The Haus

Thursday, June 15, 2000

Big Brother (Mattel) Is Watching You! -- 10:31 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

This Salon article details how a Broderbund/Mattel kids' program, Arthur's Reading Race, also installed a little program without the author's knowledge or consent that runs in the background and sends information to Mattel. The program ran silently and used PGP encryption to scramble its messages back and forth. Mattel claims that its purpose was innocuous but who wants it? And why didn't the installer mention it was installing this program? Slashdot has put out a call for the hackers among us to fire up their debuggers and figure out what information this little program is sending.

To see if you have this little "gem" running in the background, look for a program called DSSAgent . . .

News for 06/15/2000

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