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Stealware: Kazaa et al Stealing Link Commissions
goombah99 writes "We all heard about spyware, well now Kazaa, Morpheus and LimeWire are sneaking a new type of nastiness onto your computer, software that - without you even knowing it - redirects commissions for online purchases you make from other vendors you make back to them. For example, if you buy a CD from an affiliate of Amazon.com, say some charity, the software fools Amazon into crediting the commission to Morpheus, not the charity! The story quotes a LimeWire Developer who admits 'While I agree that this is really a
bit of a scam, it is a way for us to pay salaries while not adversely affecting our users.' The insidious part is the stealware
program remains even if you delete the original P2P software. And you supposedly gave your permission when you clicked through the EULA."
'While I agree that this is really a bit of a scam, it is a way for us to pay salaries while not adversely affecting our users.'
"While I agree that slapping my wife around isn't very nice, it does get me my dinner on time."
"While I agree that insider trading is against SEC rules, how else am I going to get the 2nd Aston-Martin?"
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
'While I agree that this is really a bit of a scam, it is a way for us to pay salaries while not adversely affecting our users.'
That's part of it, it does affect the users - money that they may have WANTED to go to a particular affiliate is now going to these guys. Yay.
The other part is what about the affiliate contract? doesn't this violate it?
Desperation is a stinky cologne
people with KaZaA actually buy CD's from Amazon??? Hmm... Who knew?
Humor folks, enjoy it. =)
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
From the article's side-bar:
A Software Cleanup
Computer users who want to remove shopping software from their machines can do so in a few steps. Instructions for removing three of the most common programs:
BUYERSPORT - The shopping software with Morpheus:
Click the Start button.
Click on Find.
Click on Find Files or Folders.
Type in mbho.dll. Click on find now. When the file appears in the directory window, drag mbho.dll into the trash.
LIMESHOP - The software with LimeWire:
Click the Start button.
Click on Settings.
Click Control Panel.
Double-click Add/Remove Programs.
Click LimeShop.
Click Add/Remove.
SAVENOW - The software used by Kazaa:
Click on Start.
Click Settings.
Click on Control Panel.
Double-click on Add/Remove Programs.
Click SaveNow.
Click on Add/Remove.
www.christopherlewis.com
It might not be as fast as the other p2p networks, but Gnucleus is free, open source, and not subject to any malware like Kazaa is...
This is more than "a bit of a scam" -- it's immoral and undoubtedly illegal. There are ways to get defeat all their little scams and still use the Fasttrack P2P network. You can try Kazaa Lite, which is Kazaa without the spy/scumware. I'd also recommend using AdAware, a great little program that scans your registry, memory, and hard drives for spy/scum/adware components and gives you the option to delete them.
Using AdAware to delete cydoor.dll will likely leave your P2P client not working. That's where the dummy cydoor.dll comes in. It allows the client to start without providing any of the unwanted cydoor functionality.
For more info on spyware and scumware in general, check out the quite wonderful Counterexploitation site...
Hope this helps...
:wq
Full disclosure of affiliates at the time the transaction is concluded. If Amazon and the others actually showed which affiliate was going to get a commision, people would spot the monkey business right away. The consumer doesn't have to know the amount, but knowing which affiliate is getting the credit would make this a self-policing situation. If the stealware people are so bold as to falsify Amazon's message back to the constomer, then it's time for the laywers.
I don't know if the big online retailers actually care about affiliate programs or not. If they do, then stealware is intolerable. Otherwise, the programs are useless.
"We knew it was wrong," said one vice-president, "but we had to keep the free snacks flowing for the programmers, or else we were screwed. We couldn't stop -- they'd all jump ship."
The executives insisted they had done nothing wrong. "Those kids are sick! What the hell are they getting candy for, anyway?" he asked rhetorically. "We left them instant cous-cous and bean soup. They've got it pretty good, if you ask me."
FSF founder and computer guru Richard Stallman was unavailable for comment. "He's out redirecting CDNow affiliate refferals to pay for his movie rental late charges," said an anonymous source close to the programmer.
Carousel is a lie!
I'd like to point people's attention to furthurnet.com. I'm sure it won't have the popularity of the other sharing systems, but its a legit system and you get unique material.
Furthurnet.com is a system where fans of bands which allow bootlegging of live concerts post full sets from those shows.
