Today, I found out another reason to those who did not yet buy the game to spare few bucks. The PC version of the NFS Carbon (not sure about other platforms, but XBox 360 is probably also infected) ships with the same spyware technology as Battlefield 2142 shipped earlier this year.

Electronic Arts probably sold the rights to serve a contextual in-game ads based on a player's physical location (based upon his or her IP address). If you look into decrypted version of NFSC.EXE you can find strings like locate.madserver.net, AdClient.csv or AdClientLog.txt which leads me to similar conclusions as the Battlefields 2142 players earlier.

The MADServer.net domain is currently owned by Microsoft corporation. What's the funniest thing that the publisher (EA) probably gets only $1-2 bucks per each sold title... I wish they would make the game $2 more expensive instead of doing this unpopular decisions. Problem is that the people are sheep and most of them actually never realize that they're being spied.

Currently the easiest workaround for this is to deny the resolution of the madservers.net addresses in the hosts file of your OS. See NFS Carbon FAQ for details on this.

More on this:

• EA clarifies Battlefield 2142's IGA spyware (open)
• Battlefield 2142 With a Dash of Spyware (open)