Yahoo games (Chess) "Flooding"

Yahoo games (Chess) "Flooding"

November 6, 2005

Yahoo Games Chess (on-line) Pick a night, any night, and visit any of the advanced chess rooms in Yahoo. Then you can observe for yourself first hand the problem I am about to describe. For the non-chess player, it may be a bit hard to understand at first, but I'll try to describe it in simple terms. Typically, when someone logs into a chess room, he or she uses a single user id. Then that user plays another user in an on-line game of chess. Now comes the problem, some users with way too much time on their hands have discovered ways to log on with multiple user id's. When I say multiple, I

can tell you that tonight, for example, I have seen a user with nearly a hundred user id's. How can this be you ask, if the user id has to be unique? Obviously this is a form of hacking and these enterprising computer users have methods to randomly generate multiple user id's, altering each one just enough to remain unique. For example: t3am_player114

t3am_player115

t3am_player116

t3am_player117 This goes on every night, with literally hundred of user id's flooding the rooms. Ok you ask, so what, why do we care? We care because for one thing, this practice translates into a huge load on the chess servers. When a chess room is "flooded" with these "clone" user id's, it prevents other legitimate users from even logging on until these hackers decide to log off. I have submitted hundreds of emails describing this phenomena to Yahoo support with absolutely no response from them, other than computer generated auto-response emails. One would think that a corporation as hugely high profile and visible as Yahoo would actually respond to something that

actually affects there own hardware. Yahoo has the means and the resources, but thus far has refused to do anything about this criminal behavior or even acknowledge the issue.

Mike Click this link to e-mail the message author: Email User