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

Re:An Obsession with Spyware!

[H310iSe]

1) spyware is sneaky - you can't just kill it / uninstall it unless you know ... about as much as your average 1st year tech support guy.

2) as The Register recently reminded me outbound filtering is useless against any program that has executed on your computer (because it's easy to piggyback your information on another service that already has outbound permissions) - I'm not sure any spyware does this but...

3) it's fine if someone want to try to track me from somewhere else but my computer in my home is ... well, it's mine, and in my home, it's my private home thing and it's a castle or something (under american law, after all, I can shoot someone if they break into my home so if a spyware sneaks into my computer and stealthily steals (?) from me can't I shoot the CEO of Disney who buys the information to see if I'm a good candidate for the re-release of Snow White?) so THEY'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE UNLESS I INVITE THEM IN (kinda like a vampire, no?)

4) have I mentioned spyware is sneaky? real sneaky - it won't tell you it's installed, it won't (always) register w/ uninstall, it runs all sneaky like and sneaks and stuff.

Poor limewire - they should make money but why can't they do it like NPR, just bug all the limewire users for a week a year for donations?