World of WARCRaft now WITH spyware

Rhinokey

wel actualy its had spyware for a long time, but no one cares.

http://www.rootkit.com/blog.php?newsid=358

character

now the question is, can this be exploited by a third party to access personal files and is it going on already?

danr

soon enough, you'll find companies like blizzard have access to your email address, real name, address and credit card details ...

snemmy

i think i heard about this 8 months to a year ago...
possibly on this forum

Tulkamir

It's called an overreaction. I somewhat doubt that blizzard is using it for anything but to make sure people aren't cheating, and doubt even more than any of the information is recorded.

motives

No its only when you go on a raid and see a ad that says "ITS MILLER TIME" in the cave of gnorwtielhglqforthertot that people will start to care

Motz

Overreaction my ass. Think about it, major ISPs, and Major financial corporations have had their collection data stolen or hacked into. I highly doubt blizzard is any more secure. There is no reason, other than squeezing every last dime out of the customer, that they need to be tracking anything any of us do.

Run a program like Ewido or Peerguardian to block major ad traffic sites, you would be surprised how many times you data is unwillingly sent out.

As for Rhinokey in the BF/EA post screaming about how we think this will steal our 'megahurtz'. I do understand his point of the general overreaction, but technically it does steal mhz. Not enough to affect anything, but it still has to take resources :P

Just be smart about it.

Tulkamir

I have seen no proof that Blizzard is storing any of this information. it sounds liket he program checks for any cheating programs, and if there are none leaves you alone and stores no information.

Do you really believe that blizzard, who is making money left and right, feels the need to make a bit more by getting and storing personal data?

Don't be fricken rediculous. Paranoia is all good and fine, but it gets tedious.

Motz

I take it you've never worked in sales. Once you have an audience for anything, movie, music fans, game fans etc. You instantly become a target for advertising programs. So I'm sure blizzard has been approached, as has EA about turning these audience groups into cash flow. What company would turn it down? More money, for statistics the company is already collecting.

XboxLive could do the same, and target ads based on your achievement points. As a company, the goal is to make money, not please the minority sub section of your audience. Most people either don't care or don't know.

This WOW spyware checks things outside of it's program, read the article. What right do they have to any of my other open windows? They can safely check their own executed code and libraries for cheats.

sprunghunt

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This WOW spyware checks things outside of it's program, read the article. What right do they have to any of my other open windows? They can safely check their own executed code and libraries for cheats.

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A lot of cheats do not run within the games memory space. For example; some autoaim cheats will use data from the GPU memory and not be detectable unless you check the entire machine for applications running in the background. Because some cheats are this sneaky WOW needs to scan your entire machine to check for them.

KDR_11k

Of course I still wonder how much you could cheat in an MMO. Those things aren't skill based except for maybe a few strategic decisions, most of it is stats and equipment and you cannot cheat those. Do cheats allow anything a normal player cannot do? Or is that just about bots?

hawken

yeah and all computers with built in webcameras are watching us!

Toomas

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Of course I still wonder how much you could cheat in an MMO. Those things aren't skill based except for maybe a few strategic decisions, most of it is stats and equipment and you cannot cheat those. Do cheats allow anything a normal player cannot do? Or is that just about bots?

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Bandwith costs money and could make the game unplayable on slower connections so some compromises are there that somewhat trust the client and yes bots are bad.

Justin Meisse

my penis has spyware