"The PlayOnline Membership Information section can now be accessed from the web!  (12/18/2007)

Starting today, the PlayOnline "Membership Information" section under Service & Support on the PlayOnline Viewer can be accessed from the web.

PlayOnline "Membership Information" can be accessed here."

Sorry SE, but that's highly unappropriate of you. Instead of making an effort in retrieving people their stolen account, you're giving these hackers an extra way to get our login details.

I am sorry, but I am really scared of logging in at this point. I am running these spyware programs 3-4 times before I log in… My paranoia is just driving me over the edge ! I really have no fun in playing like this :'(

I found these funny posters on the Allakhazam Forums, just click the thumbnails to enlarge

Instructions how to make your own can be found here

The last few days there has been an augmented number of reports of accounts being stolen on various servers. It's causing a lot of people to /panic and become more precautious. After a lot of casualties and accounts being stolen, an Advanced programmer on the Blue Garth forums found ut where the malware was coming from…

Following Information is taken from Maiev's weblog:

>Apparently it has been confirmed that there is some hidden iframe (0×0px) on FFXI ]]DO NOT USE SOMEPAGE[[ that contains malicious javascript. I only ask people with technical expertise to attempt to load the page at this time. The iframe loads a page from “miorsocft.com”, it should be easy to find. This script is being looked into by our dev team already and some volunteers. (I’ll post some screenshots later)

Screenshot

Despite the news above, we’ll still look into the ADs and have a full report on our website, because “account stealing capable” or not, we don’t want them installing annoying junk on your PCs

Source here (near the bottom).

So yea, to protect yourself, don’t visit somepage since its already compromised (And don’t be curious and check it out!). There’s also been speculation that the people who steal accounts are using a flaw in Real Player, so if you have it just uninstall it for now.

Last but not least, having a web server compromised is pretty bad. (Eg Somepage). I’ve also been getting random spam from Chinese IP addresses. So I’d like to remind those that own a website and forums that is related to FFXI to keep it secured ‘.’ At the very least, strong passwords for your server and update your software. As an administrator of web services, you hold a lot of information about people (especially if you run a forum), and having those compromised not only will leak personal information, but will allow an attacker to modify the website to something similar to somepage and hurt all those users.

In general, the attacker is using a flaw from both the server and client (Real Player) to make this happen. Therefore, please update your programs (like all of it), patch Windows (there’s a patch yesterday for both XP and Vista, do a manual Windows Update) and use a secure browser.<

Any idea how terrible this is? SE is actually proclaiming their accomplishments of defeating RMTs and because of the increased difficulties this has caused these gil sellers, they are looking for other ways to farm their gil. Implementing malicious scripts on community websites would seem an extreme action at first, but apparently that's the course they're heading for right now…

It even gets worse. At this point SE is nothing doing about the stolen accounts, they're not even recovering them. Basically they're asking for your NEW Visa details, which most likely has already been changed by the hacker by then. So they tell you they can't help you. CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT? You pay 4 years with the same visa for your account, expansions, membership. Then suddenly your account gets compromised and some obscure visa details editing takes place without any reason and they don't intervene??? It's as Square Enix just doesn't care and bluntly invites/encourages people to steal others their account. it even makes the selling of accounts so easy…

If SE really wants to keep this outdated method of linking owners of accounts to their visa details, then at least let them ask people for their current visa card details before being able to change these details:

*Current Visa card number…
*New Visa card number…
*Retype new viacard number…

Anyway, reading following thread made me even more scared (links provided by Maiev)

I sincerely hope this never happens to me, I would be tremendously devastated :'(

!! In a few days from now this site will be moved to http://www.verohawke.com and the current url will seize to work , so please update your bookmarks!!!

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Any comments, thoughts about the theme and layout, suggestions in general or help to create a nice banner for this weblog; please post as  "comment" in this post. It would mean a lot to me !

Most of you will probably have heard of the FFXI modelviewer and its more advanced successor Altanview. Well if you browse through altanaview, there is a basic motion that goes as in the following video: 

In case you're wondering, what you hear is the little taru singing while playing the wind instrument and string instrument at the same time, which doesn't sound bad at all.
So I searched the internet for some of these "FFXI Bard remixed songs" and only was able to find these two:

Kmax – FFXI Bard Work (1.48 min)
***Very creatively done with just a small set of variables***
[audio:http://www.daverline.com/ffxi/weblog/audio/Bardwork.mp3]
Download

MarcstaR – The Bard's Song (4.28 min)
***I like this one a lot, although the drums can be annoying sometimes***
[audio:http://www.daverline.com/ffxi/weblog/audio/Bardsong.mp3]
Download