'Not A Villain' Webcomic - Kat sees a hack coming after her and Danni.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 107

The Bandit is oblivious to all of this. And Danni gets the short end of the stick again.

Check out the vote incentive to see what Danni was probably thinking in panel 4!

31 Comments

F1R$7 P0$7! But seriously, I stay up on Monday and Thursday nights, usually until around 11:30, just so that I can grab this comic as it’s updated. Does that make me a freak? Yes. Does it make me the biggest NAV fan ever? YES AGAIN! Also, OMG OTHR H4KZ0R$! LEAVE DANNI ALONE!

Lol. That’s awesome! Thanks!

Don’t hack–snort it back and swallow. You’re a lady (about) you should never spit in public.

(That just had to be said!)

Another hacker?! WTF? Who, were, why, what? Maybe it’s TenKa hacking to try to bait Kleya out. There’s no way that can be legal. Then again, maybe it’s a new character! If it is a new character, that would be sweet.

Incidentally, let me say I love the character expressions throughout these past few comics. Kleya has been scowling / frowning / and generally looking villian-y. While the Bandit has been smiling and glowing with in a friendly way the same way a classic hero might. And yet, you identify with Kleya more because the bandit just comes off as arrogant and overconfident. Very nice touch.

Ha ha. Thanks! Glad you caught that!

Oh well done. I must say that given the art quality of this comic compared to other stuff out there, you did a wonderful job with the camera on this one. It took me a moment, but I eventually got that she’s looking AROUND Bandit.

Nice job. can’t wait to see where this one goes next!

Yay! Figuring out the camera angle on this one took forever so I’m really glad you got it. Thanks!

Well, that sponsor girl did say she’d never get past the first round. Kind of suspicious.

I don’t really get the rules, and did he really have to cheat to be faster?

You have to activate your Special by an action and the Bandit activated his milliseconds before Kleya. He’s not cheating to go faster. It’s just an area he’s really good at. Or Kleya is just slow at ‘swishing’.

The way she says “is that..” and the level of hacking makes me suspect that it’s Sasuke, (probably spelled his name wrong) and that she’s the one he’s looking for… and that they’re all baiting her to hack for confirmation.

Wow, interesting development. I wonder- is it TENka, or another player? Or even a Watcher? And why go for Danni first? Unless it’s to try and flush Kleya out, see if she really is who they think she might be. I don’t think the Bandit is quite bright enough to be the one hacking Danni. But I could be wrong. On page 69, that one guy whose name escapes me at the moment mentioned that the Bandit was also very good with programming. We’ll just have to wait and see how this turns out.

What does the Hack Vision say in the second panel?

Looks like “Lewd” and “Pathetic” to me.

“Alert!!
Level
Pathetic”

I parsed it as “Alert Level: Pathetic”

I’m pretty sure it’s “level Pathetic.” for a full phrasing of “Alert! level: pathetic” Meaning this is probably a low-level hack, at least compared to what Kleya is used to.

I was thinking it was calling Danni’s level pathetic…and the alert of course is just an alert that hacking is going on…cuz it seems like fairly high level hacking to attack someone you’re not fighting at the moment. One thing to adjust your attacks to make them more powerful, quite another to essentially create an attack without a body in someone’s fight.

That depends on how hacking works in this world. Realistically (realism, of course, is subject to veto by the word of the author), it doesn’t matter whether someone has a presence in the fight or not, if they have a connection to the server, and the server interprets the data from that input as any sort of instruction (which should never happen in a connection to a game server), then any hack is possible, even if the hacker has no avatar in the game at all. It’s computers, not magic. The only reason to need to have an avatar is to observe the effects of your work.

It also isn’t necessarily “creating a new attack” – it could just be throwing a lot of garbage into Danni’s connection, making her “lag” a lot during the fight. Even easier would be to just tell the server to drop the connection with her and disconnect her mid-fight.

…Actually, this leaves me with a lot of technical questions about how secure the Game is, but I’ll bring those up in a separate comment thread.

Well, I wasn’t expecting that.

I didn’t particularly care for Danni in the past. I mean, I didn’t like the way Kleya kept taking advantage of her to get into the game, but I thought she was a little selfish and rude.

Now, with this situation, where she’s being attacked for a reason she can’t possibly know about, which is, in a way, Kleya’s fault. I can’t help but feel sorry for her – and terrible that I probably would have wished it on her.

