..and I never would, so I know nothing specific about the capabilities of what's out there, but scanners can definitely be used to read and dupe your items, although they can't change the stats of your original items. (This could be done even when you were re in channel and not in a game; at least it was certainly true for a long time that scanners could see your items -- and therefore copy them -- when you were just in a chat channel. I have no idea if that's still true.)
I still vividly remember a post on Ogden's Tavern maybe a month-and-a-half after D1 came out, not long after Enigma's trainer went public. (His trainer made a dump of the game memory, which turned out to include data for all the characters in the game, data that was not encyrypted like the data in the character files saved on the disk -- Enigma wasn't very complimentary about this oversight, not that it would have mattered in the long run.) The post went something like this:
Poster 1: This is just a warning to let you all know that it's possible to clone D1 characters.
Poster 2: You're full of it. That's impossible, and I should know, I'm a computer professional.
Poster 1: I'm a computer professional too. Join me in a game in half-an-hour and I'll prove it to you.
Poster 2: Ok.
Poster 2: I don't believe it -- you made an exact clone of my character. This is terrible. What does this mean for battle.net?
Poster 1: :(
Although I assume the standard scanners don't have these features, I suppose some malicious people could simulate the effects of black deaths/shrines etc to modify your life/mana/spell lvls etc. (unless you were running a cheat program yourself to protect your characters from such manipulations -- something I'd never recommend). I never heard of anything like this being done, even in the D1 heyday of townkill/autokill etc, but maybe what's helped things now is that most of the old hack programs were broken by v1.09, and D1 was by that time too small-potatoes for anyone to bother rebuilding them.
Edit p.s. probably, on reflection, other D1 players can't do anything permanently bad to your character: using hacks they can send huge amounts of damage, or umpteen lvl spells, your way; basically anything that it's possible for one player to do to another -- personally, I don't know enough about the detailed programing to say exactly what info is sent from one player's computer to another.
I still vividly remember a post on Ogden's Tavern maybe a month-and-a-half after D1 came out, not long after Enigma's trainer went public. (His trainer made a dump of the game memory, which turned out to include data for all the characters in the game, data that was not encyrypted like the data in the character files saved on the disk -- Enigma wasn't very complimentary about this oversight, not that it would have mattered in the long run.) The post went something like this:
Poster 1: This is just a warning to let you all know that it's possible to clone D1 characters.
Poster 2: You're full of it. That's impossible, and I should know, I'm a computer professional.
Poster 1: I'm a computer professional too. Join me in a game in half-an-hour and I'll prove it to you.
Poster 2: Ok.
Poster 2: I don't believe it -- you made an exact clone of my character. This is terrible. What does this mean for battle.net?
Poster 1: :(
Although I assume the standard scanners don't have these features, I suppose some malicious people could simulate the effects of black deaths/shrines etc to modify your life/mana/spell lvls etc. (unless you were running a cheat program yourself to protect your characters from such manipulations -- something I'd never recommend). I never heard of anything like this being done, even in the D1 heyday of townkill/autokill etc, but maybe what's helped things now is that most of the old hack programs were broken by v1.09, and D1 was by that time too small-potatoes for anyone to bother rebuilding them.
Edit p.s. probably, on reflection, other D1 players can't do anything permanently bad to your character: using hacks they can send huge amounts of damage, or umpteen lvl spells, your way; basically anything that it's possible for one player to do to another -- personally, I don't know enough about the detailed programing to say exactly what info is sent from one player's computer to another.