I've been following this with some interest - and I'm curious people's
opinions - and the actual truth of the matter.

1) It's pretty clear that we all don't want Verant (or anyone else) snooping
around in such things as Internet directories et al. If I recall
correctly - the impression that this was being done - was from a post from a
Necro board of a log of program that claimed they were reading this. Has
anyone here verified this?

Smedly claimed that this was false...

2) Smedly claimed all they did (and I thought Kevin Crawford verified this)
is that they run a Win32API call to see what active process were and what's
in memory.

If this is all Verant is doing - I'm not so sure I have a problem with this.
I don't want them reading my hard drive - there is a chance for properitary
info. Hypothetically there's a chance that (say you had a word processor
doc running) that proprietary info is in memory - but that's kind of a
stretch. Plus - if you were really concerned about it - you chould just be
careful to shut everything down before starting EQ (I do this anyway to
conserve memory).

I'm curious what others think about this. Again - no scanning of file -
simply checking memory and active processes.

What's kind of silly about this - is how hard is it to change the name of
the program? Couldn't you even code the program to generate a random
process name everytime you ran?

And isn't there a REALLY simple solution to thsi? Couldn't Verant encrypt
their packets? Perhaps this additional overhead would negatively impact
performance - but I'd think if they are clever enough they could come up
with something that would make it really hard for these programs.
Especially since they could subtly change the algorhtym ever time they
patch..

Slyde (another RL computer geek)