so we made a big commotion about how important RSC protection was, and lots of people brushed it off, saying that nobody smart enought to make an RSC extractor would release it.
You were wrong.
http://members.byond.com/BYONDAnime/forum?id=5885&view=0
Jeffrey S. has been spamming byond all day, i post this topic here because i know the byond staff doesnt really look in the Anime forum etc. And i know tom certainly doesnt, BTW tom thanks for your supportive post in the previous topic about this. Also i would like to say, this hurts byond because now DBOII will not be released until RSC security is tightened, because the owner does the Iconing and is now super paranoid about it getting ripped. A big loss for byond, and i hope a solution happens soon.
(fyi DBOII is one of the few worthwhile anime projects on byond, theres probably only 2 or 3 other anime games that are of the same quality in development or released this far.)
ID:133964
 Aug 26 2007, 4:31 pm
|
|
The simple fact of the matter is, total resource security is absolutely impossible. Partial security is more likely, but even then it is not something we have any plans to implement in the near term, because it is not a trivial thing to do. Resource extractors have existed for quite some time. Still, Tom mentioned in that thread that he'd like to consider some improved .rsc protection going forward; it's just not gonna happen tomorrow.
The real issue here is that we have a cadre of troublemakers. Ironically this is probably one of the most innoculous things they've done lately. We're dealing with that. Lummox JR | |
Trane5 wrote:
yes but dont give out the dmb or rsc never You need to do that for a game to be downloadable, and also icons can be pulled out of other places by mere players. Lummox JR | |
In response to "there are other methods to rip that you cant protect against:
I know, you can always hack on things too, you can always steal in the workplace. The idea is you make things difficult, you prevent them, Tom has the right idea and plans to make things difficult. In response To lummox: Yes i know its a few troublemakers, and it really doesnt effect me personally, Ban Jeffrey obviously for spreading the link. Make sure DarkWizard never gets around the ban for creating the extractor and releasing it. And do your best, i have faith in you and i know you byond admins do your best. Just dont be too liberal with the banhammer in situations like this. In response to the fact that they put my name on it: First they release GOA's icons (darkwizard) now he releases an RSC extractor a few weeks later and puts my name on it. I dont know why he has a stick up his ass, but hes a total loser with no life whatsoever and i love that hes been banned and i hope he continues to be rejected from this community. | |
Theres like a <font color=green>[language removed]</font> load of original games now that wont even bother releasing and are losing motivation to do anything untill rsc encyrption is added or whatever it is the solution is.
Something should be done about "JeffreyS" membership page and that other guy DarkWizard has bypassed the ban. If the admins can atleast "threaten" or use fear to make these guys stop...it would help alot. | |
Lummox JR wrote:
The real issue here is that we have a cadre of troublemakers. Ironically this is probably one of the most innoculous things they've done lately. We're dealing with that. No offense, but... BYOND needs to desperately change their "policy", you once said, it's their blog, they do what they want, it's their game, they administrator it, if their source gets leaked, oh well. I really think BYOND Staff should take more policy to deal with rips, extractions, hub theft, etc. People have STOPPED making games because they know the Staff won't do anything if there game is stolen or leaked. Staff should play a more vital role in this. Delete all hubs with ripped content (including source codes available around the internet) this means all hub entries with dbz ripped and naruto ripped. Ban the people if they remake it. We'll loose some members, but think of it this way, are you not tired of "DBZ GENERIC RIP IS DOWN ZOMG HELP11 I CANT PORT FORWARD GIVE ME INSTRUCTIONS NOW", do we really need those kind on BYOND? | |
Flame Sage wrote:
It sucks theres no initiative being taken on this situation. But I'm happy to see you of all people concerned. The one who quit game developing because of this. | |
They have their own little sections so most people don't really care about them anymore.
