Finnish police raids target virtual thieves Finnish police have raided five homes in a search for virtual furniture stolen from Habbo Hotel. The virtual world, which is big in Finland, claims 15 million users and turns over about $60m a year by charging users for various virtual goods. Finnish police told the Beeb that they were investigating 400 separate cases of …
"the miscreants will serve a virtual sentence in a virtual gaol" - isnt this the usual punishment for common criminals in England? Unless they're overly tall photographers, or happen to have a beard and slightly darker skin, of course...
Joke icon because i wish i was...
These items are no diffrent to money in the bank. Only about 1% of money in circulation is "real" money. The rest is nothing more than numbers on a computer. (Oh, and don't get confused with the figgers passed around when northen rock went down. That only included cash and demand deposits)
is at least as impressive as it would be to have 15 million users on a Finnish-language website.
Had your two braincells cooperated, it might have dawned on you that Habbo might not be Finnish, just rather popular there. And a quick check would have verified that this is a website whose primary language is English.
AFAIK the game won't let you copy items, once you "give" an item to someone else the server that holds all your data decreases your item count by one and increases the item count of the reciepient by one. If you were allowed to duplicate items they'd have no value and nobody would hand money over to Habbo.
(You can argue they already have no value but amazingly people are willing to hand over money so...)
Still baffled. Presumably each valuble item has an ID that was assigned to one user and has been incorerectly re-assigned (stolen) by another.
There is "of course" an audit trail for each user and item. So can't the Habbo admins simply investigate the complaint and re-re-assign ithe item back (and disable the account of the offending user for breaking the T&C)?
Actually, given an effective audit trail and an enforced time-lag, why is it possible to steal money from someone's bank account remotely? Surely the banks know the account it's gone to and can just transfer the money back. IME the time-lag is certainly there. I guess key word is "effective".
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I wonder if they fact they were 'phished' will have any bearing on it at all.
If someone tricked me in to handing them my house keys and they went in & stole my furniture I'm sure my insurance wouldn't be too keen to pay out as it's my own fault for giving away my keys. It's not the same as someone picking my locks and breaking in.
Granted it's not a perfect analogy...
The term you are looking for is "burglary artifice". i.e. committing a burglary, gaining entry by ruse rather than by breaking and entering.
Whether your Insurance company sees any difference is down to your eyesight and their small print.......
...have you ever gone to see a movie? Stupid idiot! You just spent your hard earned money on a stupid movie! Do you have internet access? Stupid idiot! You're paying for a bunch of ones and zeroes! Have you ever bought a video game? Stupid idiot! You spent your hard-earned cash on a stupid game! Have you gone to an amusement park? Stupid idiot! You bought the right to walk through a gate when all you're going to do is walk back out of it again!
It boggles my mind how many people fail to understand that just because a form of entertainment-for-pay isn't appealing to them doesn't mean it doesn't appeal to others, and vice versa.
If anyone doesn't understand the way that some people attach real value to imaginary objects, I suggest that they read "For the Win" by Cory Doctorow. It is a brilliant book (other than some mildly irritating embedded commercial plugs) by a man who has put a lot of thought into visualising a future which is already here (if that isn't an anachronism).
In fact I would recommend it to anyone who has any interest in politics, IT and human interaction. One of the best books I have read in ages. Available online at craphound.com/ftw/ or in hard copy in good bookstores (shortly).
You'd expect the Finnish police to become virtual and perform the raid virtually (don't tell me that the game doesn't have administrative access to users' clients).
I can just see it....you're minding your own business when suddenly a Finnish version of the Keystone Cops bursts into your environment, clowns about for a bit then disappears to the next environment.
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