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Viewpoint - A Spyware and Astroturfing Debate?
Spazntwich wonders: "Lately, the Viewpoint Corporation has gained attention by being the subject of many debates on whether or not it spreads spyware. Of special interest is its media player which is installed by default with all recent versions of AIM, as a 'required' component. Its difficulty of successful un-installation coupled with its generally suspicious nature of installation and tendency to 'phone home' have drawn many accusations of spyware, but Viewpoint maintains otherwise. They feel so strongly about this that they've even managed to get their software removed from the spyware lists of SpyBot and other anti-spyware vendors, though nobody seems to know whether this was done voluntarily by the vendors or under threat of litigation. Viewpoint claims a strong anti-spyware policy on their site." Is Viewpoint spyware or not, and what have your experiences been with it?
"Of special interest as of late are Viewpoint's apparent plans to begin serving ads through their media player and an astroturfing campaign that can only be described as aggressive and obvious, which you can see demonstrated in the comments of several previously linked articles as well in a discussion on SearchEngine Journal and a discussion thread on AskLeo. A favorite pseudonym of the campaign(ers?) seems to be Michael Tzez, and googling the name demonstrates just how extensive a campaign the company is waging.
I'm curious as to the Slashdot community's thoughts on this."
I'm curious as to the Slashdot community's thoughts on this."
In short, this is the tip of the iceberg. We're probably going to see this a lot more, with companies doing unethical things and not getting put on spyware/adware/malware list. Like the $sys$rootkit, for example, or Google's 33 year cookie. The problem with having watchers (anti-malware industry) that are private companies is, of course, "who watches the Watchers?"
It's spyware.
nificant.
It is a .... after much intensive code and network analysis ... a spyware.
Anyway, anything that phone homes a bunch of encrypted packets is spyware, in MY BOOK!
What you should be asking is, "What useful purpose does this software serve?" If it's not doing anything useful for you, the user and owner of the computer, then teminate it. Why have it use up memory and disk space for no reason?
How easily can it be completly removed? I think that's the big question when it comes to spyware designations or not. It actually doesn't concern myself if a program brings pop-up ads or things like that, as long as it clearly identifies itself as such, and easily allows me to remove the offending software.
it's definitely scumware. Think about it. It's tough to remove, it's installed either sneakily or as a component of something else, and now they want it to serve ads. If they're so convinced they're not spyware, they can make their product easily removable. Provide an uninstaller, or leave instructions for manual removal if they're too damn lazy.
Do, do not, or delegate to someone else: there is no try.
Perhaps one of these smaller anti-spyware developers needs to come up with a new terminology. It's not "spyware" or "adware", it's "Crap", or "Software we don't like". Purely opinion-based, so there's no "misrepresentation" claims that keep picking up those pesky lawsuits.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Sorry, I've missed the part where you back up that assertion except by linking to a bunch of your 1337 friends saying the same thing. According to your Google results, the guy seems to exist, and while he might be a bit too excited over Viewpoint, it doesn't seem like he's alone in that.
And what kind of stupid astroturf campaign would have multiple people pretending to be a single goofball?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
My personal experience with Viewpoint was that I had three Viewpoint applications installed on my computer. The media player, the toolbar, and one other one. I could not open Firefox nor Internet Explorer. It simply wouldn't happen no matter what I tried. Scannings for adware/spyware/malware didn't work, until I was finally able to narrow it down to Viewpoint. After uninstalling the Viewpoint apps, my computer worked perfectly.
I'm still reeling that they're trying to put themselves off as NotEvil(TM).
Slashdot, the only place where intellectuals can act like idiots... and still sound intellectual.
Anything that gets installed as a non-essential but default bundle with anything else is questionable. I didn't even know that viewpoint was installed when I installed AIM. Anything that makes itself hard to install or attempts to hide its phoning home is spyware. Viewpoint is guilty as charged. If a spyware scanner doesn't nab it, maybe a "useless crap" scanner should.
Check out my women's designer clothing store.
Viewpoint Media Player is a program that is installed during the installation of AOL Instant Messenger that is a plugin for displaying graphical content in the software's own proprietary format. According to the software's end user license agreement, Viewpoint Media Player collects usage information and forwards it to Viewpoint servers. Each installation of Viewpoint Media Player contains a unique alphanumeric identification number that can be used to uniquely identify an installation of the software.
A successful attempt to remove Viewpoint Media Player while AOL Instant Messenger is still installed will cause AOL Instant Messenger to reinstall Viewpoint Media Player the next time AOL Instant Messenger is run. This advertising can be completely removed however with third-party hacks.
To remove ad's from AIM: http://aimadhack.webhop.net/
NOTE: I don't use AIM so I would not know if the fix really works or not...
(Thx wikipedia for the info)
As a technician I've seen it on hundreds of machines. I always uninstall it not because it's spyware or some malware, but because(and correct me if i'm wrong) this peice of software offers no new functionality to anything. Bloatware if you will.
In particular, if it was SpyBot vs Microsoft AntiSpyware vs some GnuSpy, you'd want to be able to claim more spyware stopped, not less.
Although I personally don't consider the actual "spying" part of spyware to be unethical, if it's unobtrusive. Google's fine. I don't like the encrypted dialing home, the individual usage of statistics gathered or the inability to prevent gathering them, the popups, and the general plundering of my machine's resources to feed me ads I'm going to ignore anyway.
Of course, I don't know / don't care about spyware. I use Linux.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
How dare you pricks call Viewpoint spyware! They have every right to know anything about you that they can discover. It seems a bit shady that you wouldn't want them to know something about you. What are you trying to hide, anyway?
And so what if it's not easily uninstallable? Who are you to prevent them from doing what they want with your computer or any information they discover or infer from its use? What right do you have to tamper with their software just because it happens to reside on your computer? That's their intellectual property!
