Game Publishers Using Stealth P2P Clients

An anonymous reader writes "TorrentFreak has shed some light on the dark practice of installing stealth-mode P2P clients during game downloads and using unsuspecting gamers' PCs as 'bandwidth slaves.' The clients operate in the background and largely go unnoticed until problems arise that are caused by overactive uploading/seeding. While the Akamai NetSession Interface and Pando Media Booster are specifically called out, there appear to be other offenders as indicated in the comments left by TorrentFreak readers. A publisher called Solid State Networks is putting out a call for an industry-wide 'best practices' effort to promote transparency, control and privacy on behalf of gamers who are otherwise being abused for their bandwidth without their consent."

Comments

Blizzard

[pak9rabid]

Isn't this how Blizzard distributes updates for their games?

Re:Blizzard

[Moridin42]

Last I knew, which was quite some time ago, Blizzard was real explicit about the fact that you were uploading while fetching a patch. Upload speed and bytes transferred provided in the update pane.

Its the companies that don't tell you that you're part of their distribution network, or how much of your bandwidth is being consumed, that this article is against.

Invert all word meanings on the Internet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pando Media Booster = slows down your internet connection
Norton Antivirus = makes your computer vulnerable to hacking
Trusted Computing = you can't be sure if you have control of your computer
etc.

Don't you dare steal our games...

[Red_Chaos1]

...but don't mind us as we steal your bandwidth. Oh but we *did* get your explicit permission. It was buried in that wall of text you agreed to that we could.

Re:This is the end of unlimited unmetered bandwidt

[LostCluster]

If we're all using more bandwidth, that's a demand increase, not a supply increase.

Turbine.

[Mark19960]

I called them out for it and it fell on deaf ears.
It's not their bandwidth so they don't really care.
They are using Pando Media Booster... and it's so badly set up that it takes 4 times as long to download the game
because they saturate the upstream, causing issues.

In short, these game houses don't care because it's a reduced cost to them.

Re:'bout time

[causality]

You can. Pull plug out of ethernet jack. Put plug into ethernet jack. What more do you want? :P

I know you were speaking tongue-in-cheek but really, this is why both ingress and egress firewalling with a default-deny policy for each is a good idea.

Then it's not so simple for a company to help themselves to your bandwidth. That, by the way, should be illegal unless they first negotiate with you and obtain your explicit written permission to do so. Like anything else, they're not the ones paying for it so they don't automatically have some claim to use it. The failure to recognize that is generally known as "theft of services".

If the companies really think this is acceptable, perhaps they wouldn't mind several tens of thousands of browsers refreshing their home pages as quickly as possible? After all, they think it's acceptable to do as you please with another's bandwidth without their express consent... I have the feeling they wouldn't like that at all. In fact I have the feeling they'd use every legal means available to go after anyone who arranged that.

Re:Can we name names here?

[blueg3]

You can't comment on whether Final Fantasy 14 discloses that it uses P2P, because you don't have a copy of FF14. You only have a copy of the beta. The fact that it uses P2P to download the beta client and updates is spelled out in the download and installation instructions that you clearly didn't read.