Just a suggestion while traveling... and not...

**TexRyker** · 05-21-08, 10:51 AM

Many of you have heard about the fact in public places it is important not to access private accounts or transmit personal information while on a public internet connection. I have been working my way into the security end of tech lately and have been reading up on some of the interesting things to be had while on a public network...

Things I have been able to pull so far while watching traffic on a switched network: (Real world test environment and I'm still a noob in training)

Usernames & P/W's to non https sites
Instant Message Traffic
Security Certificates that can be used later to decrypt SSL traffic
Voip Traffic
Sites being visited
What people are looking at on the net

So word to the wise... its really not that hard for someone to get your stuff without your knowledge... especially in a public place.

At your house...

If you are running 128 or 64 bit wireless wep encryption... it can be broken in less than 15 minutes these days, even if no one is connected to it. Once that has been cracked everything above is possible, along with access to the typical file shares etc.

It is very important that you assign a very strong password to your WPA encryption to also prevent break-ins this would be for example T3x@$T3@mP!@y3R$'C0m
Use of the above password would make your connection very, very hard to break... making the attacker give up and move on. If you used a standard dictionary word (for example: giant laser beams) they could be on within minutes.

Keep it on lock out there...

Tex

**CivilWars** · 05-21-08, 11:10 AM

One of my good friends is a pilot, and used to travel often hauling cargo. He said every time he got to a new hotel he would connect his computer, and almost instantly have access to other hotel guets' computers. Lucky for them he was nice, and would call the front desk and ask them to relay the message.

**TexRyker** · 05-21-08, 11:16 AM

Right, the network neighborhood and network discovery on windows will also give you free access to file shares on machines unless the folder permissions are properly set. In vista this is not so much the case as you have the ability to disable network discovery with one click.

To check yours right click your shared folder and go to the security tab. Adjust as needed.

**Visualz** · 09-25-12, 04:44 PM

Hello, I was wondering if anyone knows if there is ever going to be another big update to the first game? I'm getting really tired of some of the stupid stuff that a lot of teams are still exploiting in the game. I can think of so many things that can be upgraded, and to be honest, both L4D1 and 2 seem to have a pretty active community, so why is the second one getting all the attention?

-V

**Almostinsane** · 09-25-12, 09:56 PM

It's the way company's work. When you come out with your 2nd version, you are not going to sweep it under the rug and continue to update the original more. The 2nd game has had all the campaigns added, i wouldn't be surprised if we see the 1st L4D servers shut down. It's not because it's unpopular, but halo 2 was shut down even though tons of people played it, because they wanted more people to play the newer games.

Sent from my iPod touch using Tapatalk

**zencats** · 09-25-12, 11:52 PM

There was a fairly recent update for PC actually, but nothing really that special;

Left 4 Dead Update Released
Product Update - Valve
Aug 22, 2012
Updates to Left 4 Dead have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:

- Fixed a crash when attempting to play Single Player
- Fixed a possible buffer overflow in localized strings
- Fixed a networkID exploit that allowed players to avoid getting banned
- Fixed some images not rendering correctly on the dedicated server welcome screen

I'm unsure as to whether they'll be another one though, they left the xbox version with that 'errors' problem for aaaages...

Valve seem pretty quiet at the moment with respect to the Left 4 Dead series. They seem to have neglected L4D on both platforms recently. Even though L4D2 finally got it's Cold Stream release, from what I hear it was initially well received by the xbox guys until the server fixes never properly came and the booting back to menu during games. Now it has less players than there were before.

I'm a little befuzzled that Valve haven't been very talkative about L4D at all, especially after quite a long-awaited DLC was released. They have reduced their Tweets and forum posts, the PC version of L4D2 went without an official server connection error fix for about 8 days, and the bug-fix list is getting longer. There is an active community on both games though, so even if they did shut down official servers, there'd always be 3rd party ones available to play on. I appreciate the work done by people like ProdigySim and especially Rayman (just to name 2), and wonder if Valve would ever 'give' the game to the community to fix lol, 'cause, you know, they don't seem to be too bothered themselves.

Maybe they have something up their sleeve and surprise everybody, I mean they did announce that we'll get a Steam Workshop - however I know most people just use l4dmaps / gamebanana etc so it may not get used as much as it could... We'll see. That should be mid October I think.

As far as the xbox version goes, I can see why Valve has slowed / stopped updates (Microsoft and $ I imagine), but they should have got Cold Stream right on release. If they remove the xbox servers (which they have recently said they are increasing the numbers of), then you'd all just have to play local server I suppose.

TLDR; no idea, doubtful though.

**Visualz** · 09-26-12, 06:50 AM

Hmm. I'm hoping they are just neglecting L4D at the moment because of Half-Life 2: Ep 3/Half-Life 3. As everyone else has pointed out before, a Left 4 Dead 3 is quite unlikely, so I'm just hoping they keep the 2 existing games going as long as possible!

-V

**Beery** · 12-09-12, 07:44 AM

Originally Posted by Almostinsane

...The 2nd game has had all the campaigns added...

Yeah, but that doesn't make it Left 4 Dead. It's a different game, plays differently and has different weapons etc. Personally, I don't think it's as good.

I'd prefer it if they would add all the L4D2 campaigns to L4D. Then I might play them.