A Blizzard On Your Hard Drive
2001-05-08 | posted by Chairman Steve | print
The wizards behind Diablo2 at Blizzard added a new feature to Diablo2 in patch 1.06. It allows Blizzard to look at your entire hard drive. What’s the excuse, you ask? It’s to find Diablo2 cheaters. Looks like Blizzard is the charlatan in this scenario. They just might find themselves in court, according to the Germans. Shouldn't looking just in the Diablo2 folder and the web server be enough to find cheats? Snooping around files like a snake just doesn't seem right.Diablo2 maker Blizzard Entertainment has seen its Web sites, including Battle.net, disabled today -- an act curiously timed, since it recently altered its terms of service (ToS) to take full advantage of patch 1.06, which contains a mechanism enabling the company to monitor Battle.net users for duplicate items and disable them.
The legal move created a storm of controversy among German players, who claim the new ToS document violates German law. Players are equally ticked off about the actual technology in 1.06, which is believed to be capable of a good deal more system snooping than the company allows.
According to a German source, the tasks in 1.06 range all the way to scanning the complete hard disk and the registry. |