‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 616

Yeah, the Game is like a giant graveyard. Another major reason why it became THE game after the Ending.

NEWS

My webcomic was hacked on Saturday. Honestly, I've been expecting this to happen eventually. I mean, I write a comic about hackers; that's just asking for trouble. Anyway, s/he didn't seem to do much so I'm guessing it was done for reputation points. However, those that have passwords on my site, it would be best if you changed them, especially if you use that password elsewhere, just in case. So sorry for the inconvenience.

I'm on the promised Southern Tour. These are my stops so far:

San Antonio, TX: The Smokehouse (3306 Roland Rd, San Antonio, TX 78210) at 5pm on Friday, Oct 6th.

Austin, TX: Yo So Cool (1201 Barbara Jordan Blvd #1290, Austin, TX 78723) at 8:30pm on Friday, Oct 6th

~~College Station, TX (Sat, Oct 7, around 9am; place TBA)~~

Houston, TX: Pizzitola's Bar-B-Cue (1703 Shepherd Dr, Houston, TX 77007) at noon (12pm) on Saturday, Oct 7th.

Baton Rouge, LA: Sonny's BBQ (12475 Florida Blvd, Baton Rouge, LA 70815) at 7pm on Saturday, Oct 7th

Tallahassee, FL: Kool Beanz (921 Thomasville Rd, Tallahassee, FL 32303) at 6pm on Monday, Oct 9th.

Ft Lauderdale, FL: Moe's Southwest Grill (2400 W Commercial Blvd, Tamarac, FL 33309) at noon (12pm) on Saturday, Oct 14th.

Orlando, FL: Yogurtown Cafe (1499 E Osceola Pkwy, Kissimmee, FL 34744) at 7pm on Saturday, Oct 14th (date and time change)

Jackonsville, FL: Cheesecake Factory (10260 Midtown Parkway, Jacksonville, FL 32246) at 12pm (noon) on Saturday, Oct 21st.

Raleigh, NC: Smithfield's Chicken 'N Bar-B-Q, (4000 Jones Sausage Rd, Garner, NC 27529) at 6pm on Monday, Oct 23rd.

Charlotte, NC: Sweet Frog (8156 S Tryon St Suite C, Charlotte, NC 28273) at 7pm on Tuesday, Oct 24th.

Atlanta, GA: Los Bravos Mexican Restaurant #2 (2042 Johnson Ferry Rd NE, Brookhaven, GA 30319) at 7pm on Wednesday, Oct 25th.

Nashville, TN: Pied Piper Creamer (114 S 11th St, Nashville, TN 37206) at 7:30pm on Thursday, Oct 26th.

Little Rock, AR: Five Guys (2923 Lakewood Village Dr, North Little Rock, AR 72116) at 6:30pm on Friday, Oct 27th.

Dallas, TX: Texas BBQ and Burgers (3128 Forest Ln #228, Dallas, TX 75234) at 12pm (noon) on Saturday, Oct 28th.

Oklahoma City, OK: Ingrid's (3701 N Youngs Blvd, Oklahoma City, OK 73112) at 6:30pm on Saturday, Oct 28th.

53 Comments

Silly Jane – being dead for two years and a half is a popular tax dodge!

But only after the Earth was blown up to make way for a Hyperspace bypass. Pretty sure it is still around.

Does it count if they blow up the Earth’s magnetic field?

Now Kat has to kill her previous avatar. 😀

Well that’s a weird yet interesting design decision. Making the in-game world more realistic by making all new characters a permanent part of its history. Reminds me of forum RPs I used to get into: every character whose player disappeared still stayed a part of the history of other characters they’ve played with, just faded into background.

Jane does assume Kat’s old character is not just permadead, but I think based on the weird circumstances and Kat clearly playing against her usual type that’s a safe assumption.

Is “once ago” an error, or an idiosyncrasy of Jane’s cryptic speech? I’ve never encountered it as a valid expression in English, but then again, I’m not a native speaker.

I would expect her to be a native English speaker since she can alter popular rhymes on the spot, but everything she says is a little… off. I would guess that “once ago” is an error of Jane’s and not of Aneeka’s.

Litterally it means “the last time”, but that’s an uncommon phrase, and I don’t think that’s how it’s being used

“Ago” simply means “in the past” or “before the present time”. It isn’t used as much now, but “a long time ago” is still a commonly used phrase.

