TOPIC: Warning to users: 1.4.4 client cannot be trusted

Dear all,

I’m aware of the fact that anything I will say below can’t undo what ST2 has done, therefor I have deactivated the admin rights for ST2 for the time being.

I have no idea what can be done at this moment to “fix” or make things better on what has happened, I just want to bring my deepest excuses to everyone who got involved into ST2’s foolish actions. We will discuss internally with all other admins on what’s going to be done in regards to ST2’s rights and admin capabilities for the community, since ST2 has always been a valuable asset to our team!

BTPro came a long way from nothing till the community what it is today, this couldn’t have been possible without the daily work which people bring into the community on voluntary basis and personal costs (cause as every community admin knows, donations are far not enough to keep the servers running), this includes ST2’s efforts and is therefor even more foolish of him and VERY disappointing for our community.

I hope that the players of our community understand that this was a solo action from one of our admins and that this issue won’t happen again. We will build-in checks to make sure that the binary which gets released is indeed the binary which gets generated from the DIFF which is included into the ZIP file and hasn’t been tempered with. The best ways to do this is at this moment not known yet to me, if there are any ideas about this I would gladly like to hear it.

Again, I’m VERY sorry that this happened and I will have some personal chats on IRC as soon as possible with some people (yorvex, The_Dude, Chucky, etc.), if anyone wants to talk about this, of course feel free to join our IRC channel, the link to the channel is under the menu item: “Contact us”.

Please note that I’m on holiday at this moment and that I will return on the 3rd of November, until that time I could be a little less available on IRC, but please be sure that I AM thinking about on how to prevent things like this in the future!

Best regards,

Frank
Server Admin and Owner of BTPro

The problem with the apologies is that some of us have seen in the past how they are made on the public but then involved people get a private message from him like "I only wanted to stop the public discussion, but in reality I know I am right!" - hence the ironic comments you are seeing here. I doubt that ST2 would do it this time though, he will have noticed that this thing is too serious.

With that in mind I am glad to see that other official admins like HSquishy and Frank show that they are willing to handle this case as professional as it is possible for a gaming Community and asking the right questions about what has happened and what can be done about it in the future.

I don't have much time now but my quick answer to Frank would be: four-eyes principle. Let ST2 do everything as usual, but for the very last step where a new client is about to be released he should not give out any binaries. Instead he only gives out the diff internally and a second person from BTPro takes that, does a quick check on it and then compiles the binary from it that is going to be released. This way you got the code checked by a neutral person and also ensure consistency between source and binary through that neutral person.
The second person doesn't need to have a deep understanding of C++ but he should have some basic programming knowledge - searching for some names in the code won't be sufficient as there are ways to disguise that even in source code.
The process might delay a client release as you always need both ST2 and another person available (though the second person could be out of a pool of several people) but I think it's worth it for the extra security. It can also rule out other (unintended) problems that might have sneaked into the patch code.

For this to work of course the second person should be someone who hasn't shown to side with ST2 in his "holy wars" (e.g. the one against alex) in the past - which would rule out at least one other person from BTPro.



I am only talking about the work on the client here and not about other accesses he got in BTPro. I don't have any good suggestions what to do about this to be honest. I can tell you that back on our CS clan we had an admin who has never always been starting hard discussions about many actions within the clan - actions from and others were constantly questioned and challenged by him. But those discussions were very factual from his side, you could always talk to him about everything and it went out fine. This is why nobody expected what he finally did: he used his admin access to delete all our game server files in some sudden rage.
When we found out he denied that it was him but after we have proven it to him by log files he just told us we're all idiots and then disappeared forever. That was quite a shock I can tell you. Fortunately we were making backups to a server he didn't have access to, but it was certainly a lesson for me.
That's not me trying to say it's where ST2 will end up. I am only trying to say you cannot know what happens with a person and you should carefully check what accesses a single person got.

And in my case this was a person where everyone understood what his problem was in discussions and who seemed calm and reasonable and also comprehensible in his actions (at least until that last sudden "explosion"). Unlike ST2 who in the past often tried to explain his motives for certain things but I simply didn't understand (and others seemed to have the same problem).

