BBC – MMO Fallout

The odds of getting caught while firing off denial of service attacks against corporate servers may be low, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that the act is any less criminal. Romanian citizen Calin Mateias found that lesson out the hard way when a judge issued a one year prison sentence and $30,000 in damages after the man was found guilty of attacking the World of Warcraft servers. The distributed denial of service attacks lasted from February to September 2010 and were primarily motivated out of a “juvenile desire” to beat his rivals.

Yes, a 37 year old man will be spending a year in prison because he so desperately wanted to beat people in World of Warcraft that he committed a criminal act. Mateias was also required to foot Blizzard’s costs in preventing his attacks at the time, which ran close to thirty thousand dollars. In case that doesn’t paint enough of a picture, Mateias used the online handle “Dr. Mengele,” after the infamous Nazi doctor.

(Source: BBC)

Iranian gamers may be waking up to find that access to a number of games will be going away in the coming weeks. According to the BBC, while the Iran government would like you to believe that the games are being banned as “western propaganda” used to “poison the minds of the youth population in Iran,” the real culprit appears to be international sanctions against the country. While many publishers already have no intention of releasing their games in Iran, this does mean that gamers in Iran will find their IP addresses blocked from accessing previously available services.

Blizzard responded to recent comments of Battle.net being blocked in Iran with the following:

We can’t speak to reports surrounding the Iranian government restricting games from its citizens. What we do know is that United States trade restrictions and economic sanction laws prohibit Blizzard from doing business with residents of certain nations, including Iran. We’ve recently tightened up our procedures to ensure compliance with those laws, which means we must restrict access to our games by players in those nations.

Iranian youth may want to consider a proxy if they intend on continuing to poison their minds with western propaganda.

(Source: BBC)