Besides, what would deleting the hub really do? Nothing, making another hub, on another key as well, is easy as pie. Anything that is created can be recreated, if people are very worried about the RSC extractor situation, then they should host the games themselves or on a server... but even that won't dither people from ripping icons, sounds, etc. | |
Flame Sage wrote:
No offense, but... Though I can't find the links at the moment, there are numerous occasions where if you seek to moderate something actively, you become legally responsible to continue to moderate it. Thus, if someone slips through the cracks and violates the policy to the point that someone suffers some form of legal damage, BYOND would be held directly responsible. It's bad enough that BYOND gets dinged every time one of those little snots makes a fraudulent credit card entry. If BYOND got sued because some twit made an Aliens game and FOX Interactive wanted to push its weight around, then BYOND would disappear forever if it was legally responsible -- it'd get nailed into the ground. We have two choices: we can run forever and lose a few people who are too gullible to keep their source code protected, or we can make this a nice utopia until we get rolled over by a Sherman tank. Personally, I'd prefer to live in the former society. | |
Flame Sage wrote:
BYOND needs to desperately change their "policy", you once said, it's their blog, they do what they want, it's their game, they administrator it, if their source gets leaked, oh well. To clarify, staff actually does close down hub entries distributing stolen source code. Also there have been cases where blog posts were deleted outright, not simply hidden from the main page. Lummox JR | |
everybody who plays a game can rip the RSC, you cache them to your computer just by joining and then they are extractable. Its not a leak, its simply a really powerful tool in the hands of bad people. There are solutions to the problem, and tom has given me hope that byond intends on taking steps to help the developer community. And to jtgibson, you guys need to talk to a lawyer, seriously.. living in fear to the point of severly hampering this community sucks, i want the utopia damn it. I want moderation here i want Jeffrey S. Banned for posting links to the RSC extractor all day, spamming it constantly and hes still not punished, wow. Come on! Whats going on? Why cant byond at least moderate guilds better, allowing things like rank benefits and source hubs to exist and why doesnt byond care about the developers here who make good games? dont you want original content here? ahh its frustrating i see people quit their projects and refuse to release it simply because theres this huge community of rippers, who flourish under the undermoderated community and then things like rsc extractors come out to make things even worse and christ, i knew an rsc extractor was gonna come eventually, now all the flaws of byond are open to the public, im frustrated.. i know that more needs to be done, i want to hear what is being planned and i want to see lists of rules being posted and moderation enforced.
1. Games with rank benefits are dismissed from guilds 2. Source codes are removed from hubs instantly and the key is instantly banned, regardless of if its a member or not, source code distribution should be 100% illegal here. Then outside of moderation theres some things that should be implemented, a new rsc system that makes it very difficult to extract, would require hours to split up the icons etc. Then some sort of system for official reviewers, who review the top 10 or so populated games for each guild every month and post reviews about them and give them ratings, originality being a big part. This would cause incentives not to rip because youd automatically get a 1 star rating and therefor even if you were rank 2 or 3 youd still feel embarrassed and all the rank benefits and dumb playerbase in the world would not be able to hide yourself from the truth of low quality. Why cant we have instead of an RSC file with a bunch of icon files that are formatted to be edited in dreammaker, why cant we have when you compile your rsc is made to be one huge sprite with comments meant for the byond client only to be able to decifer, instead of english names for states it would give them address codes like 125e491, one big archive of icons that would take hours and hours to decifer between. On top of that a layer of encryption that works on the client side for decrypting, using a password stored similar to the hub password on the server end. This is doable, its not perfect and youd have to put a lot of effort in but its so important. | |
Masterdan wrote:
I want moderation here i want Jeffrey S. Banned for posting links to the RSC extractor all day, spamming it constantly and hes still not punished, wow. Come on! Your info is at least a few hours out of date. Said moderation has been had, though for reasons beyond merely that one. 1. Games with rank benefits are dismissed from guilds That'll be kind of difficult to manage, but the official guilds can have say on which games they feature or not. Unofficial guilds can remove games altogether depending on their owners' preferences. Guilds which do this can be made more popular than others by giving them your attention and your links. 2. Source codes are removed from hubs instantly and the key is instantly banned, regardless of if its a member or not, source code distribution should be 100% illegal here. Stolen code distribution is always taken down, but most of those cases don't warrant a full BYOND ban. Lummox JR | |
thanks for your time, these are basically just in my opinion changes to the regulations that could be made to severly improve the conditions here on byond for developers. The guilds running so independantly is an issue, SSGX is a great admin but it always seems his hands are tied, and he doesnt like to make changes to how the guild is run, if byond made a global rule that said rank benefits = you cant be in a guild, then the abuse of the rank system would stop. also it should be made difficult for rankers to use code to instantly gratify people who rank.