Probably the worst part is that I expect Kleya’s just going to let her fall, because she doesn’t really have a choice, either.

Good twist!

i hope Kleya saves Danni because if she doesnt that is not very “heroic” let the sidekick fall for something they have no idea y and besides…Danni needs this.

I love Kleya, and how she seems so realistic, not just the basic heroine ur use to seeing in comics these days, she is 3 dimensional.

I love the “level: pathetic” and you did a good job with the looking around for where the hack’s coming from. Loooking forward to the next page. 😀

Agh!! Danni use your speical and do a dodge or somthing! ANYTHING to stop this!!

I personally hope that she is able to call attention to the hack thus protecting her friend while keeping her behavior above reproach. After all it is a trap and hacking is illegal. I don’t know if it is possible but having Danni’s inevitable loss thrown out due to malicious hacking would probably be the best outcome for Kleya and Danni.

Some fridge-compsci about The Game and how hacking in it works.

A network connection can basically be thought of as a bunch of postcards. When two computers have a connection to eachother, they can be thought of as mailing a few thousand postcards back and forth every second. Every postcard has some header information, including the IP Address of the target (so all the computers between the source and the recipient know where to send it next) the port (so that the target knows which program should received the postcard), and, if under TCP/IP, an index, to guarantee in-order delivery of all messages.

In the end, over a TCP/IP connection, the program just gets a stream of bytes. In order for that data to have any meaning, the sender and recipient must agree on a set of conventions for what patterns/numbers mean what.

Some ports are reserved for OS services and aren’t used by applications. Port 0080, for example, is HTTP. When a webserver gets a request on Port 0080, it knows to respond by servicing a web page. Most firewalls block all ports by default for two reasons – one sensible and one not so much.

The not-so-sensible reason is that most OSes (-ALL- OSes, really) are not very secure, and listen on a whole bunch of ports that they shouldn’t be listening on, and react to calls to those ports in ways that they shouldn’t. Windows 2000, for example, could be issued a “Shutdown” command remotely. Linux allows for remote logins via SSH on port 0022, which is a problem if you have an account on your system with no password (and a linux distro that accepts SSH calls by default). Router manufacturers started building their hardware to block -all- ports unless specifically instructed otherwise, because that puts security back in the users’ hands.

The more sensible reason is that if you get a virus on your system that listens on some random port for instructions, and then uses your computer to do processor-intensive distributed CAPCHA-cracking so the spammers don’t have to buy their own computers to do it (or just use your computer to send spam out directly), your router will prevent that virus from receiving its instructions.

The point of all this is that there’s nothing inherently dangerous about any internet traffic. No matter what the data is, it’s still just data. The only way that a hacker can do damage to a system is if the program that finally reads the data (be it an application, an OS service, or a virus) itself responds to the hacker’s input by doing damage. For a virus to get into your system, some naive OS service (or naive user) must interpret part of another connection as being executable code and execute it.

The client and server are separate programs, which are sending data back and forth. A choice that needs to be made when writing a Client/Server model which relates directly to security is how much the client is trusted. Trusting the client more reduces (apparent) lag, trusting the client less makes the system more secure.

In a game like World of Warcraft, when you click on an NPC, it tells the server which NPC it was and that you clicked on it; the hit-detection is done by the client. In a game like Counter Strike, when you shoot someone, it just tells the server which way you were facing and that you pulled the trigger; the hit-detection is done by the server. World of Warcraft (in this particular case) is a trusted-client model, because successfully clicking on the NPC isn’t considered an important part of the game. As a result, if you’re lagging and see the NPC 20 feet from where the server thinks it is, you can still click on it. Counterstrike is trusting the client much less, because accuracy IS an important part of the game. If you lag that badly in Counterstrike, you miss. Imagine how easy aimbots would be to write if the hit detection was done clientside – the hacked client would just have to always tell the server, “I hit this guy in the head.”

The Game seems to trust the client way more than is ever healthy in an MMO. If the code (assuming the compiled code, as well as the source) for Specials doesn’t exist on the server, as was implied by TENka trying to threaten her to get hers, earlier, that would mean that the client is executing the special and then telling the server the -outcome.- If that’s the case, any halfway decent hacker could create a modded client to rig the effects of their specials. More than that, in order to be able to correctly determine the outcome of a special, the server would have to give the client a lot more information than is necessary.

