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Perma banning ISK sellers on MAC address

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General Error	Posted - 2007.09.17 19:32:00 - [1] Hi All, I, as so many other players, am getting tired of getting spam mails and spam in chat channels from ISK sellers. I've though of a solution for this, to ban the spammers computers by MAC address. The MAC address as you may know is a unique id on a network card. Banning computers on MAC addresses will force spammers to buy a new computer/network card for every time they get banned instead of as now just opening a new trial account. This would raise the costs of selling ISK so much that sellers would be forced to go spam somewhere else. Technically the way i thought would be the best way to do this is as part of the handshake process when loging onto eve, that the client would send the MAC of the connecting player to the server that would verify this with a database. If the MAC is not on the blocked list it would be retained on the server for a day or two and then be purged. This should not be a big fix and should be easy to implement. The database need not even be on tranq so it should not slow down eve at all but the handshake might take 10 seconds longer. (a small price to pay) Of couese we will be giving more machine specific info to CCP but hay they already have email addresses, IP addresses and in some cases credit card details - so i think we can trust them with 12 more digits. Remember that ISK sellers are criminals IRL and not just in game. They steal ISK off accounts with key loggers, they buy and sell ISK to launder money from RL crimes, fund terror and worst of all **** us off. Some of them even macromine! Let me know what you think and hopefully a dev or two will say "hey - thats a good idea..." -General Error
Aleata Gilae	Posted - 2007.09.17 19:36:00 - [2] /Signed
Reyan Zondo	Posted - 2007.09.17 19:43:00 - [3] From a non tech type of person, this idea makes a hell of a lot of sense, and the only people that would be against it are those that want to abuse the system. It is about time that something was put in place to prevent this sort of abuse and annoyance that filters into our game environment.
Lord Matrix Department of War	Posted - 2007.09.17 19:46:00 - [4] You can change your MAC address to anything you like... it's not a reliable source of unique identification. Unique Chipset ID or CPU ID would be better. ------------------------------------------------------------------ What good have you done for the EVE community today?
Igor Ramanov	Posted - 2007.09.17 20:04:00 - [5] At least changing the MAC address so often makes life more difficult for them. re. CPU ID, I remember Intel got very unpopular on it when they introduced it, because of violation of privacy etc., and as far as I know, AMD did not go along with it, which was one good sales argument when i bought my last PC. My knowledge might be outdated on that point, and they can have introducd it too. Also each Eve client cold generate a unique ID number on installation, e.g MAC Address + time and date of installation added to an algorithm, generating a unique client serial number, and having that blocked in case of spamming. Then they would have to reinstall the client too. Combining these methods would make it even MORE difficult to get in and spam
Preon Aeon	Posted - 2007.09.17 20:04:00 - [6] Great idea! I've only been thinking about easier ways to report spammers and getting them banned faster, but this should **** them up big time
Helen Hunts Gallente Red Dragon Mining inc	Posted - 2007.09.17 20:11:00 - [7] Possibly better than the MAC address ban is the Hardware Ban. The client runs a quick check of vital hardware components (CPU, Video, memory) and compiles a checksum which is then checked against a list on the Server. The way around a Hardware Ban is also kinda expensive as something major (and not generally cheap) has to be replaced to get a new checksum to send to the Server in order to login. Or better yet, do both. _______________________________ Mine da rocks, make more ships. Pop da rats, make more rigs. Sell da gear, make more money. Any Questions?
Lord Matrix Department of War	Posted - 2007.09.17 20:31:00 - [8] Originally by: Helen Hunts Possibly better than the MAC address ban is the Hardware Ban. The client runs a quick check of vital hardware components (CPU, Video, memory) and compiles a checksum which is then checked against a list on the Server. The way around a Hardware Ban is also kinda expensive as something major (and not generally cheap) has to be replaced to get a new checksum to send to the Server in order to login. Or better yet, do both. You method easily produces false positives. There are 1000s of computers with identical CPU, graphics card and memory (made by Dell, Lenovo, HP...). One alternative method would be to read the serial numbers of all the hard drives in the computer. If a banned hard drive is detected, EVE won't engage. I'd ban ISK sellers, as well as ISK buyers and ISK makers (the obvious ones). ------------------------------------------------------------------ What good have you done for the EVE community today?
Jinx Barker GFB Scientific	Posted - 2007.09.17 20:43:00 - [9] Actually each Motherboard has a unique ID built into the chipset. That can be accessed and logged. All CCP has to do is: Add a line into EULA, that specifies an agreement on the part of the user - to allow access to the Motherboard ID at each log on. Once they determine who are the guilty parties, pull up their motherboard IDs and ban them. That way every time they tried to start an EVE client the Server will get the ID and will disallow access. Similar to the HDD thing, but even more bloody complicated to resolve, once banned. Short of using throw-away motherboards. Just another thing to make the RMT Interests life's as difficult as possible.
