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?'"

Comments

Re Hacked Spyware

[Archangel Michael]

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?

Self-interest

[Faust7]

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.

Re:Be VERY wary - Who do you trust more?

[Glorat]

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

Re:An embarrassment to open source / free software

[Rick the Red]

File trading networks seem perfect for distributing i.e. linux ISOs, taking the load off organizations like Debian that don't have the money and don't deserve to have to pay for a lot of bandwidth.

Interesting idea. IANAL, so anyone care to offer opinions on whether stating "The source is available on Kazaa/Grokster/gnutella" would meet the obligations of the GPL?