Grand Theft Auto 'cheats' homes raided
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
This is just sick. These aren't traffickers or Mafia associates; they make $40 a pop facilitating violating a video game's terms of service-- a civil matter at worst. But sure, they're on par with Pablo Escobar, so let's freeze all their goddamn assets before they've even had a chance to respond to the charges.
If they'd only sold a hundred copies, they could try to contest that only $4,000 should be frozen, since that's the maximum profit possible.
That they failed to convince the court to freeze less than the full $280,000 implies either that the court already has evidence affirming at least $280,000 in potentially-illegal revenue, or that they failed to provide the court documentary evidence of total sales less than $280,000.
If your objection is that they should not have their assets frozen because the individual sale amount is low, that isn't really how "repeatedly profited from willfully violating a written agreement" works in most court systems. They freeze the money in case you're guilty and try to run with it. If you're found innocent, you'll regain access.
If your objection is that freezing their assets is inhumane, that's incorrect: they are granted a reasonable stipend from the frozen assets to ensure that they are neither hungry nor homeless for the duration of the case.
This is my objection.
It's obscene that the full resources of the state are brought down on defendants expected to subsist only on "modest living expenses."
It's one thing when your opponent has the backing of their own narco-state, but these are presumably a bunch of 20-somethings with a net worth of less than $1M.
You can't challenge someone to a duel and then handicap them by taking away their gun and making them wear a bag over their head. That's not a fight, that's an execution.
There isn't a perfect system. And your argument that they need every cent of that money to mount a defense might be more than a little overblown.
Further, they could easily spend several times that much money defending themselves. Sure, if they had billions then that's a meaningful argument but not for <300k.
We don't yet know that what they did was illegal. We don't even know if the right people are being prosecuted in the first place. That's the entire point of the trial.
We may not have a perfect system but presumptions that defendants are "obviously guilty" or "don't actually need all that money" defeats the purpose of having a system at all. Like arbitration, there's literally no point-- we're supposed to have progressed beyond kangaroo courts with arbitrary rules weighted in favor of the prosecution.
1. That this is wrong under Australian law, or somehow irregular. You not liking it, or having a knee jerk reaction is not the same as an actual moral judgement.
2. That courts generally have no recourse this sort of behavior. Lots of people have tried this sort of gambit, ditching assets and whatnot to avoid paying judgement. And everyone seems to think it's an original idea or that the courts can't nail your nuts to a wall for doing it.
Furthermore:
3. It is beyond trivial for them to determine that you took the money out of a bank. And then demand to know where it's at. And then demand that you recover it. And then also punish you criminally for that criminal conduct.
4. Every lawyer everywhere beats their heads against their desk every time one of their brain trust clients do something so egregiously stupid as what you're imagining.
It sure does seem like several folks have grandiose surefire ideas of how to beat the system. And believe they're stubborn enough that they can out wait everyone, that the courts, government, plaintiffs will all just give up and give in. Good luck with that. It sounds like a child's fantasy to me.
I was thinking more "move to somewhere without extradition". I don't think this is particularly practical, but I still like the idea of someone doing this to spite government overreach. With that said:
2. The courts _don't_ have any recourse for "this sort of behavior".
3. I _hope_ they realize you took your money. Tell them it's in a bitcoin wallet. Tell them where they can shove their demands and wish them well trying to punish your criminal conduct.
4. Clearly I'm not concerned about lawyers.
Someone is making incorrect assumptions, but it's not me. :)
>I was thinking more "move to somewhere without extradition". I don't think this is particularly practical, but I still like the idea of someone doing this to spite government overreach. With that said:
You know what solutions to problems I like? Impractical or untenable ones. You know what that makes it? Not a solution.
>2. The courts _don't_ have any recourse for "this sort of behavior".
You wish.
>3. I _hope_ they realize you took your money. Tell them it's in a bitcoin wallet. Tell them where they can shove their demands and wish them well trying to punish your criminal conduct.
They won't need your well wishes, you've made it easy for them. You seem to think sticking money into a bitcoin wallet is some impenetrable shield and enables you to ignore court orders.
