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

Gnutella?

[npietraniec]

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

Download it. Give it a try...

Re:Installation of Cydoor is OPTIONAL!

[johnnyproton]

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.

Re:An Obsession with Spyware!

[snake_dad]

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!