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Old 25-09-2004, 14:55
Dimensio Dimensio is offline
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I'm actually less paranoid about the homebrew community than I am about developers screwing up in a way that massively screws with my system.

For example, Thief III has a little in-game check to make sure that the user playing is running with full Administrative rights, even beyond the CD check. If a non-Admin player tries to run the game, it deletes its own system files, rendering the install useless. This is an act of pure malice. It is easily circumvented by disabling write-access to the files (after which the game runs without problem), but it's a clear case of the devs sabotaging their own game to enforce an arbitrary and technically stupid requirement.

What happens if they screw up the 'delete the system files' code so that it is activated even when an Admin runs the executable? What happens if it goes from 'delete the game's system files' to 'delete arbitrary files on the machine'? When developers are pulling that kind of ****, I don't want to run their software under my Admin account.

Finally, my ultimate point is that while some people don't care about recommended security measures, I do. I do not run things under my Administrator account unless it is specifically an administrative task. I don't appreciate companies like EA/Maxis deciding that they know better than security experts, and when game companies pull this kind of crap I have to rely on the crack community to provide a proper workaround. Unfortunately, thus far, nothing has come out for this particular game.