Dark Hunterj Gallente CodeManiaxx Ltd Sempiternus	Posted - 2007.09.17 20:44:00 - [10] I do hate isk sellers but what you are proposing is way too useless. why? 1. I do not want CCP to just gather data about all of our PCs, so CPU info and other hardware info is out of the question, I have a right to privacy. 2. I bet that the best Isk sellers do not spam from there personal PCs, there are so many ways to "piggy back" some other connection. Do not forget that most spammers use "zomby pcs" to spam, pcs simply infested and taken over, used for spam without the user even realizing. Yes it does require a damn lot more programming to do this for eve but it can be done, and if it can be done then someone probably already did it. ergo, banning ips, macs, or anything else is useless as one would only ban a user (a user that has no idea on how to protect his pc, but still a simple user) Do not blame the masses for the few.
Nicoli Voldkif Caelli-Merced INC. Gunboat Diplomacy	Posted - 2007.09.17 20:59:00 - [11] For those non-techies your mac address lasts only till the first router. At that point the router replaces the source mac address with its mac address and replaces the destination mac address to the mac address of the next hop. Thats even assuming that there even is a mac address involved with the data link protocol particular to that link. As such CCP would end up banning all of their users since all they would see is the mac address of the closest Router to Tranquility. As for the hardware banning, I'd rather not see that happen. for any reason. -----------------------------------------------
Helen Hunts Gallente Red Dragon Mining inc	Posted - 2007.09.17 21:45:00 - [12] Hardware banning is already in use on some systems and works quite well. Second Life uses Hardware Bans and some of our recurrent griefers end up taking an extended leave from SL when the 'powers that be' get tired of them. As for false positives, I have yet to hear a single squawk about that, and most of us communicate through methods other than SL. As for being intrusive, the same information used in Hardware Banning is already gathered (and more) by Windows. (Microsoft the MicroSnoop, yes) Oh, and as for using hacked computers to spam EVE.....no. The hacked computer would have to run EVE and be remotely controlled in order to be used in this manner. It may just be me, but I think that seeing my computer running a big graphics intensive program might be just a little noticable. Zombie programs are able to work because they can send off mails without alerting the computer's owner. _______________________________ Mine da rocks, make more ships. Pop da rats, make more rigs. Sell da gear, make more money. Any Questions?
LeGlt Caldari	Posted - 2007.09.17 22:12:00 - [13] It would never work, atleast not as intended. EVE is a multinational game and some nations have very strict privacy laws: Austria for example. Being a multinational game, it has to comply to all of these standards at the same time, therefore it would have to follow the blueprint of the strictest countries to avoid accidental infringement, which would be more likely if they ran multiple independant ethics/mechanics/EULA's for the various countires. Not only that, but it would be so much cheaper to follow one set of rules. These rules vary from place to place, but they also limit how much information you can and can't collect - even anonymously. MAC addresses can be faked, IP's can be proxied, cheap **** motherboards can be replaced - especially in China, homeland of the farmers of all places. They manufacture the damned things for next to nothing - imagine how much easier it is for them to replace components considering they won't have to pay shipping fees, export/import tax, white man's big fat pay cheque and all kinds of other crap. They could replace electronics faster than they could be banned and more importantly they could afford to - with the big profits due to crappy labour laws/bots from people's purchases. Then there is the collateral damage. Innocent people will undoubtedly get caught up in the permabanathon and they would have even more of a ballache trying to resolve the issue without being able to log in (forget the browser petition thing it goes down often, atleast for me). Then there is the 2nd hand market. yeah lets buy some bits and bobs on the cheap because we're a bit skint this month - only to find it's some farmer's cast off after he got banned. Technically there is nothing wrong with the parts and they will work as intended for anything and everything else, but sod's law says the poor guy will end up with banned hardware for the game he planned to use it for! Overall it's not the worst idea in the world, infact if it could work then fair game, but reality has other plans. __________________________ Nice forum - I'll take it!
Helen Hunts Gallente Red Dragon Mining inc	Posted - 2007.09.17 22:50:00 - [14] Interesting....Have you checked out Second Life? There are SL members across the globe. Second Life is run by Linden Labs in California, USA. (with a second server farm in Texas) They manage to do what they do for roughly the same amount of time that EVE has been around and are still going. And yes, Second Life does use hardware bans, and they provide service internationally. Figure it from there. _______________________________ Mine da rocks, make more ships. Pop da rats, make more rigs. Sell da gear, make more money. Any Questions?
LeGlt Caldari	Posted - 2007.09.17 23:34:00 - [15] SL is in a different league because Linden Labs are a bunch of tossers who **** on you, because they can do. You sign the EULA, you sign to lose your entire business etc. simply because they think it's a good idea to rob you of yet more money - take thatchap selling World War clothing for example Alas like I stated - what would hardware banning achieve? In the end nothing, but grief - most of the farmers are oriental, most electronics are oriental, some of the cheapest labour is oriental and the cheapest electronics are oriental. Factor in they can buy a motherboard for $10 and sell ISK for $100 - what difference would it make? They would still make a fat profit and they could still cut their losses reselling the banned hardware as good as new in another country. __________________________ Nice forum - I'll take it!

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