Friendly hackers?Follow

Everyone knows the world of FFXI is perpetually under attack from hackers or DDoS. My question is, why can't there be friendly hackers? Wouldn't it be nice to meet a hacker that went in and gave everyone on the server 10,000,000g? I don't know a single person that would be pissed off about that...except maybe the gilsellers. Then again, I think the people doing the attacking and the gilsellers are one in the same. Or maybe former gilsellers that got caught and had their accounts deleted. Basically, a friendly hacker is an oximoron (contradiction). Hackers seem to be malicious by nature. Too bad they don't use those talents to help people. Then they wouldn't be so dispised. I'd love nothing more than to log in one day and discover a "glitch" in the system has mistakenly sent me 10mil gil or maybe gave me 100 skill in Woodworking. ^^

Edited, Thu Oct 20 18:00:33 2005 by Kazemusha

Not all hackers are malicious, they come in many hats. From Wikipedia,

Whitehat or White Hat: A hacker who breaks security but who does so for altruistic or at least non-malicious reasons. White hats generally have a clearly defined code of ethics, and will often attempt to work with a manufacturer or owner to ameliorate discovered security weaknesses, although many reserve the implicit or explicit threat of public disclosure after a "reasonable" time as a prod to ensure timely response from a corporate entity. The term is also used to describe hackers who work to deliberately design and code more secure systems. To White Hats, the darker the hat, the more the ethics of the activity can be considered dubious. Conversely, blackhats may claim the lighter the hat, the more the ethics of the activity are lost.

Grey hat: A hacker of ambiguous ethics and/or borderline legality, often frankly admitted.

Black Hat or Blackhat: someone who subverts computer security without authorization or indeed, anyone who has been accused of using technology (usually a computer or the Internet) for terrorism, vandalism, credit card fraud, identity theft, intellectual property theft, and many other forms of crime. This can mean taking control of a remote computer through a network, or software cracking.

Unfortunately we hear more about Black Hats than White Hats..

Actually... I think you may be confusing two quite different people. The terminology I'm going to use is based on what I've learned over time, so feel free to use different words in your mind.

Hacker: One who seeks loopholes/openings in computer networks and attempts to break inside, with the sole purpose of reporting these problems to the administrator.

Cracker: While similar to a hacker in their methods, their purpose is to cause malicious damage in some way. This can include profiting themselves or damaging other people's information.

You could probably just say "Hacker (good)" and "Hacker (bad)" if you want to simplify it. The kind of person you are asking for is a cracker, in my book. One who will disrupt the economy on all worlds by providing everyone with a 10m gil bank account.

In reference to the first part of your post, hackers do help people. They're often misunderstood for it because of their methods.

True, about the inflation, but I don't think it'd last long. Anyway, it'd give us people that are less fortunate and can't afford our armor without spending literally weeks farming under heavy competition a chance to buy that Scorpion Harness we've always wanted or that Millionair's Desk or Bravo's Subligar. Gilsellers and otherwise greedy people have jacked up the prices so high that only the elite can afford them. It seems kind of stupid that in order to earn enough gil to buy the armor you need at Lv50-60 you have to level a job to Lv65-75. By the time I get to Lv70+ hopefully I'll be getting my Assassin's gear and won't need it anymore. A nice "catch 22" they have going there. Most people I know can't afford to pay millions of gil to buy armor like that. The only ones I do know that can afford to go flittering away precious gil already have a Lv70+ job and earn millions of gil a week. Maybe the people setting the prices for these items don't realize not everyone has a Lv70+ job and doesn't make that kind of gil, doesn't mean we don't need that armor or don't deserve to get it. Sure we could settle for lesser armor, but some people like me want to be as effective at our jobs as possible. We don't want our partys to suffer because we were too poor to buy the better pieces of equipment.

Edited, Thu Oct 20 18:15:32 2005 by Kazemusha

Deila said it best, nice info. That is the terminology that I'm familiar with too. Just quoting for the sake of it:

Hacker: One who seeks loopholes/openings in computer networks and attempts to break inside, with the sole purpose of reporting these problems to the administrator.

Cracker: While similar to a hacker in their methods, their purpose is to cause malicious damage in some way. This can include profiting themselves or damaging other people's information.

However. Not all hackers wish to report the flaw. Some just run around hacking stuff just to show that they can, it's a game to them. In the past I've played hacking games online where there are different steps to get around the level, kinda fun.

Sad thing is, if someone gave everyone on Asura 10mil, they still couldn't buy a Scorp Harness with it ._.

My friend, that would be a wonderful thing for sure!

However I dont know many people that would enjoy the resuly of that. I cant say that anyone would want the price of lets say an ash club or flint stone to be 2.9 million gil hahaha.

A friendly hacker would do something like move all the bots and gilsellers to some out of the way zone, set thier HP's there, and arrange for a bunch of nightmare NM's to spawn between them and freedom. That is, if they could move anywhere from the lag.

It seems stupid because it's not true. It's just that (you think) reaching these levels will make earning gil faster for you, which is only true if you earn gil solely by job-level-dependent activities. These including farming and camping NMs. However:

1. There's still plenty of stuff you can farm and camp at lower levels. It will just take you longer than a higher level to earn the same amount of gil.

2. Job level has little to no impact on your ability to make a profit with crafting, and only a small impact on your ability to make a profit by fishing.

If I actually wanted to farm (I don't), I wouldn't do it on my 75 BRD. I'd take my 40 THF to 45 and use that.

On Fenrir server regular Scorpion Harness is 6mil, the +1 is 15mil. With 10mil, I could buy my Scorpion Harness (6mil), Bravo's Subligar (1.2mil), Comet Tail (1.2mil) & Millionair's Desk (1mil) and have little left over.