What's the deal with overwolf

Tbf though, there is no pure capitalism anywhere. Only mixes of capitolism and socialism. Unregulated capitalism doesn’t work, and pure socialism is impossible, as it is a concept rooted in humans not acting like humans.

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Thank you for reminding me.

The issue is that Overwolf has bad oversight over their ad providers, which means it’s possible for malvertisements to slip through and try to execute code that takes advantage of security holes in software on your computer. Whether the malvertisements require clicking or not varies between machines and individual ads, as does the ability of these malvertisements to succeed. It’s best to not tempt fate and just never give such software the chance.

This is compounded by the fact that Overwolf runs directly on your computer, and thus lacks the safeguards and sandboxing built into browsers.

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The biggest problem with Overwolf is the safety / sanctuary of your computer, as they’ve had a history of putting Malware in their adds and selling your information to 3rd party websites.

Same, I need proof and there is none. All I’ve found is someone saying Overwolf was flagged as having a trojan and Overwolf responding saying it was a false positive and they are working to get it fixed :man_shrugging:

I think peoples problem is Overwolf 1) Admits to collecting data and giving it to advertisers to generate targeted ads in their app. This can be seen in the privacy policy here https://www.overwolf.com/legal/privacy/

We use the information we collect from and about you for any of the following purposes: … (4) to provide you with customized content, targeted offers, and advertising on the Service, on the Third-Party Apps, on other third-party sites or apps you may visit;

and 2) In app ads, people don’t like ads :man_shrugging:

YES. They are called drive-by installs, and plague even the biggest companies such as google, facebook, etc. Virus authors will exploit a vulnerability in a ad-server, and basically serve up ads that WILL install viruses/malware without your consent or knowledge, totally in the background. The people that write that stuff are scum, and every single company that uses ads to generate revenue on the intertubes is vulnerable to this sort of attack, and thus by extension, you.

This is why I use ad and script blockers. It’s literally to protect myself. It’s much harder to protect against this sort of attack with an app/client serving ads than a browser, which is why I love the wowup client so much. No ads, and the code is open-source so you can check to make sure the code is legit before compile. Once compiled, you can generate a hash key and compare it to the hash key of the installer on the website. If the same, you are golden.

And now Overwolf is trying to shut down the thing I use to protect myself, and force me to expose my system to their system that will be vulnerable to attack. Just NO.

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Can’t this client be circumvented by installing and updating add-ons manually?

A hugely overlooked and underappreciated aspect of open source software. You can personally verify what the software on your machine is doing, and even if you don’t have the chops required to do that, chances are someone else has and has raised a red flag if they found anything fishy.

Closed source programs are eternal question marks unless you pick them apart and reverse engineer them, which few people are capable of doing. You have to blindly trust which stinks.

Good to have you back, Ralph

People used to say all these same things about the Curse Client. Same situation, different company.

This is my biggest concern going into SL.
Yes I can manually update my add ons but it is tedious and I would rather not.
Have not heard many positive points about overwolf apart from one mate who liked the PoE overlay.
May need to bite the built and swap to elvui to cut down on the fluffing around with updating add ons.

Here is the thing, because fair is fair and I always try my darnedest to argue the truth in matters. I massively doubt Overwolf themselves are trying to install this sort of garbage on purpose. That would be illegal and the FBI would raid the heck out of them if they did. However hacked ad-servers is largely outside of their direct control, and so the garbage that gets installed still is something you have to deal with regardless. Part of my job in IT is security, and despite our best efforts, hacks happen. That’s just the reality of the situation. I really meant it when I said that if Overwolf figured out a way to eliminate this issue, they would be doing the entire internet a HUGE favor, and that would net me as a customer that I would sing their praises to the stars and back. It would also probably make them filthy rich as everybody would want to buy that technology to protect their company/user systems, and allow ads to be a SAFE method of pay distribution.

But it’s Overwolf… so naw, they won’t succeed where companies like Google and Facebook have failed. I doubt they have even looked into it.

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While it’s unlikely that Overwolf themselves is intentionally installing malware, in a world where antivirus software has been caught MITMing the web traffic of its users, anything is possible.

Besides that, they’re definitely hoovering up all the data they get their hands on which is pretty shady on its own.

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As usual internet nerds blowing things out of proportion.

But of course, but users agree to that when they hit that agree button on the EULA/TOS page in order to install the program, and a physical agreement is worth far more than ones verbal non-agreement in the eyes of the law. I don’t agree to it, so I use a different software program. Now the one I don’t agree with, is threatening the one I do. This is NOT how to win me as a customer.

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I have always manually updated my addons. If i can no longer do it manually, i guess i will go addon free.

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Just so you know, you’re the kind of person I charge $200/hr to fix their stuff as they come crying to me when their system and all their data has been seized by ransomware.

Please don’t change. I like the money.

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I wouldn’t pay anyone for that stuff, it’s total no sense, glad you’re happy scamming people though.

Maybe

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Or you don’t have anything of value that is worth saving. shrugs Thus if that’s the case, I can see why you might think it’s scamming. The people I have helped would probably disagree with you though.