Games, Tech and Blogging…I can't guarantee in that order.
Hey guys, I don’t really have much time to put much thought into putting together a blog post so this is going to be short and to the point. I’m not at home right now so I don’t hae the luxury to work on my 200th post. I’m inside some really foreign lands; by foreign I mean the country known as “Canada’s pants”. Aside from being State-side, I’m pretty much just trying to relax and forget about the problems I have at home. Just enjoying the moment, taking in the sights and sounds (and the delicious smells of American fast food).
My vacation started just last week on the Thursday. Taking the bus, I traveled about 8 hours south to Massachusetts. So I’m pretty much bumming out of my girlfriend’s place for the next week or so until I’ll be travelling with her a bit before I head back to Canada. So far my trip has been pretty different aside it being the first trip to the States ever. I’m pretty forgetful about holidays so I think I may of bitten off more than I can chew since yesterday was Mother’s Day. Spending it with 3 generations of maternal instinctive people is a bit too much especially one of them is my girlfriend’s mother. I met most of her family I think which made it slightly awkward but safe to say I kept my head down and played nice.
The most breathtaking part of my trip is the ride between New York and Massachusetts. Traversing the gullies and valleys carved by the ancient Appalachian Mountains reminded me of those scenes I’ve only heard about. With the Greyhound waving through fog for hours, it seems eerily ethereal yet magical as the morning sun rose through the mist. As I stepped out the bus station at my destination, it seemed as though I never left home. Yet familiar architecture, I knew I have arrived somewhere different and unknown. Travelling with her friend, we pass rows of houses and I realize some stereotypes that hold true. For the most part, a lot of households fly their American flag high and with pride – even decking out the porch with patriotic porch lights. Even in the stores, they would have an aisle for flags, banners and anything red, white and blue. Secondly, the prevalence of a fast food culture. Even in restaurants that seemed pretty middle class serve large gluttonous meals. I had some New England fish and chips from Applebee’s, and I must admit the slab of fish they served me was fairly large to the fish fair I’m use to in Toronto. I guess they like big money, big food and big women; haha!
The only thing remotely reminiscent from home is the bank here. Apparently my bank as a American office or division, I tried using my debit and it didn’t seem to work. I might have done something wrong but at least I know my debit isn’t that compatible here. Even if it was, I would probably have a large service fee charged to me back home. Oh and the trees here, reminds me of those summer days I would hike to and around High Park. the surround area of this town I’m in is very lush in trees. I haven’t been looking at the leaves, but it feels like I’m in the middle of no where even though I’m hours away from Boston.
This is all for now; until next time, I miss home. I miss my games…
There is no doubt we are very interconnected as a society through the Internet. As a gamer, I notice it more through the services I have access. But as of recent I’ve noticed a lot of publishers are taking advantage of cloud computing which I can foresee as just another of those features to exploit their audience.
Not long ago we use to have consoles and computer games which would save files locally and have multiplayer on LAN, peer to peer and peer to server connectivity. Of course some games still have this method to network players together to play together which isn’t a problem. You bought it so you should be play it indefinitely with people who did the same.
The beef I have is the service gating through the cloud. I don’t mind services that allow for digital distribution like Steam, however large publishers are approaching this differently. For one thing, they are approaching it like they’re a large free-to-play publisher. The worse part of it is they monetize off of it. Assuming at a certain point, they can’t make money to maintain the server where your save files or statistics. When they turn it off, then you’re screwed since you can’t play multiplayer. With how DRM works, this could also be a major problem since after the server shuts off; wouldn’t the DRM feature just lock you out any content associated? Then it puts you in a awkward position where if they release the next game, you have to gauge your experience with your last game to buy the next one. Well for me, I do judge how I enjoyed the last one to buy the next one. The reason I’ve been thinking about it is the whole “always-on DRM” EA has on the latest SimCity where your region and saves are on their servers. Once the server goes down or you don’t have a connection, then you can’t play SimCity since all that stuff is on their servers and they have total authority on when you can and cannot play. The interesting thing I could interpret from this if they wanted to, they could just shut it all down and say “We have a new SimCity out, it’s the same but better.” So you would have to spend another 70 dollars on SimCity and still have the same problems of not having the freedom to play whenever you felt like it since there is that chance that the servers retire or go away of whatever they do to them and you will not be able to play the 70 dollar game ever again. It just sounds like such a scheme to make you spend money over and over again.
