GAOTD & Virus

[Cuffy]

Beware the downloads......... I just saw on another forum they're spreading a virus.

That site is also suspect. It's on some remote offshore island that I neverheard of????

Update:
I don't think this is a virus. It's a nasty playmate!

""Outpost Antivirus Pro.


Onto two computers:



Outlook would not even start; Firefox locked up; Internet Exploder locked
up; every program on my systems except Forte Agent locked up until I
uninstalled the *W#(@#$&$(*& Outpost Antivirus Program.  When I rebooted and
got Outlook to run, I was informed that the Outpost AV addin had caused the
problems and "did not play well with others." "

[Darwin]

OK... now you're scaring me! Can you provide a link to the other forum? I'd like to read more about this!

Cheers,

Mike

[Cuffy]

I picked it up from an RSS feed!

http://www.freelists.org/archives/pctechtalk/04-2008/msg00150.html

A couple of days ago, maybe the weekend Giveaway, I was reading the comments posted by others that had gotten the giveaway and checked on the source.
When I read the comments I immediately unsubbed from GAOTD. Saturdays main offering I think???
If you can't find it I can boot up another machine and get that eMail msg by downloading it from the server with OE.
I dumped it!
YMMV

[Grorgy]

I find I have yearly problems with Antivirus and other security programs.  Bit defender for instance just never works for me and causes all sorts of nastiness.  People yell virus when its probably just not compatible with their setup.

[Cuffy]

Here's the info from the comments in last sat. GAOTD...........

"I still get e-mails from GAOTD so every once in awhile I check to see the offerings. But I read the comments and still stay away. I am mainly suspicious of where all these programs are coming from.

So far just about every GAOTD offering are from developers in China and former Eastern Bloc countries.

I dunno, but maybe no one minds. Maybe this is an “international site” where members are also in Europe or Asia, so it’s not a big deal that the software if coming from questionable sources.

— edited —

No offense to anyone, but the only time I have been burned with ID theft and credit card ripoffs is when I bought from Chinese or “Eastern Bloc” vendors.

So no more for me.

Comment by MichaelSF — April 5th, 2008 at 5:25 am
Did you find this comment useful? yes | no (-43)
OK, I guess it’s my mistake. GAOTD is a foreign run operation. I did not know that. Guess that explains the varied locations of all the posters in here.

I apologize, did not mean to insult anyone. But this will be my last post and visit. Good luck and have fun.

WhoIs on GAOTD. Tortola is the largest of the British Virgin Islands, by the way:

Registrant Contact Information:
Name: SoftDeluxe Soft
Organization: SoftDeluxe, Inc
Address 1: Tortola
City: Tortola
State: Tortola
Zip: 21089"

Best I can do!

[Dormouse]

When I read the comments I immediately unsubbed from GAOTD.  

Nothing to do with GAOTD really. Just that the prog (todays download) severely mucked up some computers. As said, AVs get so deep it is easy for them to do damage. I'm always careful which of these I load, and am aware they may give rise to difficulty.

[Curt]

I am surprised that you cared to react on this single freelist post. It was one post only, and no-one agreed (or dis-agreed) with him. Outpost Antivira cannot be installed on top of Outpost Firewall, it is the same engine. Users of Outpost Firewall must get the Suite if they want to test the Antivira. On GOATD one said he had troubles with another firewall as well. On the other hand some other guy even said he was running Outpost Antivira at the same time as his normal default antivira.

For more than a year I have downloaded, scanned (NOD32), and installed two out of three GAOTD files, and I can assure you there are no vira coming from Giveawayoftheday. Guaranteed!

[Dormouse]

Here's the info from the comments in last sat. GAOTD...........

Quotes from a remarkably ignorant and chauvinistic poster. Seemed to think that 'Eastern bloc' (sic) meant Asian rather than East European and being suspicious of everything, but not careful enough to avoid being ripped off multiple times. The British Virgin Islands (in the Caribbean) were reported in 2000 to have over 41% of offshore company registrations in the world. All it means is that the GAOTD co is registered there, presumably for tax reasons. No idea why he thinks a lot of the progs are coming from China ... or what it has to do with the Outpost AV.

[Lashiec]

Incidentally, the best security experts and software come from the Eastern Bloc, just starting with Eugene Kaspersky (Russian).

