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MMO's are packed with possible communication channels in addition to chat. Ever wonder if that annoying gnome in the auction hall is jumping in morse code? Cou

• rfnslyr 13y ago
  I can't wait to see a title that reads "Newest NSA revelations show that the Al Qaeda transmits information through MMO 'World of Warcraft' with in-game Gnomes jumping in morse code".
  • rasur 13y ago
    This reminds me of the kids chat world used in the comedy-terrorism film "4 Lions".
  • saraid216 13y ago
    Eh, I don't find it terribly hard to imagine that America is the Kingdom of Azeroth and Al Qaeda are the Forsaken. Just map place names and unit compositions and you have a fairly large vocabulary already. Wouldn't even make it hard to just swap out different races for the current code key.
• podperson 13y ago
  It's plausible if they simply subvert the servers. If you take World of Warcraft, say, the options are basically text chat and voice chat. (Sure, you can send morse code or whatever, but that kind of sophistication generally assumes a more detailed communication has already taken place and applies everywhere -- "let the phone ring three times and then hang up", steganography, etc.) A better option for covert communication would be a more open platform such as Second Life, where you can upload custom content. But, frankly, there are so many options if you have any imagination... If what they're really worried about is recruiting and outreach then they at least only need to worry about reasonably popular alternatives.
  • eloisius 13y ago
    I was thinking about Minecraft. The options for covert communication are limitless.
    • podperson 13y ago
      shrug if you want to communicate one-on-one covertly there are simply too many options to cover.
  • dobbsbob 13y ago
    Took them forever to discover Ft. Longcat in Second Life
• wavefunction 13y ago
  >>The NSA makes military spending look frugal! Amazing too that we can't find money for food assistance (SNAP) to poor people but we can pay NSA agents for fools' errands in video games. I'm waiting for the revelation that Gen. Alexander's NSA underwrote "The Mists of Pandaria" with tax dollars.
  • JoeAltmaier 13y ago
    There's got to be a name for when someone complains about a tiny expenditure, and compares it with an unrelated huge societal issue. You can criticize anything this way: we're delivering mail while people starve. We're giving people parking tickets while killer asteroids go undetected.
    • hythloday 13y ago
      It is the fallacy of relative privation, or appeal to worse problems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation
    • Houshalter 13y ago
      Opportunity costs are a real thing. It's a legitimate argument. See using dead children as a unit of currency: http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html
    • mason240 13y ago
      Prime example, I recently had someone on Twitter literally tell me that by supporting NASA I must want children to die. https://twitter.com/NASA_SLS/status/401818661931208704 https://twitter.com/NASA_SLS/status/401818661931208704 "I love space exploration, but the expenditure simply cannot be justified when kids die for lack of clean water" "But as we're discussing children's lives only someone lacking a moral compass would consider it an issue here"
  • wavefunction 13y ago
    I'm not complaining about space exploration expenditures when we still haven't accomplished world peace. I'm complaining about us wasting money on COMPLETE NONSENSE. If you think "investigating" whether Al Quaeda is communicating versus gnomes jumping on top of the auction house is a valuable use of taxpayer resources, why aren't we investigating whether terrorists are using kebab interval-spacing as a communications medium? Funding SNAP will feed my fellow hungry humans. Funding the NSA will... Who knows? We just have to take their lying word for it. Usually I treat posts like yours with a base modicum of respect, but I'd really think twice the next time if I were you.
• rolux 13y ago
  > MMO's are packed with possible communication channels in addition to chat. Ever wonder if that annoying gnome in the auction hall is jumping in morse code? Could signals be sent with bids? Could a character's inventory contents be arranged to leave a message to someone else who shares the login info? Is that nonsense coming from what you presume to be a bot-controlled gold-farming crew really nonsense? Precisely. WOW itself is the first level of steganography ("I'm not communicating, I'm gaming"), but one can think of many more, inside and outside of MMOs. Given proper use of steganography, small groups will always be able to communicate with low risk of detection. But for obvious reasons, you will always have to roll your own scheme, and may end up overlooking aspects that render it insecure.
  • prawks 13y ago
    Is anyone aware of articles or books that deal with the creation of these types of systems? I'm guessing some sort of cryptography text would lead to it, but the last sentence of your post has me particularly interested. What kind of considerations need to be made when creating such a system, especially in today's age?
    • sillysaurus2 13y ago
      Nope, cryptography != steganography. The situation with stego, currently, is much the same as the situation with crypto was before the invention of public key encryption: truly high-grade stego is only available to governments, mostly because nobody knows how to do it in a secure way. In other words, stego is an art, not a science, just like crypto was before PKE. There are no good texts as far as I'm aware. Your best bet is to read whitepapers on stego. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6843575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6843575 for related discussion.