Call me paranoid, but it sounds like a really bad marketing ploy that could backfire especially if it’s loyal fans who really enjoyed the games before this capitalist conquest. I played Battlefield 2 and 3; to be honest, I stop playing 2 because 3 came out and that the community splintered into mods. Then in 3, rather than mods, servers splintered off to exclude people who didn’t purchase the DLC’s which puts off a lot of players who would want to collect everything after they were done. This is why I went free-to-play since you don’t really have pitfalls with a community, they’ll always be there. Things will change in the game, but you will always have access to all the content; you would just have to decide if you want it or not rather than how much money are you willing to put in for a content update.
As for SimCity, I want to play it. Probably not now since it’s way expensive for a hard copy, but in time I want to get around to it. I’m just worried by the time I get to it, my purchase would be for nothing but some data on a disk I can’t access because of some lame code to verify server activity and such.
Most of the time when I try and find a new game, recently I use websites from moddb.com to find something new, different or a spin on some other games. Awhile back on Steam I found Frontline Tactics; a turn based strategy where you are in command a squad of soldiers to quell a terrorist group in an arid region. Aside from the the tile hybrid mechanics of moving to a square and the modern art style, there is nothing really to set it apart from any strategy game.
This week I found one called Lost Sector or Lost Sector Online. It’s in the alpha stage with a English translation which is fairly understandable. The game is a turn based strategy focused on PVP and PVE combat. The premise revolves around a civil war after another war through the city of Broxton into chaos; you as a citizen of this city is primarily to just kill people. The storyline isn’t flushed out for the game but I assume they kept it open ended for people to roleplay their own stories.
Aspects of the gameplay are highly similar to other MMORPG’s; you level up and unlock new weapons to buy. On top of this, the idea of looting and upgrading weapons is spectacularly the same; you need special items to improve your weapons and items, which costs time or money – this case, money. When you start out the tutorial is fairly short, spanning one mission which lasts a few minutes to let you get familiar to camera controls, movement and combat mechanics. After moving to the exit zone of the tutorial, it takes you to a city map which displays PvP zones and enemy encounters you can have as well as their level requirements to enter these instance; for the most part, this screen seems to facilitate in finding safe zones to heal in and find certain instances. Here’s where the MMORPG component comes in play. Within the safe zones, you can interact with other players. There is not trading facility so trading is dealt peer to peer within safe zones. In the first safe zone you encounter, you are treated to a very large map that the game calls The Factory which contains the basic necessities to play through the low levels PvE encounters. NPC’s in this zone are placed distant from each other so it does require a fair amount of in-map travelling which is moderately slow considering the time to traverse the map would be about 30-50 seconds. These safe zones serve as a lobby essentially with the ability to browse the local shops for medical supplies, hire mercenaries and armaments.
In the first 5 levels, I noticed a few things about the combat which seem to be troublesome. When you jump into a PVE instance, you see the basic interface you would see in most FPS adapted to the RPG genre. You have your active weapon, ammo, radar and the active aid items you have assigned to your character. As a turn begins, you have about 3 minutes to use your action points. Actions points (AP) resupply every turn and are used for movement and actions like switching weapons and opening loot bags. At any time you walk into sight range to an enemy, movement is interrupted which allows you to take alternate action if you want to take it. It seems the sight range for these encounters are line of sight where your character can see them directly. When attacking there seems to be an interesting mechanic to it. You get a few options when attacking which can be switched with the Q and E keys; these actions are mostly either a high damage and high AP costing attacks, moderate damage with moderate AP use and a melee which is the lowest amount of AP with a very low damage output. When you have a action selected, you see the cone of fire, accuracy and AP cost for the attack. At a certain range either too close or too far, the accuracy and damage is reduces respectively. You pretty much rinse and repeat until you finish the instance. I’ve tried quitting an instance but it seems at the moment in alpha, there is no way to exit combat – not even if you quit the game since you start from where you left off. Also in combat the only winning factors is who fires first and who does the most damage which get troublesome when you get to level 3 when you are forced to play against the AI in a 3 on 6 or in some cases 3 on 7 with a powerful mob that can tank 3 sniper rounds attacks.
