Hack-in-Waiting:
Wired has a writeup on the hacking of Shadowbane (an online game) last week. Pretty funny actually.
”…players noticed that their money and weapons had suddenly vanished. A few whispered that tonight the monsters somehow seemed slightly bigger and meaner…
…hackers managed to completely alter the rules of Shadowbane — turning a suddenly wrathful game loose on its players.
‘At first, players started speculating that there was a really bad bug in the game code,’ player Tim Wheating said. ‘Then we realized that somehow an insane god had taken control of our world and was out to kill us all.’ …The population of an entire Shadowbane town was forcibly moved to the bottom of the sea, where they drowned. City guards turned feral and attacked town residents. Mobs of never-before-seen superpowerful creatures, seemingly spontaneously spawned from the ether, began to prowl the streets unchecked, killing characters in the most painful way possible.”
Then I was watching a pretty boring segment of Extreme-Machines on Discovery Channel this afternoon. It portrayed one of those Back to the Future/5th Element type scenes where the cars ‘fly’ between buildings at different levels, and went on about how the collissions would be avoided by having a ‘traffic control’ computer system regulate the movements of the cars.
I just had to nod my head. Oh what fun a couple of overly-creative hacker-types could get up to on a lazy Saturday afternoon, or taking out the frustration of a long day at work from their cubicle during rush-hour!