Any halfway decent hacker could, in such a system, create a modded client that displays all of the extra information and/or rigs the effects of their specials. This would explain Kleya’s “hacker vision,” but it begs a question… if she’s trying not to hack, why not stop using her modded client?

Sidenote: The programmers who wrote The Game were orangutans on cannabis, and that The Game is actually a really shoddy piece of software, security wise. The story makes more sense this way.

Not disagreeing with you, but here is my take on it.

As I understand it the game runs off a neural interface of some sort, which means your brain is basically plugged right into it.
Now the human brain is an incredible computer, and it’s very good at adapting it self.
Good example is stroke victims that loose the ability to speak, but are able to learn it again by appropriating another part of their brain for it, it’s an obstacle, and the brain finds a way around it. Not all brains can do so, but some can.

Next, since it is a neural interface, everything must be rendered real time client side, and not the server sending what to be rendered.
Since the human brain is so fast and so good at processing information, having the server work out all the details and then sending it, would cause a noticeable delay, which would make the virtual experience feel disconnected.
This is how some shooter games work today, versus other shooters which that does things server side.
The client side types you can shoot someone and it feels like it happens right now, because it does and then the information gets sent to the server. This causes some lag on the recievers end (I WAS AROUND THAT CORNER HOW DID I DIE) But for you it feels smooth.
If it happens server side, it’s you shoot a guy thats somewhere, the bullet data gets sent to the server that then traces it, in the meantime the guy has moved and isn’t there at the time the server traces the bullet to where the server had told you he was. Resulting in a miss, this will feel like lag on the senders side.
Now applying this to the game, if the server does all the work, doing something like pulling out a chair would feel disconnected, because you then grab the chair, then the server acknowledge that you grab it and sends back information on the chair, the feel of it, the weight ect. So you have the time it takes to send the data from your brain to the server and back again before you actually feel the chair.
If it is done client side, the server has sent you information objects on everything in the room, you then when grabbing the chair immediately have the information, and can “feel” it. Then sending the server “Hey I did this” so the server can propagate that you did so to others in the immediate vicinity.

So taking from the latter example, your local client has all the information, which is plugged directly to that monster computer we call a brain, the brain might adapt, perhaps finding a loophole that lets it see private properties of objects, like a person who’s look is public, but name/age/stats/ect are private.
If a person has this ability and is now aware that these stats exist, it’s not a far leap to the brain leaning how to affect these stats.

Blarg forgot the last paragraph.

So as you also talked about, trusting the client. If the virtual reality has to feel real and not something completely disconnected, the trust must be absolute. There are a few ways how the can do this, if the neural interface, is basically a send/receive unit, it could prove excessively hard to hack/mod.
However if the brain learns to do the stuff, it could become innate and impossible to turn off.

I also realize that I sorta repeat what you’re saying with my analogy. But was trying to explain to others (from your post I assume you have some coding/networking background) where the lag and how you notice it comes in, in relation to a smooth experience.

Apologies for the terrible grammar and spelling, English is my second language. The errors sorta crop up when I write fast 😀

Thanks for the info guys(or girls…). I understand the basic principles but never thought it out as you two have. Sure explains alot about my experience with online FPS games…and the reason I don’t like playing them so much. HATE lag. lol. “How did I miss!? or “How did he hit me!?” Plus usually their skill level is beyond mine, as FPS games aren’t my strong suit. I’m interested to see how deeply Aneeka thought about this subject or if she just kinda assumed that’s the way it was. Since it does pretty much have to be lag free on the user side in order for it to make sense.

That makes sense. I didn’t actually think of that. Someone’s strength stat would have to be stored clientside so that if the user reached out and felt their bicep, the client module wouldn’t have to wait for the server before being able to send information on what the guy’s arm feels like.

I’m not sure I agree that the neural interface can be a “simple send/receive unit,” or that such a thing would be that difficult to mod, but neither of those points are actually necessary for your argument.

As you’ve said, having network latency would ruin the experience, so they have to trust the client (at least with read access) whether they like it or not. It’s possible that Kleya’s brain is exploiting a loophole in her own OS/Neural-interface driver that’s allowing her to see and modify all of her own computer’s memory.

