Entries Tagged "games"

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The Pentagon's World of Warcraft Movie-Plot Threat

In a presentation that rivals any of my movie-plot threat contest entries, a Pentagon researcher is worried that terrorists might plot using World of Warcraft:

In a presentation late last week at the Director of National Intelligence Open Source Conference in Washington, Dr. Dwight Toavs, a professor at the Pentagon-funded National Defense University, gave a bit of a primer on virtual worlds to an audience largely ignorant about what happens in these online spaces. Then he launched into a scenario, to demonstrate how a meatspace plot might be hidden by in-game chatter.

In it, two World of Warcraft players discuss a raid on the “White Keep” inside the “Stonetalon Mountains.” The major objective is to set off a “Dragon Fire spell” inside, and make off with “110 Gold and 234 Silver” in treasure. “No one will dance there for a hundred years after this spell is cast,” one player, “war_monger,” crows.

Except, in this case, the White Keep is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “Dragon Fire” is an unconventional weapon. And “110 Gold and 234 Silver” tells the plotters how to align the game’s map with one of Washington, D.C.

I don’t know why he thinks that the terrorists will use World of Warcraft and not some other online world. Or Facebook. Or Usenet. Or a chat room. Or e-mail. Or the telephone. I don’t even know why the particular form of communication is in any way important.

The article ends with this nice paragraph:

Steven Aftergood, the Federation of the American Scientists analyst who’s been following the intelligence community for years, wonders how realistic these sorts of scenarios are, really. “This concern is out there. But it has to be viewed in context. It’s the job of intelligence agencies to anticipate threats and counter them. With that orientation, they’re always going to give more weight to a particular scenario than an objective analysis would allow,” he tells Danger Room. “Could terrorists use Second Life? Sure, they can use anything. But is it a significant augmentation? That’s not obvious. It’s a scenario that an intelligence officer is duty-bound to consider. That’s all.”

My guess is still that some clever Pentagon researchers have figured out how to play World of Warcraft on the job, and they’re not giving that perk up anytime soon.

Posted on September 18, 2008 at 1:29 PM • View Comments

UK Police Seize War on Terror Board Game

They said—and it’s almost too stupid to believe—that:

the balaclava “could be used to conceal someone’s identity or could be used in the course of a criminal act”.

Don’t they realize that balaclavas are for sale everywhere in the UK? Or that scarves, hoods, handkerchiefs, and dark glasses could also be used to conceal someone’s identity?

The game sounds like it could be fun, though:

Each player starts as an empire filled with good intentions and a determination to liberate the world from terrorists and from each other.

Then the reality of world politics kicks and terrorist states emerge.

Andrew said: “The terrorists can win and quite often do and it’s global anarchy. It sums up the randomness of geo-politics pretty well.”

In their cardboard version of realpolitik George Bush’s “Axis of Evil” is reduced to a spinner in the middle of the board, which determines which player is designated a terrorist state.

That person then has to wear a balaclava (included in the box set) with the word “Evil” stitched on to it.

Buy yours here; I first blogged about it in 2006.

Posted on August 15, 2008 at 6:50 AM • View Comments

Searching for Terrorists in World of Warcraft

So, you’re sitting around the house with your buddies, playing World of Warcraft. One of you wonders: “How can we get paid for doing this?” Another says: “I know; let’s pretend we’re fighting terrorism, and then get a government grant.”

Having eliminated all terrorism in the real world, the U.S. intelligence community is working to develop software that will detect violent extremists infiltrating World of Warcraft and other massive multiplayer games, according to a data-mining report from the Director of National Intelligence.

Another article.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

EDITED TO ADD (3/13): Funny.

Posted on March 11, 2008 at 2:42 PM • View Comments

Suicide Bombing in Halo 3

Interesting and thoughtful article about suicide attacks in the online video game Halo 3:

Whenever I find myself under attack by a wildly superior player, I stop trying to duck and avoid their fire. Instead, I turn around and run straight at them. I know that by doing so, I’m only making it easier for them to shoot me—and thus I’m marching straight into the jaws of death. Indeed, I can usually see my health meter rapidly shrinking to zero.

But at the last second, before I die, I’ll whip out a sticky plasma grenade—and throw it at them. Because I’ve run up so close, I almost always hit my opponent successfully. I’ll die—but he’ll die too, a few seconds later when the grenade goes off. (When you pull off the trick, the game pops up a little dialog box noting that you killed someone “from beyond the grave.”)

It was after pulling this maneuver a couple of dozen times that it suddenly hit me: I had, quite unconsciously, adopted the tactics of a suicide bomber—or a kamikaze pilot.

It’s not just that I’m willing to sacrifice my life to kill someone else. It’s that I’m exploiting the psychology of asymmetrical warfare.

Because after all, the really elite Halo players don’t want to die. If they die too often, they won’t win the round, and if they don’t win the round, they won’t advance up the Xbox Live rankings. And for the elite players, it’s all about bragging rights.

I, however, have a completely different psychology. I know I’m the underdog; I know I’m probably going to get killed anyway. I am never going to advance up the Halo 3 rankings, because in the political economy of Halo, I’m poor.

Posted on November 12, 2007 at 1:20 PM • View Comments

Spammers Using Porn to Break Captchas

Clever:

Spammers have created a Windows game which shows a woman in a state of undress when people correctly type in text shown in an accompanying image.