Governments have seized bitcoins for years. And seeing as how your scheme is to do this to confound their actions against you I think you'll be on the hook for lost value and whatever costs are incurred in recovering the assets you're trying to protect.
>4. Clearly I'm not concerned about lawyers.
Yeah in your fantasy scenario where you beat the government through your deft maneuvers, sure they don't matter. In the real world though, different ballgame.
I think you'll find working against your lawyer and sabotaging his efforts on your behalf is the definition of counter-productive. And if you figure you don't need a lawyer, a well known proverb covers that: A person who is their own lawyer has a fool for his client. A lawyer who represents himself (herself) has a client who is an even bigger fool.
Yes, it's exactly a moral judgement.
It doesn't prevent them from asking you to hand over the funds, but it does mean you get a chance to react instead of suddenly finding out your bank account is frozen.
I'll also point out that there are so many tools to your advantage if you do it this way -- locking up crypto mathematically until a date in the future, shamir's sharing, monero, etc. I'm not saying any of it is a perfect solution, but sure as hell it will make them work a lot harder and give you more time to figure things out.
see: Kim Dotcom
this is the exact opposite of basis on which most legal systems are based on - innocence until proven guilty.
> If your objection is that freezing their assets is inhumane, that's incorrect.
no, that's their opinion. one i agree with. you can disagree with both of us, but that too is also just your opinion.
> ... granted a reasonable stipend
that is also your opinion, and also varies heavily based on what you mean by "reasonable"
> ... for the duration of the case.
and what if it takes two years?
be reasonable here. rockstar have made an immense amount of money from the GTA franchise. rockstar probably incur more financial damage from floating point rounding error.
the actions taken by the australian court system (one known for its.. reasonable decisions RE gaming) are catastrophically disproportionate.
Serious (and probably naive) question, what law are they breaking?
My understanding of TOSs is that the company can unilaterally deny a user the stipulated service if they believe they are breaking the terms, but not taking you to court over it.
"Undermines enjoying for users playing fairly in online modes" doesn't strike me as a punishable offense.
If the cheats involved unlawful access to the server it would be hacking, I guess, but if they work on a local PC and users used them willingly, I don't see how they can be held liable.
Copyright infringement?
"Team of 5 sued in court over creating and selling a video game cheating tool to thousands of players"
Is this interesting? Absolutely. Does it have the same emotional 'clickbait' hook as this?
"Team of 5 have funds frozen before they get a chance to respond to allegations"
Or the actual headline here?
"GTA 'cheats' home raided"
Not even slightly. Don't let a newspaper headline frame the issue for you. The issue here is simple:
"Is it legal, under Australian law, to sell software that violates the terms of service of an online service only when executed by the buyer?"
to be frank, I don't care about the troubles of a software company very much, or think this is an important legal fight for them to win. But people who use cheat software to get more enjoyment out of multiplayer games are essentially selfish losers. I mean, there are game mods which were developed specifically for humorous free-for-all play where players have infinite everything and can clown off to their hearts' content, but cheaters and griefers don't seem to enjoy those games because winning and losing are irrelevant.
I don't play a lot of games these days and the games I do play aren't that social, but I've noticed that when I do play socially the people who spend money on special item sales and the like also tend to be verbally abusive when defeated in PvP.
90 million paying customers at $60 each, that's how much damage these vandals have done.
Does Fortnite not have a ranking system? Why are people who are extremely good at the game (or cheaters) being exposed to new players?
Cheaters are regularly banned and are matched up with new players.
Additionally, cheaters have super-human reflexes and powers that make them completely unkillable.
Cheaters are much more common than elite players, so you are much more likely to run into them than an elite player.
Finally, getting matched up with an elite player in an online video game as an average player is something online video game companies invest technology into avoiding.
> If we're saying that being beaten in a video game is a entertainment-ruining experience akin to someone hacking my Chromecast, I see virtually no distinction except that one "earned" the skills. At the end of the day, my displeasure comes from being beaten, so morally speaking I don't see a difference here.
OK so you just don't like video games and want an opportunity to shit on them.
This is a huge leap. Who said their entire argument is based on winning vs losing? Losing can be fun, it's not the same thing.
