As always, courtesy of Vollketten (US Server).

This is another of the Australian projects, that are actually quite interesting and could work in real life. It’s called..

Murphy High Speed Tank – with a flamethrower no less.

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Hello everyone,

if you follow FTR for a while, you might remember that at one point, there was a piece of information leaked about the new Stronkhold mode having bot-controlled turrets as defensive buildings. As I wrote before, the use of tank turrets as bunkers is not a complete Wargaming invention – and today, we’re going to have a look at one specific installation, the Panther Ostwallturm mount.

Panther turrets were converted into bunkers ever since late 1943. Some were serial Panther tank turrets, but most were specifically modified for the role of a bunker turret. The commander’s copula was replaced by a hatch and the roof of the turret was reinforced to 40mm (earlier 16mm) to prevent the turret from being knocked out easily by artillery fire. According to German specifications, the roof was supposed to withstand the impact of HE shells up to 150mm.

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And yes, in case you are wondering, according to this tweet, this is a “self-defense T-34″ of the separatists. You know, guys, I don’t want to give you any ideas or anything, but do you know what else is standing in Lugansk?

First an IS-3, now a T-34, I fear this Mk.V will be pressed into service next…

Source: http://worldoftanks.ru/ru/news/pc-browser/1/lets_comfort/

For a completely marginal issue, it got a separate portal post on RU forums strangely enough (EU silent as always)…

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Source: http://habrahabr.ru/post/228219/ (via world-of-ru, LJ user Wisejew)

An interesting article appeared on the abovelinked portal about World of Tanks payment security. In it, a Russian programmer of payment portals takes a look at the security of various paying portals, including – yes, you guessed right, the Wargaming premium shop. The author states that he analyzes weaknesses of various payment systems and runs over and over again into the same vulnerability, called… and now, I have no idea how to translate it, because I am not a programmer. In Russian it’s “инкрементальные айдишники” – in English, it would be something like… incremental ID’s? If there is a programmer amongst the readers, please explain to us what that means :)

Anyway, back to World of Tanks portal. After making an order, the client redirects the user to an URL in following format:

http://aggregator-domain/ok.php?payment_id=123456

Which in turn redirects the client to the URL of the game in following format (decoded by the author for easier reading, from Russian server eg. the currency is Russian):

https://online-game-domain/shop/?…amount=32.86…&currency=RUB…&user=user_email@gmail.com…&item_name=1 day of premium account

The author states that if you figure out the value of the payment_id parameter, you will be able to see login of the user in the game, their purchases etc.

Wargaming shop is just one of the examples, cited by the author. He concludes the post with a statement that due to sloppiness of programmers, in the case above, a possibility is introduced for hackers to mine personal and account data from the purchases. He also comments on the solution (to use something called “token” and “an arbitrary string”). From there on (especially the comments) it gets technical. I wonder though – how much are our data really protected and since Wargaming already had some large account data leaks (remember that “change your password for gold” event? That wasn’t just because Wargaming is nice and cares about our security, it was because on RU server, a certain amount of account data got leaked (and the accounts got hacked)).

Hello everyone,

this was posted on Yuri Pasholok’s blog – pretty interesting video overall, but the really interesting part starts at 6:40 – StuG III, followed by Panzer III and Panzer IV (and Kettenkraftrad :))

This list of changes is almost certainly not complete, so take it with a grain of salt.

French tank changes

- AMX50B: gun aim time buffed from 3s to 2,5s

German tank changes

Aufklärungspanzer Panther

- reload time of 7,5/5,5 cm Waffe 0725 for turret VK 28.01 Ausf. C buffed from 4s to 3,4s

Indienpanzer

- aim time for 9 cm Bordkanone buffed from 2,9 s to 2,7 s
- reload time for the same gun buffed from 7,5 s to 7,2 s

Leopard 1

- 105mm gun reload time buffed from 9 s to 8,7 s

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Again, in shorter “snapshots” format and this time not exactly with a WoT tank…