Blizzard's WoW Authenticator to be revealed at WWI

*circumcised

It is not a dongle, this is just joystiq speculating and failing.

Just take a read at http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/080626-auth.html.
It's a small device with a button on it. It doesn't attach to your computer.
While there are usb security tokens, the press release says the kind they are using is a button + screen one.

When you press the button it generates a single use code that you use to login. That way, even if someone gets your password, that person will not be able to login without the token generator.

Would you like to know more? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_token

GOOD LORD! $6.50 for a nice reassuring boost of security to ensure that your 200+ hours of game time don't go down the drain. Ridiculous.

The price is justified. It is good to see Blizzard taking some action against such threat before they become too widespread and give the game a bad rep to potential players.

Remember, you aren't required to purchase this. If you want the extra security go for it.

I'd say 75% of their stolen accounts are because of people sharing their password with friends and guildies. An option for separate passwords for game and administrative login would do far more than this for account security.

I'll support anything that gives me a dongle.

Slut.

nom.

If you read the FAQ, it says that you can carry the dongle with you wherever you'd like to use your account. Just need a free USB port. And if you lose it, you just call and verify your info with their billing department (probably need the credit card # you pay with, or other billing info). Not sure how that will work with people who use game time cards.

You sir, are an idiot. No offense but there was a recent security update released designed to prevent keyloggers that were meant to steal passwords from online games.

Within 12 hours of its release, 500,000 keyloggers had been removed from different Windows Systems. 500,000. So at least 0.5% of the population's Home pcs probably in the first tweleve hours alone. Thats of course only the ones the update caught. It didn't rid them all.

There's probably at least an equal number out there that wasn't removed or more. A suspect at least one of those 1,000,000 people or more have common sense.

That's because they're the morons using a naked OS. Keyloggers don't get on properly secured systems and are removed by anti-spyware software easily. The typical account theft comes from those assuming their unprotected PC is a safe environment. Hackers don't bother trying to circumvent third party security. There are too many combinations to worry about and the returns for the effort are almost nil. The volume of standard Windows users on WoW is high enough to not bother trying to get past your current security setup.

Ever run anything off a flash drive? It's not exactly high performance, especially if it's FAT formatted. Also, there are three data files in the WoW /data directory that are a total of 6GB+ alone. The entire WoW footprint is a little over 8GB on my machine (and I haven't played in months, so I'm missing some patches), and that's without any addons or test realm stuff. That puts it out of range of most flash drives' capacity.

On the other hand, WoW doesn't do any fancy registry stuff when installing, so if you do happen to have a high capacity flash drive, you can drop your WoW folder from /Program Files on there and use that to backup/install on any machine you want. Just drop the folder in the right place, create a shortcut if you want then play. Just FYI.

Joystiq has been talking nonstop over the past few days about Blizzard and their mysterious and as yet unexplained involvement in World War I.

Are you trying to pin the Archduke on them? What's your angle?

Let's just say without Blizzard, Franz Ferdinand wouldn't just be a British band...

So, just don't go on any space journeys at relativistic speeds and you'll be fine?