“Absolutely no information is sent back to the company from the user's computer,” NVision’s Bielinski emphasized to the Inquirer. It wasn’t like they were the ones who started the email chains-they were distributing the games on their website, a safe and reputable source, after all. The company denied it was doing anything nefarious other than releasing an offbeat elf bowling game into the wild. It was nowhere near as bad as much of the crapware being made at the time, either. Google Analytics does far worse things than this by accident. But it’s a real stretch to call what they did “spyware.” If you’ve used a website on the internet in the past ten minutes, that page has likely done far worse. On a base level, yes, the game tracked where a user was coming from, as a primitive form of analytics.
“We were trying to think of different ways other than putting up banner ads.” “We were a small company without a budget to get our name out to corporations,” CEO Michael Bielinski said to Direct Marketing News. The company also used the internet connection to allow users to share high scores, and discussed the potential of distributing updates via an internet connection. Per another piece nearby in Allentown, Pennsylvania’s Morning Call that same week, the app simply contacted a server owned by a company to track where the game was being played, and whether the user clicked the link to the company’s website when they were done. However, the piece somewhat overplayed what the internet connection actually allowed. This is a valid concern, and NVision Design agreed that its game should have had a privacy policy to protect users. “It illustrates how computer users often lack privacy protection.” “Experts say the game is a good example of why Internet users should avoid opening unsolicited programs received via email,” Wilson wrote. Wilson interviewed experts, from places like the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Carnegie Mellon University to bolster his case against downloading random apps from any-which-where. Ergo: Downloading executables and immediately running them is a bad idea. A 1999 piece written by David Wilson of the Philadelphia Inquirer lays out the concerns like this: This random game which was just emailed you without your consent just so happens to use your internet connection. Security experts, understandably had concerns. Their methods were different their vector, across the board, was the same. In the ensuing years, email would be the key vector for some extremely damaging viruses, like ILOVEYOU, Sircam, and a virus named for tennis star Anna Kournikova. Just six months earlier, millions of computers were seriously affected when a Microsoft Word “macro virus” called Melissa tore through the internet. And there were already signs that sending executables through email was risky behavior. While just a few years earlier, chain letters and scams may have gained steam through email or similar tools like Usenet, executables were a new phenomenon for most. In its own way, it was a slightly more modern twist on what people did with Commander Keen, Jazz Jackrabbit, and Doom just a few years prior.īut the game came to life as millions of people were using email for the first time.
It wasn’t a huge executable, really-at just a megabyte, it was small enough that a few years earlier it might’ve gotten a boost from distribution via floppy.
NSTORM ELF BOWLING FOR ANDROID WINDOWS
This was before more traditional social media vectors like Facebook and Twitter, and while Flash and Java existed at the time and conceivably would have been a good way to distribute a game like this on the web, Elf Bowling was instead distributed as a Windows executable. In a lot of ways, the issue cropped up because its insane popularity was being driven by bad behaviors among the millions of people who had only started using the internet a few years prior. So, if it was just an innocuous, funny game, why did Elf Bowling gain a reputation as a piece of malware? (via MobyGames) No, Elf Bowling didn’t have any viruses in it, and its “spyware” was essentially the game pinging a random server somewhere
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