is cheating possible in CC?

[Incandenza]

Jeez, Robinette, you must dust off that old chestnut at least once every couple of months.

What you all don't realize is that, even in the sixth grade, Robinette was one of the foremost phreakers in the country, and that awful 'Hackers' movie was basically 'The Robinette Story' (except for the fact that they decided to have Sick Boy play her part...)

[BobHacket]

so if this card thing works then why is it still posted? Does the site want us to be able to cheat? : D

[PaperPlunger]

Actually, there was a time when a person cheated on CC. What he did allowed him to plant an unlimited amount of armies on any of his territories. At one point he was putting down millions. I forget his name... True story though.

[Robinette]

........What you all don't realize is that, even in the sixth grade, Robinette was one of the foremost phreakers in the country........

hee hee... I think I still have my Little Blue Box stored in the attic somewhere... those were fun days Incan,,, hey... whatever happened to Kevin Mitnick.... have you kept in touch with him? I still wonder if he and i might have been an item if he hadn't gone criminal...

[Jaleb]

Lol he moved on & got a life(& yes any game can be turned)

[hwhrhett]

*puts fingers in ears*

LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA I CANT HEAR YOU LA LA LA LA LA LA LA

[hulmey]

well robinette you should not be allowed to use any cheating devices on conquer club as it says so in the rules...I think the mods should ban you for life for this...Where are they when you want one?

[zarvinny]

ok i tried , but i just couldnt read all that ...i only now know that u cheat for 3 card sets in 6 players games ....

Dude... was that a language thing? I've been fooling everybody sayin this was a manipulation to get an extra card, when in reality it is all about manipulating the colors of the cards...

Umm, the color of the cards matters in an escalating game. If you have three cards, and only three cards, and the next cash-in value is 45. If you have 3 greens it matters a hell of a lot more than if you have 2 green and a blue.

[Incandenza]

hey... whatever happened to Kevin Mitnick.... have you kept in touch with him? I still wonder if he and i might have been an item if he hadn't gone criminal...

He's a high-paid security consultant now, so there's still a chance for you two. He still asks after you...

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go log onto a BBS and play Trade Wars.

[Fireside Poet]

........What you all don't realize is that, even in the sixth grade, Robinette was one of the foremost phreakers in the country........

hee hee... I think I still have my Little Blue Box stored in the attic somewhere... those were fun days Incan,,, hey... whatever happened to Kevin Mitnick.... have you kept in touch with him? I still wonder if he and i might have been an item if he hadn't gone criminal...

...and down in Mexico, you could simulate a quarter being dropped by putting a nail in the center hole in the receiver end of the handset. Good times, good times... Oh the fun times I had running a BBS for 6 years.. multi node even. Emulex/2 ruled!

Mitnick is still alive?!

Trade Wars? Haven't played that one since Food Fight got old and Global War (Risk) came in ... DOS sure was underrated.

*Former distro site for INC (International Network of Crackers) at a blazing speed of 4800 baud at the time. Memories....

[JerenYun]

Mmmm... Trade Wars. Don't make me go and restart my server.

*goes rummaging for his TWGS codes*

[Incandenza]

Nice to see the old farts come out and reminisce about the old days.

Renegade FTW!

(and being a Trade Wars bad guy and jacking Equipment from random space stations, then running from the Federation)

[JerenYun]

Nice to see the old farts come out and reminisce about the old days.

Renegade FTW!

(and being a Trade Wars bad guy and jacking Equipment from random space stations, then running from the Federation)

T-Warping away back to your little bubble? Or just moving normally? Nothing like setting up 80+% navhaz in sectors for people to... accidentally hit.

[Incandenza]

Nice to see the old farts come out and reminisce about the old days.

Renegade FTW!

(and being a Trade Wars bad guy and jacking Equipment from random space stations, then running from the Federation)

T-Warping away back to your little bubble? Or just moving normally? Nothing like setting up 80+% navhaz in sectors for people to... accidentally hit.

Nah, I don't have the money for a Genesis Torpedo right now. I'll just trundle along in my Starmaster doing bad deeds and climbing my way up the leaderboard...

(damn, Tradewars was some fun shit... it was like CC before there was CC... even tho I played a ton of Risk on BBS as well)

[JerenYun]

Trade Wars was fun. Thats why I bought a server license and hosted a server on my DSL from my home desktop for about two years. Made a few mods. Added three planet types (one for each resource), even started duplicating Star Trek tech and made about 20+ ships and 4 alien races... Which kinda sucked when they took over the game and started beating human players after about a week.

