A few reasons why I hate digg.com and all of it's "users."

Ah, digg. You came around some time ago, right as "Web 2.0" was getting really big. Throw in the "show/hide" comment javascript magic and you were a perfect fit for web 2.0 and AJAX (which you really are not, despite the fancy "show/hode" comment javascript... oh right, 2001 tricks).

Let's review a recent "digg": "World of Warcraft scans player's Internet Explorer browsing history".

GASP! A GAME! SCANNING MY HISTORY! INVASION OF PRIVACY AND I'M GOING TO BOYCOTT AND SUE!

For the linked picture, aka "proof" to all of you digg users, go here. For those of you who don't care to click (I'd be one of them in your shoes, I am rather boring), it's a screenshot of one of the best windows programs of all times: Process Explorer. In this screenshot, it shows a running copy of World of Warcraft (WoW.exe), and then it lists every file opened by WoW.exe. Semi-surprisingly, listed, is the poster's Internet Explorer history. C:\Document and Settings\Greg\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\index.dat. Yup, that's the history all right.

For those of you who don't know, and I'd assume that number to be many, World of Warcraft employs a nice little thing called "The Warden." The Warden is WoW's anti-cheat. But, not really. That's yet another misconception. The Warden runs every 10 or 15 seconds, searches out every running process, takes a hash of the process name, and compares it against a list of "known bad" (read: botting, hacking, etc.) programs. Yup, that's it. Compared to things like PunkBuster, the Warden is amazingly tame. It does basically nothing.

But never underestimate the power of stupidity, especially when it numbers in the seven million users range. Their anti-cheat has been accused of sending Social Security numbers, bank account numbers and PINs, e-mail addresses, and other "private information that I don't want Blizzard to have." None of this is true, of course, but again: stupidity comes with numbers. Will said anti-cheat read your Quicken title bar and grab your bank account number? Sure will. Will it send it off to Blizzard? Nope. Remember: it hashes the process name and then compares that hash to a list of known botting programs.

Average digg.com user: "So why in the world," (no pun intended) "is this game reading my history? I know you have an anti-cheat, and I know that it's rather invasive: BLIZZARD IS SCANNING MY WEB BROWSING ACTIVITY AND SENDING IT ALL BACK TO THE MOTHERSHIP!" Word for word? No. But do read the comments to the above link, and you'll find several people stating that.

The screenshot proves that WoW.exe can read your history. Nothing more. It does not prove anything more than that, period. "But the screenshot..! The open files!" In the words of the digg.com post:

"The linked screenshot provides proof that WoW developer Blizzard is actively scanning players' browsing history and cookies. Early speculation is that this is a countermeasure against cheaters, but players are arguing that Blizzard has no right to access this highly private data."

Hate to disappoint you, diggers: WoW uses Internet Explorer as part of the in-game engine. No wonder it has access to the history, it's using the browser! No joke? No joke, and no kidding. Want some proof? Here you go. Some more? More proof for you! One last bit? Sure! Even more proof? Here's the HTTP header that the launcher sends: "User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)". Check that stuff out. Blizzard has a reason to be in your history! Even though they aren't. Shock.

"But the second link you gave there is just the launcher which runs before you start the game, and the last one is just a blank page!" Yeah, you got me there. That's because there aren't any alerts at the time of posting. And further, it's the "alerts" that are displayed in game when you login. Seriously. You know - that box you see sometimes when you login, that reads: "These realms are down/will be down! Enjoy your stay in WoW, and we're deeply sorry." Yup, that's a webpage, and yup, WoW.exe uses Internet Explorer to render it.

Which brings me to my (*ahem*) point. Digg users are lemmings. Here I thought the the slashdot moderation system encouraged "group think", but that's capped from -1 to +5. Digg is probably capped to 2^32, allowing for stupidity and group think to the scale of 4294967296. Because one person posted a screenshot and said, "here, proof that they WATCH ALL OF YOUR BROWSING HABITS," several hundred people hopped on the bandwagon of "lemming," walked on over to the World of Warcraft forums, and began spamming. They don't know any better: they're just another lemming.

Digg, while "cool," "popular," "web 2.0-ie," and "high traffic," has also become a synonym for "sheer and utter stupidity on a grand scale." It has one or two cool or funny links every so often, but the huge majority of anything on there is just sheer stupidity. Do I care about some guy's experience at a Taco Bell? Or a list of proxies? Maybe a really annoying, incredibly simple game? An idiot suing Amazon?

I believe a very good (not) description of the site is the one found if you google "digg": "Technology focused news site where the stories are chosen by community members rather than editors."

Lemmings, I tell you.