      • hershel 13y ago
        >>stego is art not science what about "provably secure steganogrpahy"? there seems to be some papers on this. isn't is by definition science, not art?
    • 13y ago
• puller 13y ago
  > Seriously... The NSA makes military spending look frugal! That isn't something you can decide by waving your hands at games. WoW is cheap compared to even simple things purchased by the military on a regular basis.
  • hobs 13y ago
    A WoW subscription maybe, but the computing power to analyze character actions to extract meaning (such as the jumping example above) and the people come up with that idea is not cheap.
  • mason240 13y ago
    WoW might be cheap but a signal intelligence team to monitor a video game isn't.
• Luc 13y ago
  > I find the task of finding terrorist communications in MMO's so daunting that I'd never even consider making an attempt at it. I suppose the bigger bang for the buck would be in the metadata. Knowing who is playing at the same time, or who is looking at each other's profile or whatever.
• coldtea 13y ago
  >MMO's are packed with possible communication channels in addition to chat. Ever wonder if that annoying gnome in the auction hall is jumping in morse code? Could signals be sent with bids? There would be trillions of possible outlets for such communication, making looking for those specifically in MMO extremely futile.
• runn1ng 13y ago
  From what I read, NSA is not spending that much. Apparently snooping is more effective than sending an army.
  • awestroke 13y ago
    Sending an army where? What are you talking about?
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
• loceng 13y ago
  This is why it's literally impossible to track and analyze all real-time possible channels. Even if you have equal computing power analyzing every world activity, the ability to interpret every "hit" or suspicious pattern (which I think would be impossible to see.. e.g. the morse code used would likely be encrypted / non-standard ... which would lead to needing 1000x the computing power at minimum to even put a dent in keeping up in pattern tracking real-time). You'd be much better off spending that money on taking care of people, being kind, compassionate, etc..
• michaelhoffman 13y ago
  The NSA is part of the military.
• coffeemug 13y ago
  Privacy concerns aside, this is a "half a loaf of bread is equivalent to no bread at all" argument. Yes, catching progressively more sophisticated signals gets progressively harder. That doesn't mean basic mining is useless. It reminds me of the argument that banning soda sales in schools is useless because kids could just go to a store across the street. They could, and some will, but taking care of the path of least resistance can go a surprisingly long way.
  • bowlofpetunias 13y ago
    I would suggest that "a horde of undercover Orcs" in WoW no longer qualifies as "the path of least resistance"...
• seanv 13y ago
  Wow never would have thought of that - for some reason thinking of a bad guy playing Runescape to discuss their evil plans makes me laugh
• drzaiusapelord 13y ago
  I simply do not believe that the NSA actually catches anyone using these advanced methods. The few terrorist prosecutions we've seen released almost always involve some low-hanging nut soliciting someone online for bomb materials with zero "gnome morse code" or other gimmicks. The idea that you can datamine everything running over the internet is a fool's errand and this errand is costing us billions in wasted tax dollars and millions of instances of violated human rights. Meanwhile, organizations like NASA are clearly underfunded. Terrorism is the root password to everything from our constitution to our tax load. Playing up these charlatans and lifelong federal bureaucrats as some kind of saviors against the mythical hacker terrorist is a little much in my book. These are pork programs that go nowhere and do nothing but enrich the inside players and connected defense contractors.
  • leokun 13y ago
    > The idea that you can datamine everything running over the internet is a fool's errand and this errand is costing us billions in wasted tax dollars and millions of instances of violated human rights. Agreed. > Terrorism is the root password to everything. Terrorism is pretty scary stuff, it's intended to be scary. No way are people in government singing hallelujah everytime innocent people are killed, look we can fund more nefarious shit! They're honestly trying to do the right thing and simply went overboard with collecting too much data.
    • shiven 13y ago
      Pardon my cynicism but your second statement makes you sound like a shill for those same people. Making such terrible actions sound like well-intentioned 'overstepping' only excuses such horrendously insidious activity (which is deserving of nothing but the strongest criticism).
      • diminoten 13y ago
        Why does he sound like a shill? Do you know what a shill is? Could it be that he just supports or believes an opinion you don't?
• Houshalter 13y ago
  You can send bits of information like that, but not that many. Sending a message like a time or gps coordinates would be easy, but having a full conversation would be very time consuming and require a ton of those short messages. It is also difficult to decode, especially manually.
• walshemj 13y ago
  But it could be a good way for a case officer to keep in contact with a source none of that hanging about in parks dead letter drops and embarrassing wifi enabled rocks. Would they have caught Anna Chapman if she had met her case handler virtually instead of a coffee shop.
• RobLach 13y ago
  All I'm imagining is a group of folks snickering that their project proposal went through as now they'll get paid to play World of Warcraft all day.