Spyware terminator

Discussion in 'other anti-malware software' started by Woody777, Dec 1, 2006.

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  1. acr1965

    acr1965 Registered Member

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    Well I suppose that depends on the definition of "spyware." That would be a starting point. But their EUA/Privacy Policy of crawler states they obtain user information (which I assume they sell to 3rd party sites). Also, considering Crawler may not consider IBIS a 3rd party site, there may be other information exchanged between the two. Then, I suppose, IBIS could do with that info however they felt. But that is not based on any information I have available.

    There has to be a certain amount of "guilt by association" involved here. Especially when the two have the same contact information. But all we know for sure is what is provided to us, that being the EUA/Privacy Policy and I think there may be some semantics being played by Crawler specifically stating what they consider to be personally identifiable information as defined by them.

    And if you go to check out the free screensavers of either websearch.com or crawler.com you are directed to another site, funutilities.com. I have my suspicions when there is supposed to be a "distancing" of Crawler from Ibis or websearch when they are so interrelated that they share the same contact numbers as well as sharing the same product offerrings by sending users to the same site in order to download free products.

    They are all supposedly under the umbrella of Xacti.com. Go to xacti.com and there are spyware terminator, free screensavers and games. From there a person is directed to the same place websearch or crawler sends people. So besides the definition of "spyware" there needs to be defined what it means if a company says it will not share personally identifiable information outside its business. Certainly, if crawler, websearch, Ibis and Spyware Terminator are all owned by the Xacti it presents an issue of what is considered "outside."

    And FWIW- if you go to the Xacti web site there is a privacy policy they have published. The categories are : Information Collection, Personally Identifiable Information, Cookies, Sharing of Information, Advance Site Rank Feature, Policy Changes Making Changes, Contact Information. Then each of these is defined in detail. The weird part is that "Personally Identifiable Information", "Cookies", and "Advanced Site Rank Feature" have had their definitions left out.

    The paranoia side of me thinks that, for instance, if crawler shared personally identifiable information with Xacti and Xacti had no policy of what it did with that information (being that PII is not defined by them) then there is no telling who eventually ends up with the information. But it would technically all be within the EUA/Privacy Policy of all the sites.
     
  2. Tarq57

    Tarq57 Registered Member

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    OK. That's all not extremely paranoid, but perhaps a little. I hear what you're saying. I just don't know how applicable it is. It seems that you've done this research either in response to the comments here, or when learning of the ST's past association etc.
    Fair enough.
    I wonder though, if you research all site associations that thouroughly prior to entering any PII.
    Maybe a lot of them have that "many fingers in the pie" (or is it "pies on the finger" ?) thing going on.
    All I can say is that in theory it seems you could be dead right. In practice, I haven't had any weird stuff happen to my pc that I couldn't account for at the time. And at the risk of sounding repetitive, I think ST is partly to thank for that. (And the good folk at many security forums, this included, who've steered me toward having a slight clue about security.) :)
     
  3. dusen

    dusen Registered Member

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    Hi, first of all I want to make clear that I'm part of the development team of Spyware Terminator. One of our users posted link to this discussion on our forums. I responded over there - http://forum.spywareterminator.com/Default.aspx?g=posts&m=2395&#2395 - but now I feel that it may be better to respond also on this forum.

    First of all let me comment on some facts which are not correct - PaulBB wrote that we have fake fans and we posted false reviews - all I can say is that this is not true. We have internal policy prohibiting our team members to comment on our products without clear disclosure of their participation. All comments (which were not clearly labeled as related to our company) were posted by real users. And no, we don't employ professional blogers.

    Regarding Crawler versus Ibis relation - this was covered on several places and our approach from day one was simple - we didn't try to hide the relation. While it could be possible to use different ips, names, address or phone we simply didn't do that. You can see that for example on the press release posted here - http://www.websearch.com/news.aspx?id=1378 . That press release was release last December - and at that point all distribution was stopped at least 6 months.. We did the work first and announced it once we were sure that all issues are resolved. I just personally believe that this was fair approach and we did very right thing.

    It is also very important to point out that all previous activities were shut down - we simply don't distribute any old Ibis/WebSearch products. All products we have are new development and they comply with all possible guidelines for downloadable applications - and to tell you truth these guidelines - or their application - is much tougher because of past Ibis issues.