Being beaten by a hacker with super-human reaction speed and is completely unkillable is experience ruining. Losing in a game against a skilled player can be rewarding. And if the other player is so skilled it's not even a competition, it's a bad matchmaking system and it should be changed.
I think this is a key difference of opinion we have here.
I enjoy the challenge of trying to beat people in games, and failure obviously gives it that challenge. That being said, there's a point where there's a big enough skill difference that it is practically impossible to win against another player. This is what I'm mostly arguing here. I see the management of cheaters as the same problem as the management of overly skilled players being matched against those who aren't. Go look at some pro CSGO players for example, their performance is sometimes almost indistinguishable from cheating.
> Being beaten by a hacker with super-human reaction speed and is completely unkillable is experience ruining.
Doesn't Fortnite immediately let you enter a new match? How likely are you to encounter new cheaters long enough for the experience to get tedious? Why is suing cheaters a more fair solution to the problem of reducing this probability vs figuring out how to ban the specific cheats that have the largest userbase? Banning cheats in general is hard problem. Banning specific cheats is often not (barring crazy shit like the cheat running at hypervisor level).
This works great, but holy cow is it an art, especially with free games. VAC bans players a random time after they cheat (more than one month), so they never know which cheat got them caught. They also have crowdsourced moderation using replays. Daybreak can somehow track bans across new accounts, but how they do this is a closely guarded secret (for obvious reasons).
Yet there are still cheaters in all these games.
> Why is suing cheaters
They are suing the people who make the cheat mods. Cut the cheats off at the source, then you can ban players using known cheats while worrying less about new cheats entering the market and circumventing detection.
"Losing" isn't the only way for a game to be ruined. Hackers will spawn in millions of dollars around every player on a server. This effectively reduces the lifespan of the game from months to "a few days from now."
> my displeasure comes from being beaten
There is a vast difference between insurmountable odds and impossible odds. In addition, where is the fun without the challenge? A game is as good as a movie if you can't loose.
> (or cheaters) being exposed to new players?
Cheaters have to run new accounts all the time (because their accounts get banned), so all cheaters are new players by any reasonable standard. Doing this would greatly increase the odds of meeting a cheater as a legitimately new player. To make matters worse, new players are the least qualified to call out hackers.
These people ruin the enjoyment of the game for everyone else who is playing honorably.
Spawning UFOs, a lot of cars, attaching Christmas trees as hats or spawning a cat that follows you around on a BMX could be fun. But half of the times I spotted a cheater - he was ruining other people game.
Same with attaching Christmas Trees to people (very annoying), or killing everyone, or setting everyone on fire. Their API seems to be enabling this behavior (and the server gladly accepts the state change, impacting all other players), even though it's not used anywhere else in the game for legit reasons.
In essence you pretty much have to delegate some of the computation of game physics etc to the client - doing everything on the server isn't going to scale. But the moment you delegate that to the client you open the door for cheating.
The current best practice in preventing cheating seems to be "referee" code that performs checks that what a player is doing is actually "sane" within the rules of the game. But in the end it's an arms race between cheats and anti-cheats, which means game companies are always going to be playing catch up.
Part of that policing should be done server-side, especially with a max player limit of 32 per server instance (that's manageable).
The server should recognize not every single player in the instance can be set on fire simultaneously... and when a player dies and respawns, why is their player-state not reset? Instead, they remain on fire and die again and again and again...
There's definitely some low-hanging fruit Rockstar could fix to combat a lot of the griefing that goes on.
Problem: Other players can change your player's player model with cheats: Solution: Ignore that message if its from another player
Problem: Other players can spawn in massive Ferris wheels in the middle of the map in Freeroam Solution: Ignore that message if its from another player and we're in freemode.
So on and so forth, It's not difficult.
> I think the only ones having their fun ruined are the shareholders
That's just it... Rockstar wants to sell their "Shark Cards" - real money in exchange for in-game fictitious money... and waaaaaay overpriced to boot!
$8mm in game money for $99.99 USD?[1] That's maybe 6-8 hours of game-play (not trivial, but not ridiculous), and can be spent on one item, maybe two. No wonder people are spawning money...
