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Limewire Gets Ads, And Accusations of Spyware

Posted by timothy on from the who-sends-what-to-whom-and-how dept.

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"

12 of 288 comments (clear)

  1. Problems by Raven42rac · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have absolutely no hard feelings against using banner ads, they may be a nuisance, but you know, these people have families, and they need to eat, but spyware is the most insidious, dispicable, underhanded way of making a profit, and any company who uses such "utilities" should be sued for theft of our bandwidth, in my humble opinion, i wonder how much money in bandwidth has been stolen from Joe Consumer by these numerous programs that employ spyware, i would like to see that statistic.

    --
    I hate sigs.
  2. Gnutella? by npietraniec · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Who's still using Gnutella? GiFT just had a breakthrough with the development of ShadowFT

    Download it. Give it a try...

    1. Re:Gnutella? by juju2112 · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Check out the Introduction part of the README

      Here's an exerpt:


      There are some efforts to create a completely open FastTrack alternative,
      under the name "openFT". However, any such new network would require large
      amounts of popular content before people will switch to using it. The FT
      network, with on average 500,000+ users online, provides enormous amounts
      of readily available content, but the closed nature of it seems to prevent
      transferring this content to other networks' search facilities.

      Fortunately, the FT protocol apparently specifies that every FT "node"
      (i.e. computer running FT software) should have a small HTTP-like server
      running on port 1214 that can produce a plaintext list or index of shared
      files on that node, when asked for it. So, when the IP address of a FT
      node is known, the index can be requested and shared via different means
      than the FT network. This is what shadowFT is all about.

  3. Re:Installation of Cydoor is OPTIONAL! by johnnyproton · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually, I also declined to install the 3rd party software. However, it still installed a program called EzStub which consistently begs my firewall to access the internet.

    There is no mention of this program in the Windows Registry, either.

  4. An Obsession with Spyware! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It seems like "everyone" these days is paranoid about spyware lurking in their software, programs designed to monitor your precious packets as they bounce around the internet.

    Either don't install these add-ons (most installers ask these days) or set up your firewall to deny outgoing connections to them (you do have a firewall, right?). Failing that, run a filtering proxy like Proxomitron (Windows only, Linux equivalents exist). If you're not to scared to compile the source yourself, get the latest build of LimeWire's source and customize it the way you like, as was mentioned in a previous post.

    When you send and receive e-mail messages through your ISP, they could easily figure out what times of day you get the most mail, when you send the most mail, your average file attachment size, etc. just by doing a statistical analysis of the mail server's log files; but no one talks about how SendMail could be spyware!

    What's wrong with a little data mining? A lot, most would say. Every time you purchase something with your debit card or use coupons at the grocery store, you're telling some large corporation about your habits (this is old news to most). What's the difference if a piece of spyware watches what you do in Internet Explorer? You lose a little privacy? You lose your sanity? You lose your favourite box of rusty nails? ..

    Seems pretty silly to me to worry about things like that when you could just uninstall the software, kill the spyware with Ad-Aware (or your axe of choice) and try a different product. Even better, write your own client and be done with it :)

    1. Re:An Obsession with Spyware! by snake_dad · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'll give you one reason: I'm a software developer, and one of those nasty hidden programs fucked up my system at work so bad that certain tools I have to use would not even start anymore.

      It cost me 2 days to find that it was caused by something called newnet2_*.dll (IIRC), which appeared to do something with alternative TLD's. I was damned lucky to find it at that point because by chance I noticed this funny dll-name in the \winnt directory. It came with either Getright or Gozilla, programs that allowed me to resume a rather large download. More info on newnet at counterexploitation.

      I did not know about ad-aware at that time. I now run it often, and I use Proxomitron as well. I found proxomitron here, 'official' site is here. Oh, and don't forget to get new definition files for Ad-Aware regularly!

      --
      karma capped .sig seeking available Slashdot poster for long-term relationship.
  5. Re:Gator by DarkZero · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The entire POINT of Gator is to be spyware, much like the Comet Cursor. It offers a free and stupid little feature to attract as many people as possible for the purpose of getting spyware on their computer. Of course it still uses it, because it still exists!

  6. NO junk in the Mac version... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I use OS 10.1 and the latest LimeWire (1.8)... NO banners and no spyware... as usual. Just another reason to use the best there is. Thanks.

    1. Re:NO junk in the Mac version... by dun0s · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Adverts are a small price to pay
      Yep, that works in two ways... they are a small price for us to pay to use software, but they also pay a small price to the developers... very small. I doubt they are getting paid on a per impression basis, more likely on a per click. As no one clicks on adverts any more incorporating adverts alone into a software product is useless. Therefore (apply paranoia now) there is a very strong motivation to introduce spyware as this is likely to provide a higher return to the developers.

      You gets what you pays for. If the developers can't afford to support and run software, be it high bandwidth requirements or just needing to feed their kids then they need to find money somewhere. Adverts != money. Spyware == money. Registration fee == money.
  7. Re:An Obsession with Spyware!(Who is inktomi.com?) by TurboRoot · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Its a pretty simple concept, we have a program that allows us to edit all .html/.php/.jsp/etc files on any of our web servers with a web based interface.

    If one of these "stastical" programs captured my entire POST when I updated lets say... a PHP or JSP page, they would have source code to one of my other web based porgrams.

    And furthermore, there are servers that access files on my web server that are DEFIENTLY not linked from ANYWHERE on the WWW or my index.html.

    216.35.116.58 - - [11/Nov/2001:16:43:33-0600] "GET /developers/file.php HTTP /1.0" 302 0

    Which resolves to
    j3018.inktomi.com

    Curiously, I found a few spyware programs on my computer that I got from using Gamespy (ironic huh?). Lavasoft is cool, and helped me get rid of all those programs.

    Fortuantly, that has a password on it, and it won't even let you in unless you access via HTTPS. BUT, what if I was using security through obscurity?

    What if one of these spyware programs searches for username/password combinations and sends them encrypted with what "looks" to be statistical data?

    The fact of the matter is, this is crap, and no one should try to even defend these people.

  8. Re:As if... by Adam+Fisk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Apparently you have not looked at the LimeWire source. If you had, you would know that LimeWire was coded by a team, and that the LimeWire source is quite well engineered and well documented. I would recommend giving it a look at www.limewire.org. If you find specific performance bottlenecks, please feel free to e-mail me anytime at afisk@limewire.org. (think profiler). Thanks. Adam Fisk LimeWire Team

    --

    Adam Fisk

  9. Bandwith costs justify adding more load? by sapped · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Exactly how does it benefit them by adding more strain to their bandwith (with resulting increased costs) with adverts? Will the income from the ads really offset the additional costs of the extra bandwidth requirements?