Who would still start a business seriously after being reborn?

Chapter 581 Isn't this like using a cannon to kill a mosquito?
However, in stark contrast, those illegal internet cafes that originally existed in a gray area have ushered in an unexpected spring.

Momo Group did not punish all violators outright.

Under Cheng Yi's instructions, Zhang Lingyu's Momo Internet Cafe Management Company dispatched a series of capable evaluation teams to take action quietly.

Their target is those high-quality illegal internet cafes that, although operating without a license, have a good location, meet the required number of machines, and whose owners have certain management skills.

An illegal internet cafe in a suburban area of ​​a certain city.

The boss, Liu Laoliu, was looking at the machine, which was half empty, with a headache.

His internet cafe's business declined after "Audition Online" was removed from its menu. Although games like "Honghuang Zhanji" were available in his internet cafe, he was not a member of the Momo Internet Cafe Alliance and therefore could not receive the share he was entitled to, nor did he have access to prepaid cards.

Legitimate internet cafes that have joined the Momo Internet Cafe Alliance can not only receive a substantial share of the prepaid card revenue, but also enjoy bonuses on monster-hunting experience and drop rates when joining the alliance.

Playing games in designated co-branded internet cafes is much better than playing at home or in unlicensed internet cafes.

Players who play games at home can accept this, since they don't need to pay by the hour when playing at home, and the reduced experience and drop rate bonuses can be made up for by the amount of time they spend online.

But what about their illegal internet cafes?
Why?

Why should players abandon the co-branded internet cafes and choose us instead?

If they were to lower the price, they might as well close down.

Now the price is uniformly one yuan per hour across the country, so how could he possibly lower it to 50 cents?

He's now charging 80 cents an hour.

However, the two-cent price difference cannot make up for the experience bonus, drop rate bonus, and the convenience of recharging.

Just then, several men dressed in black suits and exuding a capable air walked in. The one leading them was a regional manager from Momo Internet Cafe.

"Mr. Liu, right? We are from Momo Group's Internet Cafe Management Company." The person in charge showed his credentials and got straight to the point: "We noticed that although your internet cafe is currently operating without a license, its scale and environment are quite good. The group is currently having a standardization and integration plan. I wonder if you are interested?"

Liu Laoliu's heart tightened, thinking they were there to raid his business. He quickly smiled apologetically and said, "Dear leaders, I... I'm about to close down..."

The person in charge smiled and said, "Mr. Liu, don't misunderstand. We're not here to investigate you. We're here to invite you to join us."

He produced a document and said, "The group is willing to invest in and renovate your internet cafe by contributing technology, management, and brand equity. We will help you obtain a formal Time and Space Internet Cafe chain license, connect to the Moc-os system and the Momo Games platform, and enjoy all the resources of the alliance, provided that you fully comply with our internet cafe management regulations."

Liu Laoliu could hardly believe his ears.

Is this a windfall?

"Yes, of course I'm willing." Liu Laoliu suppressed his excitement and asked somewhat nervously, "How much...how much money do I need?"

"There are two options. In the first option, your internet cafe is valued at about 80 yuan. The group will help you complete the standardization renovation and obtain the license, holding 51% of the shares and you holding 49%."

"The second option is that we will still help you complete the standardization and license plate application, and you can pay the costs in installments until the payment is completed."

The person in charge gave two conditions.

"I choose the first one." Liu Laoliu signed the letter of intent on the spot without any hesitation.

Similar scenes are playing out all over the country.

Momo Group also demonstrated extremely flexible and pragmatic methods:
Those who betray the alliance will be dealt with ruthlessly and without leniency. Even if the internet cafe changes owners, they will still be blacklisted and forced to sell the internet cafe to Momo Group in order to maintain the discipline of the alliance.

For illegal internet cafes that were originally outside the system but had value, an olive branch was extended, and they were incorporated and integrated into the system through equity investment and cooperation, thus rapidly expanding their own base.

Those former owners who had just sold off their internet cafes at low prices and left the market in disgrace, only realized after seeing their once-inferior, illegal internet cafes transformed into legitimate ones that they had been destined to be discarded from the moment they chose to betray their businesses.

The illegal internet cafe owners who were successfully recruited are extremely grateful to Momo Group.

They quickly put up a brand-new sign for Time and Space Internet Cafe, connected to the Moc-os system, and began to enjoy an extraordinary life.

