Astronaut
Level: Goblin
Rank Points: 21
Registered: 05-17-2004
IP: Logged

(First of all, I should clarify that the subject should probably have a ;-) at the end, as I'm not actually accusing TCB of being spyware.)

I had a rather spectacular bluescreen crash into immediate reboot while playing TCB, and I feared that I'd lost the five hours of progress I'd made since last reboot, including entire AF and UL. Turned out, however, things were far worse. On restart, DROD kindly asked me to enter my name or import existing .player-file. Trying to import an old .player-file caused crash to desktop. I tried creating a new player, same result.

In short, I had a corrupted data file. (Some trial and error with data files from a clean install showed that player.dat was the one to blame.)

Normally, I would've left it with this, banged my head against the wall a couple of times for losing all my TCB progress and started over again. But just for fun, I decided I'd have a look at player.dat in a text editor. What I found, was unexpected, puzzling and slightly disturbing: Attached at the bottom was my entire internet history, with full log over all pages visited.

I'm using Opera, which has a very neat session recovery function in case of a system crash, so my best guess is that this information was being saved by Opera when it detected an imminent crash. But how did it get into player.dat? I'm assuming it isn't normal behaviour for TCB to collect information on my visited Internet pages?

(On a side note, I don't suppose there's any way for me to repair my player.dat?)

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coppro
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 1308
Registered: 11-24-2005
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Hmmm... my guess would be that something that was collecting all your internet history (quite possibly your browser) was appended to it at the time due to the crash. (I don't know much about NTFS, but if some cluster addresses got rewritten wrong that could probably do it). I could come up with a theory as to why this happened, but it also means that there's hope. If you delete everything past the point where the internet records start, the data may work again. I suggest you also look at data.dat - is that harmed at all?

Astronaut
Level: Goblin
Rank Points: 21
Registered: 05-17-2004
IP: Logged

coppro wrote:
Hmmm... my guess would be that something that was collecting all your internet history (quite possibly your browser) was appended to it at the time due to the crash. (I don't know much about NTFS, but if some cluster addresses got rewritten wrong that could probably do it).

That's my best guess as well. The disc is FAT32, by the way, if that makes any difference.

Problem with keeping everything in player.dat above the internet records is that I'm having a hard time figuring out where the real player.dat ends and the nonsense begins. It's all jibberish, with the only plaintext being the internet addresses.

Data.dat is unharmed, identical to the one made on a new install.

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Ezlo
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1214
Registered: 01-08-2006
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Try getting rid of all the addresses and see if it works. It won't hurt. Will it?

coppro
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 1308
Registered: 11-24-2005
IP: Logged

Astronaut wrote:
That's my best guess as well. The disc is FAT32, by the way, if that makes any difference.

Problem with keeping everything in player.dat above the internet records is that I'm having a hard time figuring out where the real player.dat ends and the nonsense begins. It's all jibberish, with the only plaintext being the internet addresses.

Data.dat is unharmed, identical to the one made on a new install.

I'd suggest deleting at least all of the plaintext, because DROD stores it's data as binary. I think that attempting to figure out the rest of the data would be harsh, as you'd need to figure out where the file format ends. Most likely there's a bunch of null bytes somewhere that would indicate the break between the two files, IIRC FAT32 stores everything in areas that are a multiple of the block size, usually 4K. So you'd probably find some extra space there. Unfortunately, a plain text editor is probably no help.

Astronaut
Level: Goblin
Rank Points: 21
Registered: 05-17-2004
IP: Logged

Wow, I think I did it!

I went in with a hexadecimal binary file editor and looked for places with lots of null bytes, deleting everything below. On the third attempt, it looks like it worked. Here I thought I'd have to start TCB all over again, and all I lost of my progress was one room!

Thanks a lot for the help, guys!

(It's getting increasingly obvious to me that the bugs forum was the wrong place to post this, as it can hardly be considered a bug when DROD crashes because your browser filled player.dat with heaps of random junk. I've been suspecting the disk / file system of being damaged before, I guess this incident proves I was correct. *exports player file and saves it on another disk* )

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mrimer
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 5056
Registered: 02-04-2003
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Astronaut wrote:
Wow, I think I did it!

I went in with a hexadecimal binary file editor and looked for places with lots of null bytes, deleting everything below. On the third attempt, it looks like it worked. Here I thought I'd have to start TCB all over again, and all I lost of my progress was one room!

Thanks a lot for the help, guys!

(It's getting increasingly obvious to me that the bugs forum was the wrong place to post this, as it can hardly be considered a bug when DROD crashes because your browser filled player.dat with heaps of random junk. I've been suspecting the disk / file system of being damaged before, I guess this incident proves I was correct. *exports player file and saves it on another disk* )

Wow, I'm glad (and surprised) that worked! Good job making a player backup right away.

Here's the official word -- DROD doesn't record or examine anything you do outside the game itself. I don't know much about how the OS handles low-level interface operations, but I can say what the guys above mention sounds as good to me as anything. DROD's data files are memory-mapped, and that means certain types of badness happening somewhere immediately before a crash could make badness happen with DROD's .dat files with specific software/hardware configurations. Nothing DROD can really monitor, of course.

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Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

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[Last edited by mrimer at 04-16-2007 04:37 PM]

halyavin
Level: Delver
Rank Points: 52
Registered: 02-20-2006
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mrimer wrote:
Here's the official word -- DROD doesn't record or examine anything you do outside the game itself.

DROD send OS name (without version) via CaravelNet though.

coppro
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 1308
Registered: 11-24-2005
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Of course it would - it's a standard HTTP request, which when I last checked does require some information such as OS.

NiroZ
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 1302
Registered: 02-12-2006
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Who the hell keeps modding Coppro down? There is absolutely no way that that particular post deserved that.

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[Last edited by NiroZ at 04-19-2007 06:26 AM]

silver
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 915
Registered: 01-18-2005
IP: Logged

I didn't mod him down. I can assure him, however, that http/1.0 and http/1.1 do not require OS information. In http version 1.1, there isn't even an optional field for OS specification:

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec5.html#sec5.3

the closest is user-agent, but that only describes the browser, not the platform


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[Last edited by silver at 04-19-2007 07:45 AM]