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Tuesday, May 17, 2011

CCP's War On Bots: Anti-OCR Bot Measures?

I wasn't going to write a fresh post, but this was too good to keep on ice.  I'm looking at a new (at least for me) mining bot, Ghost Suite.  From what I can tell, it is an OCR-based bot, which should get around any software CCP uses to check for Python injection.  But CCP may have come up with a counter something to annoy the users of OCR bots.  The evidence is slim, but I have two posts that indicate this may be the case.

The first is from the developer of Ghost Suite back on 18 April complaining about a "bug."
"While fine-tuning the preferences today, I discovered that there is a bug in EVE. The window that opens for a chat request from unknown pilots floats around. So, everyone needs to go back into your EVE preferences and set your Auto Reject back to being active (under the Audio and Chat Tab), if it's not. It's being commented out of GS Preferences and the program, until EVE gets it fixed."
When I first read this, I wondered if this really was a bug.  A post yesterday on the Ghost Suite forums now leads me to believe that CCP is messing with botters' UIs.


"This is what I was experiencing before the ban-stick fell

"many, many log offs. i was getting drop outs of any character that was on Eve from my network. I shrugged it off as to a router problem (on eves end). After that I was getting windows that were minimizing which i thought was odd since the machines the miners are running on are FAR from being taxed (CPU wise)." 


...

"Before going to GS, i was using another program where I experienced my first ban. I was getting window movements as well. One of my friend who was also using the same program was getting the same issues."
...

"BTW the cargohold, and overview were the windows that were being screwed with. Back to my first ban, the same windows were being screwed with as well, but they would move the cargohold to a different position and the overview as well."

I imagine that messing with an OCR bot's windows would interfere with the effectiveness of the bot.  If this is indeed something CCP is using against bots, I really don't think the floating chat request window is going to change anytime soon.

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