You freely choose to install Viewpoint's software without your knowledge or consent when you don't read the license you agree to when you install AIM. How is that deceptive or even Viewpoint's fault?
Also, What's wrong with being bombarded with an unstoppable tsunami of advertisements? How else will you know about all the valuable offers that are waiting just for you!
http://gaim.sourceforge.net/
I just went to aol.co.uk/aim installed their version on my girlfriend's machine (yes I do actually have one so spare me the jokes). It doesn't seem to have the Viewpoint BS bundled with it, has less pop-ups and is way less annoying.
Perhaps, by their convoluted definition it is not spyware but it is malware no matter how you slice it.
As one other poster mentioned, this is the genesis of trend. No doubt we will see more of this sort of thing. The spyware, adware, demographic, data mining industry has replaced (grown out of?) the dot-com collapse and the American consumer is left with herds of digital predators with a singular interest: "take the consumer's money".
It's long been a popular practice for anything sales to tread the slippery slope of both ethics and the law. Spam distributors began creating "subscription newsletters", so its not "spam" anymore. Telemarketing firms and "outside" sales groups no longer "employ" to fill "jobs" but instead offer "opportunities" (as independent contractors so they can evade employment law, a practice I've seen put to shady use countless times). Telemarketers no longer interrupt dinner with a "cold call", they interrupt dinner with a call only to "parties who've expressed an interest", despite the fact that the customer wasn't made aware that they were putting themselves on a list when they filled out that survey at the mall. You can get a free vacation, iPod, dildo, pony, etc... no purchase necessary, as long as you commit to spend the equivalent of the national deficit on some shady promotional hotel package or subscribe to 300 crap-ass magazines owned by a conservative publishing house. I recall once hearing a sales manager tell a group of door-to-doors, "I don't care if you have to knock them down and take their wallet, just get their money". The corporate clowns in the leather chairs promote this behavior. Managers encourage, or even require, "sales associates" to hardsell extended warranties for electronics products. Telemarketers and door-to-door vermin are driven and even threatened to push to the very borders of harassment. The oil companies increase the gas prices to "cover the cost of gasoline reformulation" which reduces gas mileage, further increasing cost...But I digress.
These companies will manipulate any small detail to be able to say, "It's not spyware", and rest assured, their lawyers have pulled all-nighters splitting the hairs to ensure that this is a "legal" statement. And in legalize it may be true, but legalize != reality.
In the end I guess it's the physics of bullshit. It's all spin. Hell, it's also up and down and goddamn strange, but it completely lacks beauty or charm. (Yea, I know I left out top and bottom but I couldn't think of a witty BDSM reference to justify them).
"09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0"
>Viewpoint Media Player collects usage information and forwards it to Viewpoint servers. Each installation of Viewpoint Media Player contains a unique alphanumeric identification number that can be used to uniquely identify an installation of the software.
It uniquely identifies my machine, collects information, and phones home. Q.E.D., it is spyware. Add in that it is installed surreptitiosly as part of something else, is a bitch to uninstall, apparently gets automatically reinstalled by its host app, and requires some third-party hack to make it stop spewing spamvertising, and you have genuine malware. What's to debate about this? This also brings up the question, why would anybody in their right mind use anyfuckingthing from AOL?Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
It boggles my mind that Viewpoint would need to resort to spyware, which tends to put me on the side if 'they're being ignorant' as opposed to 'they're being evil'. Viewpoint had a liscenable product, that being effective geometry compression for 3D models. If you've got a good patent lock on that kind of technology, its hard to imagine not being able to turn it into a lot of money. On the other hand I look at their website now and search for the words geometry compression and find virtually nothing. Either they sold the tech or they don't know how to advertise it. Either one is incredibly stupid IMHO.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
The Viewpoint Media Player also comes pre-installed on Dell PCs, at least in the UK. Although they also come with every piece of crapware that AOL have ever produced, so it may be a part of that.
I uninstalled it as soon as I saw it on the principle that anything calling itself a media player that isn't WMP, Winamp etc.. is almost certainly adware or spyware and should be terminated with extreme prejudice. Unless it's called Quicktime, in which case just burn the computer. Before all the Apple fans get upset, I'm not suggesting that Quickime is spyware. No, I'm merely suggesting that it's the crappiest, most irritating piece of software ever shat into existence by anybody. I bet you thought I was going to say something controversial then didn't you?
Here (USA) it's common knowledge among those who make frequent dell purchases-- choose earthlink over AOL, because earthlink is easier to remove when you get the box....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
There are a lot of programs on my machine that I don't know how they got there. For me to label all of them as spyware, would be ignorant indeed. I don't know about you guys, but I don't read every EULA for every software I install. And with companies bundling software so often, it doesn't suprise me that I have so many programs installed on my machine. So with that said, it would be REALLY SMART to actually see what these applications are doing. This is what you have to do to determine if a piece of software is spyware or not. 1. Install a web debugging proxy that can decrypt SSL (like charles) 2. Watch the traffic being generated by these programs 3. See if any personal information, or marketing information is being sent to their servers. 4. If not- it's not spyware and guess what guys... VIEWPOINT IS NOT SPYWARE! They are checking for updates and updating their player. Sorry to dissapoint... Sometimes the truth hurts.
Shhh! They'll hear that and bundle it with our AIM too :(
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
I wonder if that's because its practices are forbidden by the UK Data Protection Act?
True, it might very well be more innocent than that, but that's still not a mark in its favor...
Why do I not want it? Over a year ago it started popping up dialogs on my screen. Once it automatically downloaded a toolbar on to my computer. When it did that, it displayed a liscense agreement that I could not cancel.
Fortunatly, I was able to get rid of the thing for good by switching to GAIM.
No, I will not work for your startup