Lyrnia Jongleur wrote:
> Some of us that play EQ work for companies that made us sign non-disclosure
> agreements regarding the companies intellectual properties. That means, if
> I take work home, and I let someone see what I'm doing. My company can come
> sue me. Now, if some company does it without my knowledge (IE: Hacks my
> system) then my company will sue them, not me. But if I sign an agreement
> letting a company scan the contents of my active memory and some sensitive
> data happens to be in there then *I* am responsible and I can lose my job
> and wind up in jail. (not that it's likely, but it is possible).
Well, my company uses the internet, but doesn't do internet-based work, so this permutation didn't occur
to me. 1) My company has more than enough internet security stuff on our network to prevent me from
running EQ altogether; 2) when we work on proprietary or secure data and/or systems, we do it on
stand-alone machines and transmit the information on cd-roms via courier; 3) for the same reason, I have a
stand-alone machine in my own home. Plus, I never play EQ with any other processes running. Yeah, I'm a
dinosaur.
> Asside from that little nastiness there is the issue of personal privacy.
> It's not *my* fault that some moron out there is hacking EQ. That's
> Verant's problem. The fact remains that they could scan my memory and
> active tasks and just shut down EQ if it has whatever they're looking for.
> If it doesn't I play as normal. This way no data is being transmitted from
> my computer that may be sensitive.
I think Verant is caught between a rock and a hard place here. If they pull information up to their own
servers, they get hammered by the arguments you've presented, but if they deny people access to a service
that they've paid for without some form of proof, they get sued from the other side. I'm quite certain
that the reasons they wanted to pull the data up were to: 1) have proof if they chose to ban a player and
2) give them the ability to review the data to make sure that they weren't making a mistake. Given the
number of clients they have, the number of machines that are running EQ at a given time, and a whole slew
of practical resource limits, I couldn't pulling much of anything up, and even if it contained something
that perhaps it shouldn't have, they wouldn't have the ability to understand it.
Since the point is moot, I'm really just wrestling with the philosophical and technical implications
here. I'm not disagreeing with you, just trying to get a handle on this.
Kenross Cantoforjado, 47 songs, Innoruuk