"[truth], honesty, ethics, moral"
I told the truth. I was honest. I explained my actions publicly when I could have JUST PMed a GT admin, and all would be well. Ethically and morally it was all for the greater good, yes?
But here are some numbers:
- GT runs four public servers, usually only one to two really have people on
- I crashed one server
- This said server had zero players, and given this and the above, my "test" had no impact (not that it would have mattered anyway, as someone else would have crashed it later)
- I was the first to report my logs and IPs so whoever knew what they were doing could find the problem
- Queenie admitted to crashing only after I reported my logs with his name and IP address
- The command at hand, when given an arbitrary high number, hits the upper maximum of a signed long (2147483647) and reports a non-fatal error
- An number in arbitrary range that is a small subset of the range of a signed long is very very very very very very! unlikely to cause a problem in programming when the bounds or larger number have no effect
What sets me and some other people apart from the people with malicious intent:
- Crashed several servers
- Crashed the same server more than once
- Crashed a server with people on it
- Possibly crashed a Windows server run by someone with likely no technical knowledge
- Spread the exploit so even MORE people could exploit it
- Crashed all the servers in a organization's set
- Did not report findings from "tests" to anyone -- rendering the test useless and only for selfish reasons
- Clearly maliciously did it, as seen by their chat comments in the game
- Did not honestly report what they did publicly
- Did not look through the C code to find the problem
- Did not actually perform one's own initiated tests (i.e. check if the map command was being abused, which was what ViciouZ and I thought of)
Other people tested too, yes, but I doubt they put too much thinking into as I. For example, Queenie crashed my server when it happened to have 16 people on it. As for "rules," there are no defined rules about exploits -- it's just ethics, and ethics are very opinionated.