Concerns about the new EULA

you keep focusing on the civil right comment and ignoring the privacy issue that has several people concerned, which is the bigger issue than his misuse of civil rights.

Westley overreacted, just about everyone, including himself, agreed to it.

MOVE ON

And moving on back to the serious stuff in this thread:

What would be Charles and Wolverine be?

Charlesverine?

or in the case of Japanese-Americans in WWII....what rights?

hmm...not quite

I will now attempt to get this thread back to discussing the new EULA rationally.

To my understanding, the new EULA (and the old EULA, and essentially all EULAs) boil down to: "We can terminate your service anytime you want. You were warned."

It is worth it to check whether a EULA expressly gives the corporation permission to install a rootkit or summat, but I don't beleive this one does that.

Therefore I don't beleive this particular EULA is a concern, because I don't beleive it actually does anything other than speak in somewhat clearer language than the previous EULA.

Oh, are we back to actually talking about the EULA? I figured that train had derailed a long time back.

Here are the two things I'll say about monitoring:

1) The EULA doesn't say anything about how NCSoft goes about its monitoring. There's nothing to prevent them from intalling a Sony style root-kit or using something that acts like GameGuard or NProtect only worse. Whatever they want to do is okay.

2) There IS an option available for mitigating the situation, which I alluded to in the EULA thread on the beta boards: Virtualization.

If you're truly concerned about the game or its software having some undesirable access to your computer or some undesirable affect upon your system, the don't run it on your system. Run it in a virtual machine. It's true that not everyone has that capability but it is becoming more and more common as people swap out their old machines for modern hardware and operating systems.

I don't really know what the tradeoffs are of running it in a virtual machine. Conceivably, you could, for instance, lose access to Ultra Mode or special graphics features that depend on having low level access to the graphics card.

I've got a Windows 7 machine at work with Windows XP Mode installed on it, so I'm thinking that I'll install Freedom on it, just to see how it works. (Windows XP Mode is a virtual machine running Windows XP. It's a free feature of Windows 7 Professional, though it has to be downloaded from Microsoft. It doesn't come on the Win 7 install disks.) As I've stated before, I don't really have a problem with the EULA. I'm primarily just curious about whether this is a viable solution to the privacy problem.