
Grand Theft Auto 'cheats' homes raided - rwmj
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45891126
======
jstarfish
> The Australian federal court has also frozen the assets of the five, who
> have not yet filed a defence.

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.

~~~
floatingatoll
They have $280,000 frozen, and were permitted a living expenses stipend by the
court. At $40 per sale, that's 7,000 potential violations of civil law that
they could be convicted of.

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.

~~~
Nasrudith
The objection is due process related including preventing them from using
their funds to hire an attorney whilst teams of attorneys are brought to bear
against them. It stinks of a capricious attempt to deny the right to legal
council to those who offend those at the top. Even Enron masterminds were
allowed to use their assets which certainly came from their misdeeds which
crippled the state and likely killed people via their outages. This mockery of
justice is what makes it inhumane.

~~~
weberc2
I’m not much of a libertarian nor a cryptocurrency enthusiast, but stuff like
this is plainly wrong and it would be satisfying to see someone in similar
circumstances dump their assets into bitcoin or similar before the government
could freeze or seize anything. I’m sure this isn’t a novel idea and happens
occasionally (regularly?).

~~~
Brockenstein
Two things. You're making some assumptions that are problematic.

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.

~~~
weberc2
1\. I don't claim it's wrong under Aussie law; I claimed to find ToS like
these to be morally wrong. Feel free to disagree with my opinion.

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. :)

~~~
Brockenstein
Alright man, if you're so sure, if you ever find yourself in that boat I wish
you well. Because I'm sure it's a recipe for disaster.

>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.

~~~
weberc2
Not really sure why you’re trying to poke holes in what is very clearly not a
realistic scenario. It’s like going to a fantasy movie and complaining
endlessly that magic isn’t real and the movie isn’t realistic. I’m really not
interested in this strange brand of pedantry.

------
thatguy0900
"Many cheaters may believe that it's a relatively harmless activity - but they
ruin the fun for legitimate players." As someone who played gta online for a
while I can tell you that the cheaters always had a line of people asking them
for free money or to do things like give everyone in the lobby access to all
weapons, even the single player exclusive ones. I think the only ones having
their fun ruined are the shareholders.

~~~
dzek69
Meh, unused to play GTA online a lot. On worst days (when new cheat was
released or leaked or whatever, I don't know) it was almost uplayable because
of players that could for example: \- Instantly kill everyone \- randomly
teleporting people around \- crating explosives around players \- blocking
movements of other players

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.

~~~
Alupis
Isn't this on Rockstar to fix? How is it even allowed in their game code for a
bag of money to be spawned in... there's no mini-game, heist, or mode that
does this, so why is the code even possible?

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.

~~~
harryf
It's not easy to prevent cheating, especially in open world games. There's a
pretty good high level read on this here - [https://www.pcgamer.com/why-is-it-
so-hard-to-stop-cheating-i...](https://www.pcgamer.com/why-is-it-so-hard-to-
stop-cheating-in-videogames/)

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.

~~~
Alupis
Yes, that makes sense... but a bag of money exists nowhere else in the game...
so why can the assets be spawned at all?

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.

------
netcan
_" The court order allowed Rockstar Games and its parent company, Take-Two
Interactive, to search two properties in Melbourne, Australia, for evidence
related to a cheat known as Infamous."_

...huh? Is it normal for a court to allow a company to conduct a search?

~~~
bigbluedots
In Australia, just about anything is possible. For example, there is the
proposed law that would somehow compel foreign communication providers to
assist in capturing the communications of a suspect via malware or similar. We
live in strange times here.

------
mattnewton
Note to self: never start a software company in Australia, especially if it
could ever run afoul of a large corporation.

Response I would expect: Scary cease and desist letter.

Australian response: Raid your home and freeze your accounts, Kim Dotcom
style.

------
esotericn
I remember a time when popular rhetoric was that violent video games would
turn the players towards crime.

Turns out, if you get too involved, violence will be perpetrated _against_
you.

So it goes.

------
graybolt
Australia seems to be heading towards some strange, horrifying dystopia. With
Nauru, government spying, and the Reef, it seems on par with some kind of
third world dictatorship.

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.

~~~
ansible
> _At the same time, it 's doing its best to destroy the pristine environment
> it inherited, and the Great Barrier Reef is rapidly dying._

Isn't this more generally everyone in the entire world's fault, and not
specifically the Australia government?

Ocean warming, pH decreasing, pollution, etc.

~~~
graybolt
Yes, the reef is being destroyed due to ocean warming and acidification, but
this is very much partly the fault of Australia.

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.