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/376850/GTA_Online_Shark_C...
Also , "breaking into" the game is a very GTAV thing to do
...huh? Is it normal for a court to allow a company to conduct a search?
Searches AFAIK are generlly speaking made by sworn LEO's or however public officers so that even within the invasivity of such a thing, at least in theory, the search is performed according to the Law and to the authorization the Court gave.
Maybe in Australia there is a Law allowing this kind of searches ?
Or maybe these searches happen anyway at the presence/with the assistance of a public officer?
Response I would expect: Scary cease and desist letter.
Australian response: Raid your home and freeze your accounts, Kim Dotcom style.
Turns out, if you get too involved, violence will be perpetrated _against_ you.
So it goes.
For those that don't know: Australia operates a detention camp on Nauru where they made the prices of visas a nonrefundable $8,000, and people are raped, sexually assaulted and abused. The Australian government tries to suppress journalists writing about this.
The government wants to ban encryption and associate it with criminals and terrorists.
At the same time, it's doing its best to destroy the pristine environment it inherited, and the Great Barrier Reef is rapidly dying. Other countries, for the most part, reduced their CO2 consumption per capita since the 80s and 90s - Belgium 65% less, Poland 63% less, America 28% less, Australia actually increased theirs by about 10%.
They've got no bill of rights, they're destroying their environment and everyone else's, and they've got a powerful nanny state looking for more power. I don't get why they enjoy such a great reputation on the world stage.
Isn't this more generally everyone in the entire world's fault, and not specifically the Australia government?
Ocean warming, pH decreasing, pollution, etc.
They're the #2 coal exporter in the world, about three times as much as the US for example. They consume massive amounts of CO2 per person and have made no efforts to decrease this while the rest of the world has. They burn massive amounts of coal and have no interest in changing this; investment in alternative forms of energy actually went down in recent years. This is despite having tons of space for wind turbines and literally perfect conditions for solar.
Australia also destroys its local environment with overfishing, introducing invasive species, clearing vegetation, and polluting the coasts.
If they want to pretend they're a first world country, they need to act like one.
And in regards to Nauru, two of the higher-qualified doctors have been arrested and deported in the last couple of months, and the mental-health program was cut.
Australia doesn't just suppress journalists writing about it, in conjunction with the Nauru government they actively prevent journalists from travelling to Nauru.
Is that even possible?
Edit: turns out they are allowed to do so. From the original source (page 5) [0]:
> Applicants means Take-Two Interactive Software Inc and Rockstar Games Inc
From Vice [1]:
> Two lawyers from the Bird & Bird law firm representing Rockstar and Take-Two were part of the "search party" that was allowed to look through their computers, along with independent lawyers and an independent "computer expert."
[0] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5002897/GTA-ORDER...
[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yw949v/lawyers-fo...
There's a thin line between the development of gameplay-enhancing mods, and advantageous cheats.
Is there someone who can explain how this kind of thing falls under 'copyright infringement'?
But as long as the content is not encrypted, it is a perfectly legal activity to engage in--and perfectly legal for a company to say you're violating their terms. Legal as in "not criminal."
If the content is encrypted, then circumventing or breaking the encryption is a violation of DMCA and a criminal activity.
Edit: IANAL
Smith compared usage of the Game Genie to "skipping portions of a book" or fast-forwarding through a purchased movie; thus the altered game content did not constitute the creation of a derivative work as Nintendo had argued. Smith wrote that "Having paid Nintendo a fair return, the consumer may experiment with the product and create new variations of play, for personal enjoyment, without creating a derivative work."
Multiplayer cheating is another thing, as is horning in on what a company wants to use as a revenue stream. If you are doing either of those things, even accidentally (e.g., a cheat you intend to be used in single player but works in multiplayer), my non-lawyerly self advises you to cease immediately and turn those skills towards something more productive and lucrative without the risks, because the risk/reward payout matrix gets a lot more lopsided on the "risk" side, especially because of the opportunity costs of things that are as lucrative but much less risky.