I know theres an incentive for you guys not to punish rank benefits, i just hope the 15 dollars a year is not a good enough incentive to basically make byond as a whole look bad, (points to the crappy anime games that make up the top 20 spots, disincluding a few of course) | |
I sympathize with your cause. Yes, the BYOND community has gotten to the point where enough bad seeds are causing problems for good developers. Contrary to popular belief, we do moderate as we can-- some of the staff are quite busy dealing with policing the forums, member pages, and hub entries. Both Jeffrey S. and DarkWizard have been banned, as have many others. It is a thankless job and a rather difficult one, because we have to have the facts straight before taking this kind of action.
My personal belief is that it is impossible to police "rips". First of all, we can't go around arbitrating every dispute over source code. How do we know who wrote what? And where do we draw the line? If someone writes a routine and someone tweaks it, is that piracy? If you don't want your game to be copied, don't let the source out. If you are really worried about the elusive decompiler, then don't let your binaries out. Frankly, I wouldn't be too concerned about that, since even the best decompilers don't produce for clean, structured, commented code (which is the same reason that I wouldn't panic if the BYOND source leaked). As I mentioned before, you have a legitimate argument over the icons, since as it stands it really is all too easy to extract those. We've known about this for a long time but trusted the audience not to abuse it. We figure it made things easier to have a public resource format. There are some technical hurdles to do this right-- and that's the primary issue for now. We are _extremely_ busy trying to finalize the latest release, not to mention attending to a growing list of site issues (some of which you touched upon, in regard to moderating users better). We'll do what we can. I am starting to believe that the only way to realistically moderate this community is restrict its freedom-- something I'd hoped we wouldn't come to. This means, among other things, members-only forums and hub-entries. That way, when someone publicly abuses the site, it is trivial to suppress them. We'll see. | |
I appreciate the response! I think the best way to deal with rips is simple, you hire people who dont have the power of admin but are still "good seeds" allow them to do game reviews and if a game is found to be a rip it loses respect and therefor attention in the guilds by getting a low review score which could be visible next to each game as like a star rating. It would be fun! having unbias reviews of games would make developers really feel like hard work and originality counts and would encourage that, and it would punish those who just steal and do a bad job and give out rank benefits! I hope you consider this! i love it when you reply because you make the most sense Tom, :D
And i know your busy with 4.0, bah this whole thing is soo badly timed. Your doing a great job though, im just trying to help with suggestions. I think being super strict and making member accounts necissary to make a game is unfair though, i understand the logic behind it but i think there are better ways. Namely the suggestions i posted. Otherwise developers who are unable to do internet purchases, as i was when i joined byond ,would be discriminated against and unable to pursue a net dream. | |
As has been mentioned, the act of employing such protection is not at all a trivial task. Sure, the current RSC format is pretty simplistic. Suppose encryption was added, and then suppose someone finds out the method of encryption and can suddenly pull files from the RSC. This person could be a bad seed that will use the information inappropriately, leak the encryption method to a wrongdoing community and leak an extractor publicly. Or perhaps it's a good, curious person that "shares" such information with a small network of friends, and one of them takes the bad seed route as stated above, or shares with someone else that does so. Now what? We've gone through the trouble to create a nontrivial file format for the RSC, but ended up at the exact same location. Ideally, this situation wouldn't happen, but preventing it would be utterly impossible and the fact that it would happen is as inevitable as was the undoing of the current format.
