>
> Certainly Mattel was doing this. I read a story a few months ago about a guy
> who noticed that (while on an airplane) his laptop kept trying to get an
> internet connection. It was a game his kids had loaded, trying to phone
> home and tell Momma about the local digs. Mattel had "forgot" to tell people
> about this option in their games.
>
You raise a good point. Who is to say that a software manufacturer is not
under the control of a government security agency? Or the Mafia? Only one or two
people in the company would need to know what is going on. I have read that
M$ is very careful to screen its software for such things, even using unix
or linux software to help, since M$ worms don't bother unix (we hope). It would be
very doubtful that a game manufacturer would bother looking too hard.
Is there any watch dog agency which screens games cd's for worms?
This sort of musing makes the Opensource movement seem quite sensible.
The degree to which this problem is ignored by my company is astounding.
Our secretaries routinely install screen savers on their PC's, which are
quite complicated pieces of software. They get them from friends or the
internet. I have complained repeatedly to IS
about this, even writing directly to the head of IS for our corporation and
writing to the CEO of our hospital. A friend in IS carried the ball on this
personally. IS has done nothing about it. So, our corporation
would be easy pickings for anybody who wanted to plant some worms.
Joel
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