Limewire Gets Ads, And Accusations of Spyware

Gerard J. Pinzone writes: "Limewire 1.8 now comes with mandatory banner ads. The reasons given by one of their developers, Christopher Rohrs, for the new ads are that 'Bandwidth alone from www.limewire.com, www.limewire.org, and router.limewire.com is around $10,000 month! And we need to pay developer's salaries--like mine--to keep driving innovation on the Gnutella network.' On top of all this, the banner ad software Limewire is using is "Cydoor". Many users are complaining that this is spyware. Here is a link to the message in the Gnutella forums where this topic is being discussed"

Comments

Installation of Cydoor is OPTIONAL!

[MarcQuadra]

Well I installed LimeWire 1.8 a few days ago and it ASKS you if you want to install Gator and/or cydoor. I said no and LimeWire is essentially the same as 1.7 (but with a banner)

Re:Installation of Cydoor is OPTIONAL!

[FFFish]

Those of you using Windows boxen may wish to use InCtrl5, which monitors the registry and various directories for any and all changes.

You can then go through its list and ferret out the shite that Cydoor has installed.

Anyone know of an uninstaller that can use InCtrl files? It'd be a snap to replace Windows' rather piss-poor uninstaller.

Bearshare has it too

[MxTxL]

Bearshare pops up to an immediate ad, and also usually spawns a browser window to show an ad. Pretty annoying, but it's not a big deal to just close the spawned window and get on with your business... not really a big deal if limewire does it... besides, if it helps keep them in business, then i say go for it!

Re:Bearshare has it too

[tcc]

Aside from the fact that when I tried bearshare last year, it DIDN'T ASK me if I wanted to install extra stuff, I was running norton internet security, and guess what I found? A nice little program that was running in the background, ALWAYS pluging EVERY site I was visiting in a database somewhere before going to connect to that typed site I sent, all this transparent if you didn't have any firewalling software installed. (I kept seeing a connection to some place that I didn't know of), I uninstalled bearshare, guess what, it stayed there! (standard uninstaller, not cleansweep or any advanced cleaners).

What pissed me off the most about this is NOWHERE in the install process or the website from front page to download link was this indicated.

I was happy to see alternative to napster, but I was REALLY angry at the fact that people are installing spying crap on my system not EVEN with small notices anywhere in the install or download process! That happened after the REAL.COM spyware fiasco, I thought people learned, I'm sure today it's not doing it anymore for that precise example (after a zillion complain probably)

But WHY do we have to go thru this?? these people should be treated the same way VIRUS WRITERS would be, heck, you can get jailed in some contries just to try to log in a .mil site for fun or do portscanning on any major sites, why the heck do these people install stuff that tracks your every moves and gets out of it with not even a scratch? 20$ you'd write something like that and treat it with a virus label, you'd get fined and jailed! I stopped using bearshare from that day and told all my friends, sent an article here about it and all the specs but it got rejected.

Anyways, I can't beleive people are still pulling that stunt, mandatory banner adds, it's okay in my book, even if it's totally useless and normally it means that the application will die (because who click these adds anyways?! the only advertising system I saw working were porn sites and some loyal people on a specific site (i.e. Here probably). The fact is they SAY so, they WARN you, if you go thru the process and something slows down your system or tracks your moves, at least you know! that's the BIG difference and even if it's almost ironic to say, I guess with all the spycrap around, people being honnest about the stuff they install on your system should get a praise. (yike!!)

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| Bearshare pops up to an immediate ad, and also usually spawns a browser window to show an ad. Pretty annoying, but it's not a big deal to just close the spawned window and get on with your business... not really a big deal if limewire does it... besides, if it helps keep them in business, then i say go for it!

Better way to do Ads

[Alien54]

Pud of Fucked Company has a better way to do ads. You can see how he does it here:

www.httpads.com

Basically he allows other people to do impulse buying of ads on his website. Very Interesting, and useful

And yes, he is making money on this angle.

Re:I just tried this

[spongman]

morpheus works just fine for me (win2k, xp) it crashes occasionally (rarely), but it doesn't matter - the downloads are continued when you start it up again...

if you have a broadband connection and you're looking for a good gnutella client, try Xolox it does simultaneous, restartable downloads. it's not as good as morpheus for identifying identical content, and the gnutelly network doesn't support the rich metadata that morpheus has, but it's the best gnutella client i have found, nothing fancy..

Kazaa did it to me...

[Sarcasmooo!]

I see people saying try Kazaa instead, but on my system it was Kazaa that installed Cydoor. When I used Ad-aware to remove Cydoor, Kazaa refused to run and told me I had removed files it needed and should reinstall.

Re:Why are they spending so much on bandwidth?

[walt-sjc]

I had a Qwest DS3 full bandwidth for $16K at my last company. Local loop was waived. Installation was waived. Same deal for T1's, but $1K - anywhere qwest serviced (can't do some states cause they are the LEC there... FCC shit.) Don't do a circuit with "burstable" or any limits / usage charges - that's crap.

You have to know how to negotiate. The major carriers are hungry. They will deal. Direct lines are ALWAYS cheaper / Mbit than colo hosting.

If you're running Windows try this program!!!

[Newer Guy]

The program is Ad-Aware. It's a freeware program available at www.lavasoftusa.com Ad aware looks for spyware on your computer and then allows you to (selectively) delete it. You'll be amazed how much can be there. The first time I ran it it found over 200 (!) files on my computer. Needless to say, the computer not only was a lot faster once I deleted all these trojans, but more stable as well. Try it, you'll like it.

Why not just use Qtella?

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

GPL, for linux and QT/KDE. Has everything I need and looks prettier. Faster too.

A new version (0.3) was released two days ago.

I have no sympathy for all the losers on /. who whine about the spyware on their Windows machines. GO AWAY!

Here is the URL: http://www.qtella.net/

Description:

Qtella is a new Gnutella client for Linux written in C++ using the Qt libraries. It should be no problem to use Qtella on any platforms where Qt with thread support (library qt-mt must exists) is installed.

The following features are part of Qtella 0.2.1:

multiple search
continue interrupted downloads
uploads
limit number of downloads and uploads
limit upload bandwidth
separate unfinished downloads from finished ones
download of several files at once
test whether file allready exists
identification of download server
automatic retry if error, busy, closed
auto connect list
KDE integration
save host list
handle extended gnutella protocol
status lines and statistics
accecpt incoming connections
download from firewalled hosts
pong cache to reduce network traffic

Re:Geez

[rbeattie]

I was about to call you names back. But then I CVSed the source and low-and-behold, if you download it and compile it yourself (very, very easy with Apache Ant - there's even a batch file to do it) it's the same version (1.8) but WITHOUT the ad stuff. You don't even have to muss with the code.

http://core.limewire.org/servlets/ProjectSource

Very nice. (Thanks for being a jerk.) ;-)

-Russ

Thiefware

[ThesQuid]

A great website about all this is ThiefWare.
They have comprehensive descriptions of all the companies and the spyware they install.

I discovered this site after being called by a "representative" wanting to sell our company keywords for $30,000! My boss was psyched about it until I impressed upon him that we did not want to be associated with such scum. The bizarro thing was that this salesman didn't even work for Cydoor Networks...they seemed to be parasites of the parasites.