Blizzard is looking for more than just your $15/month. I’ll have to say this really surprises me. I’ve always thought Blizzard was a great company that made great games. I understand them wanting to combat piracy and cheating, but this is out of line.
4 thoughts on “Spyware in Unlikely Places”
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Blizzard has said many times that the purpose of that software is to prevent players from using third-party software to exploit World of Warcraft to enhance gameplay in such a way as to break either the EULA or the TOS.
Lots of people have been crying about it, saying how wrong it is that blizzard is scanning their computer. I didn’t read the article, so I only assume this is what it was about.
Lots of people crying. The mmo world as a whole disregards the crying of the fanboys that have a problem with this. Is it spyware?
Nope.
🙂
The Jimmy
You’re more than welcome to your opinion as I’m welcome to mine. I love how you didn’t even bother to read the article. By the way, this is MY site so I’ll post whatever I want. Have a nice day.
Blizzard is using Warden to actively enforce the terms of their EULA and TOS. Legal agreements (as they both are) were not created to be ignored.
When you create your checking/savings account at your bank, you sign a lot of paperwork agreeing to their terms, and they agree to hold your money for you (and sometimes pay interest). In a world with no legal enforcement, the bank could walk away with your money and laugh in your face. Same principle, different application.
Also if you had bothered to read the comments, Warden is entirely client-side. It only sends data back to the central server when its hash matches an entry in the hash table, and even then the data sent back is in hashed form. This means that anything that doesn’t match an entry in the hash table doesn’t get sent AT ALL.
Given a hash table of A, B, C, … Z, searching for the hash of “Visa #1234-5678-1234-5678-7890” is not going to return any matches, and so nothing is done.
I understand the concept of a hash table and I wasnt trying to say Blizzard is mining credit card numbers, but thanks for the example. However, saying Warden is entirely client side isn’t really true simply because it can communicate with a central server. If it were truly client side data would only be pushed to the client and information would be sent back only when the user asked initiated the action.
I completely understand why Blizzard wants to limit violations of their EULA and TOS, and I understand that people agree to allow Warden onto their computers when they check the box for those agreements. Still, I think it’s a dangerous precedent to set, saying it’s ok to search through a person’s running process to send information back on the off chance it finds something it’s looking for. It makes it all too easy for them to take the next step to violating users’ privacy.
I read something the other day that says, despite claims to the contrary, Windows Update does send information to Microsoft. Things like this just rub me the wrong way. There has to be other ways to catch people cheating using third-party software, bots, and whatnot. I stand by my statement that this is out of line.
For the record, if I had the time and energy to waste, I would probably be playing World of Warcraft despite Warden. However, I just might download this tool to see exactly what Warden is doing. The author of that program also makes a great point at the end of the page.
Also, I’d appreciate it if you gave your name next time. Anonymity is your right, but I’m not going to jump through the screen after you, and it’s easier to have discussion with a name.