------
kibwen
Amusingly, if you're a developer making an online game where cheating is a
risk, it behooves you to discreetly contract a third-party to develop cheats
on your behalf, sell the cheat at a price that undercuts all your competitors,
thereby pricing them out of the market, and then, since you have perfect
information regarding who's cheating, periodically banning waves of players to
give the impression of diligence (and also forcing them to pay up yet again to
purchase a new account in your game). You simultaneously create a new revenue
stream while minimizing the amount of cheating your players actually
experience (since you have such precise information about who's cheating and
can strategically issue bans to keep it below a certain threshold). Unethical,
sure, but in this day and age nobody should be giving companies the benefit of
the doubt when it comes to presumption of ethics.

~~~
GaryNumanVevo
That's honestly the most amazing business model I've ever seen. How is it
unethical to sell cheats for your own game? Just include some ToS loopholes.

~~~
ThrowawayIP
ToS loopholes not even needed. You need opposing parties to launch a suit and
no one is going to sue their own developers for doing as they asked.

------
buboard
> The publisher of video game Grand Theft Auto V has been granted the right to
> search the homes of five people

Is that even possible?

~~~
css
Yeah, this doesn't make much sense. Seems like something the police/other
authorities would do and the article is just poorly written. Are private
companies allowed to petition to search their customers' homes in Australia?
Is the private company that ransacks your home allowed to invoice you for
their time?

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...](https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5002897/GTA-
ORDERS.pdfhttps://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5002897/GTA-ORDERS.pdf)

[1] [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yw949v/lawyers-
fo...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yw949v/lawyers-for-gta-
online-get-court-order-to-search-homes-of-alleged-cheat-makers)

------
half-kh-hacker
As a videogame cheat developer myself, _whoa._

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'?

~~~
dzek69
If you reverse engineering the code somehow, then it could fall under it I
think.

~~~
cabaalis
Not in the US, at least. Reverse-engineering may be prohibited by EULA.
Protocols may or may not be copywritten (there have been rulings recently that
conflict with each other)

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

~~~
celophi
I thought that reversing encryption is fine if it is for interoperability
purposes and is non-infringing. The section describing this part is kind of
confusing..

------
FussyZeus
So how about we cut the foreplay and just let corporations roll their own
investigative agencies?

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.

~~~
nkrisc
I'd be outraged if my government favored foreign corporations over its own
citizens.

------
falcolas
Speculative question time: I wonder if the reason we hear about so many raids
associated with white collar computer related "crimes" is related to the risk
of encryption and user action eliminating evidence.

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.

~~~
Nasrudith
I think it is more PR for technophobes and spiteful terror tactics to be
"tough on crime" than anything else really.

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.

------
JadeNB
Despite the headline appearing as written on the BBC website, I think that it
is supposed to be "Grand Theft Auto cheats' homes raided" (i.e., the homes
belonging to the cheats are raided), or perhaps the very awkward "Grand Theft
Auto ‘cheats’' homes raided" (i.e., scare quotes around 'cheats' in addition
to the possessive). It doesn't seem to make any sense as literally written
("Grand Theft Auto 'cheats' homes raided").

------
honkycat
Full disclosure: I play a lot of online video games and am biased against
cheat makers.

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.

~~~
bmurphy1976
> 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.

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.

------
user68858788
Seems incredibly harsh considering the "crime."

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
The crime is depriving a corporation of potential profit, that's the worst
crime imaginable.

~~~
Goronmon
Only the "worst crimes imaginable" are worthy of prosecution? That doesn't
sound right.

------
tuco86
I never understood why anyone would ban cheaters or go after the cheat
creators.

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.

~~~
MaulingMonkey
Blue team can't always keep hackers out of bank servers, how the hell are they
going to keep hackers out of the software running on _the hacker 's own
hardware_? They have physical access!

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.

~~~
tuco86
You are right, it's an unwinnable cat and mouse situation. I was focusing too
much on the printing of in-game currency in my head and didn't communicate. I
wasn't proposing to stopping it, tho. Make it hard and make them hide, cheats
aren't all powerful if you try to stay undetected. Also, having no security
around the currency for years, when it's such a problem, just seems lazy.

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.

------
kernelPan1c
Rockstar to push an update and make this cheat irrelevant?

~~~
taytus
I'm not defending Rockstar here but it sounds to me that they shouldn't have
to spend resources just because some random people decided to create cheats.

I much rather have them developing more content/games.

~~~
ilikehurdles
I take it your webservers have no csrf protection, run on unencrypted http,
pass passwords in plaintext over basic auth, run with root-level permissions
on hardware, and haven't been updated ever.

~~~
taytus
What do you want to achieve with this comment? I honestly don't get it.

------
geogeim
from a technical perspective gtav hacks are so easy to create and use, and so
powerful (godmode, really?) because rockstar decided to make the networking
model peer-to-peer so they can skimp on the server infrastructure. it has
nothing to do with technical limitations (gtav game sessions are limited to 30
players anyways). in most modern games there's actually a server that receives
the player actions and computes the consequences. this is why in games like
counter-strike godmode isn't a thing. also valve really dedicates
infrastructure to catching cheaters, even using machine learning to detect
them, as opposed to feeding a bunch of teenagers to the 'dogs' for doing a
lousy job of protecting their games from abuse.

------
rajacombinator
Please note: if you purchase any products from Rockstar you are supporting
this action.

