the most offensive software

The most offensive software award, goes to Audio Galaxy

Audio Galaxy has now joined the ranks of those pillars of personal privacy, who are saying “Dahh, I didn’t know!”

Onflow, a company whose “Web Enhancing” software is widely distributed with most file sharing and other ad-sponsored programs, and installed with or without your permission, has included in it’s bundle a little gem called VX2.

VX2 serves pop-up ads that appear to be coming from the site you’re visiting, and as it does this is sends a report back to its home base. ‘Typical’ you might say, except for the fact that included in this report is any info you submitted in any on-line form. Web based Email, site log-ins, online purchases are all done using on-line forms.

By making itself a plug-in to your web browser, it can pass through a firewall unhindered, to deliver its package.

Maybe it’s just me, but this really can’t be legal! Can it?

Read the full story here:

http://www.poenews.com/inhouse/vx2.htm

http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,49960,00.html

Wow. And I used to use AudioGalaxy. It was a long time after I uninstalled that that I found a mysterious OnFlow program. It's now happily deleted from my system :)

Instead of complaining, consider the service audiogalaxy is offering. By far, it is the most elegant and subtle of the services. They play a big host to many independant artists and labels by writing endearing articles about them and hosting their music locally. They offer a non obstructive client which has a very limited number of advertisements. For the linux users, no popups are displayed at all and the client runs quietly in the background.

I liked it when I first used it, but somehow I once downloaded a mysterious song masquerading under the name of the Blink 182 one I was trying to get. If only I couldv'e played the song while I was downloading it. And some days it just went so slow. More often then not I was too impatient to even select the song I wanted to download, let alone download it. And it only let me get music, what if I want some pictures or videos. AudioGalaxy may be better for the musicians than the others, but the ads in KaZaA or Morpheus are hardly bothersome and I've never failed to get the song I wanted.

OnFlow is the worse program I saw for your machine. I don't know how (Probabley with Cute Ftp) but I found it install on my windows 98 machine. I remove it and WOW, no more Systeme Tray! Everything **** up! :mad: But the worse in that is Norton Firewall who never told me Onflow was sending report on the Internet. :mad: Damm, I wish those compagnie don't respect privacy.

-SDK

The good ole....AOhelL setup software. It takes over a system completely. I have had to restore more computers to normal Windows (Normal hah hah, Windows?) after AOL has been removed . Because the people got wise and switched to an ISP. It even leaves the AOL logo in the browser. What a mess. Regedit to the rescue.......
Thats my $.02 worth. :cool:

The most offensive software I have ever used (besides AOL) was a free ISP dialler program from Spinway. 99% of the time I could not connect, and I couldn't remove it, and it almost got to the point of me having to format the hard drive.

Also, there are some sites that when you load them, they download and install a little exe file that when my stepfather went to the site... it changed his homepage, and everytime he opened IE6, it would redownload the exe file under a different name to the WINNT folder. Lucky I was there to discover where it was putting these files so that it did not go unchecked. Then it would have filled up the entire hard drive and it would be like this one time, at band camp...

Well, I pay the 5 bucks or whatever per month for AudioGalaxy Gold and I haven't ever seen anything for spyware on it. On the free version, yes, and AdAware paid itself in gold yet again by finding it and happily cleaning it for me. At least AG didn't stop working like Kazaa would if you removed the registry key for the spyware. For 5 bucks a month, allowing me to get any song from anyone out there who has it, it's worth it to me. And if they're giving a percentage of that cost per month to the RIAA, they won't be closing it down either. Add in the fact that a lot of people out there are leechers and won't pay for it, so they get the spyware version. Seems fair to me. After all, 5 bucks is absolutely nothing. One year of AG Gold would get you maybe 3 or 4 cds, of which you may or may not like entirely (Bon Jovi's "It's my life" was a good song, but the rest of his 19-song cd sucked mega ass...maybe because the producer of his remaining songs was the same one who did Britney's last album at that time?! Gah!).