Rock, Paper, Shotgun

28/08/2009 at 12:43 Ginger Yellow says:

Unfortunately, Australian libel law is very similar to English libel law, both in terms of the burden of proof and in the broad claims of jurisdiction. So not only would this case be practically difficult to defend, if he were to defend it the legal side of things would probably be pretty tricky too.

28/08/2009 at 12:45 James G says:

Ugh. The one good thing I’ve discovered from that whole affair is that the UK isn’t the only country with archaic libel laws.

28/08/2009 at 13:06 Kester says:

This is RPS’s worst title wordplay yet. I hope you’re proud of yourselves.

28/08/2009 at 13:56 rcsgd says:

The problem is, Bruce is [somewhat objectionable]:
http://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?showtopic=212771

28/08/2009 at 14:18 rocketman71 says:

Bruce Everiss is a bitter old man.While I can concur that what Evony is doing is, let’s say, not right, after having read part of his blog time ago, I have no pity at all for him. He’s not hesitated to hung dry people whenever his had the chance. Let he take a bit of his own medicine.

28/08/2009 at 15:38 Ginger Yellow says:

“Freudian Slip, we still have a piss-poor track record re: rational libel settlements, Simon Singh’s case being a good recent example.”

This is a whole ‘nother thread, but I actually think the Singh ruling (which is only a preliminary ruling on the meaning of the allegedly defamatory statements, incidentally – the full libel trial has yet to happen) was correct according to the letter of the law. I wish it weren’t, as I think the BCA suit will have a terrible chilling effect on the discussion of pseudo-science and quackery, but I do think it was. Justice Eady may be incredibly unfriendly to libel defendants, but the thing to remember is that he’s working within a legal framework that is also incredibly unfriendly to libel defendants.

28/08/2009 at 15:56 qrter says:

rocketman71, can you be more specific about the ‘bad medicine’ Everiss has dished out?

I believe rocketman could be referring to the ‘blaming piracy for my company’s downfall instead of our own bad management’ thing last year on his blog. He was called out on this in his comments and that’s when things went really downhill. More info here.

28/08/2009 at 16:50 Mads says:

How come? What’s up with all the hostility?
I think this Evony lawsuit sounds completely absurd no matter how many toes this Brucie-guy stepped on.

28/08/2009 at 18:06 Alaric says:

I don’t really get it. Yea, these ads are annoying as hell. So are all the other ads in the Internet. How is this Evony crap any worse than SixFlags, MediFast or AccuQuote adds? (I just reloaded this page 3 times to get those names.)

As to the game itself being a pile of crap – well, don’t play it then. I certainly do not intend to.

So again, why is everyone getting their panties in a bunch?

28/08/2009 at 19:29 Cutman says:

Best rps news title ever.

28/08/2009 at 19:35 Tei says:

postdata:

Inside the spammer mindset:
– Spammers think that are more smart that everybody else.
– Spammers think that theres a infinite number of people more idiot thatn thenselves, and that can scam these people.
– Spammers think that can lie to everyone, and escape any problem. Even use lies to put anyone in a problem. So no one can call then spammers, and survive a libel.

28/08/2009 at 21:50 col says:

Bruce Everiss is a tit.

28/08/2009 at 22:21 We Fly Spitfires - MMORPG Blog says:

All I know about Evony are the adverts with hot chicks that keep popping up on my blog.

29/08/2009 at 00:08 Blather Blob says:

@Alaric: I think the first of the series of articles they’re threatening to sue over is all about them promoting comment spam: http://www.bruceongames.com/2009/07/10/dont-play-evony/

29/08/2009 at 01:06 Idle Threats and Bad Poetry says:

So someone explain this to me. If I can put something up on the Internet anywhere in the world, a company from China that judges my comments to be libel can sue me in Australia? If I’ve got that right, that’s a law as outdated at the Salem witch trials.

29/08/2009 at 03:24 hitnrun says:

@Idle threats

It depends on which country you live in, and which country the suit is filed in.

If you live in the United States, you can just ignore it.

In some other countries where the whole “sovereign nation” thing is a little more qualified, yes, you might be able to be sued. Particularly in Commonwealth nations (Britain, Australia, Canada). The situation differ from nation to nation and case to case, but the gist of it is that the fact that what you write can be read anywhere, combined with these states’ common legal traditions and only recently diverging histories, is used to justify enforcing libel judgments in courts that sensible people, ie non lawyers, would call “a country I’ve never visited on the other side of the effing planet.”

29/08/2009 at 05:24 RobF says:

Tei, you’ve just described Everiss perfectly, man.

Battle of the spammers, who will win?

29/08/2009 at 17:18 Jetsetlemming says:

I disabled Adblock for RPS and the only ad I see is one for Duke3d on GOG, and that was visible before I disabled adblock. Ah well.
I’d totally click that ad and go buy Duke3d if I didn’t already have it. Sorry RPS!

30/08/2009 at 11:09 bill says:

The problem with his tactic is that it essentially gives more publicity to Evony.

I’d imagine they are from the “all publicity is good publicity” school of thought, and this lawsuit, and any blogs posting about it, mentioning their game and showing their scantily clad adverts…. that just means more potential clicks.

29/10/2009 at 16:20 Lee says:

I am a student studying computer games design at uni and decided to investigate Evony.com.
Just to see what some of these games are like etc. etc.
The game is actually kind of cool (found myself addicted and even spent a little money on it).
But I started to notice HUGE bandwidth use by the site as I played.
I am not the only one either, there are comments on the evony forums about this.
This is odd because all of the client info, the animations etc. are all downloaded in one big download at the start.
There is no streaming media so I began to wonder what was going on.

To cut a long story short I decided to break the law and reverse engineer Evony’s client.
Not to cheat. Not to rip them off or even to use even a scrap of the code.
But just to poke about a bit and find out what was going on, maybe even offer them some ways to improve things.

Aside from the fact that the whole thing is very poorly constructed (it is really very beginner coder level stuff. Reminds me of a lot of
what the first year students produce for assignments) it contained some very interesting information.

Included with the client are 2 peices of tracking software that monitor your web use and which applications you have open while the client is running.
These do not install independently on the machine though due to the limitations of flash and do not actually damage anything.
But they harvest massive volumes of information. My firewall was blocking a lot of outgoing transmissions and it turns out that these
were the data trying to be sent out. So they know nothing about me. lol.
However there is a LOT of data coming IN over the ports the client uses. In otherwords it is downloading something into my cache for use later.
I have bandiwdth restriction which slows these types of tricks down and I completely clear my cache every couple of hours if I am heavily using the net.

I also noticed that all the varanbles etc. are named Civony still and that there are multiple references to UMGE.
Even a couple of folders are simply called UMGE, one of these folders contains one of the spyware programs.
So I can only guess at where the data would end up if I didnt have a good firewall.

There are also commented out sections in the code which contain references to UMGE and Lam himself, though low on details.

Thank you for reading this.

Lee