Kirkman Enterprises

I'll admit I play World of Warcraft in my spare time.  For a few years now, there have been a lot of attempts by hackers to break into player's accounts.  The folks at Sunbelt software published in their Internet security blog about another recent attempt at phishing for player's account information.  The hackers attempt to convince players to visit websites either under the guise of being an official game site run by Blizzard to log into their account (the Sunbelt blog demonstrates this method) or to access a site to buy in game gold for real world cash.  

Either way, if the player provides their e-mail address and game password they hackers can gain control of the player's account.  Once they do this, they will often sell off all of the possessions for each character for in game gold.  That gold is transferred to other accounts which is sold off for real world money.  These compromised accounts will also be used to send spam in game through chat channels, in game mail, and private "whispers" to convince people to go to a website, owned by the hackers.  (From there go back to step 1.)

The websites run by the hackers can also attempt to install keyloggers that will record whatever you type into your computer, including your passwords.  Keyloggers are sometimes the most difficult malware to detect, but anti-virus and anti-malware software is getting better at it.  Hackers are getting smart to this and will write their keyloggers such that they will only be active when you have the World of Warcraft client running.  In other words, if you just scan your computer no keylogger will be found.  To detect these special keyloggers, you should run the WoW client while scanning your computer.

So what is the motivation behind all this?  There are people who play the game but don't want to spend the time and effort to gain in game gold legitimately.  For whatever their personal reasons are, they will utilize the services of a gold seller.  I think the going rate at the moment is about $4 USD for 1,000 gold in game.  It may not seem like a lot, but Blizzard claims over 11 million people play the game.  If just one half of one percent of the players were to buy 1k of gold, it would be earnings of $220,000 for the hackers.  I don't know what they are actually earning or how many players are buying gold, but it is easy to see why someone might want to sell the gold.  Through hacking and obtaining gold quickly from compromised accounts, a ready supply of in game gold is available.  

How does one prevent their WoW account from being compromised?  Much the same way you prevent any account (bank, e-mail, facebook, etc) from being compromised.  Don't click on links in e-mail.  Don't go to websites you are not familiar with and enter your information.  Use different passwords for different accounts.  And for WoW, get an authenticator; once added to your WoW account in order to log into the game you have to provide an authentication code provided by a keyfob or smart phone application.  Only you have access to this code which is randomly generated at that point in time.  It provides a great layer of security for your Warcraft account.  

Now if only more banks in the US would offer this extra layer of security.....

With my reasearch job at school I encountered a requirement to use XML files as input and ouput.  The people who were going to use a snippit of our JAVA code are doing so from a C++ program.  Since they are not programmers it was easier for them to call our code as a JAVA application than try to interface a JAVA library from within their C++ application.  The decision was made that they would provide an XML file to invoke necissary options in my JAVA program and that I would return the results as an XML file.  

Thus began my search to learn how to interface with XML files from JAVA code.  Intially I found lots of acronymic libraries and APIs to do this work: JAXP, SAX, JDOM and another one I can't find at the moment.  As I continued to look around, I found out that JAVA already has everything I need to work with XML files, at least with the small versions I had to work with.  In the full post below I'll show some snippits of the XML files and the JAVA code that reads and writes them.

This week on a Drupal based website that I run I encountered an issue involving the combination of the Advanced Forums module and PathAuto.  To start I'll say everything worked just fine initially.  It was as I was trying to tweak things I broke it and I had a hard time finding the solution.  Hopefully, if someone Googles about the problem in the future, this post will show up telling them what I did wrong at least.

 I have been closely following the proceedings in California of the trial in regards to Proposition 8, the voter enacted law that prohibits the state from granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples.  The folks over at Prop8TrialTracker have done a good job at providing a lot of facts and details as the trial occurred in January, final arguments in June, and today's decision.  Judge Walker determined that there was no valid reason for denying gay couples the same rights that straight couples do in the form of marriage.  It's an awesome decision, even though, at the moment it has no effect on me.  It honestly doesn't have an effect on anyone at the moment due to a stay on the ruling while appeals and other court procedures occur.

Being in Texas means that a federal court ruling in California doesn't have impact here.  Here we still have a constitutional amendment preventing me from getting married to the man I love.  In time, as the Prop 8 ruling works it's way through the appeals process it is possible the Supreme Court could rule on it.  If it does, then it could have an effect on me, but that a few years down the road.  In the meantime, I am happy to know that the general populous seems to be more and more in favor of same-sex marriage and courts are overturning laws against it.  

I wonder why people are against same-sex marriage.  I don't want to go into long details of why it would be beneficial to allow it.  You can find those all over the place.  However, I like the idea of not just saying I want to spend the rest of my life with my 'future husband'.  I like the idea of putting that desire into full, legal effect.  I like the idea of getting the same rights as straight couples do in the form of being able to make medical decisions for each other, health insurance benefits, ease of buying a home for both of us, and more.  I like the idea of being able to say that in the eyes of my government, in the eyes of my higher power, and in each others eyes that he is my true husband and that I am his true husband.

 My future husband was born in the Philippines and moved to the United States with his mom and aunt when he was 5.  His mom and aunt are approaching retirement and will be moving "back home" when that time comes.  There seems to be a little bit of talk between the family here in the states and the small bits of family back in the Philippines about starting a CyberCafe or Internet Cafe.  It has been suggested that the business would be built with my guy in mind to encourage him to move to the Philippines as well to take over the business.  That would potentially mean me moving to the Philippines as well depending on the family business being successful enough to provide us a living.  So, I've done a little bit of research to see what we may be getting into if this really does happen.

 I am currently developing a Java application involving ontologies for a professor at Texas State University.  The decision to use Java is due to the long-term goal of implementing a multi-agent system involving the Jade Framework.  In addition, Java also has the added benefit of being a multi-platform programming language..... or is it?  The professor I work for prefers to use his MacBook; therefore the application I write needs to run on it.  Not long into development I found out that a Java application developed on a Windows based computer, does not automatically run on a Mac.  In this post, I'll discuss why it didn't and how I fixed the problem.

 Not a lot has been going on around here in terms of clients and work.  A big part of that is because I'm in graduate school.  I'm working towards a Master's degree in Software Engineering.  Between a full class load and doing some programming work for a professor, I've been staying pretty busy.  I did do an upgrade of sorts to this website in the last week.  I've moved away from using static pages I created by hand and towards using a content management package called Drupal.