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I'm not really one for playing video games. I'm far too old and too busy to waste much time on such childish and trivial things. Frankly even when I was young I was more interested in learning about how computers worked than playing games on them. These days my interests are even further removed from such trivial pursuits. I view computers as little more than sophisticated typewriters with which to express my concerns and opinions.

And so it is that I find myself writing about video games, or rather a fairly recent phenomenon in the video games industry: in-app purchasing.

Slated employs many different techniques to protect the site from hacking, but by far the most important is vigilance, and that means paying close attention to things like logs.

Like many sites, Slated is under constant attack, mostly from bots running on compromised Windows machines, but most of those attacks are purely opportunistic and random, or in other words aren't actually targeting Slated for any particular reason. But every now and then I discover something in the server logs that suggests otherwise.

Today was one of those days.

...with the government's hot and eager help, of course.
From the its-about-"terrorists"-not-copyrights...honest dept.

SSRN-The Rise and Fall of Invasive ISP Surveillance by Paul Ohm

The Rise and Fall of Invasive ISP Surveillance
Paul Ohm
University of Colorado Law School
August 30, 2008

Abstract:
Nothing in society poses as grave a threat to privacy as the Internet Service Provider (ISP). ISPs carry their users' conversations, secrets, relationships, acts, and omissions. Until the very recent past, they had left most of these alone because they had lacked the tools to spy invasively, but with recent advances in eavesdropping technology, they can now spy on people in unprecedented ways.

We're already starting to see this undemocratic violation of our privacy and civil-rights in the UK, with sinister initiatives like Phorm from BT (and their criminal partners, formerly known as the Spyware outfit 121Media), and more generally with the mere existence and subsequent overreaching implementation of insidious laws like the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which are now being quite openly abused as a matter of routine investigation into non-terrorist activities.

And the impetus for this destruction of our democracy is ... paranoid and greedy media companies, a.k.a. the MAFIAA®, who "lobby" government to pervert our society for their own selfish ends. "Pervert" is very apt description of how the MAFIAA® gangsters operate, after all they are predisposed to stalking and making abusive phone calls to 10-year old girls.

In a society in which such thugs are not only tolerated, but actually supported by government, whilst that same government declares its entire population of ordinary citizens to be "guilty", and punishes them by revoking their privacy and other civil-rights, it's clear that democracy is well and truly dead.

Your ISP is at the front-line of that battle. It is the weapon the government uses to strike you down.

Don't let them.

Fight back.