This is just the typical behaviour of anything related to Agnitum, its firewall used to cause a lot of havoc a few years ago. Didn't know they jumped the antivirus bandwagon, too.

[Cuffy]

Sorry Curt, but you and I have obviously had greatly different experiences, both in life and with GAOTD.
In a previous life I used to fly multi-engined jet aircraft across the Atlantic , the Pacific, and various other large puddles of water, and usually loaded with passengers. I've been quite well programmed to err on the side of caution!
The rewards of downloading software from GAOTD are not great enough for me to plunge into accepting products when I have no idea what's in the box. I have downloaded a few and usually usually dumped them within hours of installing. I think I still have a couple on this machine but they aren't important enough to me to even remember what they are. I have yet to see one that "I couldn't live without". I have gigabytes of software ratholed on CDs, DVDs, HDDs and floppies, both 3 1/2 and 5 1/4 that came from similar operations, since 1988 or 89, so I'm really not hurting for software. I can afford to let this "opportunity" slip out of my hands and since somebody has raised doubts and had problems with stuff from GAOTD, I'm going to forego their offers.
Apparently you enjoy what they present? Please be my guest and help youself. I'll refrain!
YMMV

[mwb1100]

The rewards of downloading software from GAOTD are not great enough for me to plunge into accepting products when I have no idea what's in the box. I have downloaded a few and usually usually dumped them within hours of installing.

So, your experiences with GAOTD involve software that wasn't worthwhile.  This is quite different from GAOTD being a source for malware-infested offerings.

[vradmilovic]

People always tend to think that virus is causing all their problems, while solution could be as simple as plugging in a mouse. Similarly, blaming GAOTD for troubles with featured software doesn't make any sense - nobody blames CNet or Tucows for buggy software they host.

It doesn't really matter where GAOTD is based as they are not software authors. On the other hand, judging company solely by country of origin bothers me personally as I make certain efforts to raise level of trust on my website, which isn't always easy as it would be if my name was John Smith (I heard of a guy who actually made up a new name for support e-mails).

No offense to anyone, but the only time I have been burned with ID theft and credit card ripoffs is when I bought from Chinese or “Eastern Bloc” vendors.

Seriously... WTH?! Even if this is true, entering CC number into unencrypted forms is always a big no-no, no matter of country of origin. This implies that western people are honest and eastern are not - and that's a nonsense. Of course, we can talk about probabilities of individual fraud, mostly caused by other factors than plain good/evil categorization.

In essence, if Chinese or Iranian vendor sells software via known and secure payment processor (and most of them are USA/WE based), there's nothing to worry about. If USA or UK citizen asks for a CC number on his website, I'll go away and never look back.

And at the end, regarding GAOTD rants, let me quote Eric Sink:

If we lower the price, we will merely attract the attention of someone for whom it is not low enough.

If we give the product away, someone will complain that we are making them buy more disk space to install it.

If we pay each user a hundred bucks to use our product and send Salma Hayek in a bikini to personally install it for them, someone will complain that they prefer blondes.

[Carol Haynes]

On the subject of ripoffs ...

I have 3 experiences of my credit card being charged without my knowledge. Two of those were in the US and one in Spain.

Does that mean I should not do business with anyone in the US or Europe ?

Maybe I should build a wall around my home and never see anyone again!!!!

I have downloaded numerous GAOTD apps and never found one with a viruse or any other problem. You have to be selective of what you download though because they do have a lot of useless stuff. Choosing what you want to try is called having discrimination!

[Cuffy]

I have 3 experiences of my credit card being charged without my knowledge. Two of those were in the US and one in Spain.

Perhaps a numbered account in the British Virgin Islands would be safer?

[app103]

There has been at least 1 case where something from GAOTD was bundled with spyware, but that wasn't the fault of GAOTD. They didn't add it themselves, and didn't know about it...and as soon as they were alerted (and it was confirmed), they quickly pulled the file off the site.

There has been some good stuff on that site and some real crap. But that can be said of any download site.

GAOTD has had applications and games that in the past I have paid for and have used for many years and never had a problem with. Some of them are genuine classics, like the game AirXonix (and some other classic AxySoft games).

They also have had ones that I wished I could have afforded or were already on my list of stuff I planned to purchase some day. I was sure happy when they featured those.

