Meaning titles for Assets on DLS would be helpful

[ray_whiley]

I agree that it is not always easy to give a name which completely and accurately describes an asset on the DLS. This is where the description becomes useful -it can be long enough to give a really good idea of what the asset is and even, if desired, some historical information or whatever.

Too many assets on the DLS unfortunately lack any description.

Ray

 

[H222]

I'm not a coder but what if each of them has 2 or 3 bytes of a larger malicious program inside and this is their way of getting the code into the N3V system? At some later point he sends the "trigger", it assembles, runs itself, and N3V/DLS, etc is trashed.

N3V GET OFF YOUR BUTT BEFORE ITS TO LATE!!!

Ben

I have my doubts Ben. I doubt you would've said that if it had been an American bloke spamming but since it's Russian it must be a conspiracy

 

[bendorsey]

H222:

I suppose under normal circumstances I should take offense at your implication but I'll pass - I have better things to do.

As for where they are from - I don't care if they are little green men from mars - its suspicious and needs some serious investigation.

What useful (Trainz) purpose is there in reserving 1000's of places on the DLS?

Ben

 

[rickf77]

I used to be a moderator and then junoir admin at SimOuthouse. It's the same story as here. I just wanted to help in some way. Donated a ton of money to the site, they thought I wanted to "buy" a position as moderator. If you have never done this job, it's just more hours of your day shot. My last job was checking out new members. User names like. "Krash, I'mapirate, bigolddick", etc., were to be reported to someone smarter than me. Many names like that were refused membership. Any item uploaded to the site was checked very carefully. Most likely 991 uploads like this would never had made it to the downloads section. Someone would have taken a good hard look at it. I guess it would take more manpower to do this here. I sure wouldn't want to do it!

Scary stuff indeed, Ben.




Cheers....Rick

 

[bendorsey]

As I said way earlier - Auran used to actually look at each uploaded item for inappropriate content, etc. Not so anymore. The entire process seems automated. Inappropriate items only get looked at after someone complains. Folks have been complaining but N3V doesn't seem interested.

The automatic system didn't flag these in any manner so they got on (and yes - I realize there was no reason to flag them). They and there content (even the lack of it) isn't the problem (unless my silly little theory above is correct, lol) - its the quantity that should have raised red flags. I wonder what would have happened if the old "look at each item" system was still in place. At the very least I'd think someone would have asked those three gents a few questions as to the purpose of reserving so many places.

Ben

 

[JCitron]

I don't get what the reserved space is for because this is only wasting data space on the DLS. The only thing they are reserving are their own Kuid numbers.

The only way to find out what these items are is to download them and waste our disk space in the process. I too am suspicious of something else being done here given the past experiences we've had with a few individuals.

John

 

[clam1952]

Looks like the uploaders are all new users which could be suspicious, a new user is not going to upload thousands of assets and probably wouldn't know how to anyway. I'm suspecting it's the illegal cloning for multiplayer and probably banned mob up to some trickery with new identities.

 

[bendorsey]

Reserving a space doesn't reserve a kuid number. Only they can assign that and it doesn't matter when - today, tomorrow, or next year. This is either reserving positions on the DLS for a series of consecutive items or something a bit more sinister.

I've been a Trainzer since October, 2005 when I uploaded my first item to the DLS. In all that time I have never heard of anyone reserving places on the DLS. Has anyone else? If so how many and did they ever say what the purpose was?

Ben

 

[clam1952]

OK, no one else seems to have spotted this, Some prolific uploaders of illegally cloned stuff for multiplayer have had all their large numbers of cloned assets removed from the DLS. Suddenly previously unheard of new users appear and upload thousands of reserved items, curiously from the same location on this planet as those who are presumably banned. I'm wondering if removed items equate to number of reserved ones.

 

[bendorsey]

Congrats on your eagle eye for spotting that.

Perhaps someone at N3V could comment as they are probably the only folks who could determine if the numbers are the same.

Does deleting an item from the DLS leave a "hole" of some sort? I don't know (or see why it would). Wouldn't it just free up disk (or whatever) space for use by others?

Ben

 

[Jananton]

Hmm, Malc has the same idea I had when I saw this 'reserved' stuff show up first. And yes removing them would ultimately free up server disk space, but how and when is up to the database type and how it handles removing unused data slots.

Greetings from nighttime Amsterdam,

Jan

 

[bendorsey]

As I understand it doesn't actually delete the data - it just erases the pointers to the data which way back in my Commodore Computer days (told ya I was an old fart, lol) was done in what was called the BAM (block allocation map). The bit for that byte was reset to zero for free to use.

Ben

 

[JCitron]

I've been thinking the same thing. I read in another post from Zec, in the other message that has been locked from a week ago, that N3V is aware of the situation and is looking into it.


Ben,

You are correct on how the data is removed. The information is not physically deleted unless a special utility runs that wipes the disk by running consecutive 1s and 0s (FFFFFF and 000000) repeatedly on the disk then inverts the pattern and writes the data again. If this kind of operation isn't run, then the old data remains, however, the only thing that is removed is a pointer that locates the information. This is how disk recovery tools work. They can read the missing pointer and rewrite it which then brings the data back. The only caveat with a tool like this is it won't work on disks that have been written to subsequently after the data loss.

John