[14248] in bugtraq
Re: Realnetworks is trojaning people...again!!!
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Snorre Fagerland)
Sat Mar 11 19:47:14 2000
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
Message-Id: <4125689D.0030193B.00@lys_notessrv01.norman.no>
Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2000 09:45:19 +0100
Reply-To: Snorre Fagerland <snf@NORMAN.NO>
From: Snorre Fagerland <snf@NORMAN.NO>
X-To: BUGTRAQ@SECURITYFOCUS.COM
To: BUGTRAQ@SECURITYFOCUS.COM
pedward@WEBCOM.COM wrote:
<long message about Comet Cursor snipped>
I fail to see how this is trojanizing you. The RealPlayer download page gives
you three choices of which packages to download; two of which clearly contain
Comet Cursor, and also provides a link to the Comet Cursor privacy page. It
seems to be pretty clear to me.
The CC privacy page is also pretty informative compared to a lot of adware out
there.
If the information they provide is correct they:
- do not share data with outside parties
- do not collect individual information. The info is used to count the number of
individual users and cursor changes. As such, the data collected are purely
statistical. They are monitoring how many users are using their software and
where the users (as a group) are going.
I am not going to be a great defender of the marketing forces out there, but
there are privacy issues and there are privacy issues. I judge this to be a
fairly defensible action from Comet Cursor. Of course, if they are gathering
more information than they are actually saying, that would be something else
altogether, but I have no reason to believe that is the case.
If you are connected, and allow outside software onto your box, that software
can send information out. This will be more common in the time to come. Thing
is, a lot of software that does this don't even tell you about it. The
responsible software producers do, and I commed them for that.
Snorre Fagerland
Virus Analyst
Norman ASA