At first, they felt they had lost out by getting a 51% stake, but after joining, they discovered that the revenue from third-party channels of the internet cafe alliance completely outweighed the revenue from internet fees.

No wonder the internet cafes haven't said a word about the nationwide price of one yuan per hour.

They're all making a fortune quietly.

These illegal internet cafes, which were once battered and bruised by running "Audition Online," have been transformed in an instant. With richer game resources and a more regulated environment, they have attracted a large number of players, and their business is several times more prosperous than when they were illegal internet cafes.

Time and Space Internet Cafe Chain is now an independent internet cafe system outside of Momo Group. Although it is known for being low-end and unprofessional, it is an internet cafe chain company secretly controlled by Momo Group. Its existence has resolved the suspicion of Momo Group's monopoly.

The internet cafe market in China has not formed a monopoly.

Momo Internet Cafe Alliance only accounts for 52% of the market.

The Time and Space Internet Cafe Alliance holds a 39% market share.

Another 9% of stubborn internet cafes chose not to join either side.

After all, as any stubborn person knows, once someone becomes stubborn, they transcend the three realms and are no longer bound by the five elements.

At this point, the influence of the Momo Internet Cafe Alliance was not weakened by the initial betrayal; on the contrary, it grew stronger through this purge and consolidation, making its foundation more solid. The national internet cafe market, after experiencing this severe upheaval, also underwent a slight reshuffling, allowing the Momo Group to achieve an unprecedented level of control over the industry.

Jingzhou City, headquarters of Momo Group.

Li Weiwei reported the latest progress to Cheng Yi: "As of yesterday, a total of 1372 original alliance internet cafes have been permanently removed from the list due to violations, and more than 80% of them have been sold off to the Shikong Internet Cafe Alliance at low prices. On the other hand, we have successfully integrated 3891 high-quality illegal internet cafes, granted them Shikong Internet Cafe licenses, and completed initial renovations. The total number of directly operated internet cafes of our Momo Group remains unchanged, while the Shikong Internet Cafe Alliance has seen a net increase of 4518. The market share of the Moc-os system in the internet cafe market has reached an astonishing 91.7%." Cheng Yi stood in front of the map, watching the dots representing Momo Alliance internet cafes become denser and more orderly, and nodded in satisfaction.

"Very good, now the foundation is finally stable. After this incident, when we settle accounts with Microsoft and Samsung, these guys should understand what it means to be hesitant to act rashly, right?" Cheng Yi laughed.

At this time, KFC's Asia-Pacific headquarters urgently convened a financial meeting.

The atmosphere in the meeting room was so oppressive that it was hard to breathe.

The CFO's voice lost its usual composure, trembling slightly as he said, "Over the past four weeks, based on emergency purchase orders submitted by various regions, we have replaced the keyboards for more than 400,000 computers in China. Of these, 200,000 were replaced with ergonomic keyboards recommended by Microsoft, at a unit price of 499 Chinese yuan; the other 200,000 were purchased with Samsung DT35 keyboards, at a unit price of 299 Chinese yuan."

He paused, each number striking the attendees like a hammer blow: "The direct cost of keyboard procurement alone is as high as 1.6 million Chinese yuan! This doesn't even include the labor costs for replacements, or the indirect losses such as increased customer complaints and decreased store operational efficiency caused by frequent repairs!"

"1.6 million Chinese yuan?" The Asia-Pacific president slammed his hand on the table, making the teacups rattle, and said in a deep voice, "Is this the value of the strategic cooperation between Microsoft and T3? Using our hard-earned money to fill the bottomless pit of their technological vulnerabilities?"

The vice president in charge of the project broke out in a cold sweat and hurriedly explained, "President, the top technical team from Microsoft's Seattle headquarters has moved into T3 and is working around the clock to tackle this problem. Their initial assessment is that we may be dealing with a highly professional small group that is attacking game engine vulnerabilities. Their methods are very sophisticated and they are definitely not ordinary people."

"Brilliant? I think it's their incompetence!" The president laughed angrily. "Tell them! I don't care if the other party is God or Satan, I'm giving them a month. If the abnormal wear and tear rate of the keyboards hasn't dropped to an acceptable threshold after a month, and we don't see a fundamental solution, we will withdraw from the service center program entirely, and all losses incurred must be fully compensated by Microsoft and T3!"

