Violation of Security/Privacy...

Tue Oct 11 20:18:59 PDT 2005

On Tue, 11 Oct 2005, J Greely wrote:

>Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2005 19:16:53 -0700
>From: J Greely <baylisa at jgreely.com>
>To: baylisa at baylisa.org
>Subject: Re: Violation of Security/Privacy...
>
>
> 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
>
> As smoking guns go, these lack both smoke and guns. Nothing about
> visible performance hits on your machine, nothing about uploading
> PII to their servers, just a fairly simple scan of running processes
> for known hacks, and a few heuristic methods for identifying the
> processes to scan.

I recall everquest trying something similar and it lasted about three 
weeks before dying under consumer pressure.

With several million players, even a few percent is likely to be a 
considerably loud minority.

There *are* privacy issues associated with this. I have absolutely no idea 
what Blizzard does with any data they receive, and I haven't seen any 
references online to exactly what they're looking for, other than the 
EULA. I think the big issue is not that they're doing it, but that they're 
not disclosing enough details to satisfy the more concerned amongst the 
community.

Other than voting with ones feet, there is little to be done to bring 
accountability here. The problem there of course, is if you play the game, 
you probably want to continue playing the game.

You could argue that if all that gets passed is hashes, then its harmless. 
However, what if thoses hashes are of files that are considered 
subversive, or key phrases that are related to terrorist activities, or 
any number of 'lawful intercept' reasons.

This isn't to say that Blizzard will do this, but maybe the next vendor 
will...

I think theres a larger picture here.

Cheers,

Al