On October 29th, Toumal informed Pi that he (Toumal) was angry about not being able to connect to "his" MUCK's #1. The reason for doing this was to install a new head wizard and an adjutant for him, culled from the chat room moderators and the forum moderators.
He wasn't really "angry" so much as "Did I forget the password or..?". Still, had he access to #1, he would have slipped these people in without our knowledge or consent. Considering that I made every effort to abide by the "one rule" he claimed to hold me to ("ask me before assigning new wizards"), I expected the same courtesy.
This was stacked on top of a veritable pile of shitty behavior to start. MUCK wizards are not allowed to post outside the MUCK admin subforum, but everyone else can post in the MUCK admin subforum. The wizards are supposed to write up EVERYTHING they do for the forums, and new wizard postings MUST be approved by Toumal and the rest of the forums mod team.
I'm not certain if we weren't allowed. I definitely didn't
give a shit about the other forums because it wasn't my job to worry about the chat or the forums, it was my job to run a MUCK. (run amok, hurrrr)
Then, on October 30th... Well. We'll do it this way. Toumal posted a long, whining, tl;dr on the "down" page for Yiffstar Island MUCK. I'll be breaking in at points to rebut the more ridiculous stances.
==============================================
Yimu Muck has been closed until further notice
==============================================
I'm saddened to inform you that the decision was made to take Yimu Muck
down on October 30. This decision didn't come easy for me.
But with wizards ignoring the fact that I founded and paid for this server,
and all attempts to merely influence decisions made by the wizards on my behalf
being disregarded, blocked or plain out attacked, I saw no way to continue
like this. Many of the old-time players had long since abandoned the Muck,
citing the constant bickering and lack of wizard intervention.
Dear Toumal: I realize you paid for the hardware. I've paid for hardware myself, y'know. However, that doesn't make it any more "right" for me to up and give my users the finger just because I paid for the hardware. It's "morally and ethically" wrong.
-----
This shit right here is the core of the problem. Toumal claimed he OWNED the MUCK, and everything done on it. He suggested that it was the equivalent of being invited into his house, his minimal expenditure of a half-dozen cents a month on the necessary bandwidth.
-----
QFT.
An attempt to revise the AUP in cooperation with the wizards was met with inaction.
False to an incredible degree.
In September 2008, Pi copied the entire Muck data, including all rooms, users and
passwords, to his own computer. Upon noticing this, he explained this as a safety
measure in case of a harddrive failure. Since we already had a near-fatal hardware
loss before, I reluctantly let this happen. I felt that maybe a sign of trust would
be met with the same feeling.
So, exercising due diligence, protecting data I am entrusted with, and overall being a competent administrator of an online game is bad? Check.
As for the whole "trust" thing:
Considering that I made every effort to abide by the "one rule" he claimed to hold me to ("ask me before assigning new wizards"), I expected the same courtesy.
I was wrong. After expressing my wish to have another user instated as wizard, himself
a veteran chat moderator with a long experience, information about this was met with
outright hostility. Said soon-to-be wizard was met with extreme prejudice, and the story
was spun to users as ''they want to replace wizzes with chat mods'' and ''they want
to make Yimu like YiffChat''. I tried to come to an amicable solution for an entire day,
discussing transition times and also alternate suggestions with the two head wizards.
No, Toumal. You refused to accept anything other than "He goes in if not now then soon." Handing someone whose creation date was "earlier this year" is the epitome of stupid MUCK decisions.
Christ, when
everyone on the MUCK thinks you're making a bad decision, you'd think it might sink in that you were making a... bad decision.
My decision to shut down Yimu came when, after having banned two long-known
abusive users for repeatedly attacking others under the guise of roleplay -something
they had already received multiple warnings about by the wizards themselves-,
I later saw said users online again, and the wizards not only NOT banning
them again, but actually talking about how I can't make decisions like that, how I can't
force policy changes, and that overall, I have no right to make decisions in the Muck.
And this is exactly why chat mods should not be anywhere near a wizbit. They all have this overwhelming "Ban that guy in exchange for netsex or because I don't like him" attitude. You do not show up after a 9 month idle period and start whacking @toad around because someone pisses you off.
The wizards of Yimu were appointed by me. They were given this position by me.
I value their long-time contributions to the Muck, but that does not give them ownership
of this Muck. I laid out the very structure of this Muck, including all major rooms,
their descriptions, principal locations as well as the streets of the inner city.
And we're throwing that crap away because it sucks.
Just as with the chat, I appoint as moderator or wizard whom I see fit.
Anyone who's run their own server will understand my point that while one should treat
users with respect, the final decision comes from the guy who pays the bills and/or
created the service.
RARGH I RUN THIS PLACE WITH AN IRON FIST. HEIL TOUMAL LONG LIVE THE ORCA REICH.
I worked under a manager who had this attitude once. He was also a micromanaging fuckbag who couldn't be talked out of making a bad decision, like rebooting the entire server room every 30 days for no reason. He was eventually run out of town for making shitty managerial choices.
It's akin to throwing a party with free beer in your house. Just because one
of your guests mixes the drinks for the night, doesn't make said house his
property. Coloring someone else's inked artwork doesn't give you the right to
call this one of your own original works. I acknowledge the contributions made
by the former wizards, but they don't acknowledge mine.
This analogy is like someone took real words and then spoke them after breathing dead orangutan farts out of the finest chemistry pipettes.
By the by, we acknowledged your contributions... as being shit and needing to be replaced.
Following the shutdown of Yimu, I stated in the forum announcement my hope that none of
the wizards would use the copy pulled by Pi to set up an exact copy on their server.
