WHY ARE GTO GAMES SIGNED JAVA APPLICATIONS?
Any time you run a program — such as a browser or word processor, music player, or CD burner — you are giving the writer and distributor of that program control of your machine. The issue is always one of trust, based on reputation. Your virus checker can make sure the program is clean; your firewall can alert you when the program calls out to the Internet; your security module can watch to make sure it doesn’t write to the boot sector of your hard disk and change the structure of your operating system. But beyond that, any program you run can read or write files; you are depending on the reliability of the program supplier — and that the program actually came from that supplier. When you acquire code from the Web, there is a way to be sure that you know where it is coming from. Signed code guarantees that the code actually came from the signer, that the signer is who you think they are, and that the code has not been tampered with since it was signed. That is, no one “shortstopped”
