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About freedom of speech and quality of software.
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Islander
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O.P. Roll Eyes  About freedom of speech and quality of software.
Hi and hello.

Let me write this just for some of you to have a laugh, others to see perhaps what in many cases is sadly too obvious and the others to tell me if I really did so wrong.

The story started this morning when I found an emoticon pack (100 emoticons... nice!) for MSN Messenger 6 on a (I think) quite popular spanish language website about Messenger and all that stuff.
The first thing that made me wonder was that it was an executable file. The second thing that legal stuff message before starting the.... installation?
Then I got two warnings from my antivirus program (TR/Bris.Spy.1 and TR/Bris.Spy.2) and another one from my firewall telling me about some strange software trying to access Internet. Oh, and also I got a folder on my desktop with 100 gifs. At least that went well.
So I went to the board of the website I got the pack from and looked for a thread about it. Indeed there was an announcement, and also someone said something about starting Ad-aware after installing the pack.
I added a post informing about the two troyans and the unwanted software, added the URL for Ad-aware since someone asked for it, and adviced not to install that pack because of obvious reasons.
A bit later there came a reply from someone who looked like an intelligent person (several thousands of posts and admin status), saying that there is no troyan included in that pack, only some spyware that means nothing (actually he didn't say it that way, I can't translate it directly... but he definately made it look like if it really means *nothing* at all and for no one to care). Oh and he told me to learn the difference between spyware and troyans.
So I replied ("for the experts", as I stated) and told about the exact spot on the harddrive where to look at the files, making it obvious one thing was the spyware itself (or adware?) and another thing the two files hidden inside the c:\windows folder. Although now that I think of it, perhaps they really were only one piece of software? Doesn't matter. I also added an URL with extended information about spyware and the trouble it causes, for people to tell themselves if it is a matter "of nothing",  and for the nice guy with admin status I added a note about how dangerous it can be not to inform people correctly about issues like these, and for all of us to learn that. Literally I posted "Nothing worse like wrong distributed information. Let's see if we learn that".

Two hours later I was banned from that board without further notice.

Do you think I overacted?

On a side note... if not before anyway, after that I really appreciate Patchou, not only for giving us such a great piece of program but more than that for being a really great programmer, including the very correct distribution of his software.

This post was edited on 03-13-2004 at 07:20 PM by Islander.
03-13-2004 07:16 PM
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Messages In This Thread
About freedom of speech and quality of software. - by Islander on 03-13-2004 at 07:16 PM
RE: About freedom of speech and quality of software. - by Anubis on 03-13-2004 at 08:01 PM
RE: About freedom of speech and quality of software. - by billywoods1 on 03-13-2004 at 08:36 PM
RE: About freedom of speech and quality of software. - by Islander on 03-13-2004 at 09:05 PM
RE: About freedom of speech and quality of software. - by Chrono on 03-13-2004 at 09:21 PM
RE: About freedom of speech and quality of software. - by viz on 03-14-2004 at 01:51 AM
RE: About freedom of speech and quality of software. - by InsaneXterminator on 03-17-2004 at 09:58 AM


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