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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"
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.
Who's still using Gnutella? GiFT just had a breakthrough with the development of ShadowFT
Download it. Give it a try...
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.
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