At the moment the game isn’t fully translated and has a lot to improve upon. The community is also very Russian so you would hardly encounter English speaking players. The server is apparently in located in Russia and coming from an indie developer, the server lags during prime time around 2-7 PM EST. Definitely kind of a fun game to pick up and play casually. If you do and you find a “Shooter90”, feel free to add me!
Until next time, keep on fragging!
For some of you who has WordPress (well, mostly all of you) would know about the analytic tools on your Dashboard; for those who do not, I’ll let you in on it. WordPress has this Dashboard interface which allows you to see your blog by the numbers. Aside the graphs and graphics, you can also screen comments, create posts and edit the blog. This post will be mostly about my post count, which is at 193 as of this one. Which mean’s I’ve been at this for almost 200 posts and what it means to me.
I’ve been playing with the idea of celebrating the milestone with something special. Something more personal, something to open up to you guys a bit about me. So I’m getting that down which should be out about a month and a half from this post. Maybe closer…maybe. But I’m definitely working on the blog post at least once every day until it comes out. It’s going to be pretty long, but I think I’ll add a table of contents. Huh, guess I better dust off my old HTML skills and refresh my memory.
I do have real life priorities too, so I have to work on those; mostly just employment stuff and just be an adult. Adult stuff really sucks; no wait I take it back, society’s adult stuff sucks. It puts me away from blogging and writing. I might not be a professional, but I do love writing despite the poor grades I got in school over half a decade ago.
As a teaser for the post, here’s what I want my readers and subscribers do for it; yup, I’m making you work a bit. Well it’s not work, more like ask me questions. Put on you curiosity caps because I might want to answer some of them. Few rules though; keep it PG so no profanity, you can send me as many as you wish, and send it in by either by email (wordpressnawkcire@gmail.com) or put it down the comment section below.
Slow week as of yet; I have to find work or create something to keep me busy. Bring on the questions!
After a month of putting up with my laptop malfunctioning, I finally tried to fix it. At first it wasn’t serious, it would not shutdown properly on occasion; it either hangs or freezes. Then recently it was failing to wake after it went to sleep. Either solution was to hold down the power button, which in my mind isn’t proper procedure when shutting down a computer. Considering my laptop had an almost clean slate, wiping the hard drive again to reinstall windows wasn’t a tough choice. Rather than using the CD I used before, I chose to use the one I used when I first installed Windows 7 on my desktop.
Rather than keeping the system up to date, I’m going to keep the operating system from updating and look into every update. I rather know if I should use Windows Update for a certain update than letting every update running the risk of messing up the system again. Probably not all blame should be placed on the OS, I did have some drivers and utilities which may have conflicted with certain files. As I said before, I didn’t have any personal files so starting over was a breeze. With a stable Internet connection, I downloaded all the programs I need; CCleaner, Avast Antivirus and so on. I’ve tried shutting down and putting it to sleep; it works fine now.
I recently finished Assassin’s Creed III by blazing through the single player. It’s definitely a tougher game than the Renaissance storyline. I believe I’ve did it within 20 or 30 hours in a span of 3 days. It’s something to celebrate considering I hardly play story driven games. So I thought, why not mix Coke and vodka? I still have a third of a bottle so I mixed two shots into a can. As anyone who has drank alcohol, I don’t have a tolerance for it. Tolerance I mean in terms of the taste and consumption, I have very little of both. Also I’ve gained enough Zen points in Star Trek Online that I can begin building a Vesta from the Vesta pack. I haven’t purchased it but at the moment, I’m gathering all the necessary items so I can slot them. With the surplus gear I have in my bank, I will have to push myself into buying or hunting for engineering consoles that improve auxiliary power since the Vesta comes equipped with a cannon powered by auxiliary and I usually focus on keeping either shields or weapons powered up. Since I still haven’t made the purchase, I could buy the Kumari escort pack but I already have an escort.
