Closed Pornographic griefing in the wild

I came in to respond to people saying that Tiy's calling the thread "nonsense" was wrong, because it seemed like people took it differently than it was intended. And based on what Frigglish said...

...It certainly seems like the implication that people were trying to make was that it was some big Chucklefish conspiracy. Also, where did I say any of you were "bad"? I must have missed that part in my own post

 

One of the screenshots of the incident shows a goatse image with text written across it specifically addressing our server. This kind of thing certainly wouldn't be in starbound assets and likely not some random popular mod either. Let's drop the whole 'it's in the assets argment'. No drama or accusations please! People were confused and angry... leave it at that.

Focus on collecting every detail from every witness you can get. Any little clue could tip off a dev as to how this exploit has happened.

 

MY POST WAS LIKED BY A DEVELOPER!

 

This kind of griefing is completely obscene, lewd, immature, and sick. It makes me shudder to imagine this could even be possible in a game played by young children.
I hope this is resolved.

 

Which is why it was reported as soon as it could have been. It took a day to have someone do it again AND have a player take screenshots (plus getting them to the mods). Not having built in admin commands has made this a nightmare. I really don't want this lack of multiplayer admin tools to end up scaring away the wonderful user base we have.

 

If there were admin tools available, it sounds like no one would have actually reported this as an issue at all.

 

Pretty much! I started this thread within an hour of learning of this issue, which was within about 2 hours of it happening on our server. The threat of minors being exposed to this level of obscenity got me moving very fast, before I even had proper evidence. Fortunately I got the evidence I needed now. It took about a day to get dev attention here, but there is a lot going on. I don't know how long griefers have been abusing this overall, as it has happened on other servers and probably gone unreported here. One player has a partial reproduction working and that has been reported, so I think the devs have a good lead on what the cause is. Hopefully we get a fix soon.

 

This is my feeling as well. If we could handle it internally, we would have. This was out of our hands by a lot. I'm just glad we had a user fast enough to get us some shots plus people working with us to reproduce it. I hope we get this ironed out pretty fast.

 

Stepped into a weird part of the forum and found my new sig, thanks @Tiy

On a serious note, at least this exposed a security flaw in a (mostly) harmless manner, better this way then something much more malicious if the potential is there. I hope this gets sorted out. Glad I haven't seen any of this....

 

Thanks for reporting it. Of course the possibility of griefers exploiting the game to expose minors (or just...people! in general!) to shock porn is something we're taking seriously! It's been thoroughly looked into.

 

Wasn't one of the item editors capable of replacing sprites with custom variants that also worked for online?
Don't remember to much about it, but i think i saw it on reddit. Might have been a hoax though, didn't really look at it to much.

 

I think I may know what the exploit being used for this is. As I've seen it used for drawing cats. As far as I'm aware from my brief talk with the person doing it, he was using a modded item he made to display multiple pixel like assets(Using JSON 'drawables' as he put it), and using thousands of those in code to make up a bigger image.

Example picture of said Cat: http://i.imgur.com/bFCQJdE.png
Example picture of Gabe: http://i.imgur.com/L0Yn4HL.png

I hope this helps narrow down how this is being done for the devs.

- - -

Edit: I've sent the person from those pictures a message to make them aware of this topic, they'd be able to explain it to the devs better than I can.

 

Drawing the image using thousands of single pixel projectiles or particles was one of the working theories. The screenshots I have from the reports show a very 'perfect' image though without any missing pixels or odd rotation, unlike the gabe example. It could just be that our server was beefy enough to handle all the tens of thousands of projectiles required to render an image in such a way without errors. Definitely forward any information you have to the devs as this looks very promising.

 

Sadly, It very well could be possible that there are two methods to post arbitrary images.

Kufell's screenshot (http://i.imgur.com/L0Yn4HL.png) very much looks like some sort of projectile creation to me being rotated and missing pixels!

 

I'm thinking it's the same method, or at least similar with different execution and perhaps with more time put into it. The pixel drawings as I've shown there were apparently made of many, many pixels. A third image Lateo displayed was apparently around 3000+ individual displayed sprite pixels, but didn't cause any lag(at least for me). I haven't seen the size of the mature images in question, but I'd be willing to bet the same method can go a lot further than what I've seen.

 

The image was a maybe 1.5 to 2x larger than The Gabe. The circumstances surrounding it (as Tiy mentioned) suggested that it was a placed object referencing a file on the client for its graphic. A seemingly plausible method for how such an asset transfer could take place has been considered. The devs are already aware of both theories though.... so whether one approach or both proves viable, I'm sure the devs will patch it out. We just have to do our part in getting them every scrap of information we can find!

 

Did someone seriously post pizza? Wow, that person has some rock hard heavy steady diamond balls.
Isn't it insanely easy to get some feds on the guys ass and ask his ISP to reveal his billing info?

 

I'd like to thank the developers for a reasonably quick response time to a legitimate game exploit, (especially this early in the development) and to the patience of the OP. As to the sensational polar extremes that almost got this thread overlooked or dismissed, I'd like to... sarcastically thank you, for publicly demonstrating how much help you were to the developers and the community at large.

 

The word 'pornographic' gave you 1500 views, congratulations !