[Krono]

Originally Posted by Anh_Minh

Agreed, but one of the things I'd do in Kayaba's shoes would be to kill people if they start disconnecting some of the servers. Why let them study it? Either that or keep only one server and wipe the rest. Sounds risky, but what do I care? I'm a madman who took 10000 people hostage.

True, that's an entirely viable possible step to take. It depends a bit on the minimum hardware required to keep everything running properly, and how willing we are to risk killing people for a hardware failure. We want the people we trapped playing the game. We'd rather not lose a significant percentage of them because a server had a faulty motherboard, or was plugged into a faulty surge protector.

Another would be to homebrew a protocol to connect to the server (just to fuck with the hackers). Based around whichever certificate technology's the strongest at the time. And of course, change the certificates regularly. Sounds like a pain, but again, what do I care?

A certificate protocol I assume you mean? Because you pretty much aren't going to be able to get away from TCP/IP as your connection protocol.

Originally Posted by Shimapan

That's the point exactly. *Every* electronical device has to pass stringent safety checks to make sure it doesn't present a hazard when it's used. If it should become known that it has microwave emitters that could be possibly lethal, it would never get approval by the regulation office and thus couldn't get into production in the first place.

Here's an article about "Regulation and licensure in engineering":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulat...in_engineering

At a glance, that article entirely concerns itself entirely with the regulations and licensing requirements for calling yourself an engineer. It says nothing about the process of certifying that a new electronic device meets government safety standard, which is what we're interested in.

Originally Posted by Clarste

So I guess you're saying that the safest system is the one that no one need to access, ever.

More or less. Security holes being found and exploited largely arise from the need to talk to a variety of other machines for various services. When you only want to talk to a very limited number of machines that you know at a level hardwired into them, for just one or two services, it gets significantly harder to compromise you because attackers have to impersonate a machine you'll actually talk to. When you say you'll kill anyone that stops talking to you, the willingness to risk shoving one of those machines out of the way to impersonate them falls significantly.

The bottom line is that while Kayaba can't make the servers unhackable, he can make it difficult and dangerous enough to severely limit what most sane people are willing to do.