While on the STO currency problems, the dilithium market is rebounding after a low of an average of 90 dilithium for over a month in the winter. For the past few weeks, refined dilithium exchange rate has steadily increased. So at 122 dilithium from my last log in yesterday, I’ve decided to continually stockpile the dilithium when I can and probably spend it on the dilithium store. Since the Kumari was added, they began adding more items to the game within this obscure store. For one thing, they’ve added a very rare Tholian hangar pet which is much more effectie than the Widow fighters you can get from redeeming the Recluse carrier. Just another way Perfect World Entertainment saying “I love you…r money.” If anything, I will buy two hangar pets and it will be the rare times I bought something in the dilithium store. Though I’m unsure what I should get, well I have a surplus of refined dilithium so I could but I would still prefer converting to Zen (hopefully soon since I doubt any one would want to trade at that price).
Coming to full circle, I’m taking the Sunday easy. Than just sitting here and finding a job, I’m heading out there in the city and hopefully find something. Maybe also get out and enjoy the sunshine. So until next time, have an amazing weekend.
We all have our moments of weakness sometimes and we just overindulge a bit more than we should; like candy, or bacon, or buying those Big Macs with large fries and drink. Before long, you get fat or start having problems; or both which would suck doubly.
So how does this affect me? Well, I had a visit to my doctor recently and I feel like I have to do what I can to maintain a better life for myself. After being irradiated and examined, I apparently developed some health problems that have been from recent developments. Cut to the chase, the human digestive can only handle so much meat until there is some clogging of the plumbing and my leg is in pain.
The first bit means I would have to have a diet change. This means rather than cramming beef and chicken, I will have to put in some more vegetables and fruits. Cramming vitamins and fibre; so diet myself for that, that’s totally doable. For one thing, I’m on good terms on vegetables and fruit which solidifies my stance on my Chinese zodiac sign (Horse FTW!), wish something else would solidify a bit more; hopefully all the fibre my body is taking in would help.
My leg has been acting up since mid-winter, like at first it just felt like a slight aching from time to time. Around Christmas, I think I caught a bug from someone and my leg just felt worse to the point where being bed ridden didn’t help. Around February I just went, “screw it, I’m going to sit around and live with this.” So I went to the doctor, this was after I got better from whatever bug I came in contact. Okay maybe “the doctor” may be misconstrued as my doctor, I went to a clinic just a few blocks from my house because it was cold and my leg was begging me to stop walking. She gave me some painkillers; they worked for a week and after the meds wore off, it came back with a vengeance. After a month of just being super careless about it, I went to the doctor; my family doctor who I’ve been seeing since I was a kid. But apparently my back has been pretty much in a bad position for so long that something something and my leg hurts when I walk. Yup, I don’t understand. Pretty much the prescription from my doc is swimming or sit ups to strengthen the lower back. Signs of getting older, so I have to start taking care of myself more closely.
So before this week happened, I started to run again. My legs felt like they were on fire. I think I may have pushed myself too hard and too fast and tired myself out (Yeah, that’s not out of context at all…), for now I think I’m going to lay off the cardio a bit and just focus on working my lower back since my leg needs to be pain free. I don’t like describing pain since your definition could be a bit different from mine; I would put as soreness, but it could be kind of that pain when that muscle is bruised and it’s just a light bit of pressure is applied.
So I have to recover quick and recover fast since I really want this out of the way so I can focus on doing life stuff. Life stuff sucks a lot. Moral of the story here, if it hurts for more than half a week…see a doctor.
Upside to all this, I got my ship pack in Star Trek Online; WOOP WOOP! Now I have to farm for all the gear I want to have on it and choose which ship I want to equip. The Vesta is kind of hard to distinguish, but I think I’m going for something a bit more engineering to boost Auxiliary power passively. Also they released the revamped Crystalline Entity event with some Reputation stuff, I rather play the event than really focus on the Reputation since I consistently placed third on the first day it came out. The Ambassador Support Cruiser I got a month back is starting to receive some gear. I’m planning on equipping some old school Phaser arrays like the ones from the Original Series. Maybe add in some armour and power stuff to keep shields and defense up. The Dilithium market recently skyrocketed so I’m definitely staying away from the exchange for awhile. I still have a large surplus of dilithium so likely I’m going to put it into buying some Hangar items or put it towards a ship set. For now, not worried about what I should get next and more focused on real life problems.
That’s it for now, have an awesome-sauce weekend!
