Welcome back to Let’s Play.  Last time, O’Malley wiped out some Borg, and now Admiral Quinn wants him to be a ship captain full-time.  How will O’Malley handle this new assignment?

Admiral Quinn asked me to return to Earth Starbase and see him about a ship commission.  I’m not too sure how I feel about that; I’d rather just stick with engineering.  He wouldn’t force me to be a captain, would he?  I guess I won’t know until we get there.

Earth Starbase looks pretty big:

We park the ship and I beam in to the lobby outside Admiral Quinn’s office.

Coming out of the transporter room, I turn the corner into the Admiral’s office.

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A few weeks ago I described why I’d be boycotting Assassin’s Creed 2, even though I had (until then) been eagerly waiting for the time I could give Ubisoft my money.

To recap, the reason is that AC2 requires an always-on internet connection to play — and this for a single-player game.  People often respond by saying something like “who cares?  Everyone has always-on internet nowadays.”

One of my objections was this:

What if you just don’t have an internet connection for whatever reason?  What if your ISP decides to shut down your connection for maintenance, or reset your modem remotely, or any number of other things that ISPs like to do which interrupt your connection?

It gets worse.  If Ubisoft’s servers go offline, you can’t play. What’s more, if they go out of business entirely, you can’t play ever again.

(Emphasis added.) As it turns out, I wasn’t wrong – you see, Ubisoft’s authentication servers have gone offline.  Whether the reason is a deliberate attack, a simple lack of sufficient server hardware, or something stupid like a janitor unplugging the authentication servers, it doesn’t matter – this is a perfect illustration of why I can’t support such idiotic DRM.

Joystiq quoted an Ubisoft employee as follows:

[C]learly the extended downtime and lengthy login issues are unacceptable, particularly as I’ve been told these servers are constantly monitored. [...] I’ll do what I can to get more information on what the issue is here first thing tomorrow and push for a resolution and assurance this won’t happen in the future.

First thing tomorrow?  I understand that it’s Sunday, and nobody wants to work Sundays, but if you’re going to force this sort of draconian DRM on your customers you’d better make sure it’s not going to fall apart shortly after the game launches.  Ubisoft, you’ve got hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of irate customers out there right now who can’t play a game they’ve already paid for, and you want to wait until tomorrow to fix it?

Do I really need to point out that anyone who pirated the game doesn’t have this problem?

Let me repeat: Ubisoft’s anti-piracy tool has exactly zero effect on pirates (it was cracked shortly after release), but as of right now is preventing every single paying customer from playing.  Ubisoft, does that make good business sense to you?

Let’s hope this makes them realize how stupid they are so they’ll disable this DRM.  Then I’d actually buy it.

(For the record: I have not pirated the game, nor do I intend to do so.)

Welcome back to Let’s Play. Upon beaming back to the U.S.S. Innovation, O’Malley learned that the Borg had killed every single officer on board the Innovation while he was away, leaving him in charge of the ship.  Will the power go to his head, or will he spend most of his time tinkering with ship’s systems?

Well, I guess I’m in charge of the ship.  I head to the bridge and get my first overview of the situation in space.

It’s pretty bad.  Debris floats everywhere.  Damaged ships drift aimlessly.  I don’t see any Borg ships in the immediate vicinity, which is probably a good thing, since weapons and shields are down.  About the only systems that are functional are engines and navigation.

My first act as captain is an easy decision:

After all, my own replicators are broken, so why not take advantage?

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On my other Wordpress-based site, I get a lot of spam posts.

Most of it’s from the same botnet; the posted message is virtually identical (a long list of casino-related links which are probably fraudulent).  The botnet always posts using the same username and e-mail address.

Akismet properly flags it as spam, but it still piles up, and I still like glancing through it to make sure no legitimate posts get flagged.  I figured it would be easy to stop the botnet; Wordpress has a built-in blacklist:

Yes, those are the actual values the botnet uses for the e-mail address and username fields on its posts.  Unfortunately, the blacklist doesn’t appear to work at all; I added those values several weeks ago, and it has had no effect.  The same posts keep coming in, with the same username and same e-mail address.

It got to the point where last week, I installed a plugin that bans based on IP address.  For the last several days, I grab all the IP addresses that this botnet posts from, and start banning them.  Sometimes I ban with wildcards (109.122.*.*), when there are a lot of bots on the same network, but usually it’s just individual addresses.

As you can see, it’s working.  Those 479 access attempts are 479 spam posts I didn’t have to sift through.

What troubles me is that there’s basically no remedy for these botnets.  I’ve looked up some of the addresses; a lot of them are in China.  The addresses at the top of that list belong to a particular domain, but the e-mail address of its technical contact doesn’t look particularly trustworthy, so I’m reluctant to send a message there.  I don’t really want to hack into that network and disable the botnet, despite how much fun it would be to succeed.

My wife suggested I enable captchas, but I hate them so I’m not going to.

Any ideas?

Update: The worst set of addresses, 109.122.*.*, belong to a Ukrainian ISP called Megastyle.  They probably wouldn’t care, even if I could contact them…

Welcome back to Let’s Play.  We last left our hero as he beamed from his ship, the U.S.S. Innovation, over to the U.S.S. Khitomer to see how he could be of help.  What will he see when he beams in?  Will he ever be given a security detail?  Will he be forever stuck with his handheld phaser?  And most importantly, will he ever fix the food replicator in his quarters?

I beam into the sick bay of the U.S.S. Khitomer, not quite sure what I’ll see.  Turns out that, despite the Borg invasion, sick bay is doing pretty well.

There aren’t even any explosions or anything, though there are cargo containers stacked haphazardly on either end of the room for some reason.

Out the windows, I can see some crewmen fighting off Borg invaders in the shuttle bay.

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