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My thoughts exactly. This is so unbelievably bone-headed.

I want to believe that this was slipped in by a small rogue group within FSL, and that its not something everyone approved of...

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LinkedIn only has 3 people who are listed at working at this company [0], so I'd assume it's a small indie shop without a legal department.

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/index/?keywords=Flig....

It still baffles me. You can't stay even moderately up to date on technology news, without knowing that initiating a security breach, even on someone who has stolen your product, will still be criminal.

Just have the user agreement state that if you pirate it, you allow them to exfiltrate all data on your system.

Yeah, not sure if you're being sarcastic, but if not: the law doesn't work like that. You can't annul a criminal statute simply by including a clause in your EULA.

If someone signs a contract allowing you to do something you're generally allowed to do the thing, with exceptions.

Dropbox uploads data from your computer on to their servers, which would be illegal had you not agreed to that as part of signing up and installing the software.

The difference is that Dropbox is only allowed to access those files I tell it to. If the Dropbox client would start crawling my filesystem for 'password.txt' or 'banking-tan.list' this would be illegal, no matter what clause is written in the EULA.

On what basis are you differentiating between agreeing to something that allows then to access your stuff, and "telling it" to access them?

So you're suggesting that the FlightSim EULA laid out exactly what the installer was doing, and asked permission to exfiltrate your passwords if the registration key didn't match? I very much doubt that, and I'm skeptical it would be legal even if so.

It's unquestionably illegal to do it on the down-low, like FlightSim has done. It's malware, nothing less, nothing more.

>So you're suggesting that the FlightSim EULA laid out exactly what the installer was doing, and asked permission to exfiltrate your passwords if the registration key didn't match?

No, I'm suggesting they should add a clause saying that they have the right to access and upload anything on your computer if it's being pirated.

I never said anything about the current EULA and haven't looked at it.

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