOFPS that has the ablity to put 6000 players on a map.How they do it, only Sony knows. To Sony then the code is a trade secret that other gaming companies would love to know.

The Economic Espionage Act of 1996 (Pub.L. 104-294, 110 Stat. 3488, enacted October 11, 1996; H.R. 3723) was a 6 title Act of Congress dealing with a wide range of issues.
The act makes the theft or misappropriation of a trade secret a federal crime. Most prosecutions under the Economic Espionage Act have been for violation of Section 1832, Trade Secret Theft.

Link to other cases under this act.

http://tradesecretshomepage.com/indi...l#_Toc9924962,

In addition the United States, and each State has the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Sonys computers would be considered protected computers.

Protected computers is a term used in Title 18, Section 1030 of the United States Code, (the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) which prohibits a number of different kinds of conduct, generally involving unauthorized access to, or damage to the data stored on, "protected computers".

(B) which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication, including a computer located outside the United States that is used in a manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States.

Computer hacking laws vary by state, but most states consider hacking a felony if it resulted in serious damage or large amounts of money stolen. For instance, Delaware considers computer hacking to be a felony if the total damages exceed $1,500, according to CriminalDefenseLawyer.com. If the damages caused by the hacking are below $1,500, it's a misdemeanor. Indiana considers computer hacking connected with terrorism to be a more serious felony than other hacking cases. If the terrorism-connected hacking results in bodily injury, the felony is more severe.

Computer hacking laws vary by state, but most states consider hacking a felony if it resulted in serious damage or large amounts of money stolen. For instance, Delaware considers computer hacking to be a felony if the total damages exceed $1,500, according to CriminalDefenseLawyer.com. If the damages caused by the hacking are below $1,500, it's a misdemeanor. Indiana considers computer hacking connected with terrorism to be a more serious felony than other hacking cases. If the terrorism-connected hacking results in bodily injury, the felony is more severe.

There only needs to be the Potential of loss to a company, for a hacker to be prosecuted under these laws.

Other Countries, that SONY provides games to may have other laws against it as well.

[RadioFIN]

At the title: They can't seriously be even considering Punkbuster? That thing is a total joke. Please do this thing properly. Example: Red 5 is making their own system for Firefall (Red Handed) so they can fix hacks and issues fast and easy and they don't have to rely on other people's shitty software.

[Gramis]

Thread Necro!

Anyway, ive had some bad experiences with Punkbuster. ive played 2 games (both battlefield) and i always get kicked by Punkbuster. Even after days of trying to get it to work, i either uninstalled or used a server without PB. The server without PB had no hackers, when the PB servers had plenty of them.

I really hope they have more tech support than the Battlefield games i played did.

[Trignite]

I hate PB with a passion but what are the alternatives? most of them just well... suck. And you can't NOT have any anti cheat measures because admins can't tell if someone is wallhacking by looking at there screen since its client side visible only.

If no one cheated then legit gamers wouldn't have to jump through all these (mostly useless and just annoying) hoops to play the game. Not to mention it makes it harder for devs.

[Envenom]

I would imagine with free to play games the cheating would be even more rampant than normal. Let's hope SOE is extremely aggressive with their policing.

[Trignite]

Originally Posted by Envenom

I would imagine with free to play games the cheating would be even more rampant than normal. Let's hope SOE is extremely aggressive with their policing.

We can only hope, lag, severs and cheating are my biggest concerns with this game

[MooK]

Originally Posted by Trignite

I hate PB with a passion but what are the alternatives? most of them just well... suck. And you can't NOT have any anti cheat measures because admins can't tell if someone is wallhacking by looking at there screen since its client side visible only.

If no one cheated then legit gamers wouldn't have to jump through all these (mostly useless and just annoying) hoops to play the game. Not to mention it makes it harder for devs.

I don't think, in this case, something proven to be useless garbage is better than nothing. There's history of video games running their own anti-hacking software. Most of the times, human policing is the only real solution. Having the option to get statistics on a certain player's behavior would do them well (1hr long logs would be acceptable.)

[Kran De Loy]

I really just can not see PB being a good choice. In any case. Ever. It's been far too compromised far too often by far too many hacks.

Even if it DOES just happen to weed out the last few decades of scripting hacks, all the information I find on it leads me to believe that it keeps leaving too many holes for newer stuff to be written through it. That by itself is actually buisiness as usual for all anti-hack software since they are all always just playing catch up.

If I put PB on a scale of success it would just barely be reaching the 'well enough' range without even getting to the next step of 'moderately well enough'.

However PB adds it's mediocre successes to the terrible service records that plague legitimate players consistently. Also supposedly Punk Buster is incompatible with multiple legitimate programs that are commonly used.

Personally I like this part the most from the wikipedia page.

On March 23, 2008, hackers published and implemented a proof of concept exploit of PunkBuster's indiscriminate memory scanning. Because PunkBuster scans all of a machine's virtual memory, malicious users were able to cause mass false positives by transmitting text fragments from known cheat programs onto a high population IRC channel. When PunkBuster detected the text within user's IRC client text buffers, the users were banned.[7] On March 25, 2008, Even Balance confirmed the existence of this exploit, and advised users not to run any other programs at the same time as PunkBuster protected games.

Punk Buster's creators response? Just don't run anything else and you're fine. Fix an exploit that someone made to break our program? What? Why should we have to do that?

Edit: Just to make sure, that wasn't banned from the IRC channel, that was Banned from Punk Buster on their own systems.

[Top Sgt]

Originally Posted by Envenom

I would imagine with free to play games the cheating would be even more rampant than normal. Let's hope SOE is extremely aggressive with their policing.

We all better hope that SOE is really strict and on top of this or it could get out of hand quick.

I believe them when higby says they have multiple layers going on and full time 24 hrs admins watching.. let's just hope it's effective.

I have seen $60.00 Pay shooters completely wiped out within 1 week.. Homefront on PC was ovverun by hackers completely day 1 hr 1.. by the end of the week. the game on PC was a ghost town because nothing was done about it at all back then. And that was a $60.00 game.. imagine free?

[Synapse]

Originally Posted by Coreldan

There is no better alternative. They are all just about equally crap. They do however keep the devs having to constantly work on the cheats.

Thats just how it goes, cheats are always designed to bypass current level of anti cheat.

VAC and whatever that thing WoW uses are better than PB.

...but they aren't perfect, for sure.

[indirect]

As I said in the last thread about this...

I'd rather have no anti-cheat system than have punkbuster. Punkbuster RUINS games, it doesn't help them.

SEE: BC2, All-Points Bulletin, etc.

[Bags]

I've never heard of Warden incorrectly banning someone, so Warden is already > PB if we assume they both do nothing to cheaters.

[Trignite]

Originally Posted by MooK

I don't think, in this case, something proven to be useless garbage is better than nothing. There's history of video games running their own anti-hacking software. Most of the times, human policing is the only real solution. Having the option to get statistics on a certain player's behavior would do them well (1hr long logs would be acceptable.)

I agree that having third party anti-cheat is bad, but i don't see how admins can detect if a player is using more subtle hacks. Unless they make there own system which would be far more effective since they have complete access to there systems and only have to make it specifically for one game.

But i also (sadly) doubt that SOE are willing to make there own anti-cheat system and not rely on a third party.

Would you pick a third party anti-cheat over none at all? i am leaning towards the third party simply because it can detect things that people cant by just looking at there perspective. Even if it is very horrible

[Goldeh]

Never Fear!

Friendy Fire mode is On! Is here!

Also, mods.