    Regarding our Privacy Policy - our PP is very simple - so that everyone understands it. We resent it to our lawyer at least ten times to simplify it. And you should know that we can do only stuff allowed in privacy policy - stuff not included there is simply prohibited – which works strongly in user’s advantage. We state in our Privacy Policy: "we will not share, rent or sell any of your personally identifiable information provided by you." We can do that for aggregated information - and yes, we do that - we provide them for free and I believe our users love that - the threat database is mainly based on reports provided by our users.. Number of installations which is close to 2,000,000 is also aggregated non-personally identifiable information which we share with our users on our www.spywareterminator.com homepage. But nothing else - and it applies not only for Spyware Terminator but for all our products.

    We do not force anyone to use Spyware Terminator or any our other products. What we just find interesting is that while people using Spyware Terminator are usually talking about its features and how the product helped them to protect their computers while the other group is talking just about the relation with Ibis – however they can’t show nothing real – there is simply no existing adware/spyware distribution, the applications are not calling home for instructions, and we are not selling personal data.. It’d be much easier to respond to some real issues – and we would have at least a chance to quickly resolve them - and I’m not talking about features – there is huge list of stuff we are working on to make our product better.

    Anyway, sorry for such a long comment. I though it'll be just short comment but I just see all the work behind the product and I felt I have to express my opinion although it'd be probably boring to read it.
     
  4. Arup

    Arup Guest

    Dusen,

    I am using your program with full confidence, I have no qualms or fears whatsoever and thank you for offering a full featured real time anti spyware with HIPS for free, please continue with your excellent work.
     
  5. Woody777

    Woody777 Registered Member

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    Ok I will accept that you don't sell private info, no spam, no spyware. So is the ZoneAlarm challenge to this software bogus or what? Really why does ZoneAlarm question spyware terminator?
     
  6. dusen

    dusen Registered Member

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    We contacted them on Monday and got technical contact from their legal department yesterday - once we resolve this we'll let you know. It unfortunatell happens from time to time - it looks to us that someone is reporting our app as adware/spyware - but so far all antivirus/antispyware companies removed us as all our app are clean. Smaller companies can do it within few days, bigger ones sometimes need a week or two - you can't talk to techs directly - you have to go through legal first :( .
     
  7. Rasheed187

    Rasheed187 Registered Member

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    Can you explain why @ Tarq57? :)

    Yes I guess not a lot of tools offer these features for free. But I still don´t trust them though. :shifty:
     
  8. twl845

    twl845 Registered Member

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    ZA made McAfee incompatable, now your saying they're telling you that ST and Trend Micro should be uninstalled? I didn't think ZA's spyware was that sophisticated. It doesn't do much of a job catching spyware, it doesn't even update definitions regularly. A solution would be to de-activate ZA anti spyware, and install what you want.;)
     
  9. Tarq57

    Tarq57 Registered Member

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    Simply because the extent of that post was based on your opinion without any information to back it up. "I don't trust these guys" is fairly meaningless. If you had said "I don't trust these guys because my experience with the program has....." and gone on to detail the reason/s, that would have been more credible. Your saying "the detection rates are probably.." implies that you have made a total assumption about same, based on...what? Your comment about the HIPS, especially in the context of the remainder of your post, indicates that you might or might not actually have tried it out, and so is worthless, except, again, as an opinion.
    Now for my mistake: It perhaps would have been more appropriate for me to indicate that your forum post lacked the detail indicative of somebody wanting to post a serious argument against, rather than saying it indicates a lack of computer knowledge. Which might or might not be the case. I freely admit to a lack of computer knowledge, but am prepared to post the experience I have had, and the reason for any opinion I may have formed. In my opinion if anybody is going to diss a piece of software, or anything or anyone, they had better back that up with facts or experiences. It is totally your right to not trust someone or something. But to just say that without offering any reasoning behind that lack of trust makes it somewhat of a worthless comment.
    No offence intended.
     
  10. acr1965

    acr1965 Registered Member

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    I cannot claim anything bad about ST besides my suspicions. It certainly is a nice freeware program. But would you tell me why some spyware programs find an affiliate of yours, funutilities.com, as a tracking cookie yet ST does not?
     
  11. dusen

    dusen Registered Member

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    FunUtilities comply with same standards our other products do. We follow Google's, Yahoo's, Download.com's, Truste's guidelines just to name few. This applies for Spyware Terminator, Crawler.com, FunUtilities and all our othe products and websites. FunUtilities is not our major focus and we simply never tested it against antispyware apps. In addition if I remember correctly the only reason why there is some cookie is to recognize whether user has FU.com screensaver/skins/wallpapers installed so that we can offer easier download through our product's downloader. Nothing else. We definitelly do not collect any information - and we follow our very strict privacy policy.