Now, at to how she managed to get that access back up to the server to hack Hero Smiley’s trigger event in the game trials, THAT, I will still hold the orangutans on cannabis responsible for.

—
(off-topic)

My background lately is actually in high performance computing (supercomputers), not networks. I did networks in school and want to do more of it, particularly for games, but research jobs are much easier to get right now.

Your grammar and spelling are fine. I didn’t notice any errors when I read through it. Comma placement, maybe, but I’m far worse at that and I am a native. 😉

I see the hack from a different point of view that has nothing to do with messing around with the network. Many games allow a form of scripting. Team Fortress 2 is one example. Second Life is another. They allow a basic programming language that lets you make changes to the game. These changes are perfectly legal, they just require knowledge. So, in the Game, there is a legitimate method to upload a simplified program that will be executed by either your client or the server (either way doesn’t matter).

But, as is almost always the case, there are bugs in the execution environment of the program. With knowledge of these bugs, you can break out of the limited environment and affect far more than what is possible. You could potentially even gain access to the servers and install your own programs. This currently happens today, just think about all the zero-day exploits with flash, pdf, javascript. You access a website, and poof, you have a new program running on your box without your knowledge.

So, Kleya has discovered a few zero-day exploits and is using them. She’s probably installed software of her own on the Game servers and that gives the special view of her. She could have even modified the game source code on the fly (difficult but it is possible). And since she is hacker extraordinaire, her special programs are self-modifying and are impossible to track. She might have even done the grandaddy of exploits: compile their compiler with a hidden exploit. In this case, their compiler will always put her hidden exploit in and the only way to fix it is to find an old compiler.

So, I don’t think the software is a shoddy piece of software. It just has bugs that are exploitable and she happens to be a hacker extraordinaire. They probably fix it as soon as they found it, but if she’s managed to put code on their servers or modified the source code or exploited their compiler, they can fix it all they want, she still owns them.

I think they wanted to see Kleya’s source code because they thought her coding style would identify her as the hacker they were looking for. After all, they know what her Special did, just by looking at what happened to Bandit. But if all she had to upload previously was the compiled binary, it’s still a pretty big security hole for the servers to accept compiled code.

Alternatively, maybe they wanted to see what kind of loophole she was exploiting, because perhaps that would identify something about her previous level of access or her knowledge of the Game mechanics, but I doubt it. If Hero Smiley relied on an access very few people would have, Kleya wouldn’t have risked using it in an area of such publicity. The main advantage Hero Smiley seems to have is just that it uses the Game rules in a way that nobody else had expected or anticipated.

I suspect part of the purpose of the anti-hacker campaign is just to discourage people from learning anything about programming, so TENka and other organizations can more easily maintain control.

Also, in the page after this one, we see that most people use headsets as an interface, not a neural plugin. Kleya may be an exception. Mina’s younger sister might also be an exception, since her body seems to be in pretty bad shape.

Although I’m not sure how headsets could convey the feeling that ones eyes have been open too long….

I find this comic fascinating to read. As a computer *quote* Expert *unquote* Seeing people using such mechanics in a story is fabulous. However, as some people may know a game, particularly popular ones, don’t just use one server. But all servers are connected in a sense. Primarily if one server fails to interpret an action it is sent to a lower server to ‘try again’ and this in a sense can also cause lag, especially if it happens on multiple occasions.
An important thing to remember is, if a person is under the effects of a hack attempt the hacker must first use a secondary source as a ‘cover’ in case of counter-hacking, but also go through the server to finally attack the ‘source’.Or as was pointed out to cause the source to attack itself.

In a sense a hacker could be identified with a virus, and I don’t mean the computerized version this time, that doesn’t attack the human body directly but caused the white blood cells to confuse friend with foe. So a hacker could, possibly, cause a computer to see the firewall as a virus, attack it’s own protection, open up the client to further assault and cause oh so much pain.
Now let’s add in the neural link… and we have opportunity to do so much worse.
L.I.F.E could be the home to a mass murderer for all we know, and some people who log out may never log in again…

No Human being would open such an idea to the public if it wasn’t 100% perfectly safe, unless this TENka corp. (or whatever) WANTS to destroy the entire human race, they wouldn’t have made L.I.F.E accessible.
At least in my mind…

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 107