According to an article at the BBC site (pointed out by Greg “L-Man” Cavanagh), if you want to hack the online game, Everquest, all you have to do is get a Linux box, network it to your PC, and set up some special packet sniffing software called ShowEQ that decrypts the hidden information about where the monsters and other characters are. It’s just that simple! (I myself prefer the single-player Quake technique of typing tilde to pull down the console and then entering the phrase, lemme think, oh yeah, “god” to make yourself invulnerable.)

According to the article:

The fact that ShowEQ sits on a separate computer has made it impossible to detect. Sony has tried to stop it in other ways by improving the encryption used to make the packets of data unreadable.

However, it took only a week for the ShowEQ programmers to get round this improved encryption.

The programmers found that the new encryption was easier to break than the old one and meant that ShowEQ worked faster than before.

This is very cool. Unless, of course, you’re one of the players who doesn’t have a spare Linux box sitting around on her network.

Categories: Uncategorized dw