IT Uncovered

Don’t Post Your Sexual Orientation on Xbox Live or You Get Banned.

// February 26th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Consoles

I really have a problem with the story.  I really think in the 21st century it should be OK for people to put their sexual orientation in their profile if they want.  It’s not like they were posting vulgar statements or posting things that would be considered hate crimes.  I’m really disappointed in Microsoft’s decision discriminate against a group of people.  What if I put in my profile that I’m Caucasian?  Would I then get banned because that’s offensive to people who hate Caucasians?

http://consumerist.com/5160187/identifying-yourself-as-a-lesbian-gets-you-banned-on-xbox-live
“Teresa says that she was harassed by other players and later suspended from XBOX Live because she identified herself as a lesbian in her profile. When she appealed to Microsoft, she says they told her that other gamers found her sexual orientation “offensive.”

Teresa says:

I just recently saw a thing on your site about someones gamer tag being banned because it had the word gay in the tag.

I had a similar incident, only my account was suspended because I had said in my profile that I was a lesbian. I was harassed by several players, ‘chased’ to different maps/games to get away from their harassment. They followed me into the games and told all the other players to turn me in because they didn’t want to see that crap or their kids to see that crap.

As if xbox live is really appropriate for kids anyways! My account was suspended and xbox live did nothing to solve this, but instead said others found it offensive.

Today I received a message from another gamer calling me a fag. I am a lesbian, so they aren’t too smart if they cant get their anti-gay slurs right.

Microsoft does nothing to stop this or prevent it, but instead sides with the homophobes. No one will help me get the word out about Microsoft’s anti-gay policy. Not even the HRC who says Microsoft has a positive image with them. Not to me it doesn’t!

We’ve heard of gamers being suspended for identifying themselves as gay in their GamerTag, and even one case of a guy whose name was actually “Richard Gaywood” but his tag was suspended anyway because apparently the word “gay” is so offensive that it doesn’t matter if its actually your name.

As far as we know, Microsoft is unwilling to reconsider this position. ”

Xbox Live Exploits Continued…

// February 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // Consoles

Alright so for a test run tonight I did something that I despise.  I decided I wanted to exploit Xbox Live in order to get my buddy to be the host every time.  Let’s just say I was able to use combine ARP poisoning, packet sniffing, and a software firewall to do it.  It took me less than an hour to figure out and I tested it for two hours online in Gears of War 2.  I know see why people do it.  Every game was smooth and we avoided anybody doing things like standbying or lag switching because those only work as host.  I never thought I would drop to this level but every game was fun.  I really hope Microsoft addresses these exploits but the only way is to require server connections for all games.  Good luck with that ever happening.

Why Xbox Live is fundamentally broken.

// February 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // Consoles

There are plenty of people who will argue that Xbox Live is one of the greatest additions to online gaming that we have ever seen.  I’m not going to argue that thought because Xbox Live has been instrumental in thrusting online console gaming into the spotlight.  While online gaming used to be reserved to the PC crowd, it now has become incredibly popular on consoles because of the ability to have friends list and also use VoIP to communicate with friends.  Playstation Network (PSN) does not offer the same functionality as Xbox Live and most would argue that it is not even in the same league but everything is not rosy with Xbox Live.

Let’s start with game hosting.  For the most part, game hosting on Xbox Live is done in a peer-to-peer (P2P) environment, whereas, PSN uses dedicated servers for nearly every game.  The advantage to using dedicated servers is the reduction of the vaunted “host advantage,” it increases the number of players.  The problem is someone has to host these servers and maintain them or else nobody could play the game online.  The other advantage of using central servers is the elimination or easy detection of people using exploits to gain an advantage online.  This is the part where Xbox Live fails miserably.

Xbox Live Exploits:

1. Bridging – the idea behind bridging is to use a PC with a software firewall to bridge your Ethernet connection from the Xbox 360 through your PC.  This allows you to basically get host every time in a game if you do it right.  I’m not going to go through all the steps to get it working though.
2. Standbying – the idea behind standbying is to push the standby button on your cable modem to interrupt your connection.  If you do it briefly and you are host you can skip around untouched.
3. DoS Attacks – this is a new one where people are actually doing denial of service attacks on people’s IPs because when you bridge you can actually get the IP addresses of people connecting and the beauty of this is Microsoft can’t stop it because the traffic doesn’t go through the Xbox Live servers.

I understand why Microsoft made the actual connnection to game P2P but it’s better in theory than in execution.  By eliminating the servers they effectively made hacking easier and made it so games can only host a limited number of players because not everyone has a great upstream on their broadband connection.  Sony may not be as big as Xbox Live but the online experience is tarnished once you let people have the ability to exploit it.  It’s so bad on Xbox Live right now that my friends and I can’t even go more than one game on Gears of War 2 before the game is either laggy (due to a poor host) or someone is using one of the exploits previously mentioned.  It’s both frustrating and infuriating at the same time.  I just hope that Microsoft will take future precautions and implement changes that help eliminate these exploits and not keep ignoring the obviously problems that have plagued the service since its inception.

Untangle 6 Firewall and Port Forwarding Configuration Woes

// February 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // Firewalls

I love Untangle and have for awhile, but there are just some configuration settings that make you scratch your head.  I recently installed Untangle 6 on an old Dell PowerEdge SC420 that has a Celeron 2.53 Ghz processor, 2 GB  of RAM, and two 160 GB hard drives running RAID-1.  I was trying to get port forwarding to work and configure the firewall to block everything by default.  For some reason I couldn’t get the firewall to pass the traffic if the firewall was set to block everything by default, but as soon as I changed it to allow the traffic passed fine and the port forwarding worked. 

After a little bit of troubleshooting I finally figured out where I was going wrong.  The firewall rules are actually applied AFTER NAT and not before.  This changes everything when doing a basic configuration.  If you want to keep reading I talk about it a little more in depth below.

Configuration

Take a look at the two images of the basic port forwarding configuration screen and the firewall configuration screen:

Port Forward Configuration:

Firewall Configuration Screen:

Now in a normal firewall configuration the port forwarding and firewall rules are meshed as one but not in Untangle.  My problem was with the port forwarding I was using the Destination Address as the public IP of the interface I wanted and then in the New Destination I would put the NAT IP of the server.  This worked fine, but when I tried to do it in the firewall configuration it would be blocked because it thought the rule wasn’t matching.  After some troubleshooting I figured out that the firewall is actually being applied AFTER the network address translation.  My first response was WTF?!?!?!?!? After I figured that out the fix is pretty simple.  You just set the correct interfaces to be the Source as external, the Destination as internal and then you put the NAT IP address as the destination address.  Once that’s done it works just fine. 

I’m not going to go into why this is odd but just in case you have an issue getting Untangle to work remember that the firewall rules are applied after NAT!