Right, so, I finally got around to investigating the Origin client (as opposed to the client-lite that ships with SW:TOR). I have a full dump of the Origin startup sequence captured if anyone wants the nitty-gritty details, but here's the TL;DR version: Origin is playing it straight, near as I can tell.
Oddities:
* It accesses my Avast! installation, briefly and near as I can tell benignly. I suspect it's registering itself somehow with Avast so as not to trigger false-positives, but who knows.
* Apparently, Origin uses Amazon's cloud for... something. There are multiple calls to amazonaws in here.
Suspicions Confirmed:
* SW:TOR's launcher is basically Origin-lite. The Origin client scans the SW:TOR folder during startup, only looking at the launcher.exe file. I'm pretty sure this is related to it offering to 'install' SW:TOR for me every time I start it up.
What The F-in F, Guys?:
* It traverses the file tree unnecessarily *for its target folders only*; this is to say, it's looking for (for example) the Origin folder in the Appdata tree (totally legit); it starts out at C:Users\ and apparently tries to create the folder first, when that fails it then traverses down and ... starts the process over again. Either I'm reading this wrong or EA designed this thing to rebuild its directories every time it starts on the off-chance that one of them got nuked somehow. Which is... legit? It's just a brute-force and inelegant solution to the problem. :/
Verdicts:
* It doesn't touch Steam.
* It doesn't touch things it shouldn't (every file and resource accessed are Origin-specific, or, EA products, excepting Avast).
* It doesn't report anything back to EA that it shouldn't, as far as I can tell.
* It doesn't (as far as I can tell) use rootkit techniques. Caveat: you have to install it as admin originally, and I suspect it sets file permissions for its folders at that time so as not to need it thereafter, as I'm not being prompted for admin rights when I fire it up (as opposed to SW:TOR, c'mon, guys, get with the program).
* Holy crap, the startup sequence alone generates an 8MB CSV dump file.
So, that's the down-low, folks. EA's got a deservedly bad rep for its EULA, and should be slapped hard for *that*, but aside from what looks like lazy programming techniques, I'm not seeing anything in the Origin client that isn't legit.
EDIT: since I know someone will bring it up if I don't -- yes, it also accesses Windows system files, but that's totally legit as well. It's hitting required DLLs and such. I forgot to mention that above, my bad.
--sofaspud
--"Listening to your kid is the audio equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, Spud." --OpMegs
Oddities:
* It accesses my Avast! installation, briefly and near as I can tell benignly. I suspect it's registering itself somehow with Avast so as not to trigger false-positives, but who knows.
* Apparently, Origin uses Amazon's cloud for... something. There are multiple calls to amazonaws in here.
Suspicions Confirmed:
* SW:TOR's launcher is basically Origin-lite. The Origin client scans the SW:TOR folder during startup, only looking at the launcher.exe file. I'm pretty sure this is related to it offering to 'install' SW:TOR for me every time I start it up.
What The F-in F, Guys?:
* It traverses the file tree unnecessarily *for its target folders only*; this is to say, it's looking for (for example) the Origin folder in the Appdata tree (totally legit); it starts out at C:Users\ and apparently tries to create the folder first, when that fails it then traverses down and ... starts the process over again. Either I'm reading this wrong or EA designed this thing to rebuild its directories every time it starts on the off-chance that one of them got nuked somehow. Which is... legit? It's just a brute-force and inelegant solution to the problem. :/
Verdicts:
* It doesn't touch Steam.
* It doesn't touch things it shouldn't (every file and resource accessed are Origin-specific, or, EA products, excepting Avast).
* It doesn't report anything back to EA that it shouldn't, as far as I can tell.
* It doesn't (as far as I can tell) use rootkit techniques. Caveat: you have to install it as admin originally, and I suspect it sets file permissions for its folders at that time so as not to need it thereafter, as I'm not being prompted for admin rights when I fire it up (as opposed to SW:TOR, c'mon, guys, get with the program).
* Holy crap, the startup sequence alone generates an 8MB CSV dump file.
So, that's the down-low, folks. EA's got a deservedly bad rep for its EULA, and should be slapped hard for *that*, but aside from what looks like lazy programming techniques, I'm not seeing anything in the Origin client that isn't legit.
EDIT: since I know someone will bring it up if I don't -- yes, it also accesses Windows system files, but that's totally legit as well. It's hitting required DLLs and such. I forgot to mention that above, my bad.
--sofaspud
--"Listening to your kid is the audio equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting, Spud." --OpMegs