Oh Dear
For the record:
1) Catsy finds holes in achieve for a living. A minor living, but a living. The fact that she is so good at this has helped us to make Achieve stronger, better, and safer. I personally have lots of important stuff on Achieve, and a malicious hack would be disasterous for me.
2) Catsy has long been capable of hacking my wiz bit. One day, while trying to work out some of these ins and outs, I told her to hack my char and she did it in 15 seconds. But not one second before I asked her to. She won’t try anything without explicit permission, and I feel absolutely sure about this point.
3) She did NOT hack someone else’s MOO. She hacked ours. First she tried to get my wiz char to churn out a wiz bit for her, and then she tried it on Rhonna. Both of us were online at the time, and both of us gave our permission. The hack worked. Catsy’s first act as a wiz was to unset her own wizbit.
4) We realize this hack program compromises ALL the encore MOOs. that’s why we gave a heads up, and that’s why we’re working on patching it. It’s not the only hole, those all of them are fairly complex. Catsy will no doubt find them, and as this happens, we will continue to give heads up about them. And we’re commited to helping to fix them all.
5) I’m utterly saddened that Catspaw is being painted as a cracker, when in reality she is going to help all of us create better MOOs. MOOs do best when lots of eyes are looking at them and lots of hands writing code. The EnCore group is an interesting and dynamic bunch. We can continue to be so. I hope we do.