Case of the Quake Cheats

The open- ascendent community got a lump of coal in its Yule 1999 stocking from renowned hacker John Carmack, the genius behind id peck and such games as Castle Wolfenstein, Doom, and the joggle series. Carmacks .plan file notable a problem that has swiftly emerged since the Quake 1 inception was released under GPL; it seems that some people sport used their force to modify the Quake node as a dig for deceiver. This may at first sight seem a trivial issue who c atomic number 18s if a few testoterone-pumped teenagers cheat at a shoot-em-up game? however in todays internetworked world, countermeasures against Quake cheating arguably provide an valuable laboratory model for cases that atomic number 18 decidedly not trivial, such as electronic commerce, securities trading, and banking. The Quake model is made oddly relevant by its open-source connection. Open source advocates (including me) have been making a beefed-up argument over the end two years that open-sour ce software such as Linux and Apache is fundamentally more inviolable than its closed-source competitors. Cryptographers have long dumb that no encryption dust can really be considered well-tested until it has been ener cleaveically and repeatedly attacked by experts who have full noesis of the algorithms it uses.

Open-source advocates argue that in that respect is nothing finical about cryptography just now its luxuriously stakes that, in general, open peer review is the exactly road to systems which are not merely accidentally upright by obscurity, but robustly secure by design. Carmack, therefore, caus ed a bit of a flutter on Slashdot when he we! nt on to to suggest that simply a pair of closed-source encryption programs could process the Quake-cheating problem. The problem, as he correctly pointed out, is that asking the open-source leaf node to confirm its own correctness wont work; a sufficiently bright cracker could always write a client that would arrogate the right kinds of responses and then cheat. A debate ensued, with some(prenominal) people...If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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