Categories
conferences photos recruiting

Recruitment party photos

We didn’t quite get the sunny afternoon we were hoping for, but we did get some nice light

develop conference 2007

…so we had to move inside, but we still had a great turnout of peoplencsoft recruitment party 031

And it’s nice to have a games-industry recruitment event right on the beach, by the sea, for a change (instead of in the centre of a big city)

ncsoft recruitment party 035

Categories
games design

What do Computer Games “do”?

Not just teaching, but perhaps also defeat loneliness and make people feel better in their day to day lives.

Categories
conferences recruiting

NCsoft recruitment party – Thursday 26th July

NCsoft Europe, publisher of award winning online games such as City of Heroes and Guild Wars is searching for skilled individuals to join a growing internal development team. We offer competitive salaries, excellent benefits, a casual work environment and the seaside just 10 minutes walk from the office!

To coincide with the Develop Conference next week, NCsoft will be holding a joined recruitment party with Linden Lab. If you’d like to join us for an evening of food, drinks and the chance to chat to us about our current vacancies, then head over to this page for more details.

Please note: this is an industry only event, and numbers are strictly limited.

Categories
recruiting

Now hiring … MMO developers in the UK

Senior Network Developer

“NCsoft is one of the world’s biggest online gaming companies, a major developer and publisher in Asia, America, and Europe. We need an expert in online games development – from low-level network programming to multithreaded server code.

This role is in our UK studio, in Brighton. The office is in the centre of this vibrant city, just a couple of minutes from the station and a five minute walk from the seafront.”

http://eu.plaync.com/eu/jobs/detail/senior_network_developer/

Junior Network Developer

NCsoft Europe – Brighton, UK

http://eu.plaync.com/eu/jobs/detail/junior_network_developer/

Gameplay Developer

NCsoft Europe – Brighton, UK

http://eu.plaync.com/eu/jobs/detail/gameplay_developer/

Categories
conferences security

Austin GDC: Vote for your conference

AGDC is a small computer-games conference (about 1,000 attendees) with a particular focus on online and massively-multiplayer online games (MMOGs). In that context, it’s pretty big – with such a niche within a niche, it tends to have talks and representatives from most of the players in the space.

Every year, each of the games industry conferences have to pick between 100 and 300 talks and speakers, each of whom gets a free all-access ticket and usually free international travel, hotel, etc. The process is fairly straightforward: they put out a request for proposals about 6-9 months earlier, receive thousands of 1000-word abstracts, and select those that they think are interesting, novel, or will attract people enough to make them buy expensive tickets.

Democracy rules

Often, the choices made baffle, frustrate, or infuriate people in the industry. The most common complaint is that each year the conferences a higher proportion of worthless talks on subjects that everyone with any experience already knows about, and contain no information you couldn’t have got from home just by using google for a couple of hours. A lot of conferences have a few near-identical talks each year, so that if you’ve been to one you needn’t bother with the rest – one conference even got a reputation for just recycling the talks given at other conferences already that year, which killed it. There are always slightly bitter rumours about the best way to get a talk accepted – “pay for some advertising with the company that owns the conference”, or “offer a favour to someone on the advisory board”. Certainly, the biggest games industry conference (owned by the same people who this year bought-out AGDC) – GDC – has had a substantial number of talks in the last few years that either blatantly broke the conference rules on talks “not being an advert for a product”, or which were of an extremely low quality / low in any actual content.

So … it’s particularly interesting that for this year’s AGDC, the advisory board only chose the majority of the talks. For the rest, they took all the speaker proposals they had received, stuck them online, and invited the world to come and vote for which talks should fill up the remaining places. Even more interestingly, you can see how many people have voted for each talk, and what the average score is so far.

One man, one vote … maybe?

One problem – there’s no apparent rules restricting who votes. All you need is an email address (or gmail or mailinator) and a programmatic web browser, and you can choose who gets the free conference passes. I wouldn’t mind, but there’s a couple of talks I really want to go to myself which are on the voting list, and at least one of them isn’t going to get in – and I’ve little confidence right now that the ones that beat it will have done so by being the most popular with people who actually attend the conference.

