Broadband Service as P2P Distro Experiment

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Sunday February 26, 2006 @04:09PM from the you-learn-something-new-everyday dept.

Not another doctor wrote to mention a PC Doctor article about the Sky by Broadband service. In addition to providing access to the internet, the service also helpfully downloads and installs the Kontiki P2P service. From the article: "What this really means is that Sky in all their advertising are making out that you are downloading content directly from them rather than other users. Also, the P2P link continues to run in the background after you've shut down the main application, eating up bandwidth by allowing others to download the files from your PC. Kontiki also collects and sends back to Sky a lot of information about your PC. There is no mention as to how this data is protected from unauthorized access, however, initial examination with Ethereal seems to show that all data is at least encrypted during transmission."

1 of 71 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

The problem is the software by gataylor · 2006-02-26 22:00 · Score: 5, Informative

Whether you agree that specifying the P2P nature in the Terms and Conditions is enough, the Kontiki P2P software is hard to uninstall.

Uninstalling Sky By Broadband does NOT uninstall the Kontiki peer to peer. So, anyone who tries Sky By Broadband, doesn't like it, and uninstalls it, is still participating in the P2P network - and most likely doing so without their knowledge. I bet they're all wondering why teh internets have gone all slow...

I wrote some uninstall instructions on my blog last month for the Sky By Broadband Kontiki P2P server:
http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/Blog/blogentry=0017 5/Blog.aspx

And here's another set of uninstall instructions:
http://www.nanagram.co.uk/sky.htm

The big question in my mind is whether it is incompetence that makes the software hard to uninstall, or is it a deliberate attempt to grow their network.