Following an article written here on the ‘experts’ Messenger Plus! Zone Forums, I decided to take a further in depth look at the Habbo Hotel service available on the web. Habbo Hotel appears to be an online discussion or chat centre facilitated around the idea of rooms which actually contain moving people, furniture and actions.
[quote]Messenger Plus! Zone Investigates’ first article, “Habbohotel.com”, came from a tip of a user of the service saying that it is simply WRONG to charge REAL MONEY for Virtual Furniture on a very insecure site. We agreed and looked into it.[/quote]The Habbo Hotel service reserves the right to charge for whatever services it likes, and they also reserve the right to charge as much as they please for users to have advanced access to the service. To show the complete ignorance of this articles’ writer, he decided to disregard the fact that they somehow have to provide a way of paying for the server whilst allowing a free service. Huh!
[quote]The report filed with us was very clear, Habbo Hotel uses methods requiring users to pay for credits to use the Extra Furni and Services.[/quote]Yes, they do. I used to know one of the initial designers of the system. Is there something wrong with requiring a credit card for purchasing Credits. Although the system is designed for younger users especially children there are many older users of the service who are willing to pay for the service as well as support the funds for the management of the servers.
[quote]# Habbo Hotel charges different amounts of money for credits through different payment methods
# The site is very insecure, several users we talked to admitted to hacking the site at once
# The site is intended for CHILDREN users, which leads us to the believe that they expect children to call the numbers required to use Habbo Hotel’s Extra Furni and Services.
# Habbo Hotel requires users to BUY credits to use the Extra Services and buy Furni.
# Habbo Hotel uses Insecure Shockwave Movies[/quote]The service is secure. Users who ‘hack’ the service are just users who register and pretend to be technical support staff for the service trying to gather usernames and passwords of other users to try and scam their points form them. As I noted previously, users can purchase credits and they can also be transferred credits from other accounts. Users are not required to use the credit card facilities to purchase more credits, there are numerous other method of purchasing credits.
To say the service uses insecure shockwave movies is just an outrageous accusation, with no evidence to prove this is actually true. The data sent to and from the Habbo client to the Habbo servers is encrypted, and only the intended recipient of the message will be able to receive the messages.
The next time the ‘MPZ’ decides to investigate into a service, I suggest they actually do some background research on how these ‘hackings’ are occurring, and think of alternative reasons for the service to be charging for Credits.
). I could have done better in Physics and English too, so we’ll just disregard those results for now.
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