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Comment by prvit | Hacker News Reader

> The usage of locally forbidden material in online gaming, to insta ban opponents or as a form of protest is a well known trivial hack. Some games allow to spray an image file to a wall, the picture is downloaded by all players. Locally enforced censorship then causes disconnects and even legal repurcussians to some gamers.

Any examples?

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I know this was technically possible in Rust (the game, not the language) circa 2015 (when I last played). I'm not sure how often it was used to trigger bans or local law enforcement action, but I wouldn't put it past people in that community. I stopped playing specifically due to the community's toxicity.

Can you actually show a documented example of this?

I strongly suspect this is a myth akin to the common reddit copypasta supposed to trigger Chinese filters (and that one is way more likely to work, at least it’s HTTP traffic).

I didn't take any pictures 7 years ago to provide evidence to a forum I didn't even know about at the time, no.

But there's someone on Reddit complaining about the same thing at the same time period.[1] NSFW words (not pictures) in the link

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/playrust/comments/3jdjdc/can_we_tal...

Oh, yeah, you could totally upload nasty pictures. What I’m questioning is the original claim that people have been using these mechanisms to trigger automatic internet censorship systems to kick people off game servers.

An easy test for plausibility in these cases is: Can we prove a more extreme case?

Here the answer is: yes. People demonstrably SWAT others in online games. Victims have actually died from this. Yet it continues to happen.

So since the more extreme case - do people trigger police visits to other player's houses, knowing they may die? - is true, the milder case of triggering automatic censorship seems very likely to be true also.

There's a copypasta you can use to kick Chinese players out of games that use P2P connections. You can read it here, it touches pretty much all the pain points of the CCP's current situation.

Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/plso8p/how_to_di...

Do you have any evidence of this actually working? I’ve seen the copypasta a million times, but never the smallest shred of evidence.

Lets run a test! Please reply if you get in trouble for loading this page.

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H\*

XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-UBE-TEST-EMAIL*C.34X

XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTPHISH-STANDARD-ANTI-PHISH-TEST-EMAIL*C.34X

I don't understand, what does this do?

Here's a link to what I see: https://i.imgur.com/vaZJq4b.png

EICAR is not supposed to trigger like this, but if you have access to the virustotal search API you can find some even smaller signatures that do trigger in this manner.

The original counter strike supported this. I was certainly guilty of using pornographic sprays back in college in the early 2000s.

Nobody was getting automatically disconnected from counter strike because of pornographic sprays though.

I remember reading this on HN a long time ago, but I can not find it anymore.

The method was explained in detail and concerned the source engine for this exploit. When I search the web for it, I only find articles of the game being banned in China, this feature being removed and then coming back as a monetized feature.

Also searching for this felt extremely sparse.

Maybe you are right and this never happened and it is just some clever internet hoax. The insta ban thing seems far fetched.

But I am certain this was used to troll, protest and circumvent censorship with gusto and must have had some consequences.

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