Spring’s here, that’s a given. Aside from getting out of bed earlier; this year, exercise is becoming a priority to me. I’m not obviously freaking out eating healthy and just becoming a total jock and pick up sports or be on an extensive exercise regimen. But for the start of spring, I decided to go for a run. With no inhibitions, I donned my athletics and at the crack of dawn; I went for a slow run around a route I measured to be 1.2 kilometres (just under 3/4 of a mile), completed just under 6 minutes which isn’t so bad. My aim is a 2.5 km run in under 14 minutes, 12 minutes if I can really do it.
Even for six minutes of a gentle run, I found some bliss into it. Stepping off my doorstep, it was quiet and silent in the twilight of the street lights. Eerie more like it, with the artery empty of car flow. As I made pace, I thought about the past months. Ever since I fell ill around Christmas, my state of health seems very amplified in front of me. Bit by bit, I’ve been working to get back into better health. Been talking to the doctors I have to see and I’ve been feeling better under the guidance of them. As I round the halfway point contemplating, I felt I never really went anywhere with a bit of guidance. I always feel like I’m holding a map I can’t read and I still need directions.
We can sit here and lie with “I know what I’m doing” and “I know where I’m going in life”. But do we really? If that one person or thing wasn’t there to inspire or push you, would you be at this moment in your life? Without that moment where realization needed to be reality, would it have happened like this? We all remember the positive influences. For some, we have to remember and regret the negative influences. Looking back we might say they were negative or bad decisions; but in that very moment, it felt necessary and even urgent above all else. For me it wasn’t one full moment of clarity, but it was small moments just punted me along. And for me, it took a couple bad thoughts and a bunch of bad apples to tear it all down.
Nearing the end of my run, I could only think of the few things those few things I’ve learned about myself. Some good advice I should have listened to before. Do what you feel you want to do and not the wishes of others. You are the only one seeking your direction.
In time, I’ll be back where I felt I belonged. All I can do is run laps in my mind, readying myself for my second chance.
Have a little clarity everyone, until next time!
About a few weeks ago, I got my closed beta invitation to Warface, Crytek’s foot in the door free-to-play shooter. From the outside world, it seems like more of another shooter with similar mechanics seen from other games in the same genres. However it does offer some oddities that has been demonstrated by other games.
Quick impressions, the invite redirects me to login and download the game. As of this post, the size seems to be pretty beefy at around 10 GB more or less as well as a client plugin for Chrome (FireFox is also supported). After a 2 hour tease by the downloading bar with a prompt on screen telling me not to close the browser it was downloading from. We’ll get into the the browser aspect later; after I was presented with finally what appears to be the first bit of the game. The game allows you to select a game nickname and your face. The face is a preset of about ten faces and skin colours. After confirming the selections, we jump straight into the tutorial level.
Tutorials are pretty much the same, they run through all the basic stuff every player can do. From WASD keys to planting explosive charges, then to game specifics like combat slides and weapon customization. For the main part, the level is fairly flat compared to the multiplayer and co-op levels.
I was really interested into the co-op levels, so I decided to hop into it as quickly as I can. From what I noticed once logging in, you would have to play through the easy levels before you can jump into higher difficulties. There isn’t much to do, so I chose the tutorial difficulty and hope into a game. The co-op allows JIP (Join-In Play) however you would have to wait for the team to reach the objective or before the chopper touches down. As the rear lowers down, you are exposed into the blinding morning of the Middle East and the rattling of gun fire from your fireteam of five. The map seems expansive but uni-directional, just a group of AI after AI. However they seem pretty intelligent enough to take cover and try and suppress players. This in higher difficulties would force players to learn to move cover to cover. Usually easier to be done while your buddies to lay down fire (so it seems). But having every class in your group does help a lot.
Warface consists of four classes; rifleman, medic, engineer and sniper. The class names and loadouts are reminiscent to Battlefield 3 and Bad Company, aside from the engineer and medic. The medic is more focused on utilizing shotguns and heal and engineers focused on armour repair and submachine guns. Maps sizes make the sniper a more obsolete class but does provide a one hit kill at a distance while the medic offers at the same in close quarters (almost). In the recent update the shotgun seems a bit over powered and the engineer class seems underused since there is no really use for a claymore for most of the time.
