Intel plays tattle-tale

ONE OF THE slightly more dystopian projects to come out of the Research@Intel tour in California this week was news that Intel is working on ways or preventing fraud by client-side users, by reporting activity back to internet administrators.

Couching the technology in fun terms, Intel rep Travis Schluessler said that the technology could be used to find out when gamers had enabled in-game cheats such as AIMbots or gold mining. This would obviously be a big benefit to the online gaming community, although less so to those who like their playing field slightly uneven.

But more worrying is a throwaway comment about how the technology could also be used to detect click-fraud in online advertising and other business oriented applications. Do we really want Intel to build in hardware technology that will watch our clicks and run our behaviour through some good-faith algorithm?

The technology is still a long, long way from production yet - but Intel clearly thinks the idea has legs to show it off to hacks in this way. Big brother is watching you, or, at least, Chipzilla is. µ