SquawkWin: The Community's First Trojan Horse?

[Martin Georg EDDF 0]

Hi Marty,thanks for the clarification. Yours,Martin Georg/EDDFVACC-SAG PR & Events Coordinator *** mailto:sag11@vacc-sag.orghttp://vatsim.pilotmedia.fi/statusindicato...r=SAG01&a=a.jpg

[Guest jacaru]

They should reveal their identity.Code review ahould meet some conditions that satisfy both, and not only networks managers.And for the your second paragraph, i think it cant be worse that squawkbox 2.3 after a reduced period of testing. Being the condition we are in current pilots, i think the effort is necessary.Jaime.

[Guest metamarty]

You're welcome! :-beerchug

[Guest Piotr_Nowicki]

Well, Hell has been made with good intention.IF you claim to be harmless - please reveal yourself and provide source code for better investigation.I do not wish - I repeat - DO NOT wish to have any information stolen from my PC.How can I be sure you do not record my net transactions if you quietly have done what you 've done?No, definitely I'm displeased of the maneer you have introduced your software.

[Guest metamarty]

I believe most of the changes that were made are for further refining and finetuning the network relaying code and not really adding much functionality. You see, we faced an interesting problem when we started in 1997. As far as I know, this was the first multiserver, low latency network with reliable connections. Realtime ATC over the internet has some strange requirements: first you need low latency; second, you need multiple servers because there will be more players than a conventional multiplayer game, and third, if a link goes down, you'll need backup links to reroute data. All existing networking code was unusable, so everything had to be invented from the start. Some stuff in the code like maximum link queue's where guesswork, so I think VATSIM/IVAO tuned this. Too bad I don't know what was changed, I would find it quite interesting. :-) I also hope they got rid of some horrible code. I remember receiving a panick mail somewhere back in 1998 about the weather no longer getting updated. Turned out that NOAA had just migrated their gopher download service into ftp, and I had to write an ftp client in an hour. You can probably guess what that code looked like :-badteeth

[Guest]

Development of SB3 was first announced when FS2000 was out a while. That was when it was decided to not develop SB2.3 further from the then-current beta version (which is still the latest version released today) and instead focus on SB3 development.That's a main reason SB2.3 was never adapted for FS2002 or FS2004, it was decided it would be too much work and wait for SB3 instead which was promised to be "almost ready".I think development ground to a halt sometime after that (I think it was a fight between the people working on it, but not sure. Such were common at the time in FS groups and led to several breakups) and Joel picked it up about 2-3 years ago (may even have started from scratch).I don't blame Joel for taking his time, but he might have taken on some others to help out when he saw it would take this long.Especially given the very regular announcements that it was "almost ready" and then half a year of nothing at all before the next announcement.I work in the industry myself (though not in games development) so I do know the stress levels we're working under regularly.There's days I hardly see my bed too (though currently it's a bit slow with project priorities shifting away from the project I'm on to please our largest client who needs more manpower).

[Martin Georg EDDF 0]

Jaime,I can fully understand your comment about the current traffic conditions - but I think a software release which is not fully tested would even more people draw away from online flying. I can really imagine their comments now: "damm, that soft was in development for 2 years and it still crashes after all that time". That would be even more worse IMHO ...Regarding code review: This is ONLY to satisfy the network managers, I

[Martin Georg EDDF 0]

Hihi, that sounds really funny :-)As far as I know (and I can only speak for VATSIM) most of the original FSD code has been replaced in the meantime. And there was some functionality added: For example the servers now remember your flightplan after disconnection, and you can instantly reconnect with the same callsign. This saves you from resending your flightplan all the time. AFAIK a sipin-off of that function is also the ability to prefile you flightplan via the web up to 2 hours in advance. But I

[Guest jacaru]

Well I hope IVAO & VATSIM can reach some type of arrangement with the sun team. I dont know why this is so difficult, i have seem more complex environments getting to practical solutions faster than all the arrangements that need to be done for virtual networks and pilot/controller clients getting together. :(

[jeffyen 0]

So the answer to the 'why' question is "We have transferred the datas plane/pilot/squawkwin/FS in order to study the evolution of the software in real time... What is the interest to get your personal data of IVAO or VATSIM? Absolutely nothing! It acted of a follow-up to see at which point our software is popular. And it was!"Can any software developer comment on the relevancy of obtaining id's/passwords to 'study the evolution of...' in the developmental process? And how does that tie in with the ability to 'see at which point our software is popular." Quite a weird answer?

[Tom Allensworth 1,532]

Ah yes, the good ol' days. Nice to see you are still around. Coming to Denver in September? I need to buy you a drink! :)

[Guest Lt_Hawk]

I agree there is a better way of traking the progress of your software than obtaining Passwords/ID's. Also I don't like the Idea of unknown developers. I have not and will not look at Winsquawk until it is approved by Avsim,Vatsim, and IVAO, and I really don't see that happening.As for SB3,I have all the patience in the (people have real lives before creating a FREEWARE client) world! Keep up the good work!

[Guest xtremdav45]

I dont know if I am the only person who feels this way, but I am dying to use this program.I have never gotten SBRelay and SB 2 to work with FS2004, and I want to get on VATSIM badly, I installed SquawkWin, it looks like a great program, but I am too scared to connect, for fear of being terminated.I could care less if The Sun Team knows my PID, as long as I can fly on VATSIM again, and it seems like I have been waiting for SB 3 forever, and there is still no beta out!I think VATSIM should allow virtual pilots like me to fly with this software, cause I dont care is I have some spyware.Just my 2 cents

[Guest rcarlson123]

I'm a software developer, and I can comment on this, but I think you already know the answer. :)All of the information they were gathering can be useful in studying the use of their software, save one piece ... that being the password. I can think of absolutely no way in which their having the password would be of any use, and they've said so themselves. (Which makes me further question why they gathered the password in the first place.)The flight sim version and the SquawkWin version certainly are useful data, for obvious reasons. The CID is also useful. Gathering and storing the CID each time someone logs in via SquawkWin allows them to generate at least two interesting statistics on an ongoing basis: 1) How many distinct users they have, and 2) how often the average user uses the software. It also allows them to see what the distribution of casual, versus moderate, versus power-user is. As an example, VATSIM may have thousands of registered users, but I'd love to know how many log in more than once a week. Gathering the CID would begin to tell them that.Unfortunately, they also gathered the password, which has no value to them. Perhaps they just did so for the sake of "completeness." Perhaps when someone was writing that particular piece of code, they just made a quick and casual decision to simply wrap up all of the user-specific data and send it to the server, in case they might find a need for any one piece of the information at a later date. Perhaps they simply didn't consider the consequences and potential backlash from the VATSIM community. Even the fact that they deliberately encrypted the information before sending it to their web server could be explained by the fact that it's common practice in the web development world to encode any potentially sensitive data that is used as part of a web URL (as is the case here) so that it will not show up as plain text in web server logs, and to make it more difficult to capture with packet sniffers on the network.Perhaps their intentions for gathering our passwords were benign, if there were any concious intentions at all. The naive optimist in me likes to think that no harm was intended.Even so, they refuse to shed their anonymity, they refuse to submit to a code review, and they refuse play along with the rules of VATSIM, so they've blown it.

[Guest Thomas Nyheim]

Can you guys imagine what would happen if a supervisor or admin logged on using this software? That basically gives them access to the whole network.And the fact that they didn't tell anyone about this "feature" makes me wonder. As someone else stated, there are laws against taking personal data without agreement. (and why did they first deny that it sends the info and now suddenly they admit it when we have proof?)Thomas NyheimChief Pilot, UVAVA-Director/Events NY-ARTCC