It doesn't matter where a file is coming from, whether it comes from GAOTD, Tucows, Softpedia, or Microsoft.com...one should do a little research and know exactly what they are getting, the good & bad. Read the experiences of others, reported bugs & issues. Google is your friend.

Do not rely on the comments posted on GAOTD, only. Do your own homework and you are less likely to ever get burned, no matter what download site you are getting your software from.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Do not foolishly rush in to download & install stuff from any site. Being an educated downloader is one of the best ways to defend yourself. You have to research every application.

[Darwin]

Being an educated downloader is one of the best ways to defend yourself. You have to research every application.

Very nicely put! I spent today trying to rescue my friends' notebook and desktop, which are networked together and were both INFESTED with spyware, adware, malware, and trojans. Truly frightening. I stupidly used one of their old thumbdrives to transfer a couple of files from my notebook to one of the two machines. The dratted thumbdrive had a trojan on it! Thank goodness for having good security in place - I subjected my notebook to several full sweeps and reboots AFTER the trojan was discovered and spanked, just to be sure. All is well. Anyway, moral of the story is that these people are fairly computer literate but simply aren't very knowledgable about the perils of living on the virtual edge, as evidenced by the trojan on the thumbdrive, which was literally dug out of the back of a drawer, not having been used in months...

[J-Mac]

In my experience with "freeware" download sites - and most that I have dealt with were for handheld device software, primarily Palm and Pocket PC - they have generally had a much larger amount of "bad stuff" packaged with their downloads than more well-known licensed software developer sites. Of course since then I have had more Yahoo junk try to install while being packages with paid software downloads than anything!  (Yahoo Toolbar and Yahoo Music mostly - and I call "junk" anything I don't want hiding in another's installer setup!) I don't know if anyone has ever studied this but the results would be kind of interesting.

....nobody blames CNet or Tucows for buggy software they host...

I do - it's all part of CNET's quest for world dominance!!  (Aren't they Chinese too?!?    )  -  -  - (Kidding, for any too-serious readers...)

Jim

[Carol Haynes]

My pet gripes are the number of time I have downloaded Yahoo, Google (and to a lesser extent Microsoft) search engines and toolbars. Just imagine the amount of bandwidth and time that could be saved if they stopped bundling these in practically every internet download these days. I really can't see how it serves anyone's best interests - the software seller gets a few bucks and pissed of customers, the group of three get pissed off potential customers and I have to uninstall unwanted crap (yet again) because it wasn't made clear in the intstaller! How does that help anyone?

[wraith808]

It's the new AOL CD in the mail paradigm.  You remember the days when AOL CD's came in *everything*.  Now these webapps are doing the same thing.  I'm not sure what made AOL stop... but whatever it is, we need to use it on them!

[Carol Haynes]

There used to be large scale campaigns against AOL because of the petrochemical mountain of rubbish they were producing - not least large scal mailings of the crap CDs back to them (without postage paid), and skip loads dumped on their entrance.

I wonder if AOL went out of business (or at least sold out) because the CD mailing count cost so much it broke the bank. They were heavily in debt when they stopped.

As for google-crap and yahoo-crap included in everything I suspect the best way to sort the problem is to persuade users to boycott any application the bundles the crap without telling you. There is no reason why sites can't have two downloads - one with crap and one without ... CrapCleaner, for example, does that!

I wonder which donload would be the most popular?

[app103]

Tiscali was just as bad with their CD's. I have tons of them and they never even offered internet service in my country!

At least AOL used to have service in the UK, when you were seeing their disks. (btw, they are still in business in the US and are the ISP I use for my crappy pc I can't use with the DSL...only service this pc seems to like)

Some towns started holding stores responsible for street cleanup for broken disks after kids made a game of swiping stacks of them from shops and playing 'hit the passing bus' with them, trying to use open windows as targets. If they managed to get it to go through the window into the bus, they won. This left a lot of broken disks on the street. Shops stopped putting them on the counters around here, after that.

[Carol Haynes]

AOL still seem to be around in the UK too but their profile is much lower these days. Only ever got one Tiscali CD - that was when I actually signed up (a long time ago - I no longer use them).

[cranioscopical]

This left a lot of broken disks on the street.

Not to mention headless passengers!

[wraith808]

^ Kung Lao FTW

[Darwin]

This left a lot of broken disks on the street.

Not to mention headless passengers!

[Edit -- corrected malformed BBL tag]