Chacal just convinced me not to write a full reply to Dustin's attack. I will however reply to one point, the malware issue. It's probably the one that raised the most eyebrows, and there's nobody besides Dustin and me knowing about it, and he keeps trying to push it.
To put this into the correct time frame: The incident he refers to happened in July 2009. That was after the Alcugs (unet3+ version) and Offline KI release in December 2008, and before I made Offline KI officially support Shards in November 2009. For more than a year already, I had been running a private Alcugs Shard using the Offline KI plus some extra stuff, which was subsequently released. Dhelayan also used to be a member of this Shard, and he became a major annoyance. When he finally decided to remove all the data from the private FTP server the other admin and me had set up, we decided that enough was enough (this was just the top of the iceberg, I don't want to drag this issue into the public as well) and kicked him in July 2008 (this is the "minor misbehavior" Dustin refers to).
A year later, in July 2009, the Pelishard was opened by him and Mystler, his co-admin, who is Dhelayan's "friend" Dustin mentioned. He got kicked (in July 2008 as well) because we had proof that he gave Dhelayan his password to let him access the private forum, which Dhelayan later even admitted. In its first incarnations, Pelishard essentially refused to give any credit to the actual authors of the software that was used. I had even helped Mystler to set it all up, but was not mentioned at all. And then he made it public, and even claimed he had Cyan's confirmation to do so which was quickly denied by Chogon. I was seriously annoyed by such a person using my work and taking all the credit. The Offline KI back then already "happened to work" on a Shard (since I wrote it on one
), but that was just an internal detail. So, in what was probably an over-reaction, I decided to make a
change to the crash detection (the crash detection, btw, was an idea of Dustin, but written by me) so that, after the next update of the server software, the KI would constantly think it crashed, and quit the client. Shards that did not use the Offline KI would continue to just work. After all, the Offline KI was not even supposed to work on Shards - yeah, a rather lame excuse. You could say this was my attempt to take revenge to Dhelayan. I do not even remember whether the update actually landed on Pelishard before I told Dustin, but it probably did (I had still considered him a good friend, and he did not give any sign of what he says now he had already thought about me back then). He then made aware to me that by doing what I did, I was essentially as bad as Dhelayan. I was still angry at him (Dhelayan), but calmed down enough to see this was true, and
reverted the change about a month after it was committed.
Well, and that's it. Yes, I made a mistake. Yes, it was a bad idea to take such destructive action. And yes, I am sorry that I did it.
But no, I do not think that qualifies as malware. Please judge yourself, I hope I did not forget anything. The source code of all the tools I wrote for Uru is out there, for anybody with coding knowledge to check (though I admit 20k lines of code in the server are hard to verify
), and I can - again - assure you that the code is as malware-free as I can get it, and also free of purposefully hidden pitfalls like the one I described above.