Guide - Security

Security Considerations

In general Playcasting has many powerful security advantages over conventional web surfing:

Players only recieve a video stream to their browsers, the Playcast host is not a full web server. Streaming just video is very secure for both the Playcaster and consumer compared to surfing full web servers.
The entire Playcast stream is secured by standard web protocols all the way down into the ring-0 drivers, so hacking, cheating, and manipulating the stream should be impossible by the time the product is fully hardened for public release.
Windows user accounts have powerful security features and tools to manage them. Rather than inventing a new security model for Playcasting, we have simply embraced the very mature and widely adopted Windows account management paradigm.

While security precautions are pretty loose for the Alpha release, Playcasting will ultimately be very secure and trustworthy. Until then here are the major concerns/considerations for our alpha testing community:

1. Avoid sharing access to a Windows admin account. If anyone gets the URL they will have nearly total access to all the data on your local computer and total control over it. The released product will require secure user authentication to access these shared accounts but in the mean-time, be careful. We recommend configuring a Windows GUEST account for testing Playcast streaming.

2. It’s possible for Playcasters to stream any kind of illicit, inappropriate or deceptive content. Please use our technology responsibly and check your TOS agreements.

3. Your IP address is exposed to anyone you share with. In practice this should not be a major privacy concern because most public network carriers assign consumers an IP address from a revolving pool and can quickly detect and block DDOS attacks. If you think you are being DDOS attacked, call your carrier or if necessary, unplug your home router for 24 hours and you will generally be assigned a new IP address automatically by your carrier.