I noticed on Slashdot that Blizzard/Vivendi have begun action against one of the bot-vendors (WOWGlider).

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/06/11/18/1950203.shtml

Maybe there will be some mobs actually standing in Hearthglen/Burning Steppes/et al

They just need to make a 2 hour debuff that you get from a city/uncontested zone that makes you unflagged for pvp. Then you just make people drop a portion of the money they have that isn't in their bank.

Problem solved.

http://www.komjesnel.nl/lawsuitwow.pdf

The wowglider creater is counter-suing blizzard. Good for him. I don't particularly care for bots personally, but dammit, I wish they'd stop going after people screaming "DMCA violation! DMCA violation!!".

did they file in arizona or delaware? cant tell from the doc. It should be delware but (ianal) blizzard does business in arizona

Yes, cause bots are completely unable to hearth and fly back. That would have to take some genius programming!

I haven't seen a bot run back to its corpse yet. It's much harder to do. Most are simple move target attack repeat.

Good move, although I am surprised it took Blizzard so long to take legal action.

It was filed in Arizona. Blizz is a delaware corp with a ppb in california, but their contacts with Arizona means a suit can be brought there without a personal jurisdiction problem.

edit: correct, the glider owner is the one who filed the suit in response to blizz giving him a heads up on a possible suit against him by them. at 8:30 in the morning too, that was probably an unpleasant awakening. he was able to file in arizona because of blizzard's contacts in the state.

If we read the link that Slashdot quotes in their story, you can see that the WowGlider author sued Blizzard, they haven't taken any legal action yet. Blizzard lawyers just visited him in his Arizona home. The suit was likely filed in Arizona since that is where he lives :P

If they're actually trying to stop the distribution of the glider application instead of just banning people caught using it like they do the other bots, it sounds like they really do have as hard a time detecting that particular bot as the author claims. All moral issues aside, I'd say that's an impressive bit of coding on the part of the author if it does everything the site claims and is also undetectable.

Well, each time they manage to get some software-side detection going, it is usually through Warden. Last time this happened, Mercury (the bot's creator) implemented measures to counter it, again rendering the program undetectable. In addition, he implemented a script as part of the launch process that detects when there is a new version of Warden present on the user's computer, and will refuse to start the Glider program until an update has been received from Mercury's website to block client-side detection.

That said, the way in which Blizzard accumulates a long list of accounts-to-ban before acting in one sweep prevents most of the botting community from accurately discerning if it is a new software-side detection method, simply a large number of lazy or obvious botters getting banned at once, or whatever. This means it is even more difficult for Mercury to act. In addition, he has to deal with the possibility that Blizzard has built in ways to detect Glider to the actual client software, and not just Warden, or semi-automated processes that report the use of typical bot-used script commands to a centralized GM location so that Bekyn (the primary prosecutor of the anti-cheating effort) and other Senior GM's can process them.

Blizzard has actually made a bold move, because now Mercury knows not only that they dislike bots, but that they are aware of him, and are actively pursuing a front against Glider in particular on multiple levels. If, as he put it on a thread on the Glider forums, Blizzard is willing to go to any cost to catch Glider and eliminate it...the program will indeed cease to exist, because they have the technical advantage and too many ways to catch just one program.

If you think about it, all it would take is for a couple programmers at Blizzard to stop scripting instance encounters, install Glider, and look at how it operates. There are a lot of things you could put into just such an automated reporting service that reports users of suspicious or common script commands to the GM's. Etc. etc.

Anyway, not sure where I'm going with this, but that's what I know about the situation and my 2c.

It runs as a random process name each time you start it up.

Thas is lame, its easy to detect process even with random name. That’s how anti-virus programs work:)

I think that blizzard should really hire someone from Symantec to enhance client-side check :)

http://www.rootkit.com/redirect.php?...desWoWHack.rar

A presentation from BlackHat 2006 that talks about how to dodge warden's detection systems, with a focus on how to implement it as a rootkit, making it theoretically completly undetectable. You do start triggering antivirus scanners, but if the user wants to install something, a AV program will never actually stop them.

Its not easy for guardian to detect it. Guardian atm just collects prcess names, hashes them, and sends the results to the server, which if it sees certain flags, flags your account for the specific hack.

It's 100% far from undetectable, considering every single Glider user I know in game has gotten banned. Even the one that used it for half a level.

I don't really know how they parse those info and ban people. A month ago or so, I had 3 friends who were macroing BGs to get R14 before TBC. They were macroing so much that they were in the top10 honor ranks 3weeks in a row, and as such got reported quite a lot. However what is "funny" is, using the same macros/program and playing about the same, only 2 of them got banned, the 3rd one didn't even receive a warning.

Well, of course, you're an idiot for using a publically distributed bot because, well, it's publically distributed and thus fairly routine to detect.

Don't be silly. At this point, the number of bans isn't that major. The recent "banwave" wasn't even a blip on Mercury's radar, except because he had had recent contact with Blizzard's representatives and because of the stir that the Linux/Cedega issue causes on Slashdot and elsewhere. As one of the Glider moderators put it, the number of recent bans isn't even close to a significant fraction of all active Glider users.

This doesn't mean it's 100% undetectable, but it does mean that it is not "routinely" or even "easily" detectable through automated processes. If Blizzard could detect Glider through an automated client-side process, they would identify all users of the program as soon as they installed and booted it up and then ban them in one fell swoop, eliminating the entire Glider population from the market at once. I'm sure Bekyn would love to do this if they had the means, but from the evidence (lots of people are still gliding) they do not, ATM. (Though I and many others certainly wish they did.)

Time will tell though. Maybe by the end of next week every single Glider user *will* be banned. We can at least hope. <_<

It is possible that they are just banning batches that are large enough to (they hope) scare people into stoppping the botting. They may not want to wipe out XX thousand accounts all at once since that is a hell of a hit money wise and in the end the botting isn't really hurting the game.

Considering the effort that Blizzard has put into keeping the economy in balance, I think that they would disagree with you. Botting artificially inflates how much cash/items are going into the economy. Obviously it has an effect, and a negative one from Blizzards point of view. After all the effort they have put into to make sure and force interaction between raiders and others, what makes you think they find botting harmless?

The point is that in using a public bot you're trying to get away with using something that Blizzard has access to to check for. It's just stupid -- you're just waiting for them to find you, because if they want to, they're going to have the tools to do it.

If you really want to bot, write your own and don't share the thing.