The client is browser based, meaning you get the game but everything to launch it would be online. All tying into their Gface social network. I’ve had one from Battlelog (Battlefield’s social network solution) and I think it’s a dead in, but lets just cover it. Gface has a friend list feature as well as a Twitter-ish new feed from friends and community. At the moment, the buddy list in Warface doesn’t sync up to Gface. Also there is not way to see who’s online so the private game feature seems useless as of the moment, or probably I’m missing something to get on the buddy list screen.
The tough part to really let you know how great a game is closed beta game is, for the large part is due to the changes that might happen now and whenever the game is open or released. At the current stage right now, there’s a lot of broken systems. The game functions pretty normally like public game and the social networking features are limited to your status updates and community feeds. Probably in time, Crytek will test and implement the last bits. Though in my opinion, the social networking feature is pretty generic and just some bad gimmick to play. Aside from Gface, Warface is not so polished since there are European players in the presumed US servers so matches do lag and players do drop out from time to time. The graphics are fairly progressively with the times. The verbal commands are simple with each devoted to ammo, health, armour and help requests. The weapons are parodies to their real life counter parts and have various numerical stats like any other free-to-play game I’ve seen from Korea publishers. The ammo is limiting which reprises the rifleman’s role as a munitions provider, excluding explosives which restores upon reaching certain objectives. Co-op levels are fairly linear but provide positions to out flank the enemy and take position, however usually allows one or two classes to be fairly dominant throughout. Most of the game on hard difficulties are focused on cover and trying to maintain distance while the tutorial difficulty is run and gun. The only special part of the co-op is the daily missions which allows you to rank daily and gain a special currency to make purchases away from normal currencies like revive tokens.
Overall experience of the game; it’s fairly average to any free-to-play shooters I’ve played. It’s mostly comparable to how Alliance Of Valiant Arms operates with the graphics closer to EA’s Frostbite engine and it’s iterations and the achievement system of recent Call Of Duty games. The on-the-fly attachment swapping does help the player to overcome some disadvantages of the class, but usually marginally unless they have good attachments like anything boosting accuracy or the ability to use optical sights. I know I’ve said “as of this moment” a lot, that’s due to the unpredictable nature of testing. The end user is the guinea pig and sometimes, not a lot of information is imparted. But as of the moment, I’d recommend the game as a co-op game, I’ve haven’t tried the versus mode yet. If I did, I would probably say the same thing that it’s fairly generic to any other versus mode exception for the sliding the the in-game attachment swapping. Definitely worth a peek when it comes out, though after all the item collecting there’s not much you can really do.
Until next time bloggers, keep fraggin’ !
At 98 refined dilithium per 75 Zen points, I’m pretty certain that I may get what I want after all. Of course after about three to four months of button clicking and trying to keep just enough ore to get it done. It’s safe to say I’ll have enough dilithium for the next week and a half with an output of about 937 Zen. Meaning with the 4100 already waiting will be just enough to get it done; well assuming the exchange rate is low enough for the next week and a half. Maybe finally after so many days of sitting around doing DOFF missions will finally pay off, the Vesta ship pack better be worth the last four months. For those readers just joining me and doing the math, that’s a month too long to get the Vesta pack! True, I had some computer problems so a month more just seems appropriate from my point of view.
This week, I received a very long awaited invitation to Warface; Crytek’s first attempt at the free-to-play market. At first it seemed to be very little to offer, understandable at closed beta. The PvE system like others I’ve seen are very linear despite what is advertised with ways to go around and outflank the enemy. But the interesting bit so far is the the daily missions which seem to change which maps are used. I’ll probably set aside some time to put a review on it, for now I got to try all they have to offer in terms of the PvE. No matter how bland and really repetitive as it may sound, killing AI enemies over and over again.
Like many times before, I’ve always had trouble with playing two games at once. Time investment into just one is extreme, even if it’s an hour or so for dilithium farming. I’ve been cutting back on playing video games, not diverting it. Still hopeful I can rid this habit and maybe devote more time into better endeavours, definitely real life stuff that must be done. I don’t want to play real life, real life is hard; like difficulty level “ridiculously un-fun”. I do like challenges but challenges I know that can be won, thus why I love playing games.
