There have always been warez sites out there. Since the earliest days of the internet, long before I was ever on it, people traded naughty or illegal files anonymously through ftp and irc.

Napster was a natural step in this progression — a simple way for joe user to acquire material he’d rather not pay for. I was sympathetic to the ‘try-before-you-buy’ perspective, but then, I was on dialup, so having liked one or two songs, I was far more likely to hit HMV than try to keep downloading. Ultimately, of, course, it was shut down, to be temporarily supplanted by Morpheus, Limewire, Bearshare… and then Kazaa. Sponsored Kazaa. Spyware Kazaa. That one.

It always struck me as amusing that a company would actually try to make money from providing a legally questionable service to its clients. Sort of like selling advertising space on a hitman’s jacket, but not really.

The thing about the internet is that there’s so many people out there who are willing to contribute their time and resources to the global community that it becomes exceedingly difficult to actually charge money for anything. Hence the donation buttons, which I’ve proudly pressed on various sites to give my $2 of support. But is that always enough? Enter: Ad- and Spyware.

DivX was another great irony. The overwhelming majority of DivX movie files out there are illegally reproduced material — dvd rips, animes, tv shows, music videos, etc… and yet they charge $30 for content-creation package. Or $0 and they install you with spyware. Why even bother, when the QuickTime and WindowsMedia ones are free?

A most recent example that I encountered was the program Messenger Plus, an extremely handy add-on for Messenger. The creator, Patchou, is famously quoted as called boycotters ‘idiots’, but whatever he assures us to the contrary — it’s still definitely spyware. Yes, it’s optional, in theory, but the ‘agree to install sponsor program’ page looks deceptively like a normal ‘End User Agreement’ screen.

Out of curiousity, I went to the official MsgPlus forums to see what the discussion was like on the topic. It was a little disappointing to see so much denial and outright mis-information from the creator and his cronies. Yes, it’s still an extremely useful tool, and for that I’m grateful, but honesty trumps anything else. And to insult and dismiss users who object to these policies is not the greatest assurance. Apparently if you uninstall the program, it uninstalls the spyware. BUT, if you’ve ever run Ad-Aware, Spy-Sweeper, or any major virus program that picked up the malware, it locks itself in and is no longer removable by the ‘easy’ method.

The way I used was stumbled upon partly by mistake, but I figured out the ‘creation date’ of the online casino shortcuts that it made on my desktop and favorites folders. Then I did a search for all files modified in that one-hour period. Surprise: There were subfolders all over the disk in random locations with different names containing files with more scrambled names. It was only after wiping out ALL of these at once that the unwanted IE adbar went and stayed gone.

Had I not thought to use the date-search, I quite likely would never have found them all.

The irony again: A major feature of MsgPlus is to disable the Microsoft advertising box in Messenger.

Mike

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