Bioware and EA have done a strategic withdrawal from the harsh privacy preventing measures they announced a few days ago, with which the authenticity of the game would have been checked every ten days over the internet, meaning that if you don't have access to the internet regularly and you wanted to play it without internet access after having had a break for two weeks you couldn't do it because your copy of the game would be automatically blocked till you have access to the internet again.

This seems to have caused an uproar, because now Jay Watamaniuk from Bioware suddenly lets the disappointed fans in the Mass Effect forum know that

Yes, that's right. We all apparently have to say a big "Thank you" to the armed forces, who are obviously looking forward to Mass Effect and did not really agree with the new security measures, given that their access to the internet and their free-time probably wouldn't allow to play the game and let it check the authenticity every ten days. This is why Bioware now decided to take a step back and to only let the re-authentication process happen every time that someone playing the game wants to download new game content.

Same goes for EA, who announced that the changes made to the protection of Mass Effect will also apply for Spore. The protection of both games will however still only allow users to authenticate each game on three computers. But you don't need the disc in the drive to play or authenticate the game, which is actually a pretty comfortable thing.

All in all, it's good to see that publishers really seem to listen to their customers sometimes.