Your skill in Spyware has increased by 1.
You may have noticed the new logon message this week that says don't use third party executables when you play World of Warcraft. The game now checks to see what kind of programs you're running in the game space to see if you're cheating. This doesn't mean the regular addons, but other programs running at the same time.
There’s some misinformation that’s going around in regard to the hack-scanning process (not a separate program) that we run within the World of Warcraft executable, so we’d like to take this opportunity to help clarify things for our players.They told you they were doing this in the new Terms of Agreement with Tuesday's patch. So Blizzard is not hiding the fact. They've posted about it on the game forums. Although they're understandably reticent to say exactly what the process looks for, since they don't want to make it easier for hackers.
Legally speaking, the scans are not a violation of rights. Understandably, that’s beside the point for the people who are concerned about our security measures. What those players seem to be concerned about is whether the hack scans are ethically appropriate. To address those concerns, we’d like to make it clear that the scan does not review or retrieve anything that’s personally identifiable. For example, the data that the scans read is not data that says, “This is John Doe’s computer. John lives at 123 ABC Drive, his phone number is ABC, his personal interests are XYZ, he has ABC friends, and he sent XYZ emails yesterday.” Again, we can’t get into what specifically it does look at, but we can say that all it tells us is whether a computer is hacking World of Warcraft.Some guy has gone ballistic, saying that this spyware is checking everything his computer is doing and might be downloading all kinds of personal information. His tirade is getting quoted in lots of places. Rumor has it that the guy with the tirade is actually one of the cheaters they're trying to stop, so he's trying to make it look like they're stealing all your personal info.
I just wanted to let you guys know that the Author of "Wow is Spyware" over at rootkit.com that EVERYONE has been linking recently, is a development team member on a certain program that is SPECIFICALLY designed to hack/cheat in World of Warcraft.When you re-read said tirade, it's lots of innuendo and practically no facts. So, the final analysis at this point seems to be that they're tracking hacking programs, which as a player, I believe is good for the game. Maybe this is where all the Krol Blades keep coming from in the AH. Alls I knows is I don't like cheaters.
3 comments:
I have no problem w/the concept of the Warden client. I don't play WoW, but I've been an active Ragnarok player in the past and I'd have welcomed something like this with open arms. Botters had quite the negative impact on the game economy as well as the secondary market and cheapened the gaming experience as a whole.
Generally speaking, those who complain have something to hide.
When a cop pulls you over and asks to search your car, do you say no? You're well within your rights to do so, as without probable cause, all he can do is look in through the window.
Thing is, you say "go ahead," because you have an excuse for being late to work, and while it's an inconvenience, so is waiting for the K9 unit when you declining creates more suspicion.
Do I think it's wrong for a company like Blizzard to scan your active processes looking for something? Sure, and in a perfect moral world, they wouldn't have to. But I do not cheat, and above that, I have nothing in any active process while I play which I care if Blizzard knows or not. So they can go right ahead.
But, on the flip side, I would prefer people monitor the situation from a third-person standpoint, to ensure nothing else goes funky. But Blizzard's a multi-million dollar corporation without a reputation for trying to get one over on its customers (as the Microsoft example). I'm more than willing to trust them.
Everquest had some of the same problems in that programs began popping up which you could run concurrently with EQ and it would tell you various things about the zone you were currently in, including I believe, the drops that any particular mob was going to drop.
To combat this, EQ began programming invisible mobs into zones with great loot. As the story goes, only people running the side programs would see them and run over to kill them. Then, they got their accounts deleted. Yay team.
I applaud WoW for trying to screw over the cheaters. Besides, AOL probably knows more about you than Blizzard does.
Post a Comment