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The Legal and Technical Ramifications of the GTAVI Hack | Sacred Symbols+, Episode 227

Welcome back to Sacred Symbols+. As promised, I (Colin) endeavored to get our two favorite subject matter experts -- @Hoeg Law and @Moore's Law Is Dead -- onto the show to discuss the recent Rockstar hack/leak from a more academic perspective. We begin with our legal analyst Rick Hoeg of Hoeg Law and Virtual Legality, who dives into the potential legal fallout for the hacker(s), as well as the different litigious avenues Rockstar might pursue in remedying significant injury. Then, Tom from Moore's Law Is Dead and the Broken Silicon podcast joins-up to pore over the technical ramifications. What does it mean for a company to potentially lose its product's source code, and what insanity can result? What does the future of GTA development look like when it only took a single person making a single mistake to blow the whole thing up? Tom spoke to his dev sources to get first-hand answers, and we relay all of that -- and more -- on the other side of play.

Comments

Anonymous

Yes thank you.

Matt ODwyer

I always feel smarter after I listen to either of these two

Zack Fair

Awesome episode Colin, love hearing Moore's law and Hoeg on, and hearing their expertise shed light on matters! Amazing!!

Charles Carroll

Sorry for the long post and formatting but just wanted to shed a little light on GTA Online and the source code/what it could enable online. As it stands currently with GTA Online it doesn't have servers, at least not how you would think of them. They operate matchmaking servers to take active player sessions (your local game) and match them with a host (someone else's game) and then they operate peer to peer (your pc/console talking directly through a considerably less secure connection). This is significantly less costly to do, is why the load times are crazy long, why they previously used to be able to edit in game money very easily even on consoles to give people millions of dollars even when they had disabled in game money gifting, and why the roleplay servers like NoPixel can even operate as they just develop a wrapper program that redirects the matchmaking to a different server other than the official Rockstar ones. If Rockstar were to swap to a fully hosted server environment where every player has to communicate through the host server then the source code would just trivialize most of the anti cheat contermeasures they may try to implement. If they continue with the current GTA Online operation model then that would open up a lot of players to potential directed malicious code sent through the game and executed locally on the players system. A game that had it's source code leaked in it's entirety is World of Warcraft. A patch for that game accidentally sent the full code base instead of just the update package which in turn allowed people to eventually creating custom private servers which were then shut down and lead to Blizzard launching WoW Classic. The private servers took years to engineer even with the full blueprint laid bare. GTA likely still has a long period of time before any super nefarious things could go into full effect if the source is compromised but it would still be catastrophic for the in game economy and prolonged monetary earn for the online component. The account system and having your player progress stored in the cloud would stop crazy money hacks but nobody will want to come back to a game where every other player is flying through the air and headshotting everyone with a pistol from a mile away. Cheers to anyone who made it this far and I'm open to corrections if my previous knowledge of the matter is outdated as I hadn't dug into GTA Online in a few years.

Charles Carroll

In this economy? I spent all my money on this Patreon, I can't afford that. Be easier to copy the text on adjust it in notepad than actually use the text box here lol

Pyo

Very good explanation on things, the source code examples are very good