Away from video games, I’ve stumbled on a Facebook comment on an old classmate. I usually shrug it off since Facebook friends aren’t really friends. So apparently someone I know from high school has discovered herself on WordPress. “OMG Eric! u haz crush on gurl?” Ummm, I rather not say since I had a couple cruses on a lot of girls in high school; okay, maybe a bit too much information there. I don’t know every time I read about stuff I already know about, I just get ticked off since the world seems to be telling me something I already know. I wish I could find a word for that, there’s got to be a reverse dictionary for that.
That’s all for now until next week, take it easy folks!
Recently I read a WordPress blog about hacked email woes. I think I should share my experiences with it and some techniques to prevent it. After the first time when you feel your privacy is violated, you usually would want to find the solutions that would solve it. Usually, we take the easy routes to get it done. Easy routes are cheap and less time consuming, however they’re probably quick solutions to probably a few small small problems in your security.
Lets start with account security, this is pretty much anything requiring a user name and password. Though not sure if everyone does this, but it seems those that assume the same username to all their accounts fairly much allows a bit of consistency with password insecurities. Especially if it’s those people who have your user name across multiple service, they can just easily search up the username and if they crack the one password for that; they’ll get them all. If you are those kind of people who keep usernames the same and keep shuffling the password, that’s a good plan. However do note it is recommended to keep a different password for each account; from my point of view in out interconnected world, this might be hard. Consider we all own probably 2 or more email address as well as miscellaneous services like online banking, online games, and various accounts requiring an account and password; this approach would require a minimum 20 password you have to remember by heart. Eidetic memory would be the only ability you would need for this, however most of us don’t really remember those passwords that well and usually try to brute force their way onto their account by cycling through passwords or just resetting the password which would defeat the purpose of having the password in the first place. To reduce the amount of passwords to use or even cycle through, I suggest prioritizing your accounts into categories.
Getting Started
First you are going to need to think about all the possible passwords you can create. Don’t pen them or type them out; use your mind and figure out which ones are going to work out. To find out which one’s are going to work out, you have to know what kind of restrictions you have on your password from the service you are going to use. Sometimes the service would want you to have numbers and letters while some would go the distance and ask for numbers and letters with one letter capitalized. Most of the time, numbers and letters will do fine and dandy. Now in your head, find things you know that people won’t know. These could be important dates, lucky numbers, names of pets, and certain random facts you know of yourself that others don’t know or would not be able to guess. From this stack of keywords and numbers, we have the most secure passwords; lets call these Alpha Phrases for now.
Now think of things people might know in person only; sports teams, political and religious affiliations, inside jokes, names of those people and so on. The bulk here will be our Beta Phrases.
Optionally, think of common words and numbers you could use in a pinch. These could reference to games, movies, books, dirty jokes, et cetera. This will be our Pool. These should be easily recalled at anytime but would make the least secure passwords like “asdf”, “root”, “admin”, “1234”, and “password”. These phrases suck when combining with themselves but would make a minimal password when combined with a Alpha or Beta Phrase.
Priority Tier System
This is how I normally put my things together online to keep it from getting compromised. This system varies depending on people’s influence and usage.
A priority based system would require is pre-planning in terms of how you will classify your accounts. Basis of this blog, I’ll demonstrate with a 3 tier linear system. Linear because each priority does not interact with the one succeeding or preceding itself. However if you are part of a business or a person who has grey zones, read the non-linear area of this section.
The highest priority should be assigned to accounts that will contain real life consequences in the event that your account is breached. Under this priority I would recommend using a combination of two or more Alpha Phrases to ensure security. This should make it impossible for someone to break into the account and would protect your assets like a bank account or a business email. Each account here should have it’s own unique password.
One down is moderate, passwords should be quick accessible but hard to guess. So the bulk of these passwords would be Beta Phrases, you can sneak in a bit of the Pool in there if you want it. In my opinion, this contains personal and social media. This is the area where you wouldn’t mind an accidental breach or doesn’t have a physical loss, don’t cry over spilt milk and all that. You can be a bit more lenient in using a password twice, try and not overdo it since people might find out.
