Slashdot Mirror
Spyware Makers Resent Cleaned-Up Versions
Tri0de points to a ZDnet artcle on a programmer who's taken it upon himself to release spyware- and adware-free versions of popular file-sharing programs. "'He's done Grokster and iMesh. And he's not alone. His work, now available through the Grokster and iMesh networks themselves, joins that of other programmers who have previously "cleaned" programs such as Kazaa and Audiogalaxy in a campaign against "adware" and "spyware."
Is the shoe on the other foot?'"
These companies are trying to advocate that it is fair use to take something you paid for, rip it into another format (removing some of the superflous data), and trade it on their networks... [personally i agree with that]
Yet it is wrong to take something you paid for (remember they provide it FREE - they dont provide it in exchange for spying on you and stealing your cpu cycles - they say FREE), rip it into another format (removing some of the superflous data), and trade it on their networks.
Get real, this is going to cause more damage to their legal cases than anything else.
Now if only someone would write an integrated client that works across all the p2p networks.
Why doesn't someone come up with a hack that fills the Spyware home Database with useless information? I mean the data fields that phone home should be easy to fill with meaningless information but seamingly valid data?
This would render any information gained worthless until scrubbed of the offending dirty data. And the scrubbing of dirty data would leave dirt, and/or scrub valid data.
Another option would be to Flood the home servers with pure junk traffic. Or maybe even both?
How about sending home a destructive payload? It should be easy to hack the data fields of the database so that it ends up running the DB server into the ground.
Any other ideas?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Whilst it's likely the author had your best interests at heart there's some chance he didn't.
Some chance, but in my opinion very very little. Even virus writers and whatnot love P2P networks. Users are what allow these networks to exist, ergo, it doesn't make sense to attack them. I doubt someone would be willing to sacrifice access to music and warez just to see some trojan or virus succeed. And I don't think this is naive; after all, the networks haven't self-destructed thus far.
The coolest voice ever.
That's hitting the nail on the head. Who do you trust more? Do you trust the original authors who hid the spyware in your program but are possibly giving some legal notice in the EULA (bleh), so they aren't completely rogue, but are ripping you off? Or do you trust the rogue programmer who claims to have fixed the spyware but maybe has slipped his own trojan in instead?
In the case of Kazaa Lite, I trust the rogue coder but I won't have that attitude on patched software for long. I think I would rather wait for my Slashdot peers to "beta test" these patched versions and find out if their computers die, before I even consider downloading patched up pirate software
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
What would happen if someone were to release a version that created bogus and unreliable information making their data collection unreliable and worthless?
The data would have to be indestiguashable from real data or at lease hard to distiguish and yet provide enough noise to make the current collection of data unreliable
Play Command HQ online
Actually this is easy to answer. Crackers are less likely to include malware in their products than commercial vendors.
Cracker groups release thousand of key generators and patches every month. MS wants you to believe that these are full of trojans and whatnot, but afaik there has never been a single reported case of a scene group deliberately releasing an infected crack.
All the shit that people are getting is coming from legal software, either as spyware or through outlook.
I noticed that after running the newest ref file from Ad-Aware that Kazaa Lite stopped working. It gives the message: "You have uninstalled a part of Kazaa that is required to run". I thought my system was clean until the latest update where it found more BDE stuff. I assume that's what made Kazaa Lite stop working. So, it appears that the Lite version isn't as ad/spy-ware free as I thought.
Jason
"FORMAT C:" - Kills bugs dead!
By the way, try searching FT for "Tracy Mandeville" for documents. Apparently, she unintentionally shared her whole my documents collection. There's tons of homework questions, essays, and general school stuff there.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
Yeah, sure, I'm gonna be flamed. But how is it possible for "the original authors" to be "ripping you off"? They wrote the code. Not you. How is it a rip off? Do I have a serious logical gap? It seems to me that the reverse is true. I don't like spyware/adware/whateverotherinsidiousnameyouwantto callitware. So I use linux and avoid such program completely. It seems to me that people using programs like adaway/adaware/whatever are in fact ripping off the original programmers. As are the people who designed said programs. If you don't like what these companies (e.g. the Kazaa people) are doing with their software, don't use it. The chief principle of the GPL is almost entirely that. If you don't want to use it as they say you can, you cannot use it. If someone violates the GPL there's a general uproar. Yet someone violates a different software license and people are complaining about the writers of that license? Stop and think about what I'm saying for a minute before I get mod'd to never-never land. That's all
This is a great example of the 'net acting like a biological organism...routing around censorship, and developing its own defensive mechanisms against unwanted intruders. The image of the Internet community as a giant "blob", slowly flowing over, bypassing, and eventually making irrelevant the obstacles created by others reminds me, too, of a volcano - locally powerful, representative of tremendous potential.