<story><title>EA is File Snooping with the Origin Client</title><url>http://wccftech.com/ea-spying-file-snooping-origin-client-investigation/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bellerocky</author><text>Yes Steam I think tracks what websites you&amp;#x27;ve been to, but they only do this when they are already suspecting you of cheating, and they only send a hash of the url to see if matches known cheat sites. That&amp;#x27;s just one of the things I remember.&lt;p&gt;In a perfect world EA would just use steam and give up on Origin. I&amp;#x27;m sure they can pay Valve enough to get top billing on steam and it would be less than they spend on their own anti-cheat and origin engineering. They&amp;#x27;d also have to cut steam in on sales, but it might still be worth it. It would definitely be worth it to the user as the Origin software is horrible.</text></item><item><author>FatalLogic</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s quite likely to be cheat-detection scanning filenames, maybe even file contents. Valve had an issue like this recently. (edit: the Valve issue was actually DNS cache scanning)&lt;p&gt;edit: Gabe Newell explained Valve&amp;#x27;s reasons for scanning DNS cache - &lt;a href=&quot;http://reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_and_trust/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;reddit.com&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;gaming&amp;#x2F;comments&amp;#x2F;1y70ej&amp;#x2F;valve_vac_and_tru...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cameron_D</author><text>&amp;gt; Yes Steam I think tracks what websites you&amp;#x27;ve been to, but they only do this when they are already suspecting you of cheating, and they only send a hash of the url to see if matches known cheat sites. That&amp;#x27;s just one of the things I remember.&lt;p&gt;And this is perfectly okay, but looking through a list of start menu entries isn&amp;#x27;t? In fact I&amp;#x27;d consider shipping off lists of URLs and domains I&amp;#x27;ve been to worse than looking through installed programs.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; In a perfect world EA would just use steam and give up on Origin.&lt;p&gt;I disagree, competition is a good thing. By this same argument we should all ditch every other operating system because most users run Windows, so using others isn&amp;#x27;t necessary. Sure Origin has had its&amp;#x27; share of bumps, but so did Steam in its early days, now look at it - Steam is adored by gamers and anything else is immediately shunned.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; would be less than they spend on their own anti-cheat&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure about this, but from my understanding Steam doesn&amp;#x27;t really offer much anti-cheat, mostly just DRM. Valve games all have VAC, but I&amp;#x27;m not sure how widely used VAC is for non-Valve games.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; It would definitely be worth it to the user as the Origin software is horrible.&lt;p&gt;I partly disagree with this. The Origin interface really isn&amp;#x27;t that bad, I actually find it a lot faster&amp;#x2F;more responsive than Steam&amp;#x27;s. Steam&amp;#x27;s interface is also far from great - although they do have great cross-platform consistency, it is at the expense of being inconsistent with the users operating system.</text></comment>
<story><title>EA is File Snooping with the Origin Client</title><url>http://wccftech.com/ea-spying-file-snooping-origin-client-investigation/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bellerocky</author><text>Yes Steam I think tracks what websites you&amp;#x27;ve been to, but they only do this when they are already suspecting you of cheating, and they only send a hash of the url to see if matches known cheat sites. That&amp;#x27;s just one of the things I remember.&lt;p&gt;In a perfect world EA would just use steam and give up on Origin. I&amp;#x27;m sure they can pay Valve enough to get top billing on steam and it would be less than they spend on their own anti-cheat and origin engineering. They&amp;#x27;d also have to cut steam in on sales, but it might still be worth it. It would definitely be worth it to the user as the Origin software is horrible.</text></item><item><author>FatalLogic</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s quite likely to be cheat-detection scanning filenames, maybe even file contents. Valve had an issue like this recently. (edit: the Valve issue was actually DNS cache scanning)&lt;p&gt;edit: Gabe Newell explained Valve&amp;#x27;s reasons for scanning DNS cache - &lt;a href=&quot;http://reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1y70ej/valve_vac_and_trust/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;reddit.com&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;gaming&amp;#x2F;comments&amp;#x2F;1y70ej&amp;#x2F;valve_vac_and_tru...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mfisher87</author><text>Why is &amp;quot;everything on steam&amp;quot; a perfect world scenario? Give all the power to one system that already has significant problems with DRM and offline play?&lt;p&gt;We learned monopolies are bad this decade, again. Or is that again again? Or again again again? Or maybe it was again again again again again. I can&amp;#x27;t keep track. But we have a large portion of our population clamoring for every game to be on Steam or every house to be on Google fiber.</text></comment>