4 ms·

Unbelievable. Why give players the ability to override arbitrary functions like that?

by tomc1985 10y ago

ajkjk 10y ago
Why are you.. outraged? Clearly allowing this attack was a mistake. Overriding functions is a language feature, so you'd have to think of the risk to think to block it.
- tomc1985 10y ago
  Outraged? C'mon now. Shocked with disbelief maybe? Because that is such an obvious attack vector that it is hard to believe Bnet allowed it. It's very hard to enforce language-level restrictions (like which functions may run when) when they can be circumvented with reflection. Besides, Bnet's WoW client code has been known to be janky, and their entire security setup seems to only care about protecting the business, and not users. Bnet is the only online gaming service where I have had multiple accounts hacked that I could not trace to any specific doxing/pw dump event... forcing me to conclude that their security infrastructure is absolute garbage
Houshalter 10y ago
Why not? The user interface being modable is awesome.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
slrz 10y ago
Because it's useful and it's their fscking computers and it allows them to tweak the interface to better suit their play? Should people's ability to receive email also be taken from them, because some of them might fall for the prospect of receiving a million bucks from a friendly Nigerian prince?
usea 10y ago
It's a feature, which Blizzard has invested a significant amount of time and money into, and has definitely contributed to the game's success. It allows players to modify the game's interface, not just arbitrary game code. Think of it as crowd-sourcing UI improvements from the community. Blizzard is known to take great UI mods and implement them into the game directly. For example, on release I created a mod that let you examine a player's equipped items from any distance. By default, the inspection window would close when a function returned true. This function checked to see if the distance to your target was greater than 5 meters. An easy way to change that behavior was to rebind the function to one that always returned false. It's a natural thing to do in Lua, I think.
- tomc1985 10y ago
  I used to run tons of WoW mods back-in-the-day. I get that. This particular language feature is not something that is solely responsible for WoW's moddable UI. While it might be nice in certain circumstances, you can build flexible UI without having to hook or reassign critical functions

Unbelievable. Why give players the ability to override arbitrary functions like that?

ajkjk 10y ago

Why are you.. outraged? Clearly allowing this attack was a mistake. Overriding functions is a language feature, so you'd have to think of the risk to think to block it.

tomc1985 10y ago
Outraged? C'mon now. Shocked with disbelief maybe? Because that is such an obvious attack vector that it is hard to believe Bnet allowed it. It's very hard to enforce language-level restrictions (like which functions may run when) when they can be circumvented with reflection. Besides, Bnet's WoW client code has been known to be janky, and their entire security setup seems to only care about protecting the business, and not users. Bnet is the only online gaming service where I have had multiple accounts hacked that I could not trace to any specific doxing/pw dump event... forcing me to conclude that their security infrastructure is absolute garbage

Houshalter 10y ago

Why not? The user interface being modable is awesome.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

slrz 10y ago

Because it's useful and it's their fscking computers and it allows them to tweak the interface to better suit their play? Should people's ability to receive email also be taken from them, because some of them might fall for the prospect of receiving a million bucks from a friendly Nigerian prince?

usea 10y ago

It's a feature, which Blizzard has invested a significant amount of time and money into, and has definitely contributed to the game's success. It allows players to modify the game's interface, not just arbitrary game code. Think of it as crowd-sourcing UI improvements from the community. Blizzard is known to take great UI mods and implement them into the game directly. For example, on release I created a mod that let you examine a player's equipped items from any distance. By default, the inspection window would close when a function returned true. This function checked to see if the distance to your target was greater than 5 meters. An easy way to change that behavior was to rebind the function to one that always returned false. It's a natural thing to do in Lua, I think.

tomc1985 10y ago
I used to run tons of WoW mods back-in-the-day. I get that. This particular language feature is not something that is solely responsible for WoW's moddable UI. While it might be nice in certain circumstances, you can build flexible UI without having to hook or reassign critical functions