Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Rolan7]

Well yeah, tomato tomato.  It wasn't particularly good DLC either, I thought the system was neat though.
Main point was that Uplay was unobtrusive, which was all I wanted from it.

[forsaken1111]

So long as they only run when needed and don't pop shit up onto my screen about 'deals' and stuff I have no problem with these other launchers (uplay, origin, etc)

[scrdest]

Anti-virus software does have a history of misidentifying such programs as rootkits.
Of course there's some measure of truth to it...  With the extreme being something like Starforce.  *Technically* legitimate, but it walks talks and quacks like malware.

Uplay isn't bad at all though, Steam installed it with Far Cry 3 and it's just kinda there when I play Far Cry.  Had to make an account to do multiplayer and acquire points through achievements (used to buy certain DLC, a system I kinda like).  But that was easy and by default you can just X it out when done with Far Cry or whatever.  And FC3 uses the Steam overlay just fine, *and* the Uplay overlay, without issues.

Unless Uplay has been doing some spying I haven't heard about.

It was not an anti-virus false positive, it was a Google whitehat, Tavis Ormandy. And he wrote a proof-of-concept exploit that utilizes it.

[Persus13]

Uplay isn't bad at all though, Steam installed it with Far Cry 3 and it's just kinda there when I play Far Cry.  Had to make an account to do multiplayer and acquire points through achievements (used to buy certain DLC, a system I kinda like).  But that was easy and by default you can just X it out when done with Far Cry or whatever.  And FC3 uses the Steam overlay just fine, *and* the Uplay overlay, without issues.

Unless Uplay has been doing some spying I haven't heard about.

Yeah, I've had a similar experience with Assassin's Creed II through Steam. Only difference was that I had to download Uplay separately from the game. Except I didn't know about that and almost every post I found online which asked for help with a similar issue only got a bunch of people complaining about how bad Uplay sucked instead of actually trying to help.

[Rolan7]

... Okay yeah this sucks, apparently it installed a browser plug-in without asking.  And the security on that plugin was faulty, such that any site could use it.  That's bad, particularly since there was no need for the plug-in at all.  And again, it was done quietly without asking.

It was also back in 2012, but still.
(Also, calling it a rootkit is silly.  Microsoft, Oracle, and Adobe have all installed countless rootkits by that definition.  An insecure plugin is a gaff, a potentially terrible one, but not a "rootkit".  It's called a "vulnerability".)

[0x517A5D]

I tend to think of rootkits as having kernel-mode black magic to be super-stealthy, including across reboots. 

And in one memorable case, across a full Windows reinstall.  (IIRC, something about a custom boot sector and some code hidden in the 1MB of a disk that Windows reserves for their GUID partitioning scheme.  As I say, black magic.)

As such, I wouldn't class a browser plugin, however stealthy, as a rootkit.  But obviously some people do:

The plug-in can be classed as a rootkit because it is thought to allow continued privileged access to a machine without a user’s consent.  [1]

And Wikipedia's definition could be twisted to fit:

A rootkit is a collection of computer software, typically malicious, designed to enable access to a computer or areas of its software that would not otherwise be allowed (for example, to an unauthorized user) while at the same time masking its existence or the existence of other software.  [2]

So potayto, potahto.  It's all in the definition you choose.

Can we all agree that that a plugin allowing any website to execute arbitrary software with arbitrary command-line parameters was a massive security problem?  Then we can move on.

So what about that Train Fever on the current humble weekly bundle?  It looks like you can build track but not drive the trains, is that correct?

[Shadowlord]

Origin doesn't do anything like that, does it?

[Aklyon]

Origin is EA pretending to be steam-like. You don't hear much good about it besides 'its gotten better', afaik.

[Shadowlord]

I mean, I have it installed, and it seems fine, but if it had a rootkit I wouldn't know, so...

[Culise]

The worst I've ever heard about Origin is that it phones home with your OS, hardware, and installed programs.  I've never heard of it installing fresh security holes, though I'll be the first to admit that I'm not exactly in the loop.

[Chiefwaffles]

(source of following: "I think I heard it somewhere online")
Doesn't steam do that as well?

[0x517A5D]

(source of following: "I think I heard it somewhere online")
Doesn't steam do that as well?

Steam Hardware & Software Survey

1) It's opt-in voluntary. 

2) The aggregated data is made available for everyone to look through.

I note that 100.00% of the systems surveyed in November have CPUs that support the FCMOV instruction.  This means that they are Pentium Pro or better.  99.99% of them support SSE2 extensions, meaning that they are Pentium 4 or better.

This means that one Steam user in ten thousand is still cruising along with a PPro or a Celery.  These are probably the same poor saps who have less than 512MB of memory.

[n9103]

This means that one Steam user in ten thousand is still cruising along with a PPro or a Celery.

Intentional typo?

RE: uPlay/Origin/et al.
I've at one point or another installed most of these publisher distro platforms, if only to see how intrusive or just bad they are for myself.
Almost every one of them left behind non-trivial parts after running the "uninstall", ranging from ID'ing logs or cookies, to background daemons that had an open port.
More than once, I've had to comb my registry and services to track down where an obfuscated process name was being called from. (Probably one of my biggest IT pet peeves. Use common sense names you jackwads )

Have they changed their behavior in the time since I installed it? I don't know, nor care. Scummy moves don't beget 2nd chances.
You could offer me Fallout 4 free on Origin, and I wouldn't touch it.

[ChairmanPoo]

Should I go for Necrodancer for 6€?

[BigD145]

Should I go for Necrodancer for 6€?

Yes, and a dancepad for more than 6 Euro.