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Windower v4 Beta
Posted: Mon Mar 11, 2013 12:16 am
by bluekirby0
Mirroring this post here so that people are aware:
http://www.bluegartr.com/threads/115146 ... indower-v4
This is to warn everyone that the new Windower v4 Beta launcher collects and tracks information about your machine, including your Machine GUID (globally unique identifier) and quite possibly your IP address as well. If you would like to further examine what exactly is going on, a piece of the decompiled source follows (the most interesting part so far starts at line 32):
http://pastebin.com/P8w4BtVw
This can easily be written off as normal usage statistics tracking done by adware, but at no point in time does it ask for your consent to collect this information. Not only is this practice unethical, but it is quite possibly illegal (note: IANAL).
This gives them the power to feed your information to ad services. It may also give them the ability to relate your character information to your hardware or IP address.
The hooking library has not changed from the previous version, aside from some minor changes to the plugin interface, so a major version bump is a little misleading. The new Lua interface is a step in the right direction in giving developers the freedom to create their own plug-ins for Windower, but it could have easily been released as a plugin without leading people to believe that important changes had occurred with a major version bump.
Re: Windower v4 Beta
Posted: Mon Mar 11, 2013 8:05 pm
by whasf
So they get your GUID, run it through SHA256, get what type of OS you have, and post to a Google analytics site. The real question is why did they write it in C#? lol
TBH it's not any worse than what a website knows about you....
Re: Windower v4 Beta
Posted: Mon Mar 11, 2013 8:15 pm
by bluekirby0
Its the fact that they didn't bother to mention it at first and that there is still no option to opt-out that bugs me.
Re: Windower v4 Beta
Posted: Thu Mar 14, 2013 10:58 am
by limmy
It does say they use google analytics in the posting about it. They said you can turn it off via blocking, but alas, it crashes the client.
I wish ashita had a guildworks plugin
Re: Windower v4 Beta
Posted: Thu Mar 14, 2013 3:57 pm
by PrBlahBlahtson
Re: Windower v4 Beta
Posted: Thu Mar 14, 2013 7:58 pm
by limmy
Im not sure how i missed that.
Re: Windower v4 Beta
Posted: Thu Mar 14, 2013 9:24 pm
by bluekirby0
Yes, the Windower team has chosen to lock down their v4 Beta tight so it is likely that a working launcher for it will not be made anytime soon. It seems they have no qualms alienating the private server community.
Re: Windower v4 Beta
Posted: Fri Mar 15, 2013 11:36 am
by limmy
The only thing I like about the windower UI over ashita is the UI slider. I'm really only complaining because I had to run calc and multiply by .8 to get the 1.2x multiplier
I'm lazy.
Ashita, as far as I can tell, is far superior. Run my own server? Open only one instance and keep launching ffxi clients? Only thing I can't seem to find is an exact clone of autoexec, but onevent does what I need.
Out of curiosity, does LightLuggage use packets as well? I wonder if the plugins they provide do all the things these do, but don't provide the warnings given out.
Re: Windower v4 Beta
Posted: Fri Mar 15, 2013 4:04 pm
by atom0s
limmy wrote:The only thing I like about the windower UI over ashita is the UI slider. I'm really only complaining because I had to run calc and multiply by .8 to get the 1.2x multiplier
I'm lazy.
What do you mean with this?
Out of curiosity, does LightLuggage use packets as well? I wonder if the plugins they provide do all the things these do, but don't provide the warnings given out.
Yes, LightLuggage is done all through packets. A lot of Windowers plugins use packets without warning the user(s).
Re: Windower v4 Beta
Posted: Fri Mar 15, 2013 4:37 pm
by PrBlahBlahtson
There's an Ashita equivalent to LightLuggage. Not sure how it works, but I do know that it doesn't spam the server with sorting packets, so it won't trigger DSP's LightLuggage disconnect.