[stepurhan]

World of Warcraft comes with a program called "The Warden" The stated purpose of this program is to detect if a player is hacking the WoW code to enhance their character and alert Blizzard who will then cut off that persons account. Some concern has arisen that it could be a lot more intrusive than that.

See this article on the Out-Law website.

[Aj_]

A piece of software that Sony installs actually allows cheat applications to hide from The Warden. Using rootkit technology, the Sony software is meant to be invisible, for doing some evil things on your computer without your permission.

I don't think people mind being scanned for cheats but they want to know:

• when they install the software.
• what the software does and what infomation it sends back.
• how to uninstall the software.

It's not so much the intent of the software that makes it spyware, but how it gets installed and how it does what it does.

A piece of software called "The Governor" has been created to tell you what "The Warden" is doing..

World of Warcraft is a great game, but I've had crashing problems, constant lag, and now it's installing spyware. I don't expect this treatment from a game developer that expects me to pay a monthly fee.

[Huz]

Originally Posted by Aj_

I don't think people mind being scanned for cheats but they want to know:

Indeed. Although the idea of CD copy-protection annoys me because it breaks the precedent - I've always been able to copy CDs before and I expect this to continue - I'm not opposed in principle to digital rights management (DRM). All I ask is that it isn't intrusive and isn't annoying. iTunes is a great example of DRM done right - it is essentially transparent - whereas a really simple example of "copy protection" done badly is the unskippable anti-piracy bollocks that plays at the start of rental DVDs now. It's intrusive, it's annoying, it's stupid, and yes I would steal a handbag. If I was starving and it was made out of bread.

Bit of a tangent there, sorry. What I meant to say was that I agree with AJ. If I'm going to have DRM gubbins on my computer, I want to know what it's up to, and I want to be pretty sure it's not sending my credit card details off to China. It's all about achieving a balance, and both examples in this thread, the Sony 'rootkit' and The Warden, sound like they are far too intrusive and overreaching.

And the fact that one can be used to defeat the other is genius.

World of Warcraft is a great game, but I've had crashing problems, constant lag, and now it's installing spyware. I don't expect to treatment from a game developer that expects me to pay a monthly fee.

And now we come to the very reason a balance is incredibly difficult to achieve. What's the alternative with the current model? MMORPG operators are stuck in an arms race against cheaters, the same as record and film companies are now sadly stuck in an arms race against pirates. The only solution is to start afresh, with a different format in the case of film and music, and with a different (server-based) model for MMORPGs.

I don't think this is very likely, so in the medium term we're stuck with ever-more intrusive software in the name of protecting games, or record companies' pockets.