Not flaming Ca

[Didz]

As such, branding SEGA *immoral* and CA *such a good company* is with all due respect childish.

Well sorry but how else do you describe a company that embeds Securom spyware into its products and then sells that spyware and the ability to code it to third parties.

Of course SEGA and its customers (like EA) don't tell you when you install one of their games that you are actually embedding a spyware program into your PC, that cannot be uninstalled again, even if you uninstall the game. That might put you off buying their product, instead they just slip it on the disk secretly so you will never realise its there unless it starts messing up your system, and even then you wouldn't know to blame Securom because you don't even know its there. The fact is everyone reading this forum probably has it embedded on their PC, and it does interfere with your system, as several class action suits against SEGA and EA have already shown.

You can find out more about this secret application which is embedded in your PC here http://www.securom.com, but its what this site doesn't tell you which is more interesting and worrying.

In the early days SEGA were quite bullish about using Securom on their products. They were so excited about this new era in game security and marketing that when you visited their website you could actually access and read SEGA's own marketing 'blurb' about the benefits of using this product for game publishers.

Since the class action suits SEGA have become a bit more secretive about advertising what Securom is capable of doing, and unless you actually buy the product you can't read about its full potential on their website, as its hidden behind 'customer only' restictions.

However, the main benefit they were peddling in the early days was that Securom comes with the potential to be coded by the customer who purchases it to 'gather any marketing information you consider relevant to your market and products' and 'to vary the content and nature of that data gathering over time as your marketing interests change'. The package necessary to code Securom was sold as a seperate ancillary product and came with the ability to update the Securom software already embedded on the PC's of your customers at any time.

Note: This ability is NOT limited to simple data gathering. If you read the class action suits you will see that Securom also has the potential to be used to prevent the customer running any application that the company owning the access rights to the software decides their customers should not be allowed to use. Eldridge lists a few that EA chose to inhibit, but effectively the list is only limited by the the coder, and could vary according to the desires of each Securom customer and over time.

In effect, not only is Securom a piece of spyware, but it has the potential to be a trojan horse which has its own key to bypass all your PC security programs. All it actually needs is for one game publisher who has purchased the marketing expansion from SEGA, to employ a dodgy coder, or allow someone to steal their access protocols and we could find Securom being used as a certain way of loading mailicious programs onto our PC's.

Now you can call me childish, for labelling the decision to not only use but sell this software immoral. Personally, I would say that it was not only immoral but criminal, and I'm not alone in this view as the following transcripts of the class action suits already lodged in the US show.

Eldridge-vs-EA

Cortez-vs-EA