Fake WOW server makes owner $3m in 'donations'

Nope, they will have written their own server code and haxed up the client a bit to work with it. I was involved in investigating a couple of private servers for my own companies games and it's quite an interesting area. The rather massive intellectual property infringments aside, private servers provide a rather interesting look at the features players of your game really want.
 
Good for Blizzard :) i dont see the point in going to a fake server anyway (dont know how it affects chars and whatnot) but the people that used it were cheating. imo


Silver - i was highly distracted by your sig = its good :D whos the girl?
 
adamknox said:
i was thinking the same thing. I think she will have to go into 'bankrupcy' and pay off as much as she can. Good old blizzard they couldnt have just taken the 3M they decided to take the donations + as much else as they could get and REALLY ruin some ones life. Id rather be put into prison for 5 years. leats when you come out you would still be able to get a morgage and some what a good job.
Click to expand...

thats what you get for stealing people's work and making money out of it. well deserved what she got.
 
alfalavala said:
$3mil in donations (versus "80mil") shows how much people think WOW is worth to play
Click to expand...

I think that would be called "making an example". I'd be very surprised if Blizzard saw a penny of it, if it was me i'd be long gone. The moment a Blizzard court order hits your letterbox you know theres no turning back.
 
Spuds said:
Nope, they will have written their own server code and haxed up the client a bit to work with it. I was involved in investigating a couple of private servers for my own companies games and it's quite an interesting area. The rather massive intellectual property infringments aside, private servers provide a rather interesting look at the features players of your game really want.
Click to expand...

Wait a minute. There's nothing illegal about so-called black box reverse engineering... sampling the packets in and out is legit, surely?

So where is the intellectual property infringement? Obviously there is one, or the courts wouldn't have ruled in Bliz' favour, but where exactly is this infringement occuring?

You're allowed to write your own software... you're allowed to write your software to interoperate with someone else's software (even if they don't want you to) so long as you don't hack/crack theirs, so... well, what's wrong?
 
FoxEye said:
Wait a minute. There's nothing illegal about so-called black box reverse engineering... sampling the packets in and out is legit, surely?

So where is the intellectual property infringement? Obviously there is one, or the courts wouldn't have ruled in Bliz' favour, but where exactly is this infringement occuring?

You're allowed to write your own software... you're allowed to write your software to interoperate with someone else's software (even if they don't want you to) so long as you don't hack/crack theirs, so... well, what's wrong?
Click to expand...

Its using a leaked server program from blizzard with their own game then cracking it and getting the players to alter their realmlist files to only get the free servers. Massive breach of copyright anyway you look at it and the IPI is basically what I just described.
 
The court took the size of the community, 427,000, and multiplied that figure by $200 "per act of circumvention" of a copyright security system, and came to the statutory damages amount of over $85 million.
Click to expand...

Ha...
 
Mp4 said:
Good for Blizzard :) i dont see the point in going to a fake server anyway (dont know how it affects chars and whatnot) but the people that used it were cheating. imo


Silver - i was highly distracted by your sig = its good :D whos the girl?
Click to expand...

You can't play with the same chars on a private server as you would on a Blizzard server. Just the same you can't switch between real servers. (Transfers require your characters data to be transfered from server to another server)

Private servers allow free play, but also allow other things that normally wouldn't happen, such as special items that don't exist in real servers, boosted XP gains etc. Some servers are "instant max level" so the moment you create a character, they are instantly lvl80, fully equipped with max stats etc.
 
FoxEye said:
Wait a minute. There's nothing illegal about so-called black box reverse engineering... sampling the packets in and out is legit, surely?

So where is the intellectual property infringement? Obviously there is one, or the courts wouldn't have ruled in Bliz' favour, but where exactly is this infringement occuring?

You're allowed to write your own software... you're allowed to write your software to interoperate with someone else's software (even if they don't want you to) so long as you don't hack/crack theirs, so... well, what's wrong?
Click to expand...

Nope, nothing wrong with writing your own server code, but to use the game client with it you need to modify it as it is designed to only connect to legit servers using things like encryption on the communication protocol. Modifying the client in this way is illegal (Circumvention of technical measures under the DMCA and European copyright laws) as is distributing it to your users.
 
Spuds said:
Nope, nothing wrong with writing your own server code, but to use the game client with it you need to modify it as it is designed to only connect to legit servers using things like encryption on the communication protocol. Modifying the client in this way is illegal (Circumvention of technical measures under the DMCA and European copyright laws) as is distributing it to your users.
Click to expand...

Shouldn't need to modify the client, surely you could temporarily add an overwrite to your HOSTS file re-directing the client to where ever. I remember back in the day you could connect to private Lineage 2 servers this way.
 
stooeh said:
Shouldn't need to modify the client, surely you could temporarily add an overwrite to your HOSTS file re-directing the client to where ever. I remember back in the day you could connect to private Lineage 2 servers this way.
Click to expand...

Things have moved on a bit since then ;) Even if you still could redirect the connection to the server this simply you still have to deal with the dozens of other security features designed to stop exactly this.

One simple method of defeating this approach would be through the use of public key cryptography. Packets encrypted using the public key in the client could only be decrypted using the private key held on the legitimate server. Likewise, the client would reject any packets from the server which wasn't signed using its private key. To get the client to work with a private server would require modifying its public key to match the new peivate key of the private server, or removing the encryption process from the client altogether.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom