Blackmoor Vituperative

MySpace.com on Tuesday said it has filed suit against Sanford Wallace, seeking to bar the “spam king” and his affiliated companies from the social-networking site.

In the suit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles, MySpace accuses Wallace of violating state and federal laws including the federal Can-Spam Act and California’s antispam and antiphishing statutes, the company said in a statement.

MySpace charges that Wallace launched a phishing scam in October to fraudulently access MySpace profiles. He also allegedly created profiles, groups and forums on MySpace, spammed thousands of users with unwanted advertisements and lured MySpace users to his Web sites, according to the complaint.

“Individuals who try to spam or phish our members are not welcome on MySpace,” Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer for MySpace, said in the statement. The lawsuit seeks a permanent injunction barring Wallace and his affiliated companies from the MySpace site, in addition to unspecified monetary damages.

(from ZDNet, MySpace wants to bar ‘spam king’)

I think MySpace is a colossal waste of time and energy, but at least they are trying to do the right thing here. This guy Wallace is spamming, phishing, spyware-spreading scum.

I am writing this post more or less as a note to myself, but maybe they will be useful to someone else, too. Here are the changes to the standard key bindings to make SWG playable (or least reasonably so).

Mouse Pointer Mode Default — Checked
Jump — CTRL-SPACE
Primary Action — SPACE
Primary Action and Attack — [unset]
Set Intended Target — X, MOUSEBUTTON1
Summon Radial Menu – MOUSEBUTTON2
Toggle Auto Target — T
Toggle Repeat Auto Attack — R

Note 1: you have to hit R (in this setup) to attack with, because a normal attack will just stop after you attack once. Essentially, you have to turn on auto-attack every time you attack something. That means you can’t use the same key to “use” and “attack”. Yes, it’s idiotic, but that’s how it works.

Note 2: you periodically have hit ALT because SWG has a borked user interface that changes “mouse modes”. Yes, there is a very good reason you don’t see this in any other game. It’s idiotic.

Note 3: you periodically have to hit ESC or MOUSEBUTTON2, because SWG has a borked user interface that prevent you from selecting a new target if you examined something else. For example if you looked at a terminal screen ten minutes ago, you won’t be able to click on that Tusken Zealot who’s doing his level best to kill you. Infuriating, but I see no way around it.

Here’s a security tip. Never, ever log into any URL that has been emailed to you. Never.

Always go directly to the URL you have bookmarked (for your bank, let’s say), and log in there.

One of the most common scams I see nowadays is scumbags sending so-called “HTML mail” to their intended victims, and making that so-called “HTML mail” look like an official email from someone the victim does business with (eBay, PayPal, and various banks are the most common spoofed emails). In this so-called “HTML mail” there will be a Login button, or a what appears to be a web address. However, if you look at where this address actually goes, it goes to some scumbag piece of filth’s server, typically in China or Romania but it could just as easily be in Idaho, who then grabs your login and password and rob you of everything you have in that account, and then they sell it online to other scumbag pieces of filth on underground web sites.

There are two things you should learn from this.

1) So-called “HTML mail” is EVIL. Don’t send it. Don’t read it. Disable it in your email client if you can.

2) Never, ever log into a URL that has been emailed to you. Never, ever.

As you may recall, e360 Insight wasn’t exactly pleased when Spamhaus labeled it a spammer last year; in fact, e360 Insight’s owner sued the UK-based company. Now, in an ironic taste-of-your-own-medicine twist, e360 Insight is being sued for (allegedly) spamming an individual in California.

(from WebProNews, e360 Pulls 180 On Spam?)

I covered the Spamhaus suit in this blog back when it happened. The short version is that notorious spammer David Lindhardt sued Spamhaus for adding Lindhardt’s company to their list of spammers, and a judge was incompetent enough to rule in the spammer’s favor even though Lindhardt was and is violating Federal and state law.

Well, now people are finally suing David Lindhardt. It’s about time. Spamming scumbag.

Don’t expect a reversal of the ruling against Spamhaus, though.

Incidentally, the article to which I am linking is misnamed. e360 has always been a source of spam. There’s no “180” involved in this. I think the author just thought it was clever to have “360” and “180” in the same title. I guess it didn’t bother him that it makes no sense.

This is an update on my evaluation of World Of Warcraft.

Well, I have used up my free trial period with World Of Warcraft. I really can’t see myself paying to continue. It’s just too much of a chore to target and attack things.

Star Wars Galaxies is even worse, at least by default. I have found a number of settings to ameliorate SWG’s worst problems, but it still requires several taps on a keyboard and a mouse click just to attack someone, and periodically the mouse will abruptly change “modes” or the attack will stop working and you have to hit Escape and then try again.

On the upside, SWG is smart enough to pivot the character when the target moves — WOW doesn’t. Instead, you get an idiotic “you must face your target” message.

You can’t see it, but I am shaking my head.

I swear, I wish the developers for these games would go play Guild Wars for ten minutes and see how a user interface ought to be designed.

Oh, well. I have some more free time with Star Wars Galaxies. Maybe something will come up that makes the game’s UI less freaking frustrating. I don’t have high hopes, but I haven’t given up yet. It’s Star Wars, for crying out loud.

This is an update on my evaluation of Star Wars Galaxies.

