September 24: It makes teh Kimps go "bye-bye"

[Baker]

Also known as Project 23: Chapter 1 - Anti-Proxy or "So Long And Thanks For All The Fish!"

Question: "Buh buh buh you've been sitting on this for a long while and haven't released it yet?"

Answer: The because we as a community had to let the natural course of events happen. To do so earlier would not give us the benefit of how various alternate points of view play out. We need to suffer the slings and arrows of our own mistakes. If we don't, our community can't grow. Technology to stifle debates is wrong. The debates have to stand on their own merits. But we've seen both sides now.

Note: Sorry Linux, the upcoming release is Windows only. Server-side only, compatible with all clients. In DLL form. I believe in open source, but not for this type of enhancement. If you are jerk, this is all bad news. And if you don't like it, you can get angry. You will also have to "get used to it". If this wants to make you break your keyboard, well --- hey, it's your keyboard

Please note: This is a server-side enhancement. It does not impact the ability to a Linux or Mac player to connect to such a server.

[Baker]

Note: I've been sitting on this for about a year and a half now. And I'm not the only one who knows this.

But if this were introduced back at that time, it would have been viewed as an attempt to stifle debate. And I'm no villain and I'm not looking to damage alternate points of view. And if you are in to that kind of thing, you are part of the problem. But I'm not and I view that as wrong.

If you have a heart-felt honest debate, you have to let those points of view play themselves out. Pulling out some mechanism that interferes with honestly-felt debates isn't solving a problem, it is just being a jerk in some different way ("Oh wow, gee I can mess with your oatmeal because I'm into engine coding and you aren't. " Weeeee! That's just being a dick in a different way, really).

And if we are striving to be a community that is absent of jerks, you can hardly be part of solution if you are being part of the problem and more or less being a jerk because you have something that some other point-of-view doesn't have. No ... you have to let these matters settle themselves.

[l0lpc]

Question: How do you make Kimp stop playing at the only server he cares to play at?

Answer: You can't! Buhbuhbuhbuh


Inb4 kimps in the title is plural for a reason

[golden_boy]

Disagreement with some of what you're saying.

There was no need for the in-passing slingshots at Linux users / aficionados, and no need calling other people jerks.

If you learn to not write down everything you think, ie leave out the parts where you call people jerks and patronize (and the parts where you contradict yourself about technology used against offenders), then your posts would become 200% more convincing. Take a rhetorics course if you have to.

On the up side, nice that someone is trying to do something.

[Spike]

Baker, are you drunk again?

[Syluxguy28O3]

i guess this is going to turn into a shitstorm!

[golden_boy]

not from my side.

[Solecord]

No Mac

[monoz]

since most quake servers on linux...how will this help?

[bta.monster]

[wicked_lord]

Ok, these truck accidents are a bit old. wait, THEY ARE REALLY FUCKING OLD.

While i am a owner of a trucking company, i feel these pictures are great to look at, but the "truck'D" thing is just as bad as the KIMP'D scene. Just gets old and boring after awhile. Let's find something eles to bombard a thread!

[bluntz]

While I certainly agree there needs to be a mechanism to ban proxies, Doing so at the cost of loosing our Unix section seems beyond incidental.In fact from my perspective it seems an obvious and deliberate effort or LACK thereof.
Checking a connection for proxy use and banning them has nothing to do with what OS the connected happens to be running.The kicker is that most likely a tool to do the killing will most likely be a Unix one.
Since I am a Linux user that does not use a proxy,I find your solution particularly disturbing.I am certainly not dishing out a wad of cash for an anal gaping from Microsoft either.You are always touting you embrace of Opensource,well I'd say I am from Missouri,SHOW ME.

[Mr.Burns]

Perhaps I may have misread it , but it's not entirely clear what the implications of this release are. For example, would I be correct in thinking that this is a server side DLL that means any Windows user using a proxy will no longer be able to join servers running this DLL? Or is it more wide reaching than that?

I'm not looking for any disclosure on how the technology behind this is implemented, more how this will impact players. If someone (looks at Baker ) could clarify this I would be grateful


Kind regards

Monty

[Spike]

the problem is not proxies themselves, but rather that they mask the originating client. proxies are very widespread in the quakeworld community for instance, because different routes can result in lower pings.
quakeworld clients 'luckily' have a console command that sends a udp packet to a given location. modern quakeworld servers thus have the ability to require such a packet to be sent directly from the client.
then you know the ip of both the client and the proxy. and you can ban the client instead of the proxy.

also, the packet sending can be done in the proxy instead. Either way, the sender must be known, so a public proxy should never handle it lest the public proxy be banned instead. If its not a public proxy, you're still banning machines controlled by the person you want to ban. Yay if they had to pay for that proxy.

You're still screwed when it comes to vpns, as that is 100% indistinguishable from just running the client on the vpn gateway instead. tor counts as a vpn. good luck banning that. too many endpoints to ban each and every one. but who'd seriously want to play quake over tor?

Vanilla QuakeWorld has an issue where the source address of the packet can be spoofed. You need to ensure that the sender is a valid client, and can send you some known info to verify that it is the client you think, and not one of the other clients connected to the same server (NQ servers stupidly make available the ips of other clients, if I remember correctly, so make certain that your bannee is not spoofying the source address to report the ip of an admin or whatever).

Baker's original post implied that his change was serverside, in a windows dll. If this is true, linux clients, win64 clients, mac clients will be unaffected.
This is stupid because:
1: 75% of servers are linux based, at least. Few admins pick windows for servers unless forced to do so by software dependancies...
2: If the dll shares any data structures with the engine, then the GPL will likely apply to the dll also - they are not a separate work if they share headers.
3: There's no point in a dll as you can just build it into the server binary - Obscurity Is Not Security... If a closed dll is required then its not secure. Especially if its only serverside.

If it includes a clientside componant, what provisions will be included that prevent iptable-style packet rewriting through a proxy (including spoofing), and other NAT techniques?

[monoz]

Yes. I understand it to be a dll for windows servers that will somehow prevent proxies from connecting (regardless of whether they are linux or windows b ased). As I stated, most servers run linux (including hdz and zero), so it will need to be ported somehow to truly be effective. I like the idea, but it has to be universal for it to work.

Wouldn't it be easier to simply make a better banning function in quake?