Welcome to Gaia! ::

Hmmm I don't see the big deal about the new items... the thing that's been bothering me and others I'm sure is just how much of the new items you need to buy with real money now (unless you're good at vending), but I deal with that by just not buying them.

My password is incredibly hard. I just changed my firefox setting to be on the safe side. When I hear that the hackers on steroids are actually here in full force, I'll change my password.

Just be careful with what you click on :]]]

The cookie grabber links have been around a long time now; especially in the exchange. Just check links and be wary.

TLDR obtained. Just need a yarly, long cat, omnomnom, and monorail cat halo and I'll have the complete new hat collection.

Also, all this talk of accounts being stolen made me do a little reflecting. I've changed tremendously since I first joined, at least I believe I did.

would scrolling over it and checking the link before clicking work or does it redirect in mid-load? I'm not too familiar with cookie grabbers.

I love the little GCD kiddies who don't know what a 4chon is, and then they have it explained to them and they inevitably make the gonk face IRL.

It's kind of like one of the banners 4chan has, if you're familiar with it. It's a couple of memes in 8-bit (I know it's Cockmongler Grinman Cockmongler and Happy Negro, as well as a couple of others), then a plus sign, then a O_o emote with "x170,000" under it. It's a surprisingly accurate summary of the site.

I don't underestimate the power of Anon to do s**t that - in retrospect - is really, REALLY ******** stupid in normal terms. (Newsflash: You are not really anonymous. No matter what you do.) The football thing was less than two years ago, and still remains in my memory.

Certainly, I'm slightly concerned about raids and hackings (though to be honest, the high-page forums tend to be the bigger raid targets - i.e., GD, ED, and to a lesser extent GCD). On the other hand, I think that people are a bit panicky over it. Gaia does not retain any real-world information, as far as I recall; I'll start worrying when they access PayPal. (Or when they start spoofing PayPal pages.) I myself have almost four and a half years' worth of items spread across two accounts, and while I'd certainly be sad to lose my stuff, I also would hope that Gaia keeps backups as a for-profit service. (In fact, they do.

In the instance there's a mass breach of security, there would at least be a rollback of all accounts.

Plus, my Gaia password has NOTHING in common with any of my other passwords on other sites. (Okay, it links to my more common web alias through e-mail, but my e-mail address displays a bit wonky on Gaia anyway. My login is somewhat reused, but nowhere near exactly reused.)

Depends on the site. Generally, don't click TinyURLs for the next week or two - those do redirect mid-load, by nature of the service. Any site can, to be perfectly honest; I'd suggest sticking to sites which are generally trusted to be safe (such as Wikipedia).

On the other hand, Gaia flags you EVERY time you leave the site unless you have that setting disabled (in which case, Gaia tells you you're ******** if s**t happens anyway). As much as I abhor the general Q&F/SF/GCD party line that it's your dumb a**'s fault you got scammed (even when it's not really a scamming - you do generally have to ignore quite a few warnings where Gaia is concerned.

Granted, you could bypass this by embedding malicious code in Gaia's pages itself. But I'd think that it'd be rather difficult to do so, Gaia being what it is. I'm not totally sure, and PHP isn't the most secure thing (not quite sure what database they're using, but - if I recall - Gaia's running on a phpBB backbone, so most likely SQL), but yeah.

On a related note, I don't know whether Gaia owns gaiaonline.net, gaiaonline.org, etc., etc., etc. Or highly similar names such as gayaonline.com. In that sense, a spoof COULD work. Certainly, someone has had to have tried it by now, and Gaia has possession of the domain names, though - and if they don't, it's kind of stupid because with operating costs in the tens of millions, $60-$80 (not even) per year to reserve a few domain names should be but a fraction of the cost.