I'd be more worried about it turning non-issues into bugs, the cases when programmers think: "ah that can never happen" or "the program would've crashed/thrown-an-exception before getting here..." and in 1 in 1000 installs that cases has some weird behavior. Personally I prefer less intrusive, honey pot based approaches Bitcoin Vigil It's not perfect, but at least it doesn't have side effects, or false-positives.

I work in the security field, so I experimentally run hundreds of programs :)

I use Avast for AV and Bitcoin Vigil for IDS. Both are free and work well together (although, Avast does noticeably lag my computer -- but less so than competitors)

They could just freeze a version for a couple of weeks -- and test it with the new samples. However, I'd be a lot more interested in seeing a ROC curve -- it's pretty easy to have 100% TP if your FP is high ;D

Sounds about right. I've had at least 3 viruses that have circumvented Norton -- but caught by Bitcoin Vigil (a honey pot based approached to catching malware). I guess it's a combination of outdated signatures, and novel attacks and Antivirus needing to limit its false positives

I'm sure there's an American equivalent to what we have in Australia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe_Benefits_Tax_(Australia)

I'm not sure about spoil, but definitely leave a bad impression. I started playing Heroes of Newerth without any DotA experience, and I can say the learning curve was STEEP, and people definitely hurled a lot of abuse at me (well, I was "letting the team down" and in hindsight, ruined a lot of games (they're normally 5 people vs 5, so one person learning is a huge disadvantage). That said, after I learnt how to play; and my stats got lower (which reflected the fact I was bad, the game became a lot more enjoyable. What they really need is a tutorial (which they have now implemented) and (forced) beginner games to classify people, and make sure they play with people their own skill level. After it's all said and done, it's a fantastic game -- and I highly recommend everyone give it a try. (And it runs great in Linux, which was the thing that got me hooked and preorder)

Or they could just restore it back to what it was..

Paranoid much?

Not sure why you need a fake SSH server (and how long could it take, anyway?) but I've seen what they do. First command was a uname -a, second command was to wget some binary. You can guess the third command

Ha. I got this (annoying) piece of crap on a reasonably fresh install of Windows (XP). The install was up to date, and barely used other than a few games (I use Fedora primarily). The thing I attributed it to was the fact the Windows install I got was from thepiratebay. After reinstalling with an MSDN install I haven't had the issue again (Which raises the question of why I didn't just download the msdn copy originally)

You're joking, right? The theory behind an aimbot is pretty much as simple as it gets. And it's not like you have to kill every person on the map, you could easily use the aimbot to achieve "snapping" to the target or what not.

While I'm sure you've proved something, it has nothing to do with this. If the task isn't suitable for a bot, don't do it with a bot. You'll notice I also qualified it with a statement "as long as a computer is better at the task" part. Things like social element and group work is going to be too difficult.

It's a silly point, as it's all down to implementation of the bot. The bot doesn't need to do more than just assist you to be a huge advantage.

One such bot that comes to mind is: tibiabot It only uses data accessible to a person, and only does actions a person could do. And it primarily sits on the background until needed. An example of its use is to automatically hit someone when they're on low health (before they have time to heal) or to automatically heal (with an optional rand(x,y)) delay on low health. Or you can use "combo" features where multiple people playing will all target the same person automatically etc. And even to automatically heal a friend, something that would normally go missed because a player is too focused on something else. It can make a beginner player far more effective player than an advanced player in battles. And is all done without extra data.

Not even close. As long as computers are better at tasks than humans, the issue remains.

i.e. Think about an aim-bot. A computer is going to be more accurate and faster than a person with the same data. And even if you do the whole streaming-game thing, bot likely will still exist, that process the stream and emulate user actions far quicker than a human could