In this case he didn't even try to explain, so the only thing I am left with is speculation.
Mostly it seems to be very old grudges anyone else in the world has long forgotten. He still seems to hate me for chosing alex over him when I selected someone to get SSH access to the server. And he always said and still says that we're not enforcing the rules properly on n-ice and tries to make his point about this whenever he can. E.g. for the 3 people involved that's the case and there have been discussions with them in the past. So it seems like he used his position to give a penalty of his own to them.

The good news is that this is still mostly about n-ice, which is why you haven't had problems with this on BTPro in the past and have always seen the good side of him. I am surprised myself to see that he has gone this far to finally involve BTPro business too.
So if you want to know how it looks if you ever enrage him against BTPro too you have just gotten a small taste - we at n-ice know already very well. The only reason why I haven't banned him from our channel and from our servers so far is that I was afraid this could disturb the good relations between BTPro and n-ice. But I have to think this through again, because now he has crossed that border anyway.

Thats the problem with high risk assets Frank, you can profit or loose way more.

The point is, even after this shitstorm, ST2 still has no intention to tell us about the real reasons for why he did it. As long as he does not become a more open person, telling us in all honesty what exactly was the reasons, those things sooner or later will happen again.

The approach of BTPro team is excellent and it shed all dirt. I personally think no one would doubt about BTPro creditability anyway, because ST2's attitude and actions are more or less well known.

It is only ST2 who lost every last bit of honor here and it is dissapointing that someone who demanded from everybody else to explain everything and act correctly has very little courage to do so himself.
I'd like to also express my notion, that reason why communities with so much common roots like BTPro and n-ice were not cooperating much or at least there was this feeling that they don't like each other was ST2's hate for his past in n-ice.

I agree with previous posts, that to regain trust amongst not only BTPro community, but from the n-ice and maybe Novapolis too, ST2 should play with open cards (I don't really care about some diff, but posting it would at least show some real will to apologize) and go though some catharsis, because simple impersonal apology and hiding behind the wall will result only in building another wall there, and this I am saying directly to you, ST2. Unless you thought your current sorry words honestly and unless you explain your role in this incident more, from now on every word you say against anybody else will be looked upon as pointless and nobody will take it seriously.

Well, I missed the part "ST2 has asked me to do it" in Frank´s post, so it shows to me like he thinks that his rage action is gone with the help of some apologies. Nevertheless it was an expected decision.

Since I have registered here I looked around the topics on btpro and I was suprised that another ST2 is working here. I am wondering why he is making a good job here and he is like a grumpy guy in our forum and irc. Anyway, YorVeX´s last post has brought some light into this matter. But I believe it´s hardly doable to supervise him all the time to prevent for rage actions in future.

Well, I have noticed that ST2`s account is deleted at n-ice forum, but his posts are saved for everybody. Hopefully he will not announce in our shoutbox at website again that somebody has done it without reasons. He did this few months ago and some days later he told to us that he did it himself (but this was on irc only). Maybe it was a rage action too.

And correct me if I´m wrong, I thought openttd is open source. So why is the btpro client 1.4.4 hidden on website or could be download with restriction only? I remembered that the version 1.4.0 and 1.4.1. was downloadable for everybody. Is it an action of the guy we are talking about?

*edit*

vGelder pointed out to me that I might have misinterpreted Chucky's message, therefor I have removed the text from the message which I originally posted (which was this:)

Well Chucky, thank you very much for the "ST2 has asked me to do it" part of your message. Luckily I know exactly what has happened and best of all: what has not (which in this case is the thing you are talking about). It's pretty obvious that we didn't talk much yet on IRC, otherwise you would know that the things I said are coming from me directly and not from ST2 and that ST2 has absolutely nothing to say about what I say and how I say or do it.

That said, what ST2 DID do is giving me the DIFF he used to generate the client in question and here is the link:

dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/33165366/Limited_full.diff

To make clear what is different in comparison to the real diff he also made this:

dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/33165366/Limited_only.diff

which only shows the changes according to the real diff which is normally used to create the client.

Now, again, it was ABSOLUTELY ridiculous what ST2 has done and I'm not trying to make this better or "fix" ST2's actions, nothing has changed with this, but I did wanted to know exactly what he did and wanted to share this with everyone as well to clear some things up!