jSnively

Nope nope nope nope nope. Thread closed.

I encourage all posters to please take a minute to review our posting guidelines.

Apologizes to anyone who actually wanted to have a conversation about this.

Metriacanthosaurus said:

This minor issue can get in line behind:

1) Shameful scam In-App purchase design that prevents you from using the purchase on more than one of your own personal devices. No idea how Apple has allowed this. All other Apps with in-app purchase to unlock permanent content allow you to restore it at any time.

2) Embarassingly stupid gameplay. Auto-jump over enemies? This is not Mario.

1) Completely incorrect. You need to link the game to your Nintendo account, as it instructs during the initial set up. If you don't do this, you can always do it later, but it tells you that's where your purchases and progress are stored -- not on Apple's ecosystem. This is nothing new for games on IOS, plenty work behind an external login. I will concede, however, that it is a bit obtuse given who they are targeting with the release.

2) It's not bad. Going by your comment it seems like you didn't make it much past the tutorial though? The only enemies you auto-vault over are the tiny ones like goombas, and even though you auto-vault over them you still do need to interact via a timed tap to actually jump on their heads and get any points. You are still forced to jump on the heads of larger enemies, and they will still do damage to you if you simply walk into them.

In a lot of ways it's a return to form. You're doing score-based runs while the game itself is emphasizing mastery of the levels and working to retain the precise timing part of platforming. That's pretty Mario at its core. Have you gotten to the black coins on any level yet? Those things are no joke.

No one is going to argue that losing direct control of Mario makes this game better, but that is one of the concessions of the platform and the audience they chose to target. This is a game built for mobile, and all the baggage that comes with that. At worst it's just disappointing because it's exactly what everyone expected it to be. There were hopes that maybe Nintendo, of all companies, would do something really cool, but it turns out they essentially just made a runner with Mario.

This whole thing is more about the brand than the game anyway. Nintendo doesn't want to make full blown iOS games, they want to keep their brands fresh and encourage people to buy their hardware to get the full experience.

apple ][ said:

jSnively said:

I went ahead and removed the post completely for you. Going forward, we will simply delete any inappropriate posts you make instead of sanitizing them. That's less work for us anyway ; )

I have a feeling that a considerable percentage of my posts will have to be sanitized, as I have never been shy to state what I believe, and I am always willing to back up what I believe and argue in favor of my viewpoints.

If the new direction of the site means that certain kinds of opinions will have to be 'sanitized', then I don't have a problem with that, it is up to the site owners how they wish to run their site after all.

But it is obvious to me that a person such as myself, who is often politically incorrect, will no longer be a good fit, with the new direction.

I wont burden anybody with having to 'sanitize' any of my posts anymore, because I wont post here anymore, and that'll be even less work for anybody involved.

For what it's worth, I do still believe that this is the best Apple related news site, and I will still check in and read it from time to time. I just wont post anymore, because I'm just not a very 'sanitary' person, at least when it comes to my viewpoints and my words.

You are still welcome to post here. The moderation is hitting the news threads the heaviest, because that is where we can affect the most change, and harder still where it is most public facing (fist 10 or so posts). I'm not going to go in the political threads unless someone flags something. The bog is too deep there to even begin to wade through.

That said, should you choose to stop posting, we wish you nothing but the best and hope you find somewhere you can express yourself how you feel you need to. We'll be here should you change your mind and return, no hard feelings.

SpamSandwich said:

Not exactly sure if this would be the thread to add this, but are everyone else's headlines looking like this (especially with longer text descriptions)? Notice how the text is cutoff?

Haha, Dan's title was too long for the forums. Publisher has been updated to truncate with '...' : )

volcan said:

Good to know. So how long do you think it takes to crack so many accounts using your techniques?

This gets technical. Depends heavily on the resources of the person doing the cracking. GPU accelerated cracking has moved a lot of this stuff from "that would take forever" to "holy crap, everything is broken now."

I suggest taking a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5#Security if you want to know more info about the security pitfalls MD5 specifically.There are ways to iterate over the passwords faster than a brute force attack too, some of which could potentially reveal the actual password itself -- not by reversing the MD5 mind you, but by working with  extremely large sets of data known as "rainbow tables".

Basically if you know the password is MD5 hashed, and it's not properly salted, you can remove the need to brute force anything by simply comparing the stolen hashed output against a precomputed set of outputs. If i spend the time to figure out what most common passwords would be when run through the algorithm, I can skip doing any potentially expensive computations. This is what is known as a "rainbow table". You can do a whole lot of those comparisons every second on modern hardware.

Essentially, If your password gets hashed to 1234567890123456798012 and I already know the possible inputs that could return that output, or (often) just the most likely inputs, then I can use that knowledge to know what your password actually is.

volcan said:

Isnt that billions of computer hours for slim possibility that they would find something useful?

'Useful' means different things to different people. They're interested in things like your contact list so they can add them to their spam lists (either for personal use or resale), credit card numbers, security question information, etc. Once (in the case of Yahoo Mail) they get a hold of an email account, they can use it to try to reset your password on other, potentially more valuable targets. If, for example, that same email was used to log into your Wells Fargo bank account and your security question is your mother's maiden name... there's probably a good chance they can figure that out. That can be a real problem.

Also, none of those companies (like Wells Fargo) really know what you sound like on the phone, so it becomes very easy to use social engineering to trick them to do stuff that is outside of normal policy. You can appear to be an authentic person and even 'prove' you are them by sending an email from their account.

TLDR; Damn Internet, You scary.