KFC's anger, like real pressure, instantly reached Seattle and Seoul.

At 3 a.m., inside the third security response center at Microsoft headquarters in Seattle, a group of technicians were working through the night to tackle a major challenge.

The technical team they sent to Seoul was just a facade; the real team responsible for tackling the challenge of Audition was the S1 team, led by David Copperfield, a senior security architect at Microsoft.

The air was filled with the bitter smell of coffee and an almost solidified anxiety.

As Microsoft's top technical team, they initially resisted the headquarters' orders. After all, what level were they? Being assigned to deal with a minor cheat program seemed like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

But after two weeks of research, they realized they had met their match.

To be honest, they really couldn't figure out what the other was thinking.

With this level of technical skill, why bother with cheat codes? Wouldn't it be better to just modify the computer system directly?
David's eyes were bloodshot as he stared intently at the computer screen in front of him.

Instead of code, the screen displayed an extremely complex network topology diagram, showing the nodes of several core servers for Audition Online in the Asian region constantly flashing. The data streams connecting them resembled a surging blue galaxy, which looked spectacular.

But occasionally, a faint, almost imperceptible purple pulse will flash through this normal starry sky.

They are mixed in with the massive torrent of data, appearing regularly and then disappearing quietly.

“That’s it!” David shouted in a hoarse voice. “This is the fluctuation we’ve been looking for. We’ve finally caught its tail.”

For the past two weeks, his team has been groping in the dark.

The opponent's cunning was beyond imagination, rendering all traditional malware detection and memory scanning ineffective.

The other party didn't attack the game itself, but rather exploited it.

Your opponent is like a highly skilled dancer, perfectly timing every beat of the music, yet you can't accuse them of ruining the music.

Until yesterday, Emily, a data genius from Cambridge in the team, put forward a bold hypothesis: since the purpose of the cheat is to make the behavior of a large number of accounts converge, it must have some form of synchronization mechanism, and this synchronization cannot be completely without trace.

Therefore, they abandoned the futile search at the application layer and client and instead devoted all their computing power to in-depth analysis of inbound network traffic on the server side.

Several high-performance deep packet inspection devices, originally used for testing the next-generation Azure system, were deployed to capture, parse, and reassemble every data packet from the Audition Online client 24/7.

During this period, they were almost overwhelmed by massive amounts of data.

Normal game operations, player chat messages, character movement commands... all of these are mixed together, forming a vast ocean of information.

However, for the geniuses on the Microsoft S1 team, they always manage to find what they're looking for in the vast ocean.

Ultimately, Emily's jointly designed analysis algorithm managed to retrieve those faint purple pulses from this vast ocean.

These data packets are completely legal in themselves, and their content consists of normal keystroke commands. However, the time intervals between their appearances exhibit an inhuman precision and consistency on a microscopic scale, and they create a strange resonance between specific accounts.

“This is a time-based Steganography,” Emily said, her voice tinged with the excitement of discovering her prey. “They hid the synchronization signal in the timestamps of the data packets, without needing to modify the data content itself.”

David suddenly stood up, his fatigue vanishing and replaced by a bright smile.

He stated decisively, "Immediately deploy DPI clusters at the entry points of all Audition servers and write filtering rules: calculate the arrival time interval of all inbound data packets in real time, and automatically identify data streams with an interval standard deviation of less than 5 milliseconds and whose content is specific game operations!"

"And then?" a team member asked. "Should the account be banned?"

A cold glint flashed in David's eyes as he said, "We can't ban accounts; that would be too much of a commotion and play right into their hands. We can just delay the injection of the identified abnormal precision streams. Audition Online is very sensitive to delays, so that should be enough."

The technicians present immediately understood.

Using DPI devices, data packets identified as abnormally manipulated are precisely delayed by 50 to 200 milliseconds before being allowed to pass through to the game server.

Thus, from the server's perspective, the operation command itself is perfectly fine, but the execution time becomes unpredictable.

For a music game like Audition Online that relies heavily on rhythm and timing, even a delay of tens of milliseconds is enough to turn a Perfect score into a Miss, making a smooth dance move fall apart.

"Our goal is to prevent the person using cheats from completing a single dance," David said slowly. "That way, we can shift the pressure onto the cheat program itself."

(End of this chapter)