The latest EVE Online blog post by CCP Stillman discusses team efforts to keep user data safe and the underlying HTTP protocol used by the API feature. As a result of new and aggressive hacker attempts, the team is changing the protocol from HTTP to HTTPS to ensure that user data remains secure.

If you're anything like me, you religiously check the status of your character training and market orders on your smartphone. It's the greatest invention ever, especially if you can't log into EVE Online or EVE Gate. It's also nice to be able to pull out your smartphone at Fanfest and show off your nice skills and large wallet.

As we've added more information to the API, there's more incentive to try and acquire these keys by nefarious people. Due to the underlying use of HTTP when querying the API, it's possible to sniff the data stream of an API user and acquire their API key if they're using an unsecure Internet connection. This is not a good idea. And we don't want it to be that way. So we went ahead and enabled HTTPS on our API servers, which makes too much sense.

Read more here.

CCP Games has revealed images and details for the 2010 Holiday Ship. Called the the Concord Echelon, the new ship will roll out to all players on December 14th. The ship's description also comes with full instructions how to redeem and claim their ships.

Constructed in secrecy, the Echelon is a minor masterpiece of engineering, integrating otherwise incomprehensible Sansha technology into a frigate-class capsuleers vessel. The advanced cryptographic processors on board provide superior hacking capabilities for use on most known password-secured devices. However, the true beauty of the Echelon is in the adaptive synchronization of capsuleers and Sansha codebreaking components, creating a system predicted to give capsuleers an edge over even the strongest of the Nation's encryption locks.

Read more here.

The EVE Online team has posted a brand new blog about one of the most anticipated features coming with the Incursion expansion: Character Creation. CCP Ph00ze goes into great detail about the process developers went through to make the huge improvements in the models for Incursion. There's a lot of great information to read so be sure to swing by and check it out!

We figured that with the attention our character creation system has been getting lately, that it was time to write a devblog about it. There´s lots to cover, so let´s get to it!

The Carbon Character System was made to enable us to create characters for several projects, including Eve. It started off as a design document containing various wishlist features, ranging in complexity from the simple to the impossible. I believe most of the items on the list ended up being possible, with the possible exception of essentially being able to perform a striptease with arbitrary clothing. Hmm, do they even do that in CGI movies these days? Do I really want to know?

Read more here.