    If you can let us know which apps detect it we can ask them to remove it. Thanks.
     
  12. acr1965

    acr1965 Registered Member

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    Actually, I would rather not. But I appreciate your concern.
     
  13. fred128

    fred128 Registered Member

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  14. twl845

    twl845 Registered Member

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    Switch to Comodo firewall.
     
  15. PaulBB

    PaulBB Registered Member

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    Muhaha, you girls & boys made my day, real users with a reward...

    I really admire the advertising skills of the people behind Crawler.com . Not even Webroot, SuperAntispyware or Lavasoft has so well made advertising campaigns like you guys, keep up the good work! :thumb:

    ps.Absolutely no exaggeration or sarcasm HERE!
     
  16. dusen

    dusen Registered Member

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    PaulBB, my comment was targeted toward posts on 3rd party websites :) .. We want to motivate our users to help other our users.. And get more information from our beta testers ..this is the main motivation behind our reward system on forums.
     
  17. ccsito

    ccsito Registered Member

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    I am going to shoot for the five star general ranking. :D :p :D ;)
     
  18. mhallerman

    mhallerman Registered Member

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    Spyware terminator - bad memory leak

    Dusen,

    I opened up a ticket on your site 4 days ago regarding a pretty big memory leak - the only response I got was to make sure I did an update and rescan for objects -

    (the sp_rsser.exe process was taking up 804 MB of memory one morning a few days after install)

    Is there any way I can get a real answer to the problem before I just uninstall? To me the answer was ridiculous and for the most part a brush-off....

    I have seen you post here and figured I would give it a shot.

    Thanks,
    Mark.
     
  19. Tarq57

    Tarq57 Registered Member

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    As stated, this is for help provided at the ST forum, not (as I understand it) promotion of ST on other sites. If it was, since I use a different user name on other sites, I don't see how a reward is heading my way. (BTW it's spelled Muahahah :D )
    Don't care how sarcastic you aren't. I've ordered my new T-shirt, and very happy about it too. :thumb:
     
  20. dusen

    dusen Registered Member

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    Yes, our ladder system is relevant just for our ST forum!

    Mark, I'll check on that, I believe there was similar bug reported recently and resolved. I'll try to find your ticket and check the status - in general we respond to all tickets (not to all posts on forum) within 24 hours. Forum is usually responded very quickly for simple issues or in 2-4 days for more complex issues which require more QA resources.
     
  21. mhallerman

    mhallerman Registered Member

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    Thank you Dusen - please let me know.

    Regards,
    Mark.
     
  22. st_helper

    st_helper Registered Member

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    We're happy to report that Zone Alarm has removed Spyware Terminator from detection. We’re committed to creating a quality product for our users and we hope this eliminates any doubt for some users. Thank you once again for using Spyware Terminator!

    Happy Holidays to all!

    ST_Helper
    (Disclosure: From Spyware Terminator Team)
     
  23. rdsu

    rdsu Registered Member

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    Nice work! ;)
     
  24. Rasheed187

    Rasheed187 Registered Member

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    @ Tarq57

    OK I understand it. But personally it´s my policy to not trust just any tool anymore, especially a tool with this background, which also needs to install a driver (which means complete system control).

    But of course, this tool is probably clean, still I would rather go for a more known tool with a better reputation and I also believe that these "new kids on the blocks" will not be able to detect more threats than the older tools. As for the HIPS, there are other way more advanced HIPS on the market, some also freeware. ;)
     
    Last edited: Dec 20, 2006
  25. Perman

    Perman Registered Member

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    Hi, folks: ST team has done so much to improve not only the quality but also the image of their product. I understand they also have paid corporate version beside this free personal edition.Anyone needs to eat, therefore I assume they make their living by collecting lic fees from these fat corporations. Good approach I would commend. Now I have few questions to ask; (1) Is database of personal edition same as those of corporate version? how about their scan engines or drives? (2) Do you somehow collect information from users of personal edition to polish the corporate version? (3) What is the main purpose behind the scheme currently available to all your own forum users? namely, award Army style ranking depend upon number of posting and usefulness of such posting. I guess folks@ ST may not feel obligated to answer these funny questions, but thinking your product has just be released from Jail, still on probation?, it will be your perfect opportunity to tell all of us about these situations. Hope no offending here, just business is like a business, no disguise. BTW, I am a former ST user, and am eager to convice myself to get it back on my defense linup.:)
     
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