Hacker News Reader

Comment by tibbon | Hacker News Reader

If I remember right, there was a post on HN here a while ago about how there's a dot pattern embedded in all WoW screenshots, so they can identify who the user is even if they remove the character name from the screen.

If they have the account information on this, I have to wonder if they could actually sue someone (instead of just banning them) for using this hack?

View on HN

Those screenshots are probably the victims', anyway. While Blizzard probably does have enough logging to track this down on their end, it's fairly easy to get a trial account with bogus account information, so it would be back to grabbing their IP addresses and pleading with some ISP to reveal their real identity.

As it turns out there are a couple of guys publishing videos youtube of their, POV as the attacker/killer, so if the dot-pattern thing isn't a hoax then those guys are screwed... but from what I read it sounds like it's a bunch of guys who are annoyed that the hack exists and so they're abusing it until Blizzard fixes it.

The dot pattern only exists in in-game screenshots, and only if they're set to 9/10 quality or lower. They won't exist in a frapsesque video.

Source?

http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-w...

Wow, I missed that first time around. Neat. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4505584

Yes - easily circumvented though with a few tweaks to the config.

Maybe not with the dot-pattern but a more robust fingerprint.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com