The scrambled text images come from sites which use them to stop computers automatically signing up for accounts that can be put to illegal use.

By getting people to type in the text the spammers can take over the accounts and use them to send junk mail.

I’ve been saying that spammers would start doing this for years. I’m actually surprised it took this long.

Posted on November 1, 2007 at 2:37 PM • View Comments

Cheating in Online Poker

Fascinating story of insider cheating:

Some opponents became suspicious of how a certain player was playing. He seemed to know what the opponents’ hole cards were. The suspicious players provided examples of these hands, which were so outrageous that virtually all serious poker players were convinced that cheating had occurred. One of the players who’d been cheated requested that Absolute Poker provide hand histories from the tournament (which is standard practice for online sites). In this case, Absolute Poker “accidentally” did not send the usual hand histories, but instead sent a file that contained all sorts of private information that the poker site would never release. The file contained every player’s hole cards, observations of the tables, and even the IP addresses of every person playing. (I put “accidentally” in quotes because the mistake seems like too great a coincidence when you learn what followed.) I suspect that someone at Absolute knew about the cheating and how it happened, and was acting as a whistleblower by sending these data. If that is the case, I hope whomever “accidentally” sent the file gets their proper hero’s welcome in the end.

Then the poker players went to work analyzing the data—not the hand histories themselves, but other, more subtle information contained in the file. What these players-turned-detectives noticed was that, starting with the third hand of the tournament, there was an observer who watched every subsequent hand played by the cheater. (For those of you who don’t know much about online poker, anyone who wants can observe a particular table, although, of course, the observers can’t see any of the players’ hole cards.) Interestingly, the cheater folded the first two hands before this observer showed up, then did not fold a single hand before the flop for the next 20 minutes, and then folded his hand pre-flop when another player had a pair of kings as hole cards! This sort of cheating went on throughout the tournament.

So the poker detectives turned their attention to this observer. They traced the observer’s IP address and account name to the same set of servers that host Absolute Poker, and also, apparently, to a particular individual named Scott Tom, who seems to be a part-owner of Absolute Poker! If all of this is correct, it shows exactly how the cheating would have transpired: an insider at the Web site had real-time access to all of the hole cards (it is not hard to believe that this capability would exist) and was relaying this information to an outside accomplice.

More details here.

EDITED TO ADD (10/20): More information.

EDITED TO ADD (11/13): This graph of players’ river aggression is a great piece of evidence. Note the single outlying point.

Posted on October 19, 2007 at 11:44 AM •

Movie-Plot Threats in Second Life

Oh, give me a break:

On the darker side, there are also weapons armouries in SL where people can get access to guns, including automatic weapons and AK47s. Searches of the SL website show there are three jihadi terrorists registered and two elite jihadist terrorist groups.

Once these groups take up residence in SL, it is easy to start spreading propaganda, recruiting and instructing like minds on how to start terrorist cells and carry out jihad.

One radical group, called Second Life Liberation Army, has been responsible for some computer-coded atomic bombings of virtual world stores in the past six months.

On screen these blasts look like an explosion of hazy white balls as buildings explode, landscapes are razed and residents are wounded or killed.

With the game taking such a sinister turn, terrorism experts are warning that SL attacks have ramifications for the real world. Just as September 11 terrorists practised flying planes on simulators in preparation for their deadly assault on US buildings, law enforcement agencies believe some of those behind the Second Life attacks are home-grown Australian jihadists who are rehearsing for strikes against real targets.

Geez. Do we all need to take our shoes off before logging in or something? Refuse to be terrorized, people.

Another discussion.

EDITED TO ADD (8/2): Another article.

Posted on August 1, 2007 at 11:49 AM • View Comments

Ubiquity of Communication

Read this essay by Randy Farmer, a pioneer of virtual online worlds, explaining something called Disney’s ToonTown.

Designers of online worlds for children wanted to severely restrict the communication that users could have with each other, lest somebody say something that’s inappropriate for children to hear.

Randy discusses various approaches to this problem that were tried over the years. The ToonTown solution was to restrict users to something called “Speedchat,” a menu of pre-constructed sentences, all innocuous. They also gave users the ability to conduct unrestricted conversations with each other, provided they both knew a secret code string. The designers presumed the code strings would be passed only to people a user knew in real life, perhaps on a school playground or among neighbors.

Users found ways to pass code strings to strangers anyway. This page describes several protocols, using gestures, canned sentences, or movement of objects in the game.

After you read the ways above to make secret friends, look here. Another way to make secret friends with toons you don’t know is to form letters/numbers with the picture frames in your house. Around you may see toons who have alot of picture frames at their toon estates, they are usually looking for secret friends. This is how to do it! So, lets say you wanted to make secret friends with a toon named Lily. Your “pretend” secret friend code is 4yt 56s.

  • You: *Move frames around in house to form a 4.* “Okay.”
  • Her: “Okay.” She has now written the first letter down on a piece of paper.
  • You: *Move Frames around to form a y.* “Okay.”
  • Her: “Okay.” She has now written the second number down on paper.
  • You: *Move Frames around in house to form a t* “Okay.”
  • Her: “Okay.” She has now written the third letter down on paper. “Okay.”
  • You: *Do nothing* “Okay” This shows that you have made a space.
  • Repeat process

Randy writes: “By hook, or by crook, customers will always find a way to connect with each other.”

Posted on June 20, 2007 at 12:48 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.