Uhh never thought of that, I wonder if Kat’s old char also have her own Island like mom and dad.

I have the feeling her character would be more of a destroyer of islands than an owner of them…

Going off how powerful she used to be, it’s possible Old-Kat had a whole “country’ to herself. She did seem to become all-powerful towards the end there…

More likely the entire *f-ing GAME! Which is why Jane thinks she can destroy it.

Odd phrasing in panel 5:

“You played before, once ago, with another…”

Did you mean that? Or something else:

…years ago…?
…long ago…?
…before, once, with…?

Thanks for the comic!

Pretty much it seems to be Jane-speak for “You played this game before, didn’t you? BEFORE the world ended? And now your Avatar keeps playing, controlled by AI to keep doing what it did before you abandoned it?”

Well that’s… horrifying honestly. I mean, we knew her father was being played by an ai, other important players, but, enough to call it a giant graveyard is disturbing.

Just to make sure, you do only store salted and hashed passwords, right? That would mean that stolen hashes are useless for signing into other sites, even if users used the same password.

Online security is tough, and usually you should change any passwords when things like this happens. Just because the PW list is encrypted doesn’t mean someone hasn’t figured out a way to decrypt it, even though it’s highly unlikely.

If everyone used a unique password for every account they register then the worst that could happen was that you lost control of one account. But I’m pretty sure most people who has registered more than ten user accounts for different services or sites will tend to reuse all or part of a password for at least those sites they deem non critical.

Besides not all hacks are discovered immediately. A patient hacker able to gain access the site can introduce code that intercepts the login communication and harvest the account names and passwords in clear text. I would consider a site like this as an unlikely target for such an attack, unless it was done as a training exercise.

Since this is based off of WordPress, I would assume that it uses the default wordpress settings which is both salted and hashed (https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_hash_password).

But even with salted and hashed passwords, you can reverse them. You just don’t get to use pre-built rainbow tables (unless the salt is badly chosen). So if you password is weak, then it can be reversed.

Salted and hashed passwords cannot be reversed as stated by other people who I don’t think understand encryption (hashing is one way, you can’t read it, you make a new hash to compare to it). But they also don’t need to be two ways. Hashes are made by an algorithm, assuming the algorithm is known (which it usually is, because people can’t write their own encryption algorithms and be considered secure) all they need to do is find a collision — or something that hashes to the same value. When they have access to a password list you can assume they will find a collision and then try it on other popular sites using the same or similar standards. If your password has been leaked, even if it is salted and hashed, the safe bet is to change it to waste the hackers time, which is the best thing you can do in this situation.

If you were practicing pure password security though, every site you log into should have different passwords anyway, meaning the only password that needs to be changed is the site that got hacked. Too many passwords? Get something like keepass. Then you only need to know the password to your vault, and use keepass for the rest.

It depends on your definition of “reverse”. If you are using reverse in the sense that they can recover your original password from a hash, then yes, you can reverse it. If you are using reverse in the sense that they reverse the algorithm, then no.

You can recover any password from a hash, even if it is salted. It just might take longer than the existence of the universe to do it 🙂

No. Even in a system that doesn’t use salts, a hash by definition is a lossy algorithm. Multiple text inputs result in the same hash. Knowing the hash and the algorithm, and with enough time and resources, it is possible to find a text input that results in the same hash. It would be a text input the would give access to that system just like the actual password would, but there is no reason to expect it to be the same text as the password the user entered.

That’s not true. The number of combinations that can be tested with today’s technology is way, *way* smaller than the number of combinations modern hash codes can produce. Consequently, the only realistic way to break passwords is by vastly limiting the search space: only brute-forcing short combinations; and for longer ones, only trying *likely* variants.

(Which works more often than not, as the vast majority of people fail to produce good passwords even when they seriously try, since they don’t understand entropy, and/or follow dumb advice propagated by other people who don’t understand entropy…)

Since the number of combinations tried is vastly smaller than the number of possible hash codes, the likeliness of finding *another* combination producing the same hash code as the real password is virtually zero.

I am using a more complicated method for passwords protection:

1) For starters, I do no use the same name/ID depending the purpose; this ID is only for games and leisure regustrations.

