Real World Anger Affecting MMOG Reality? 46
We reported late last week that FFXI was under a DDOS attack. The Japanese origin of the title may be the reason for the attack, as Ludonauts asks the question of whether chinese crackers may attacking the game because of political frustration. From the article: "Discussion on the Allakhazam forum points the attack at Chinese protesters angry about the deletion of references to Japanese war atrocities from history textbooks: the DDOS attacks began on April 9, the same day as the protests in China. In FFXI, this issue is linked to the question of 'gil-sellers,' players who farm in-game resources for real-world cash, who in FFXI are usually characterized as Chinese: many who are suspected of being gil-sellers have placed comments in their searchable information fields like 'Resisting all Japanese goods, long live the People's Republic of China.'" Commentary available from game girl advance, Broken Toys, and Terra Nova.
From TFA (Score:3, Funny)
Isn't it obvious? Al Qaeda just loves playing Halo 2.
Re:From TFA (Score:2)
Heh. Seriously, though, it seems that XBOX Live would be a crappy service to disrupt if you're mad at the USA. I'm not sure how I'd register a complaint about that, but XBOX Live seems like a wasted effort. Hmm.. how about the IRS's site close to the 15th? Heh.
Re:From TFA (Score:5, Funny)
All the army guys would have to do then is promise the XBOX Live outage victims that they could play with something like this [utexas.edu], or this [engadget.com], or these [wired.com] or even better, one of these [defensereview.com]
Conveniently leave out the part about pushups and getting yelled/shot at and you'd have hordes of HALO fanatics breaking down your doors to come join up. So hey, Al Qaeda, if you're reading this, better leave XBOX Live alone!
Re:From TFA (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:From TFA (Score:1)
Hmm.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Especially when the article in question is just a copy/paste of the Terra Nova article, with only two typo-ridden sentences as commentary tacked on the end.
As for the DDOS attacks being linked to national unrest, it seems like a rather odd way to vent frustration and anger about the China/Japan situation. I can't imagine anyone in power noticing something as trivial as gameservers in the current situation, and the effect on the average Japanese user is slight at best.
Re:Hmm.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, it's not like people would do stupid things like hacking Al-Jazeera [slashdot.org] out of pure nationalistic spite.
Re:This is greed and stupidity here... (Score:5, Insightful)
In case you haven't noticed, that's pretty much how the rioters have been operating. They've been trashing Japanese cars, reguardless of who's driving them, and attacking Japanese factories, reguardless of who's working in them. You're trying to apply logic to mob mentality, and it just doesn't work that way.
Re:This is greed and stupidity here... (Score:1)
And the Japanese textbook issue has been a topic for almost a decade
Re:This is greed and stupidity here... (Score:1)
Re:This is greed and stupidity here... (Score:1)
Re:This is greed and stupidity here... (Score:2)
That's part of it. But the PROC isn't only trying to influence Japan and the "international community", but also their own citizens. By encouraging some pseudo-grassroots anti-Japan protests, they get more of their citizens angry at 70-year-old Japanese warcrimes.
That keeps them distracted from remembering the 40-year-old PROC peacecrimes, which coincidentally had 10,000 times as many victims a
Hmm. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hmm. (Score:2)
From behind the Great Firewall of China... (Score:5, Insightful)
/sarcasm
Its humorous to see how a lot of posts here on /. seem to have this idea that the Chinese are seriously informed about what they're 'fighting' (read: rioting) for. China is still a Communist country with a censored press and is subjected to a censored internet (something few outsiders could probably comprehend). Regardless of what it looks like from the outside, people need to think of what the average Chinese citizen sees from the inside. Once you do that, its not TOO much more difficult to see why the Chinese would/are doing such things.
Japan is attempting to join the security council at the U.N. China is the only MAJOR U.N. player in Asia (Russia doesn't count since its focused domestically and to its southwest right now). Throw in political (North Korea), economic (U.N. sanctions on China for human rights issues to cut competition?) and historical (WWII fears) and you have a nasty case of mass backlash.
Re:From behind the Great Firewall of China... (Score:1)
Except this has gotten out of Beijing's control. Protesting is one thing, but rioting is something completely different and not something the Beloved Party would want anything to do with right now. They're in enough trouble with their recent legislation against Taiwan that they don't need to be damaging relations with Japan quite to this degree right now.
Re:From behind the Great Firewall of China... (Score:2)
Sorry to get all foil-hat on you, but that's what they want you to think. There are 1.2 billion people living in China and only so many of them are members of the Beloved Party, let alone the People's Liberation Army. Beijing rules more by intimidation than by true force of arms. The system works by both coming down hard on small, select groups while keeping the majority happy enough to keep from being a threat. There's nothing Beijing can r
Just goes to show... (Score:3, Interesting)
This suggests that decentralization of popular services is even more important than ever before, both on a technical and social level. If someone has a monopoly on something that has a widely-spread fan base, and they give it a common address (DNS, IP, postal, conceptual, whatever), then individuals or groups from anywhere can disrupt that product everywhere.
I wonder how this is going to drive uptime-maintaining technology for MMORPGs. My impression is that existing systems aren't very good at failover. Virtualizing server systems and spreading them over clusters in a failover-compatible way would be a good start.
Background Knowledge (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, during the fall of one of the latter Chinese dynasties, protests against Japan were encouraged as the people had less faith in Confucianism and thus the emperor thought their anger against the Japanese could be used to rally national unity. In the same way, perhaps the current government's ideological grip is being lost as a communist economy is giving way to a much more open-market one and thus China again looks for a way to rally national unity.
Some could even argue that allowing for free forms of expression against the Japanese government could lessen desire for other, less desirable, open demonstrations (ala Tienaman Square).
Re:Background Knowledge (Score:3, Insightful)
for a short time it ussualy works aswell but it has always been a bad idea for the rulling party to support and promote it for their own gains and facists tend to ldo it to get in to power
Hittler userd the jewish people
Saddam used the kurdish people
people who are Communist tend(ed) to be demonised in the USA
After the tragedy upon the Twin towers(and a few other incidents) , the ar
Re:Background Knowledge (Score:1)
Re:Background Knowledge (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:how is it (Score:2)
We would need some hard evidence to back up these claims if we are to take them seriously.
basicaly right now by all the evidence you have , there is as much proof to think that sony did it to win back players to everquest lost in the japanese market or some or competitor.
This right now is just an unsubstantiated rumor and a conspiracy theory .
Pot vs Kettle (Score:5, Informative)
While living in Taiwan in the late Eighties I had to spend a few hours in a cramped air raid shelter in downtown Taipei, because the authorities there felt that the Communists might use the protests at Tiananmen Square as an excuse to move against the student's supporters on Taiwan, and retake the island.
Re:Pot vs Kettle (Score:1)
"It takes one to know one." "Two wrongs don't make a right." "People in glass houses..." "I know you are but what am I?" etc.
Re:Pot vs Kettle (Government vs Public) (Score:1)
Funny... (Score:2)
Monday nights we have our usual "why the Chinese government sucks and all its officials must be tortured to death in public" seminars in Lower Jeuno. There's always active participation in these from all sides, although our friends from the PRC generally display a level of bloodlust towards their own rulers that we in the west find incomprehensible. We really think they enjoy being able to hear our account