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Trading Spaces
(Article Contributed By Dino - Posted on July 15th, 2008)
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Every now and then you see a post or an article that makes you sit back and think seriously about what direction this business is heading in. I saw a post such as this today, and I’m still reeling from some of the responses that the original poster received – he wrote a very clear, very simple “expose’” of the current password trading/cracking scene for webmasters, and basically got flamed to hell and back.
His advice was pretty good; use form logins, use MD5 has encryption on your password files and never let your new members choose their own passwords.
Some of the latter posts did catch my eye, especially the one with the backdoor script posted for anyone to use. I’ve no idea if it works and I’m not about to find out, but I’m sure someone out there will try it and find out for themselves. You can bet your ass one of the multitude of surfers is trying to get it installed somewhere right now, but that’s beside the point.
My concerns after reading this were thus:
- No one took the issue seriously. While password trading and cracking have been a problem since the BBS days, it’s one of those subjects that simply isn’t discussed beyond the “give me a recommendation for a secure login script,” to which the poster gets spammed with a few refcodes. Password trading is a problem that can really effect your income if you run a paysite.
- Automatically, other posters assumed that the original thread creator was selling something. Have we become that jaded to think that everyone out there is only after our money? Are we falling into the trap of our own publicity, where we’re money-hungry ruthless bastards who will stop at nothing to make a quick buck? I hope not, because we need information out there in order to survive.
- Lastly, the thread brought to light a problem (or a symptom, if you will) of the current market in adult – people want to stay anonymous beyond the boards. The poster would not reveal what sites he ran, and probably wisely so. Had he revealed his identity, his sites and servers might well have been under attack in minutes.
While these don’t seem like major problems on the surface to anyone (except the first one, which should be of concern to anyone who owns a paysite), they are symptoms of a declining industry to me. I’m not talking about a monetary deprecation, but more of an intellectual one. Yes, the industry is getting dumber by the day.
This password trading thing is a case in point; for years there have been two basic schools of thought about password sites. The first was that the trading sites were actually run by the paysite owners themselves. They would create special passwords to give out and get people limited access to their paysites for perhaps 30 minutes, and then kick them out, hoping they’d seen enough to want more and possibly buy a membership.
Then there was the “nothing is secure” school of thought. These are, more often than not, tech-savvy people who know that nothing, nothing is completely secure if it’s connected to a network. There will always be a loophole, a backdoor or some way of getting or breaking inside a system should the person wanting to break in be sufficiently motivated to do so.
Even the poster’s suggestion of MD5 passwords has flaws, depending on the way MD5 is implemented. His point was to deter the casual “Script kiddie” into moving on somewhere else and try their luck with an unencrypted site in much the same way as having a good car alarm might deter a thief to find an easier target.
No matter which side you take on the matter, it is a problem. We can do things to our sites and servers to help prevent this yet so few owners do, it’s horrible. I can’t bear to think about the lost revenue, the wasted bandwidth and the missed sales that a total disregard for a great post could bring to so many people.
Who cares who he is? Who cares what sites he runs? The poster had information that went beyond the “My new model is HOT! [PICS!]” threads (which I’ve already written about, so I’ll save that rant for another time) yet it will be largely ignored or simply buried in the noise.
This is what is wrong with our industry today. We have a small section of the community that is serious in its business dealings, no matter what direction they or the industry takes. The rest are bandwagon jumpers; here for the quick buck, the illusion of easy women/men or just pretenders who will never, ever make any money selling adult entertainment.
It’s those people who we need to weed out. If you read that post and thought it was a waste of time, I feel sorry for you. Even if you don’t own a paysite, you’d have to be a special kind of idiot not to see value within.
Till tomorrow, pimps!
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