2) I have my own algorythm to make or reconstitute password, which is a combination of several variable parts, some of which depends the site itself and are unique to that site; it is entirely in my head, nothing stored or written anywhere; a number of sites I have/had registrations with got hacked over the years, I even had an account stolen for a while… until the hacker tried to change again that account details, which came back to my security email account, at which point I retrieved that hacked account, and got the IP of the hacker (it was a guy in Israel).

Typo, I meant ‘registrations’, but I have no way to edit.

for those wondering, “once ago” is part of an older style of speech in english. It could be used to offer a wider range for time. Not recently but not a long time ago. While not as common now a days it was used and does make sense in context. I’m not an expert in english but it could be used in a setting like lord of the rings. I guess it makes jane seem more experienced in the game than we realized, if I had to guess bloody mary wasn’t her first character.

So, it’s kinda like, “Years in the past, but not many” 🙂

And we have the first indication of something happening with Kleya between running Kat (now) and The Ending (about 2 years ago)

What does Jane actually know?

… and why did I leave this overnight? 🙂

This scene appears to support my personal theory regarding Bloody Mary, KleyaKat, and someone else I’m unsure of a name for.

Can’t wait to see them face Kat’s old character

Somehow I don’t think that Kat’s old character is in there somewhere, what with her being the very person who allegedly caused the Ending. It could of course be an incentive for players to level-up and then hit her over the head, but I don’t think they did that.

Well, they can’t remove old characters that easily, remember? People couldn’t remove her father’s character from the Game.

Actually, I’d guess her old, pre-apocalypse character(s) are still in the game. They most likely would have been extremely high level characters, with all the best gear, custom specials, etc., and I’d also presume that they would have had top-notch AI running them in her offline times.
They’d’ve had islands of their own, and she probably would have customized her island(s) to make her characters even more powerful there, the way her mom and dad (with her help) did.
Thus her character(s) would be extremely hard to take out in-game, and I would expect that Tenka wouldn’t try to use their admin/development access to just remove them, because D/”the Virus” probably would not like that, or, at least, they’d have to assume that it would be too risky to try anything like that.

Okaaaay, I did not remember that at all. Sounds like quite a bit of wasted energy if deleting A.I.s is dangerous.

To be fair, I expect that Tenka can do whatever they want to almost any pre-Apocalypse PC, but Kleya/Kat’s PC(s) and those of people she was close to (mom, dad, etc) are probably considered to be something the “the Virus” pays attention to, and they don’t want to provoke it.
Remember, just saying her name or her mother’s name is considered too dangerous. If saying their name is considered too dangerous, then actually doing something to anything of theirs probably even worse.

Given that the login page still flags on my browser as being insecure, is it worth it to change my password now? Or is this something you are working on fixing?

Having EVERY former/abandoned character played by an AI now seems computationally expensive for this world setting. Were there always competitions to be allowed to play the Game?

The login page is over “http”. So anybody can snoop on your password if they can see your network traffic. This is fairly easy if you are on a WiFi that other people are also on (home, work, school, coffee shop, etc). A wired network is a bit harder but still possible. Plus, anyone in between your machine and the navcomic.com server (nation state, ISP, etc).

It’s only been recent that browsers have started to mark login pages on “http” sites as insecure but they really should go the full distance and say that all “http” sites are insecure (they are getting there but it will cause a lot of disruption in existing sites).

As long as your password for navcomic.com is unique, you should be fine. If you are sharing passwords between sites, then you should definitely change all the affected sites to a unique password. I would strongly recommend using a password manager so that you can just use randomly generated passwords for all sites.

You could also use the Patreon signup mechanism. Then your password is only known to Patreon and it uses https for its login. Of course, Patreon can also get hacked. I’m still getting plenty of spam from the last time.

Hmm. I wonder if everyone get’s a “home” island and the game generates a copy of you to defend your home. That would make sense that everyone has a copy. And it would make sense why people could go fight on Kat’s dad’s island. Plus, the copies would only be active when people were on that island. So you would avoid the super creepy thing of having millions of talking corpses walking around in the game all the time.

I think at some point they said that you get an island once you reach a certain level, and that you can customize it. It seems that the game doesn’t generate a copy of you, but you just have to defend it yourself(if you want to. I don’t think defending the island is required) and if you die(irl), the ai takes over and sticks to defending your island, as that’s easier and more fair than letting it roam the world.

