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Which Adware and Spyware are the Most Insidious?
the_dreadnought asks: "I was just asked today which adware and spyware are the most insidious by an acquaintance. He asked me if this stuff was really legal, or was it just not important enough for law enforcement to deal with? I know the porn stuff (not from experience,,,ok, from experience) that dials out to foreign countries is one of the more extreme examples, and Gator is well known, but if Slashdot readers could describe what adware and spyware they think is the sneakiest I would appreciate it. Also, any thoughts on whether some of this stuff is even legal, as it is almost certainly not ethical."
And the fun part is, if you (or the user) uncheck the New.Net software in MSCONFIG, it doesn't just stop New.Net from working... They simply stop being able to use the internet. At all. So then we have to pray that their version of New.Net has a working uninstaller, or we have to go through a huge manual uninstall that involves removing multiple registry keys. BTW, if anyone here gets this or other spyware that is difficult to remove, try using a program called HijackThis and "Fix" anything that looks out of the ordinary (use common sense... don't delete everything).
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I'm sure there aren't many people who agree with me, but I personally consider RealOne to be spyware. It's intrusive and has lots of 'features' that are extremely difficult to turn off if you can turn them off at all, and it installs things without telling you. (For example, its 'message center' in the system tray that tells you to Buy RealNetworks Products(tm)(r)!0
Other than that, I don't really run into spyware much, but I find gator and its kin to be the most intrusive and common on the web.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Should the purveyors of operating systems be prosecuted for allowing software to run on their loyal customers computers, without their knowledge or permission. I have never read a Microsoft EULA in it's entirety, does it mention that this is part of the agreement?
gets my vote. Not only does it report your media files, but also any other apps you're running!
/me adjusts tinfoil hat...
One program that really annoys me is hotbar. The main reason so, it adjusts your MS Outlook settings all the time turning off using Word as your HTML editor. It also requires about 2 hours to remove the stupid program.
You remove it using AdAware and it will remove it for that user profile. Then login as another user it will actually install itself again. I logged on as each user to remove it and finally managed to get rid of it, so I thought. It has now appeared back and I know it wasnt the (l)users installing it again since I gave them a lecture about adware and installing crap on machines that I am in charge of.
If a program comes with a valid uninstall feature then I can tolerate it. When its a program thats a biatch to get rid of and keeps coming back I get really ticked off.
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*This is the cute bunny virus, please copy this into your sig so it can spread
How about Dell's SupportLink, which (and I have the TCPdumps to prove this) broadcasts your system's S/N, your MS Windows S/N, and several other tantalyzing bits of data back to Dell every 30 minutes or so?
Mind you, I love my Dell, but this pissed me off.
Jouster
I don't use RealPlayer at all. If for some reason a website offers only RealPlayer videos I just do without. not a big deal for me. much more annoying, as you say, to remove the tentacles of Real after you've installed their "free" player.
-sweatyb
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
I didn't think that spyware existed on MacOS X, but... my girlfriend came home from school last winter with something really odd. Internet Explorer would, no matter your user preferences, always go to a certain internet shopping site as a homepage. And would give you a barrage of popups constantly. I forget what shopping site, and back then I only had inbound firewalling, so I had no logs to check.
No toolbars installed. No plugins. I created a new user account for her, and that worked, so apparently it hadn't messed with the internals of the Internet Explorer.app (which seems like a vector they'll soon exploit). Crappy, though.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
More and more applications are becoming intrusive, software such as Winamp, Windows Media Player and Kaaza all having annoying dialog boxes which popup each time you run them if they detect a newer version which you haven't yet downloaded. MSN actually refused to do anything until I upgraded it.
A large number of applications now have an online registration feature, they dont force you to do the registration, but they will bug the hell out of you if you choose not to.
Applications such as RealPlayer try and sign you up to email based newsletters(spam), why should I have to give my details (email address, home address and hobbies for example) to a company in exchange for using their software?
There seems to be a gradual increase in the invasiveness of software, currently most of these 'features' are still optional, but I dont think it will be long before many software companies start making things like software updates, online registration and having a valid email address mandatory.
Some of it's not even broken ethically - if all they're doing with it is deciding which ads to show you, rather than tracking your every move online, especially if they didn't collect personal information about you, and if they didn't lie to you about what they were doing, and if they have a privacy policy that actually reflects what they're doing, that's ok. Not necessarily something you want to run, but ok. Some particular examples are the adware versions of Eudora and Opera.
European data collection laws may have terms that popular spyware violates, but usually the spyware companies aren't based in Europe so there's no legal jurisdiction. The data collection laws themselves are often effectively spyware - in return for "protecting" you, they're also subjecting you to possible audits of your machines because you *might* have personal information about other people on your computer or your PDA or your cell phone. (Sure, they mostly pretend they wouldn't do that to regular citizens, only businesses, but it's pretty much a selective enforcement thing. And you are registering all your computers with the data protection bureau, aren't you?) But at least it doesn't slow your machine down when they're not auditing you.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm a end user admin on a small (300 machines ) network where both IE5 and Netscape4 are available ( and nothing else ) on WinNT4. I'm constantly fighting against end users that install spy/adware. I'm losing the battle and re-imaging machines on a daily basis... I'm looking for tips on reducing downtime due to this junk being installed. Any tips would be appreciated.
Basicly, any time a program wants to do something like put something in startup or modify winsock settings or stick files in windows system folder or modify the hosts file or dns settings or things like that, windows should come up with a nicely worded warning about why clicking "yes" is a bad idea.
Also, it should log all these actions so that for example, you can see which programs installed what settings (so you know what to remove)
And it should have something that allows sysadmins to turn off these things completly (just like how its possible to turn off control panel and other system things)
That way, when some idiot wants to install kazza, the system detects that kazza wants to install "privacyviolatingspyware.exe" to c:\windows\system\importantmsfile.exe" and add it to startup and denies the request.
What should be done when the request is deined (either because its completly switched off or because the user clicked "no") is that it should return for file i/o calls "cant open file" and for registry calls whatever the appropriate error is.
Or better yet, pretend to write to the registry or the file but dont actually do it.