I think this warrants to be here as people may not be on the known about it.
What is (was) Playerscope?
With the changes to the Blacklist in Dawntrail, players got an Unique ID on their Service Account, said ID was shared among every single character in that Service Account. Playerscope was a plugin that scraped this ID, and was able to pin all the Alt Characters of a player. It got a Cease & Desist by SE and was deleted, to also be "fixed" by Square in future patches, but that didn't stopped someone from making another similar plugin, EchoVault.
Ok, What is EchoVault?
About a week ago, another plugin came to light, Memoria, which got it's discussion, it stated being able to track alts, but that feature never seemed to work, regardless, it got a fair bit of backlash and was shut down by the Dev (More about him later).
But that didn't lasted long, because ANOTHER Plugin came out a few days ago, EchoVault, which I am sad to announce, it can track alts, just like PlayerScope did.
Wait, I thought Square Enix fixed this User ID thing?
So what SE did to patch this issue, was make this User ID be randomized on login, which would technically make it impossible to track...or that would be the case, if it wasn't due the fact this "on login randomizing" worked on the user that logs out, the problem, it is not YOUR login, but other users, meaning that if an user of this plugin were to never log out, they could scrape the data of anyone that enters their render distance, or well, Player Search too as I was typing this post up.
Is there proof of this?
I made Two Alt Characters, completely shutting down the client between their creation, and doing so again on login between them, then I proceeded to go to Balmung's Uldah, as it seems to be the spot that's being tracked the most.
Both got scoped instantly, and the alt tracking worked soon after.
(Proof they are my characters)
If you need further proof, you are more than welcomed to try this yourself.
What is the Dev's damage???
Wish I knew, but here comes the fun part, the Memoria dev and the EchoVault dev are the exact same person. The domain for both websites is the same, and on his "shutdown message" for Memoria, he felt the need to put this line here.
Not to mention, as someone who was in both Discords, the mannerisms of the dev are the exact same, snarky, childish, and downright dismissive. Even worse now too since he literally has a channel where he mocks people's takedown requests.
So...what can I do?
Report it to SE's Special Task Force in hopes they deal with this. I'd say report the GitHub as well, but that was shut down rather quickly, and instead the dev opted to upload the code himself. Code that I should mention is Closed Source, so who knows what has in it.
tl;dr: alt tracking still works, Square's fix did jack.
submitted by /u/Trooawei
[link] [comments]
Continue reading...
What is (was) Playerscope?
With the changes to the Blacklist in Dawntrail, players got an Unique ID on their Service Account, said ID was shared among every single character in that Service Account. Playerscope was a plugin that scraped this ID, and was able to pin all the Alt Characters of a player. It got a Cease & Desist by SE and was deleted, to also be "fixed" by Square in future patches, but that didn't stopped someone from making another similar plugin, EchoVault.
Ok, What is EchoVault?
About a week ago, another plugin came to light, Memoria, which got it's discussion, it stated being able to track alts, but that feature never seemed to work, regardless, it got a fair bit of backlash and was shut down by the Dev (More about him later).
But that didn't lasted long, because ANOTHER Plugin came out a few days ago, EchoVault, which I am sad to announce, it can track alts, just like PlayerScope did.
Wait, I thought Square Enix fixed this User ID thing?
So what SE did to patch this issue, was make this User ID be randomized on login, which would technically make it impossible to track...or that would be the case, if it wasn't due the fact this "on login randomizing" worked on the user that logs out, the problem, it is not YOUR login, but other users, meaning that if an user of this plugin were to never log out, they could scrape the data of anyone that enters their render distance, or well, Player Search too as I was typing this post up.
Is there proof of this?
I made Two Alt Characters, completely shutting down the client between their creation, and doing so again on login between them, then I proceeded to go to Balmung's Uldah, as it seems to be the spot that's being tracked the most.
Both got scoped instantly, and the alt tracking worked soon after.
(Proof they are my characters)
If you need further proof, you are more than welcomed to try this yourself.
What is the Dev's damage???
Wish I knew, but here comes the fun part, the Memoria dev and the EchoVault dev are the exact same person. The domain for both websites is the same, and on his "shutdown message" for Memoria, he felt the need to put this line here.
Not to mention, as someone who was in both Discords, the mannerisms of the dev are the exact same, snarky, childish, and downright dismissive. Even worse now too since he literally has a channel where he mocks people's takedown requests.
So...what can I do?
Report it to SE's Special Task Force in hopes they deal with this. I'd say report the GitHub as well, but that was shut down rather quickly, and instead the dev opted to upload the code himself. Code that I should mention is Closed Source, so who knows what has in it.
tl;dr: alt tracking still works, Square's fix did jack.
submitted by /u/Trooawei
[link] [comments]
Continue reading...