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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"
Bandwidth alone ... is around $10,000 month!
That's the pre-SlashdotEffect figure, right?/p.
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)
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Non-story. Limewire is open source. Go download it and remove any ads if you want, whiny bitches:
m e
http://limewire.limewire.org/servlets/ProjectHo
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
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.
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!
Who's still using Gnutella? GiFT just had a breakthrough with the development of ShadowFT
Download it. Give it a try...
I haven't used LimeWire since I discovered the KaZaa family of networks. LimeWire seems to have the same problem Gnutella did about two years ago - the network is *SO* huge that it fragments and you can't find anything. Most things >100MB (i.e. DivX movie trailers, etc...) are either interrupted due to dropped routing, or killed by the other host. The only thing I get in the "search monitor" is:
(this is a snippit of my LimeWire 1.07 search monitor I fired up just for this post. 5 seconds generated these queries):
xxx
kiddy f*ck
*.mp3
"Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" [vv].avi
nudist
Windows XP Professional.iso
how to hack
*.mp3
porn.jpg
l33t warez
ts.wasco*.avi
12 year old
*.mp3
GOD DAMNIT PEOPLE USE THIS AS A CHAT CLIENT
a.gif
kazaa
and it continues.
Conclusion: There's nothing good ON the Gnutella network. (!= The Gnutella Network is not good.)
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.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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
I heard Linux is spyware. Why, with a simple one letter command
$ w
....
I can see what anybody on a system is doing, in REAL TIME! Imagine what this would mean for marketroids who got ahold of this information!
The only solution is to delete Linux from your systems now. Here's how:
$ DELETE LINUX.EXE
bash: DELETE: command not found
It's even nice enough to tell you that it's not found anymore. Hope this helps everyone rid their systems of spyware!
And we need to pay developer's salaries--like mine--to keep driving innovation on the Gnutella network.
Gnutella and peer networks in general are going to continue evolving and innovating regardless of whether you specifically are involved.
If there is one thing I hate about all these projects it is the lame excuses for significant and broad invasions of privacy by people who cannot build a decent business model.
Instead they take a short cut, sell privacy invasion for a quick fix, and say that it is all for the good of the user.
Just because it makes money does not mean spyware is a proper or even tolerable method of funding work on your project or business, regardless of what it is.
Peer networks are about empowering and utilizing individuals communicating at the edge of the network. Invading their privacy like this defeats the purpose and sells everyone short.
Of course, if they charged for their software, then there would be no need for ads or spyware.
-
In the old days you worried about viruses. Now, the companies themselves try to take control of your desktop in order to shove ads down your throat. It's a shame you can't trust software developers anymore but at least there's programs like Ad Aware, ZoneAlarm, Popup Stopper, etc that help you fight back. (And negative ratings on download.com help punish spyware-pushing companies too.)
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..
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.
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.
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.
Two problems with this though:
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
GPL, for linux and QT/KDE. Has everything I need and looks prettier. Faster too.
/. who whine about the spyware on their Windows machines. GO AWAY!
A new version (0.3) was released two days ago.
I have no sympathy for all the losers on
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
Moritz
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.