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Remember one of your favorite companies that got shareware authors to release their software for free in exchange for including an ad client that watched where you went on the Internet? They also got sued. Their settlement? You can purchase a discounted version of Go!Zilla Plus through them, which I believe is actually the registered version one of their products.

If you believe you once used a product with the Auriate/Radiate ad client, and believe you might be entitled to the aforementioned discounted version of Go!Zilla, the page to determine this is titled "Class Action", and may be found off of Radiate's privacy disclosure. They used to be called Auriate until a series of negatively slanted stories came out about them (or, so several articles have led me to believe).

Note I did not this link to this page directly because they redirect you to their privacy policy page first anyway. Please don't take advantage of their offer unless you really *really* installed a product that used their ad client; I don't feel like being sued for posting this.

I'm not sure if this advertisement-concept is known to the Linux people out there, but a lot of win32 software that is advertisement supported ships with spyware, profided by advertisement agencies as Radiate.com. This spyware is installed on the win32 machine together with the ad-supported software and it collects data of the user and transmits this data to a radiate server.

This spyware even sits on your computer when you've already deinstalled the sponsored program. You have to use software like Ad-Aware to remove al kinds of installed spyware and registry modifications done by his spyware.

It's not clear to me what kind of data this spyware collects, but it's both a privacy and security violation that a piece of software is able to sit on your machine to collect private data.

As long as it's not clear what kind of ad-software Opera uses for their version 5 browser, I would be very careful. Ad-supported software is more than just a banner on a web page.

For more information on spyware, have a look at: Spychecker or ZDNet.

Arleo

Check out this story on that site: http://grc.com/oo/aureate.htm

Christ! I consider myself a pretty savvy user, and I had this advert.dll on my system. It's part of, for instance, Go!Zilla. (See list http://www.radiate.com/press/products.html ).

Quick summary:

- installs as part of other freeware without telling you
- hides in your browser's address space to avoid detection by egress firewalls
- specifically avoids removal when user attempts windows add/remove programs
- periodically (insecurely) checks with the master server to see if there are "updates", then downloads and runs them

If someone wants to ruin this company (and 22 million home users' day), a little DNS poison and a trojan would certainly do it.

If you're a windows user, delete /windows/system/advert.dll now!

Radiate.com has some interesting additions to the standard EULA..."you understand that this software will connect to the Internet UBIQUITOUSLY to download advertisements and/or to provide software updates"... HMMMM nice Trojan potential.

And of course...."you agree not to alter, decompile, disassemble, or reverse engineer the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, in whole or in part, whether for error correction or otherwise" Don't try to fix it.

And finally ... "NO LIABILITY FOR DAMAGES...EVEN IF RADIATE HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES." Don't even bother telling us - we don't care.

All these made me block the UBIQUITOUS connections (via port 1975) to their web site I saw on our network. Nice thing is none of the users has noticed a lack of functionality with the ad sponsored "free" software and no unexpected updates.

A list of products which contain Aureate spyware can be found here.

From Aureate's marketing page.

Detailed information about the people using your program and their feedback

Updated statistics on your application's performance on the Radiate Network

What they don't tell you is that all the information they receive about your browsing habits is WITHOUT YOUR PERMISSION. The spyware uploads information without ever telling you.

Scary, but yet another argument for forced distribution of code. And to think, I'm an MS zealot `;^).

Marc

A list of products which contain Aureate spyware can be found here.

From Aureate's marketing page.

Detailed information about the people using your program and their feedback

Updated statistics on your application's performance on the Radiate Network

What they don't tell you is that all the information they receive about your browsing habits is WITHOUT YOUR PERMISSION. The spyware uploads information without ever telling you.

Scary, but yet another argument for forced distribution of code. And to think, I'm an MS zealot `;^).

Marc

Or maybe it's not such a bad precedent; it'd be interesting if such a ruling helped discourage hard-drive searching by software which searches for "undesirable" content without your consent or knowledge.

It's pleasant to think that this ruling has potential to only be used for Good Things®.

However, the stark reality is that if it can be used to prevent breaches of privacy à la Aureate Media aka Radiate, it can also be wielded as a weapon in cease-and-desist letters as well as in the courtroom when a site doesn't like another (a competitor, perhaps?) crawling them on a regular basis like the recent AuctionWatch brouhaha.

Gibson Research Corporation has a fantastic links page regarding privacy. Many links on this page really ring true with this ruling.

On another note, Slashdot is really on the ball -- eBay's Press Releases page has absolutely nothing to say about this (as of when I wrote this, of course).

--
"Give him head?" ... "Be a beacon?"

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft Ad

I had been using Go!Zilla, until I read that the Aureate software was tracking me. All I want is to resume my broken downloads, and perhaps queue them.