[Robinette]

well robinette you should not be allowed to use any cheating devices on conquer club as it says so in the rules...I think the mods should ban you for life for this...Where are they when you want one?

lol... let he who is without sin cast the first stone...

I just looked at your game list and low and behold 506078, the VERY FIRST Freestyle game of yours I looked at i find this:

2007-06-09 11:40:13 - Tieryn: an apology would have been nice.
2007-06-09 12:30:00 - hulmey: nope- when we were playing rt, you were waiting till every1 had finished their turn to go.....which although is not illegal is frowned apon here at CC
2007-06-09 12:30:28 - hulmey: so gave u some of your medicine back

So tell you what... I invite you to turn the tables on me too... pm me when you have this card thing figured out and then lets play a game... only I promise to NOT use it and I will not complain even if you do...
(but i'll warn you now, this card thing isn't easy to understand... i recommend you work it with a friend and practice a bit before we play if you want to have any advantage at all... and I welcome the challenge)

And in all seriousness... I do admire your integrity to speak up about this...
Have you also been a vocal opponent of Defacto double turns??? Now THAT is something worth speaking up about....

[GreecePwns]

Legitimate cheating is really difficult on this site...

The card hack program that i wrote just has too many bugs when playing flat rate... so don't even try right now with flat rate games, and never ever with only 2 or 3 player games. Anyway, for those who haven't seen it yet, I'm reposting the basic method to hack into the card program, but it's a bit complicated to explain without a whiteboard. Also, this is not compatible with greasemonkey, so if you want to do it you'll have to work it out just like I did, but with the info below you should be able to do it in a fraction of the time it took me.... just don't give up, it really is worth all the effort.

First off, it doesn't work with flat rate, and it doesn't work with team games. Here 's why... it is all about the Cyclomatic Code Complexity within this site. The simple part to explain is that on this site the code complexity is defined by control flow, and obviously there are different ways of measuring complexity (e.g. data complexity, module complexity, algorithmic complexity, call-to, call-by, etc.), and although these other methods are effective in the right context, it seems to be generally accepted that control flow is one of the most useful measurements of complexity, and high complexity scores have been shown to be a strong indicator of low reliability and frequent errors. That's simple enough, but it's what we do with it that's so cool... This measure provides a single ordinal number that can be compared to the complexity of other games. Because of static software metrics intended to be independent of language and language format, Cyclomatic Code Complexity becomes a measure of the number of linearly-independent paths through a program module and is calculated by counting the number of decision points found in the code. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/str/descriptions ... _body.html Stay with me people... I use a Lutz Roeders Reflector http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/ which basically allows the user to point his Reflector tool at any Common Langauge Runtime (CLR) assembly, and it will then de-compile this creating an entirely reflected treeview with all the objects from the source assembly shown, with code. Yes with code. Great stuff. http://research.microsoft.com/~emeijer/Papers/CLR.pdf Basically you can use this tool to see how any valid CLR (assuming it has not been obfuscated) assembly works. Anyway the up shot of it, is that we get a boolean to say that the current file is valid or not, that is all we care about at the moment. So if the file requested is not a valid CLR type an error message is shown, and nothing else is done. However, if the input file is a valid CLR file, it is then checked to see if the file is a "System" assembly, and if it is... eureka! I get an extra card. Ok so thats pretty much all there is to it.

A while back I started to modifiy this to work with flat rate, but I don't think it would really be worth all the effort. So if you really want this for flat rate, let me explain how far I got and you could work on finishing it. You would have to revisit the treeview with ONLY valid namespaces and ONLY valid classes created. We would also have to find the NameSpaces object which contains the list of strings (for namspaces) and for each string of ucClass objects (for the classes). The list of ucClass objects are created by this and are then ready and waiting to be placed on a suitable code. But as yet we dont know what classes the user needs, it could be all of them, or it could be 1 of them or even none of them. It depends on what the user selects from the treeview on the mainform (frmMain.cs). And that's where I got stuck. So I looked and I looked for an answer. The only thing simliar at all, was GDI+ http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533798.aspx and in order to do something like this, a destination target needs to be created at the full string size, and then the viewable (onscreen) fragments are printed to individual page framements and saved into the destination image at the correct x/y co-ordinates. In order to do this the application has to programatically perform scrolling to get the next page fragment code to merge with the destination code. I managed to get this to work, but it was a complete nightmare, and there were definetly bugs everywhere, which resulted in losing more cards that I gained! So if there is anyone reading this that is totally rad and knarly at GDI+, and knows how to save the entire contents of a scrollable control to an exisiting code, please feel free to let me know. As for the above code, it is code that I am kind of 1/2 proud of, but would rather wasn't there. Do you know what I mean? After all, sometimes you just get completley stuck with trying to patch all these code fragments together, to form the final destination code.


