Here is a fun story. Do you know where your links are pointing?
P2P contender iMesh
has been around for several years. For financial reasons they decided to include the Cydoor software with their client. Although clients including Cydoor have recieved a great deal of heat over the possibility of Cydoor being spyware, proponents of the software have been claiming that Cydoor is in fact not spyware.
To validate their claims, iMesh’s website has a large banner along the side that states “No Spyware : Imesh is spyware clean.” Clicking on that banner will bring you to another page that explains iMesh’s position and a further link to validate their statement.
“iMesh is installed with the Cydoor banner and popup engine. The Cydoor ad engine is NOT a SpyWare software. Neither iMesh or Cydoor tracks the iMesh users in any way or collects any data about them.
We’ve put a lot of effort in becoming “SpyWare Clean” by talking to all the main SpyWare gurus and following their advices about telling our users ahead about the Cydoor ad engine, and making sure we and Cydoor only do ad delivery activities.
Steven Gibson’s site (the #1 SpyWare guru) took Cydoor off the SpyWare suspicious list (he writes only about the ones that are SpyWare).
It is necessity for us to sell advertising space in the form of banners and popups on our iMesh client. The banners and popups provide us with a revenue stream that enables us to provide you with a free and easy-to-use iMesh software.”
Clicking Steve Gibson’s link quickly brings you to the promised destination. This is, of course, the funny part. In rather prominent display, this is what Gibson’s site reads:
iMesh Warning!
We do NOT endorse the iMesh File Sharing System.
An erroneous page on the iMesh web site: points to this page and misleads people into believing that we are somehow endorsing the spyware-free nature of their software. This is not true.
We have received reports that iMesh is infested with nasty, self-interested, spyware-style software of several known varieties that will infect and can damage personal computers. It is the LAST THING we would ever endorse.
It may be that you will need to tolerate this sort of invasive and intrusive low-life software in order to use any of today’s “free” file sharing systems. But please don’t do so under the belief that we have said that any of them were free from this sort of hidden nightmare.
Needless to say, people concerned with the possibility of spyware will then go back to iMesh and download at least three copies.
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