The Korea Times covers the "Macro" software scene among Korean Gamers; this is software that automates tedious, repetitious in-game "grinding" tasks, such as repetitively hunting down and killing weak monsters. I'm especially fond of the hardware-based keyboard emulators that look like thumb-drives and can be trained to undetectably automate input to in-game tasks

Hardware-based keyboard emulators to automate grinding. And of course, this being South Korea, it's a scene.

It can grab video signals transmitted between the PC and the monitor, and analyze the signals to make a judgment.

Wow. What's worse? Third world sweatshops farming gold? Or those jobs being replaced by machines? Not to mention that the fight against gold farmers is getting more and more like the fight against online crime. Which, according to whose TOS you subscribe to, it is.

This is probably old hat for people deep inside MMOs, but it's fun if you're sitting on the sidelines and eating popcorn.

(Via BoingBoing.)