So for these reasons, it only works properly with 6 player std escalating games, so that is the only type of game that I play.

I was thinking just that!

[Robinette]

hey... whatever happened to Kevin Mitnick.... have you kept in touch with him? I still wonder if he and i might have been an item if he hadn't gone criminal...

He's a high-paid security consultant now, so there's still a chance for you two. He still asks after you...

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go log onto a BBS and play Trade Wars.

Omigod... like totally takes me back... Seriously.. in 1981 I got my hands on a couple "Trash 80" TRS-80, model 3's. They had no Radio Shack markings as it was one of the computers Beckman Instruments provided to hospitals to run thier medical diagnostics,,, statute of limitations allows me to share that I did not aquire this through legitimite means... Totally state of the art at the time... hee hee... I had 48K of RAM, and (get this) DUAL 5 1/4" floppy drives (but only single sided... 180K storage each).. cut my computing teeth on that box... did you know that the 1st BBS ran on a TRS-80?

And glad to hear Kevin is legimate now, and out of jail.... but for how long? Please don't tell him you know where I am.... I am enjoying my legimate life and I want to keep it that way...

[Fireside Poet]

hey... whatever happened to Kevin Mitnick.... have you kept in touch with him? I still wonder if he and i might have been an item if he hadn't gone criminal...

He's a high-paid security consultant now, so there's still a chance for you two. He still asks after you...

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go log onto a BBS and play Trade Wars.

Omigod... like totally takes me back... Seriously.. in 1981 I got my hands on a couple "Trash 80" TRS-80, model 3's. They had no Radio Shack markings as it was one of the computers Beckman Instruments provided to hospitals to run thier medical diagnostics,,, statute of limitations allows me to share that I did not aquire this through legitimite means... Totally state of the art at the time... hee hee... I had 48K of RAM, and (get this) DUAL 5 1/4" floppy drives (but only single sided... 180K storage each).. cut my computing teeth on that box... did you know that the 1st BBS ran on a TRS-80?

And glad to hear Kevin is legimate now, and out of jail.... but for how long? Please don't tell him you know where I am.... I am enjoying my legimate life and I want to keep it that way...

Niice... first computer I ever touched was a TRS-80 and programming in BASIC ... created a very cool "skiing" game using backslashes with it and all the kids in my class were addicted to it... wow that goes back. I still have my C64 and plenty of old games with it ... wonder what it goes for these days?

[Incandenza]

I am actually shockingly bad with computers, but for some reason I found myself using a 2400 baud modem attached to my Mac Classic some unfathomable number of years ago, and thus I feel somewhat smug in my early adoption of a concept that would later blossom into the internets.

(you know you're old when you remember being thrilled when you finally upgraded to a 14.4)

[Robinette]

Omigod... like totally takes me back... Seriously.. in 1981 I got my hands on a couple "Trash 80" TRS-80, model 3's. They had no Radio Shack markings as it was one of the computers Beckman Instruments provided to hospitals to run thier medical diagnostics,,, statute of limitations allows me to share that I did not aquire this through legitimite means... Totally state of the art at the time... hee hee... I had 48K of RAM, and (get this) DUAL 5 1/4" floppy drives (but only single sided... 180K storage each).. cut my computing teeth on that box... did you know that the 1st BBS ran on a TRS-80?

Niice... first computer I ever touched was a TRS-80 and programming in BASIC ... created a very cool "skiing" game using backslashes with it and all the kids in my class were addicted to it... wow that goes back. I still have my C64 and plenty of old games with it ... wonder what it goes for these days?

