Archived from groups: alt.games.battlefield1942 (
More info?)
In article <8NudnXkwgYrBEV3cRVn-1A@comcast.com>, "GrössKopf FLOT Admin"
<admin AT flotserver DOT net> says...
> "Jan Kannemacher" <varros@gmx.de> wrote in message
> news:5hq0s098navsov3itit47bq5feoa8t3fna@4ax.com...
> > In a nutshell:
> >
> > First, read the EULA. This should be well enough to piss you off.
>
> What? Do I have to give up my first born? Pledge allegance to the flag of
> Punkbusted.com?
>
> > PB requires to run on a highly privileged level, normal user rights
> > aren't enough. Nobody actually knows what it's doing ("such information
> > would help the cheaters"), it's rather like having an unpredictable
> > nutcase with all keys roaming in your house. Updates are slow, PB often
> > misfires either for false positives (less frequently) or for self-caused
> > problems like communication errors between client and server, update
> > timeouts (quite a lot of them). As for me, I don't really fancy being
> > kicked off my own server frequently because the pretty much useless
> > "anti-cheat" software hiccups again.
>
> I guess I must be in the minority then. I'm not sure what you mean by PB
> requiring a "highly privileged level" and that "normal user rights aren't
> enough". I play on my own PC at home so I've got all the "rights" I need.
> Are people playing BF1942 on PC's where they don't have complete control
> over it, like on their corporate LANs? The only time I've ever been kicked
> by PB is during the most recent update and it only happened 2x. I manually
> updated and it worked no problem after that. Previous updates were done
> without incident and were quick. I suppose if it's such a bad piece of
> software for some server admins, they could run their server without it.
> Personally, I only play on PunkBuster servers because some protection from
> cheaters is better than no protection.
>
> As far as the nutcase roaming my house with the keys... I have some highly
> rated anti-spyware programs running along with an excellent firewall, so I
> don't think there's anything poking around in my computer that I don't know
> about nor is anything accessing the internet without me knowing about it.
> The black helicopters hovering over my house is another matter, though.
>
>
>
You should never need Administrator access to a computer to run simple
programs, such as Battlefield and Punkbuster. Administrator access gains
full control over the system, allowing it to do _anything_ it wants,
without so much as a pop-up requesting permission from you. This means,
you're "highly rated anti-spyware" could be turned off or circumvented
without your knowledge. This is of course theoretically possible,
however highly unlikely.
For anti-spyware and firewalls to work, there must first be something
that matches their scans or in the case of a firewall, attempts to gain
unauthorized access. If you read the documentation for a program and it
tells you in order to use this program, you must allow it through your
personal firewall, chances are, you're going to allow it. Now imagine if
you will, you've installed this program and it runs with your
permissions. In the background, when you're not playing the game, it's
installed itself in a manner that will allow it to periodically start
and run, scan your system and report something about your computer to
it's masters. You've already "ok'd" the program to pass through your
firewall, it's of no known "spyware", so therefore, it won't be caught
by that either.
Chester Nimitz said it best, way back when, "...you're not paranoid if
they're really out to get you."
Spyware is out to get you, malware is out to get you.
Who are the folks at punkbuster? They're not owned by a "big name
company". They just so happen to offer a popular, if not "good" product
to detect *some* of the cheaters out there. There's no guarantee that
they're not gonna try to start making money off your idle computer time.
In recent years, many types of spyware has done just that, from some
very "big name" corporations.
http://www.cotse.net/privacy/spyware.htm
/CF
a25s0p2lt4hq1hd4o9t64ftudpgtdbocm@4ax.com...
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