Seriously if I was Australian I'd be seven levels of outraged that my tax dollars were being burned to help Rockstar Games catch someone writing a fucking cheat program. What an atrocious waste of public money.
With a raid, they have a better chance at getting immediate access to running and decrypted computers, whereas with a normal warrant service that chance goes way down.
I'm curious as to what a better solution would be.
Destruction of evidence is itself a damning crime which may be used to infer guilt and encrypting it after being subpoenaed or given a search warrant is pretty much destruction unless they reverse on request. Even with a destruction policy upon demand they need to pull out all stops or start making regular backups.
This seems frivolous and a waste of time but I think people here underestimate the effect online cheats can have on a company's bottom line, and just how PROLIFIC online cheating is.
Imagine you spent $300,000,000 developing an online video game. And then some company in Australia hires a number of full-time workers to develop a way to ruin the experience for other players, or to work around your monetization strategies and get stuff they should have to earn for free.
These companies are parasites that make money off of game developers. They make money off of making other people's products worse for the majority of players.
People underestimate the number of online cheaters. It's seriously an epidemic and ruins games for people. People buy the cheats and then play at internet cafes who will refresh their game library regularly so there are no consequences for cheating.
For example, PUBG has banned over 13 million users since June 2017. With an estimated 350 million player count, that is a large portion of their player base.
And that is for a middlingly-popular game that was mostly a flash in the pan. Games like Fortnight, and League of Legends, and DOTA 2 probably have similar numbers.
Most companies do not release their ban-numbers and I suspect there is a good reason for that, because the numbers would be shocking.
I don't find this stat particularly useful. What I'd be more curious to see are statistics like % and rate of game matches significantly impacted by cheating. I don't care if there's 1 cheater or 100 million, but I do care if 5 of 10 game matches I play are ruined by cheating.
The worst offenders are definitely in China since a lot of these cheaters simply do it for status and can jump from cafe to cafe with different accounts.
Pay 40$, reverse engineer the cheats and get a cheap list of security issues you ought to fix anyways. Thus raise the bar so it becomes hard. Hire the remaining few very skilled crackers for your reverse engineering team (or bug bounty them).
In contrast to lobbying the/a government for overreach laws, have the government find the offenders and then litigate. There has to be a better and cheaper way.
Also bring back dedicated servers so the community can police itself.
Even if you turn the game client into a perfect dumb client that merely consumes video (ala game streaming services), in theory there are still opportunities to cheat - image recognition is an ongoing area of research into machine learning, no reason you couldn't apply that towards creating aimbots or other tools that replace player skill.
In practice, game clients are way more hackable than a dumb client for performance reasons. RTSes use lockstep networking models, reducing bandwidth but allowing map hacks. FPSes predict movement and render locally to reduce perceived latency, enabling the extraction of accurate 3D position information and replacing camouflage with blinking pink neon "shoot here" textures. Reducing server costs by using P2P networking models allows players to DoS each other instead of the game servers, and gives them more authority over the game state to tamper with. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of intentional design decisions - we haven't even gotten into actual bugs in the implementation yet.
You can do a cat and mouse game of detecting and banning and obfuscating and so on, but you're only going to stem the tide and contain the damage, not actually stop it any more than you're suddenly going to stop piracy. And even doing that involves spending a lot more resources than $40 and a couple of FTEs if your game is even remotely popular. And runs the risk of understandably pissing off your legitimate users if your game appears to be spying on them. And if you avoid that, it will still be more resources you can't spend on making new content, new games, QA, etc.
Bringing law enforcement into the equation won't stop cheats either. And it involves huge costs for the company and much more for the society, I think.
Also: ML can be used on both sides as well. A scaling Autoadmin which detects odd behavior doesn't seem harder than a bot playing for you without showing odd behavior.
I much rather have them developing more content/games.
Playing online is constantly watching loading screens, waiting between matches I queues are ultra long.
Cheats works like forever, before banning occurs.
No simple heuristics, like 'if player earned 1000000000000 in a day - something's worth verifying'.
I could block half of the cheats with few hours of such simple logics (I used to host Multi Theft Auto server, heuristics and "playing" with cheaters was very easy and successful way to protect legite players)