Violation of Security/Privacy...

Tue Oct 11 17:10:37 PDT 2005

So they go through a lot of stuff and hash it, and complain if the 
hashes match ones they don't like. The only thing it sends back
to the company is "Yes, this hash matched". As invasions of
privacy go, I'm not impressed. As for stealing resources,
exactly how is it stealing system resources for a game to use
cycles while you are running it? It's stealing resources by
reading more files than it should and wearing out your disk
bearings too fast? If using more CPU than you need is an
offense against propriety, there isn't a lot of software
that avoids stealing resources.

And no, this doesn't violate anybody's 4th amendment rights
because the 4th amendment only applies to the government, and
World of Warcraft is not run by the legitimate government
of the United States.

I believe companies decided this was completely OK long ago,
and nasty EULAs are not uncommon. I don't even think this one
is particularly unreasonable.

	Elizabeth

On Oct 11, 2005, at 1:28 PM, Jennifer Davis wrote:

>
> Interesting articles here:
> http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/26402/
> www.rootkit.com/blog.php?newsid=358
>
> In summary, it appears that Blizzard is doing some interesting things 
> with looking at process/files running on the system to keep people 
> from breaking the EULA.
>
> Now I'm wondering about other software companies attaching this kind 
> of spyware into their software.  We don't allow this kind of thing in 
> our web browsers, we specifically install Spyware detection kits, and 
> in general we have very strong opinions about privacy.
>
> Is this legal?  Just the idea that a bunch of different software 
> companies implementing this kind of scheme with their software, and 
> _stealing_ my system resources gets me kind of angry.
>
> Maybe you don't play WoW, so you might not find this applicable to 
> you, but if there isn't any comments about this, then perhaps 
> companies will start accepting that it's completely ok to do this sort 
> of thing.
>
>
> Jennifer
>