 real speed.. |
 140fsb, not bad for a KT7 (non-A)! |
 WTF? |
Hmm, got some disturbing information today which I hadn't heard of anywhere else, so I thought I would share it. Most people are aware of the Half-Life (and Counter-Strike) "Speed Cheat" - a program that, by manipulating your computer's sense of time, lets you race around the game at high speed. This obviously gives you an unfair advantage over people without the cheat and there has been something of an outcry about it. There is a patch for servers now that stops it working, so I had hoped we'd seen the end of it.
As a further bit of background info, I linked from the news page a screenshot of someone in Japan running a 400MHz (DDR) AMD Thunderbird system. While this seemed a heroic overclock, I didn't really question the legitimacy of this screenshot as, in my mind, if anyone is going to get that kind of score happening it's most likely to be one of those mad lads in Japan who enjoy "remodelling" motherboards with custom PLL chips and liquid nitrogen chambers pressed against their CPU slugs.
However, Gary AKA Crash_Dummy emailed me today with an interesting, but worrisome, discovery that he's made. I'll let him explain:
I turned the speed cheat on while in windows and moved my mouse over ICQ. It showed the person's details instantly instead of after about 2 seconds. It had me thinking. If the speed cheat program affects ICQ, then why won't it affect any others. So i started H.Oda's WCPUID.
Here's a few images he sent along. To save bandwidth, these are all cropped down from full-desktop screenshots he sent me:
|
real speed.. |
140fsb, not bad for a KT7 (non-A)! |
WTF? |
How about some 3DMark2000 results? Gary's machine normally gets about 5000 3dmarks:
 time for an upgrade? |
 not too shabby |
 10GHz CPU + GeForce 6 Ultra? |
 lunacy.. |
 more lunacy.. |
Anyway, I think that proves the point. Sure, you can laugh at stupidly high scores, but what's more scary is someone just raising their scores by a little, by a plausible amount. It used to be that you could sometimes look closely at the image and see if someone had changed the image - how will you know now?
One possible fix might be to get benchmarks to report the O/S they run under - the speed cheat apparently only works in Win9x, not the NT/2K kernel. Proving the benchmark was running under Win2K might give it more credibility - the problem there, of course, is that Win2K often gets lower benchmark scores on identical hardware than Win9x. Update: Apparently there's a Win2K version now.. so bang goes that idea.
For those who will cry "Now
you've revealed this, everyone will do it!!" - Gary stumbled
across it by accident and I'm sure plenty of other people already
have or will soon. Better to get the info out there, try to get
some kind of resolution, rather than only a select number of people
know and use it to their advantage.
Finally, for the countless people asking me where to get the Speed Cheat - I honestly don't know and, because of the stuff in this article, I'm not too sure I'd be telling everyone even if I did know. Try your favourite search engine.
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