I have discovered some tricks to make the user interface for Star Wars Galaxies a little better. There is an auto-aim function that makes it less of a click-fest, you just have to enable it. Every. Time. You. Attack. Something. Yeah, well, at least it’s there.

http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/players/guides.vm?id=80115

There are also a whole lot of guides available, which is pretty cool.

http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/en_US/players/guides.vm
http://swg.allakhazam.com/db/guides.html?guide=538

And there is a radar, it’s just not available during the entire first portion of the game. So from levels 1 to around 8 or so: no radar. That’s just stupid.

However, there is a crazy level of detail in this game, for everything from trading to smuggling to bounty hunting and god knows what else. There are so many slash commands, it’s almost like a MUD. I used to really like MUDs.

So I am still playing. It’s growing on me.

Well, I played Star Wars Galaxies for an hour or so this afternoon, and I have to say, the UI for Galaxies looks really dated. Like, mid-1990s dated. By default, there are no targeting hotkeys at all, and there is no radar/minimap, making it even worse in those respects than World Of Warcraft.

I am pretty baffled. How hard is it to look at how other games do things and implement them? I’m not talking about curing cancer, here.

Also, the animation is really crude. Very clunky. World Of Warcraft and Guild Wars are both much better.

Still, it’s Star Wars, so I am inclined to give it more of a chance than I gave Warcraft (and I still may try Warcraft again, especially after comparing it to Star Wars Galaxies). But my initial impression of the game is that if it were anything other than Star Wars, I’d be uninstalling it now.

A federal judge in Philadelphia yesterday ruled against a 1998 U.S. law that makes it a crime for operators of Internet sites to let anyone under 17 have access to sexual material, rebuffing the government’s argument that software filters are ineffective and upholding earlier rulings that the law infringed on free-speech rights.

In a detailed decision, Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. found that the Child Online Protection Act would not be effective in protecting children from online pornography, and that parents could shield their children by using software filters and other, less restrictive means that do not curtail adults’ rights to free speech.

(from WashingtonPost.com, Judge Rejects Law Aimed at Internet Porn)

I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later: a judge who has a clue about the Internet.

Check out this giant crystal cave in Mexico.

Last summer, when I wrote “Vicious orchestrated assault on MacBook wireless researchers,” it set off a long chain of heated debates and blogs. I had hoped to release the information on who orchestrated the vicious assault, but threats of lawsuits and a spineless company that refused to defend itself meant I couldn’t disclose the details. A lot has changed since then: Researcher David Maynor is no longer working for SecureWorks, and he’s finally given me permission to publish the details.

The scandal broke when Jim Dalrymple put out a hit piece on security researchers David Maynor and Jon “Johnny Cache” Ellch, saying that their research was a “misrepresentation.” Dalrymple based his conclusion solely on the word of Apple PR director Lynn Fox. David Chartier went even further and said that, “SecureWorks admits to falsifying MacBook wireless hack” based solely on a SecureWorks disclaimer (it’s no longer there) that merely reaffirmed what the original video was saying all along — that the hack demonstrated in the video was based on third-party wireless hardware. I had personally interviewed the two researchers before this whole scandal broke out, and I specifically asked Maynor and Ellch if they were using Apple’s Wi-Fi hardware in their official Black Hat demonstration. They clearly said that no Apple Wi-Fi product was used for the exploit. That’s why I was shocked to see the researchers blamed for changing their story and “admitting” they made the whole thing up when no one changed the story and no one admitted to anything. Yet the headline from Chartier, along with Dalrymple’s story, was blasted all over the Web after it made Digg and Slashdot. Everyone simply assumed Maynor and Ellch were frauds because they supposedly “admitted it.”

[…]

So what was the end result of all this? Apple continued to claim that there were no vulnerabilities in Mac OS X, but came a month later and patched its wireless drivers (presumably for vulnerabilities that didn’t actually exist). Apple patched these “nonexistent vulnerabilities” but then refused to give any credit to David Maynor and Jon Ellch. Since Apple was going to take research, not give proper attribution, and smear security researchers, the security research community responded to Apple’s behavior with the MoAB (Month of Apple Bugs) and released a flood of zero-day exploits without giving Apple any notification. The result was that Apple was forced to patch 62 vulnerabilities in just the first three months of 2007, including last week’s megapatch of 45 vulnerabilities.

Apple is a mega corporation that nearly smashed the reputation of two individuals with bogus claims of fraud. It didn’t matter that they weren’t the ones pulling the trigger because they were pulling all the strings. David Chartier should be ashamed of himself and his blog. Jim Dalrymple of Macworld and his colleagues who jumped on the bandwagon should be ashamed of their reporting. Frank Hayes was the only one of Dalrymple’s colleagues who had the decency and honor to apologize. Most of all, shame on Apple.

(from TechRepublic, How Apple orchestrated web attack on researchers)

This supports two things I have been saying ever since I had the misfortune of using a Mac PowerBook for a while and being exposed to the whole “cult of Mac” back in 2005:

1) Macs are not secure. The only reason that Mac users think Macs are secure is because the Apple marketing machine tells them so (as in the recent Mac vs. PC television advertisements) and because Mac users are willfully ignorant.

2) Apple is every bit as ruthless, monopolistic, and anti-consumer as Microsoft is, if not more so. The only real difference between the two companies is that Microsoft is better at it.