Low priority are the accounts that will get lost so the passwords won’t make a difference since it’s kind of just something you made to check out the service. This is things like IRC and forum accounts unless you are a forum moderator or an administrative figure. Which case, these are things may be consider moderate or high depending on popularity of the service you are working with. As a normal user, likely you will only need to mix a couple Pool phrases together. The accounts listed here are the low of the low so you can literally have one password for all the accounts.
Now in life, nothing fits into boxes the right way so for those that aren’t too sure what is what I’ll help you how with exceptions and rules to help you through in sorting accounts and assigning passwords. If your account links to other accounts, that linking account must be secured higher than the other accounts. So lets say you have an personal email to forward email, that forwarding email address’ password MUST NOT be used again since it’s directing information to other emails. Same goes for gaming accounts where you’ve collected ultra-rare gear in and social media if you are a social butterfly. So they’re like semi-high priority but not really when you don’t want to use it anymore.
The only thing you would have to worry about in this system is any passwords that are shared since if one gets compromised, then it’s likely the other would get hit pretty hard. Also if you don’t have a diverse pass phrase pool since someone could can just guess it. Any case, change you password after you think one of them is compromised and try and avoid using the same password.
Gridlock
Another approach is to construct a cipher, a method to conceal your written work. Depending on what you use as a cipher it can be super easy or super hard. You can use a grid of 260 squares arranged in a 26 x 10 grid and fill each grid with a random character from A to Z and 0 to 9. Based on a phrase or a number, this grid should hash out a sequence that should consist of numbers and letters. You can use it like a map. First you establish a set of rules. easiest one off the top of my head is a mnemonic like “I love those adorable puppies.” So “I” has one letter, so look in the square in I1. “Love”, four starting with “L”; L4. And so one until you have a sequence from the phrase. Usually online services require a minimum of 8 characters so your phrase should be at minimum 8 words long.
Simpler cipher is to get yourself a letter, like a rejection letter from a college or university. Pick a number, then just go through the letter puling out a word or number that happens to fall upon every n times, where n is your count number. You can substitute it with letters so you can take single characters in words. It might take longer than pulling words but as long as you remember the count and keep the correspondence, you can always refer back to it. It’s antiquated but as long as it’s difficult, password’s safe.
Take it to the cleaners
Not too sure what it’s called but it just wipes temporary data off your computer. I personally use CCleaner by Piriform, it deletes all the temporary history from all my browsers and for a bit of flavour I have it clean out my Start menu and certain programs that need to be deleted. Even without programs, you can delete it too but it would be quite hard to know what’s junk. The point to it is to get rid of anything weird that’s inside a file that’s either sending or receiving information that you don’t want sent, such as what you’re typing in as a password. This is only a temporary measure but it’s a start of a two prong attack to rid your computer. Having some anti-virus protection helps a lot if it program has an active scan feature to let it check incoming data for malicious material like a worm or something. When I get nervous, I usually use CCleaner then run a full scan followed by another run with CCleaner to make sure it’s all cleaned up. Probably the first one isn’t necessary but it never hurts to try.
Nuke it like North Korea (too soon?)
If you have exhausted all methods into removing malware off your computer, there is a last resort but sometimes comes at a heavy price. Reformatting a hard drive would be a hard thing to do considering the size and collection of stuff you’ve accumulated. Best you can do is save as much as you can before you wipe the hard drive clean and start over. Usually all operating systems now have some feature to allow you to wipe the hard drive. I have two methods of wiping my computer if I had to, CCleaner has a feature to allow a full hard drive wipe and I have my two operating system boot discs. Be careful when you do this and change your BIOS to allow boot up from a CD or USB, whichever medium you keep your boot disc on. This should be a the last course of action, but it’s necessary if you want a virus free computer.
At Day’s End…
After all this stuff, online systems are vulnerable to attack. Certain companies are good at keeping up with security holes, some not so good. I know for a fact my Hotmail account was compromised server side since before they fixed it, my Junk folder would always contain 100 messages every day about random products and services I don’t want to know about. Sometimes no matter how hard you make those accounts hard to break into, sometimes it’s just something out of your control and you have to accept the fact that the service you trust can be so incompetent. In which case, it’s time to find a new service to replace it.
Stay safe and stay secured, everyone. See you next time!