And so onto the security angle here. This is the games industry, and this is a conference almost entirely dedicated to online games. It is immediately obvious that this voting system is open to rampant abuse (assuming they haven’t got silent back-end detection going on – I’m not criticising the conference organizers here, who probably have some good security measures in place, I’m merely using the visible details of the system as a starting point to talk about similar systems), and here’s a standard attack pattern:

“Write a program in a scripting language to automatically create accounts and vote for my talk”

  1. Use a free open-source library to make requests and post responses to the web server (libcurl)
  2. Use Firefox with the View Headers feature whilst surfing the site manually to see and record what you need to send and receive
  3. Create enough fake email addresses to swing the voting in your favour
  4. Don’t get detected

First of all, I’m not even sure that 4. above is an issue. Things to do:

  1. Use the US census data to programmatically make email addresses using believable REAL names with a wide variety of different names – and in the right proportion to be all US citizens
  2. Don’t have them all registered from a single domain name
  3. Don’t have them all from a single IP address (assuming they save your IP address when you vote, which most such sites don’t bother to do until too late)

In which case, the only question is “can we pass step 3?”. “But email providers have captchas, that stop automated account creation!” I hear you cry. Ahem. Even if they did (stop you automatically creating email addresses) the attack described only requires you to register enough email addresses to sway the voting. That may be as little as 50 or 100 emails – easily few enough that you could create them all yourself, manually. (in fact, right now, it would only take 20 or so votes to make sure your preferred talk was top).

Cheating better

If you’re still worried about the organizers getting suspicious of all those 5/5 votes for one talk, just look at it this way:

“Identify the major competitor talks, and vote them down, instead of just voting yours up”

Easy enough to hide your skewing of the results in the sea of all the other, genuine, untraceable voters voting one way or another based on personal preference…

Finally, I just want to briefly look at the expected outcome of this, because it touches on a real-life problem with games security: it’s unlikely any individual will cheat, so it may seem it’s “mostly” OK … but with some systems (such as this one) it only requires one cheater to destroy everything. As soon as one person starts cheating, others will notice and will feel “forced” to cheat also – this is what happened with Diablo, when cheaters found a way to make their character able to attack in towns, where no-one was allowed to attack. Non-cheaters were forced to cheat just in order to become able to defend themselves – there was no other defence that would work.

Some people started promoting their talks on their blog, and others have now followed suit. The voting contest has become a contest of who has the biggest blog :). I’m sure this was intentional by the conference organizers – it’s an excellent way of getting more free publicity that specifically targets and promotes the individual talks rather than just the generic conference itself. Even better, it has a natural tendency to give the most publicity to the most popular talks-to-be, whereas the conference organizers have to second guess what they think will make people pay to come and listen.

I wonder why they decided to let anyone vote, rather than restricting it to people who had booked tickets? They could even have just taken a refundable deposit, up to a certain date, to force only people who were willing to stump up some cash to take part in the voting. That could have filtered out most of the “no intention of going to the conference” people (although it certainly wouldn’t have made the system secure from determined cheating).

Categories
bitching

First Complaint

WordPress still has the worst UI for editing posts I’ve seen in years. It can’t even handle adding H3 tags! (you have to add them in source code, the visual editor doesn’t support them, and it’s got bugs if you try to then edit from the visual view afterwards)

Categories
introductions web 2.0

What is Web 2.0?

This question keeps coming up, and most people just need a simple answer. This is the quick and dirty explanation I came up with for some colleagues with the added emphasis on concrete benefits rather than just theoretical ideas.

What is Web 2.0?

“Web 2.0 was the moment we stopped using computers and started using the internet” – frantic

…is a brilliant answer, I love it, and it sounds really short, but takes at least 10 minutes to explain properly. Probably more like an hour, if we’re being honest here. If you already know what Web 2.0 is, and know lots of examples and counter-examples, that sums it up neatly. But cryptically.

Theoretical definition

(my super short summary of: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html)

  • Data is the most important thing in the world
  • Mass-market consumers are the most important business-partner in the world
  • Software that you can use today is more important in every single way than software that “works” or is “good”
  • Quantity (of consumers) beats quality: use Network Effect to get vast numbers of users very quickly
  • The internet is part of every platform. You are *always* selling stuff to the internet, *even when you think you aren’t*

Maybe explaining what the concrete benefits are will help.

Here goes…

OK, what does it actually do?

Web 2.0 has four main benefits:
1. A clever trick lets you use “the internet” as your development team, your sales team, your marketing team, or your support team. Increase your output by a factor of 100!

2. Make money out of other people’s data

3. Use other people’s development teams to build features for you

4. Provide a user-experience that is so many times better than anything you’ve ever done before that your sales increase substantially just because it’s so much more pleasant to use

Categories
Uncategorized

First Post

oh, the excitement.

oh, the drama!

Another First Post from Adam…