Ohhh... that's way cool... I remember spending a day and a half trying to figure out TRS-DOS, did some really stupid stuff but everybody thought it was sooooo cool. But the Level II BASIC was just AWSOME... First program I made was converting an algebra equation to determine correct deck height shims to get an optimum compression ratio when rebuilding high performance VW engines... That one took alot of time, but in the end... it was perfect... took nearly 2 minutes after hitting RUN program before it started displaying answers on the screen (a 64 character width screen if you'll recall)

EDIT: Just found some of that formula... Doesn't look so hard now... but at the time, it was a big deal.... my friend immediatly rebuilt his engine for his dune buggy using my calcs and ran an 11.9 second 1/4 mile at the OC Bug-In.... 11.9 seconds from a reliable 4 cylinder air cooled engine... ahhh... BUG-IN's.... those were the days... Here's some of that formula:

Bore x Bore x Stroke x .0031416 (pi) = Displacement in cc’s
Swept volume of 1 cylinder = cc displacement divided by 4
Deck Volume = Bore x Bore x Deck Height in inches x .01996
H = Head cc volume
Compression ratio = S+D+H divided by D+H

*The Deck Height was the key... so I had this calc thru every possible deck height and then displayed only answers that resulted in 8.0 to 12.5 compression ratios.... I can still remember the jubilant feeling when I got the entire thing to work.... all this in Level II Basic... LOL

[MingFromMongo]

Omigod... like totally takes me back... Seriously.. in 1981 I got my hands on a couple "Trash 80" TRS-80, model 3's. They had no Radio Shack markings as it was one of the computers Beckman Instruments provided to hospitals to run thier medical diagnostics,,, statute of limitations allows me to share that I did not aquire this through legitimite means... Totally state of the art at the time... hee hee... I had 48K of RAM, and (get this) DUAL 5 1/4" floppy drives (but only single sided... 180K storage each).. cut my computing teeth on that box... did you know that the 1st BBS ran on a TRS-80?

Niice... first computer I ever touched was a TRS-80 and programming in BASIC ... created a very cool "skiing" game using backslashes with it and all the kids in my class were addicted to it... wow that goes back. I still have my C64 and plenty of old games with it ... wonder what it goes for these days?

Ohhh... that's way cool... I remember spending a day and a half trying to figure out TRS-DOS, did some really stupid stuff but everybody thought it was sooooo cool. But the Level II BASIC was just AWSOME... First program I made was converting an algebra equation to determine correct deck height shims to get an optimum compression ratio when rebuilding high performance VW engines... That one took alot of time, but in the end... it was perfect... took nearly 2 minutes after hitting RUN program before it started displaying answers on the screen (a 64 character width screen if you'll recall)

EDIT: Just found some of that formula... Doesn't look so hard now... but at the time, it was a big deal.... my friend immediatly rebuilt his engine for his dune buggy using my calcs and ran an 11.9 second 1/4 mile at the OC Bug-In.... 11.9 seconds from a reliable 4 cylinder air cooled engine... ahhh... BUG-IN's.... those were the days... Here's some of that formula:

Bore x Bore x Stroke x .0031416 (pi) = Displacement in cc’s
Swept volume of 1 cylinder = cc displacement divided by 4
Deck Volume = Bore x Bore x Deck Height in inches x .01996
H = Head cc volume
Compression ratio = S+D+H divided by D+H

*The Deck Height was the key... so I had this calc thru every possible deck height and then displayed only answers that resulted in 8.0 to 12.5 compression ratios.... I can still remember the jubilant feeling when I got the entire thing to work.... all this in Level II Basic... LOL

I still have my 32K TRS80 in the basement. I don't have a disk drive that works anymore and no tape recorder so I couldn't tell you if it still works.

My first program predicted NFL games against the point spread. I had a 61.4% success rate the first year picking a minimum of five games per week. My bookie got busted and I never used it again. My programming skills haven't advanced much since then either.

[kalishnikov]

I miss the days of being able to modify a tone dialer with a different megahertz crystal to make free calls from a pay phone... I've still got my red and beige boxes, although they're just heirlooms at this point.

Never made the transition to computers however as when they began to rise in popularity I never had any access to one to be able to learn anything about them.

God I feel old...

[stringybeany]

Brilliant!

Brilliant!

(think beer)

Brilliant!

oh god that's funny!

[stringybeany]

...
I still have my 32K TRS80 in the basement. I don't have a disk drive that works anymore and no tape recorder so I couldn't tell you if it still works.

wait a sec...lemmee dig around here...yep! timex/sinclair 1000 with my own hand made 8k ram memory module with battery backup!

the zenith black and white 19" tv and tape recorder are gone though.