Pros:
*Free, no ads, no spyware, nothin
*Legal - music is only by bands who approve
*New stuff - you can get stuff no on CD's yet
*Live stuff - could be a plus or minus depending on the artist, but its a new perspective.
Cons:
*Bigger - they're recorded in a non-lossy format shn, so a full concert is anywhere between 200-600 meg
*Recording quality not as good - depending on the band, the recorder and show, the acoustics and equipment aren't as good as live CD's and certainly not as clean as studio.
*Fewer artists
I just discovered this a few days ago looking for Jack Johnson stuff. I love it. Take a look. Its on Win and linux (maybe Mac too, not sure)
"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the most surely the one wasted." -Sebastian Roch Nicol
File sharing companies are, at the very best, a dubious bunch. Experience has shown tht they will try to screw up your machine in some way.
So...let them. They'll find some way of doing it eventually anyway. The trick? Just make sure the 'machine' is a virtual machine. I personally use Virtual PC for Windows, but VMWare would do just as well.
Make a blank virtual machine, install your P2P clients on it and take a back-up of that file. Then use that machine for nothing but P2P. The result? Spyware is useless, because there's nothing happening to actually spy on. The machine gets too spyware-ridden? No problem - delete the current machine and restore from that fresh backup you took.
Cheers,
Ian
Here's the link: http://associates.amazon.com/exec/panama/associate s/join/operating-agreement.html/104-2963693-286633 7
Section 5, at the end:
In addition, you may not: [snip] (b) read, intercept, record, redirect, interpret, or fill in the contents of any electronic form or other materials submitted to us by any person or entity;
Desperation is a stinky cologne
I am shocked--shocked, I say--to hear that Kazaa, a fine purveyor of music-stealing software, would behave in such an unethical manner.
Since this comission theft is apparently legal, I'm going to modify our GL system here at the office to re-code all our product sales as being sold by me, so I get all the commissions. Why should those pesky sales people get any of the money, anyway? If they want money, they should become c++ programmers instead of salesmen.
That's why if your going to use Kazaa you should really use Kazaa Lite. It's Kazaa without all the spy stuff installed.
Ok so you are saying to not do it yourself but to endorse the community around it. If the community grows (whether from "Lite" users or not), it will be good for the Kazaa company. Do you really want to support a company that is twisting the internet in such an underhanded way? At first I was like you. They put in some spyware and they said that they would take it out (which as far as I am aware, they never did) and so I downloaded the Lite and thought 'mostly harmless'. Yet now they are showing thier true colors. The Kazaa company thinks that any underhanded way they can possibly make money is fair game in bussiness and war. I don't want to support a company with no moral standard and embraces such a corporate culture. I want the whole kazaa p2p to whither and die and to be never heard of from again.
I miss the Karma Whores.
Hmmm... I wonder if Amazon would be willing to say how many CDs Kazaa users have bought? That might just prove (note that I said "might") prove that those filthy dirty music pirates are actually *gasp* big customers. Could be interesting.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
I agree. I don't feel bad about pirating mp3s and stealing from a bloodless record label, but stealing from charity?!? Lines have to be drawn...
Spread the RC luvin'
I have been noticing for a while now that many corporate entities seem to think that their own private rules somehow take precedence over the general laws of the localities in which they operate. A quick example. My old ISP kept sending me a bill in the mail for a yearly subscription to their services that I had not used in months and had decided not to renew. I finally called up and asked them why they kept sending me a bill. Their reply was that THEIR POLICY was to renew subscriptions automatically (fortunately, they didn't have my credit card number or I would have had to jump through all kinds of hoops to get out from under them). To which I calmly replied that it was MY POLICY not to expect to be billed for items and services that I hadn't requested. The above mentioned attitude of the writers of user agreements that they can specify any old nonsense they want is just a special case of the general tendency of modern companies and institutions to try to write their own rules in complete disregard for the laws of the land. This goes for the ubiquitous rent-a-cops who parade around with guns pretending to be law enforcement officers.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
What do you expect. They feel like their userbase are all criminals so they don't care about abusing them.
Not much different of an attitude from the RIAA.
What really gets me is their claim that this diversion of cash doesn't hurt the customer. Sure, it doesn't cost the customer any more money, but most of the sites that have funds diverted away from them are small, special-interest sites that provide their content for free, and use that income to pay for their bandwidth. If that money dissappears, then the sites dissappear as well, and voila, the customer is now hurt. I certainly don't want *my* favorite sites dissappearing just because some amoral jackass decided he needs the money more than they do.