Exactly this has happened. An exact copy of this MUCK, only with a changed name, is
running on a server owned by a former wizard. Not even the street names or locations
have changed. Instead of creating their own MUCK, which would've been the right thing to do,
they chose the easy way and just used the entire copy they pulled from this server.
Funny, I've had exactly 4 negative reactions to this out of the 70 unique CLASS-C NETBLOCKS (given some of our players have a zillion alts), and they're all from Toumal's butt buddies. Who he's threatening to send to see if we changed things. (Yawn) Anyway, everyone ELSE is thanking me ceaselessly for the apparently daunting task of doing my job.
While it is true that the majority of MUF code was installed or even written by the
wizards, this doesn't change the fact that my trust in them was utterly misused, and that
any argument as to the percentage of contribution is moot the moment you talk about
something I thought up in the first place. You don't do a remix of a Michael Jackson song
without crediting the original creator. Alas, this is not the only worrying thing.
Again, here we go with the crappy analogies. I'm not going to bother responding to this.
===================================================================================
I urge all Yimu users who used their passwords here as well as somewhere else to
immediately change them. If you used the same password for paypal, ebay or any other
sensitive site, I strongly recommend you to do it right away.
Although your passwords were stored in hashed form in the muck's datafiles,
the former wizards also downloaded all command logs to their computer, giving them
access to your passwords in plain text.
===================================================================================
Yeah, I guess I can spend time decrypting a bunch of passwords (after patching John The Ripper to crack raw MD5 hashes and finding some hardware that isn't busy doing useful work). Toumal could just as easily set up a packet sniffer and try to steal passwords from people trying to connect.
What's stopping me?
I don't give a shit about your passwords. I don't care, never have, never will.
What's stopping him? What's to say there's anything stopping him? He's willing to go on a smear campaign about passwords, who's to say he's not busy at work trying to decrypt mine?
The sort of person who would the same password for yiff-fucking-star as you use for a sensitive site would most likely pick a password like "12345" and reply to emails "from" their bank about how their account is going to be shut down unless you reply within 24 hours, and in that case I would have not a single bit of sympathy.
I'm sorry to shut down a place that was home to so many friendly furs.
The future in terms of MUCK is still undecided. Right now, we will concentrate on the
main site, which is going to undergo massive improvements in the coming months.
After this major piece of work is done, there may well be something new here.
That's the good thing about being creative vs. copying: You can always make something
new and original, whereas the copycat can't.
ahahahahahahaha
That's the good thing about being creative vs. copying: You can always make something
new and original, whereas the copycat can't.
ahahahahahahaha (once wasn't enough)
If you need information from the muck retrieved, please email toumaltheorca at yiffstar
dot com with your character name.
Sure thing. How are you going to authenticate that users are who they claim to be? I can create a Yahoo account
yiffyfaggot81928691@yahoo.com and claim that I'm player YiffyFaggot and get someone else's data.
Or, you could just connect to library.7storm.org, port 8888, and have your creations magically restored.
That said, if any old Yimu people want me to totally destroy their data, in effect "unstealing" it, shoot me an email. After all, according to Toumal, "there are more than a just a handful of users who do not want their account information transferred anywhere without their consent". None of which have spoken up to me, nor any of which could he name when asked.
And since this wouldn't be furry without blustery legal threats:
Volley 1:The fact remains that you downloaded all authentication information for the MUCK and put that up on your system. I have several
users who will, in some 17 hours, check if their passwords have been removed from your system. If I get a single report of a user
whose permission you do not have, I will report this as the felony it is. Whether that will have any effect or not, I can not say.
But after that the matter will be resolved for me, but it may well cause large amounts of trouble for you.
I strongly suggest you consider my advice and start over. Take all the stuff that you did, and import the accounts of users who want
that to happen. Delete the authentication data you took without permission.
This was responded to with a resounding "meh". I committed no crime by safeguarding data to which I was entrusted while I was authorized.
Volley 2:Since their server is based in the US, the legal aspect of them downloading all authentication information of these users is not to be underestimated. I talked to my US lawyer, who advised against any civil litigation in this matter (and frankly, if they have to use a 1:1 copy of Yimu instead of being able to start up their own, that's rather pathetic of them) , but he also told me about the criminal offense aspect of stealing authentication information - he advised me to compile and forward my material to the local authorities there, which is the FBI. I will do so tomorrow if I find that they still haven't purged said account information from their system.
Yeah, that "theft of authentication information" is a staggering federal crime. It yields all of
4 google results. Oh, such blustery bullshit.
Fun Fact: In the 1980's, Clifford Stoll, an administrator at the Lawrence Berkeley Labs, was repeatedly
root compromised by a West German hacker. The FBI told him to fuck off until he lost $500,000 dollars or any classified military information. No way am I going to believe that they're going to give a damn about 100-odd megabytes of
furry bullshitVolley 3 (the ultimatum!):If you remove the passwords, I will not have any reason to do anything further. If you do not, I will send off the folder and then
get on with my life, which may or may not result in unpleasant consequences for you, personally. Why take your chances? Erase the
passwords and be done with it. I will wait until tomorrow, roughly 11am CET.
I see little sense in further debates. Obviously, anything I say is wrong in your eyes. Unless you come to realize that what you
have done is ethically and morally wrong, I will not continue this discussion. I give you time to at least remedy the criminal
aspect of your actions.
As of writing, it is 17:38 CET, on the "tomorrow" he stated. I'm sure shaking in my boots in fear of legal summons from "Orrick and partners", a law firm so prestigious that it shows NO results on Google, unless the quotes are removed. A legal summons for a crime that apparently doesn't exist.
The mere idea of an Austrian launching a federal criminal suit against an American whom he can only identify by "Pi", 2 email addresses, and an IP address is so totally laughable in reality that it makes me wonder just what's going on inside Toumal's mind. Fascinating stuff, really.