I bet it was fsociety…

Jane apparently knew a lot about Kat from the beginning. I guess now we are getting hints towards how much she really knows, or that she suspects.

I don’t think Kat likes how she acted with her old character, and the idea of that continuing is obviously not something good in her eyes.

As to the site getting vandalized or whatever, always keep offsite current backups. That way the worst result to the webpages is restored to last backup shortly after discovering the buggering.

As always, take reasonable precautions, but always expect security to be compromised someday. After all, the only 100% secure computer is the one that doesn’t work.

Oh yeah, back to talk of the comic instead of the webpage…
As to everybody’s character staying in game at all times, and even going into an NPC mode when uncontrolled, that’s something that already exists in various forms in games now. Some have had some of those features for over a decade. With the desire for persistent and changeable environments in games, it’s not surprising that they’d have some learning algorithm to work out an NPC type script for players that are no longer active for some reason. Obviously the more powerful ones would do more than just walk down to the corner shop and mumble at people for a few hours a day. 😉
As to resource levels, it’s going to be pretty much in line with the rest of the game, so again, it’s nothing all that special for their tech level.

I see no indication of Jane actually knowing anything… From Kat’s skill level, it’s an easy guess she has been playing before.

Mention of Jane’s old character in this context made me realise something else though: apparently Jane is not fond of abandoned characters (which is presumably why she has been killing the trees) — maybe that’s also the real reason why she slaughtered her old team?…

The part I still don’t get is “That lives on in the game, busy busy busy with its pre-ending life.”

This seems to suggest that characters function in The Game on their own, but I had understood that when a player logs out of a character it just “sleeps” in-Game (unless that’s just a contest condition). A character actually in in-game “sleep mode” would actually clutter a world with “litter” avs. Regular virtual games have the characters disappear when the player logs out and they don’t re-appear unless the player signs in with that character.

So not sure how the other character “lives on in the game”. Unless of course she’s speaking of D or another self-aware AI.

Remember how they had to pick a player to be “on guard” for the group? The rest went into sleep mode. The “dead” players were probably ones left in guard or trade mode.

Have you ever played a MUD called HellMOO? Once you roll a character in the game, when you log out, your character is still physically in the game, asleep. Your character can be killed for whatever you might drop, and when you log in you’ll start as a new clone of your character.

That’s not the same as having an AI animate it, but do you recall the scene where they all have to log out, and someone has to set up as a guard, because the guard function has a sort of AI to it? It’s not a stretch to go from a little AI for that, to a more powerful version so that your character goes on after you die. Having played a MUD (not HellMOO!) in which yes, some characters are never coming back because their players are dead… I actually like this idea. Better than a gravestone: a moving, interacting being that can tell stories about the life it represents.

Naturally, all it takes is one person to push that too far…

Quick heads-up – today’s page title (the text right below the comic itself) says:
“‘Not A Villain’ Webcomc – Page 616”

Note the typo in Webcom[i]c.

Thanks for the great comic, I love how things are slowly unfolding to show us a bigger view of an already rich set of worlds!

we already knew that Kleya had at least one previous avie since She was the destruction expert and Jane had a weird smile on her face when Kat saved Dani the first time

While everyone else is freaking out over “once ago,” I’m sitting over here mumbling about “pre-ending.” My brain wants to read it as “pretending” or “pre-Ending” (that’s with a capital E). I suppose the “ending” could also possibly refer to the player’s end, but somehow this doesn’t click with me. One has to give Mary’s grammar a wide berth given her idiosyncratic speaking habits but even by that standard this is somewhat awkward and unclear.

Probably should be “pre-Ending”, where “Ending” is a proper noun, referring to the apocalypse that happened.

Kat’s avatar is well-programmed. Look at those ears reacting.

One of my very far out personal theories: Jane isn’t Mina’s mom, she Kleya’s mom.

My theory too.

Ooo… I saw your earlier comment and wondered if perhaps it was the same theory. I only developed it as early as the last comic, and I’m not sure why. But when I saw this comic, I thought it lead a lot of credence to the theory and I did some digging through earlier comics, and it seems totally plausible. We deserve a medal and parade if we’re right. …and perhaps Aneeka too for actually writing this comic.

been saying that for awhile

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 616

NEWS