Now suppose Tom comes up with a really magical, unworldly solution that banishes RSC extractors from existence. Problem solved? No. If someone wants your graphics, they can get them easily enough. I can quickly glance at my keyboard and see a nice, pretty "Print Scr" key that I know would be of use to anyone that wants graphics. As well, there is software that captures video from the monitor; it would be a trivial matter for someone to fire up one of those programs, start recording, start playing a game, and then "edit" the videos to pull out all of the graphics that he or she could want---all it would take is for the graphics to appear on the screen, and the screen capture software has it. Policing every bad action is also an impossibility; such administrative actions require an investigation into the dispute to see who's right and who's wrong, who's lying and who's not, and who's just an outright crybaby. It's impossible to witch-hunt out every single immature adolescent that decides to commit a foul act to the community. Besides that, such actions can only happen after the action has occured; you can arrest every person that commits murder, but the fact remains that there was still a victim and the damage has been done. If someone leaks an RSC extractor, they can be reprimanded but it's not unlikely that one person, if not many people, downloaded it and now possess it. Tom can't go and delete the thing off of each of their hard drives, so the fact that RSC extractors can and will exist is an inevitability. I don't at all get where you were going with hiring a group of people to review games and manage their reputations; no person can truly be without bias, and "hiring" people takes money---money isn't cheap! Besides that, "reputations" are already managed by the favorites/ranking system; if a game sucks, then people shouldn't add it to their favorites lists and it should have a low rank. If they like the game, then perhaps (at least to them) it doesn't suck and they have every right to add it to their lists. Solved. Hiead | |
bah read my post about what i suggest we should do for the RSC. Its an issue of needing to make things more difficult to rip, im not stupid i know its always going to happen. However if you couldnt rip icons in the convenient package they can be ripped as now, with every icon in the game being included all at once. It would be a plus for developers. Till now we felt pretty safe that our icons would not spring up en masse to games, they would be shottily print screened and they woudl mess it up in that transition, with white noise around the icon and whatnot. Now they get everything, all at once, with no effort.
Make the RSC a different format, the current one is too easy for a human to navigate, i dont want to repeat myself, but i wrote a big explanation for what would be an example of a solution. Compiling the RSC into basically a huge mush of the icons, in one big image, with comments similar to how the new dmi format works, and the states would be replaced with addresses, and then some level of encryption could be used, with a password on the server end so that games dont decrypt in one linear manner to be found out by one bad seed, but instead it would require a second program to also somehow steal the password from a game that is used in the decryption process, you guys know this stuff is possible.. | |
Masterdan wrote:
Compiling the RSC into basically a huge mush of the icons It is currently a "huge mush of the icons[ and other data]," separated for navigation by DreamSeeker. in one big image, with comments similar to how the new dmi format works So...you'd rather they just extract one large PNG that contains every state of every icon? Then they still have all of the pieces to the puzzle, and just need to reconstruct the pieces using the same formula that the client would use to read the resources, which is not at all possible to hide from those who know how to find such a formula. and the states would be replaced with addresses ...which would involve what? People getting icons that have funny icon state names? DreamSeeker would still have to find a way to translate icon state names to these addresses, which isn't a trivial matter in itself. with a password on the server end At some point, the password would have to be known by the client so that the client can traverse the resources, and at that time it would become visible to those seeking to know the password. In short, it's not possible to prevent people from extracting resources; it's going to happen. What is possible is to make it more inconvenient but, as experience and history show, inconvenience has never stopped the willing from achieving their goals. Wrongdoers on BYOND can get banned by every method in the books, creating quite the inconvenience if they want to come back. However, if they want to, they will rear their ugly heads again and again; the only "solution" is to continue fighting an uphill battle by creating more inconveniences for the person, but such an inconvenience may only equate to the click of a button on some program that manages the data on one's computer such that he or she is no longer interpreted as a banned user on BYOND. Ultimately, it would be possible for Tom, Lummox, et al to make it extremely inconvenient to extract resources. However, doing so would be extremely inconvenient for them, it would hinder current BYOND development and fixes, and would ultimately only prove to do nothing; Tom could announce that there's a new format, all would rejoice, the person you spoke of (DBOII owner, or something like it) would continue work on his or her game, someone would overcome the new inconvenience and extract some more resources, and you guys would come posting that we need a new format because everyone's in fear of their valuable work being stolen. Hiead | |
In short, if you don't want your icons being stolen, don't draw them in the first place.