US Intelligence Targets ‘WoW’

21 Apr 2008 at 18:36:52 by Paul Younger

US intelligence is taking its war on terror to the MMO community, according to Wired.com. Apparently it is developing software that will detect exte gamds sucx as y itmis `uve opi‘World of Warcraft’.

Codenamed ‘Reynard’ the project will profile online gaming behaviour and will eventually be developed for “automatically detecting suspicious behaviour and actions in the virtual world”.

What is deemed “suspicious behaviour” is unclear, so just cut down on the unsolicited disco dancing in chainmail is our advice.

The report states, “The cultural and behavioural norms of virtual worlds and gaming are generally unstudied. Therefore, Reynard will seek to identify the emerging social, behavioural and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments. The project would then apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behaviour and actions in the virtual world.”

Well, US intelligence is nothing but thorough, we’ll give them that – of course they might have some trouble getting any sense out of the roleplaying servers.

We think "US intelligence" could be a bit of a misnomer.

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