Hey--thanks! I probably wouldn't have spotted that--that's good, I think.
For lurkers--the issue that I and others had was that a number of reputable
vendors used specific versions of backweb's mechanism for legitimate update
mechanisms in their products.
In my case, I was using F-secure's antivirus, which used backweb to provide
definition updates. Before Windows OneCare Live, backweb had the best
definition update process I'd had experience with--nearly 0 UI, but easy to
tell whether it was up to date or not, as I recall it--it's been a good many
months. So--I was quite miffed when Spybot Search & Destroy began detecting
backweb on my machine, and suggesting that it be removed. (I didn't ever
actually try to see what would happen if I told it to go ahead...)
So--this is good news. Spybot Search & Destroy had previously been a
program I used regularly and didn't hesitate to recommend to others. I'm
glad to hear that I can look at it again with this issue taken care of.
I'm clear that BackWeb variants were definitely used as spyware--i.e.
installed with no legitimate purpose in surreptitious installs, to display
ads. And the use of the product by some vendors bordered on useless--how
often are mouse drivers updated? If the app displays ads every week, and
gets you driver updates once a year, is it a good thing? However, in my
case, suggesting that I needed to pull the definition update mechanism for
my antivirus seemed over the top to me.
