Real Player & Ant-Spyware

[Adelphia]

From my observations every time I used Real Player a tracking cookie was
created and activated. While some feel these are harmless their naivety is
their problem. Such things do nothing to serve me and may be used for very
nasty purposes.

It is quite unfortunate that Bill Gates is more interested in supporting
commercial users of his products rather than the average "Joe Six Pack" type
user. He has evidently elected to allow some of his commercial associates to
post various types of cookies that either track your use of their software,
track all of your usage, and/or force home pages and advertisements to crop
up based upon the habits the evil cookies detected. I say that Bill allows
this in that a deliberate decision was made in Anti-Spyware to not block
notorious cookie plants to preserve relationships or avoid disputes. Even a
billionaire has his price!

I also use Ad-Aware which fortunately detects such nefarious cookies and
allows me to eliminate them. Usually this is sufficient on a one time basis
per cookie. However, Real Player installs its tracking software very time
you use it. Therefore, since I was only using it to view the Shuttle
activities I have erased it and I also blocked Internet access from any
remnants in the Zone Alarm firewall.

The refusal to allow detection, and optional erasure of tracking cookies, is
a sad commentary on Microsoft and an obvious bending to other commercial
interests at the expense of the general public.

Dick

 

[Linuxgirl]

From my observations every time I used Real Player a tracking cookie
was created and activated. While some feel these are harmless their
naivety is their problem. Such things do nothing to serve me and may
be used for very nasty purposes.

Don't use Real Player. There are alternatives.

It is quite unfortunate that Bill Gates is more interested in
supporting commercial users of his products rather than the average
"Joe Six Pack" type user. He has evidently elected to allow some of
his commercial associates to post various types of cookies that
either track your use of their software, track all of your usage,
and/or force home pages and advertisements to crop up based upon the
habits the evil cookies detected. I say that Bill allows this in that
a deliberate decision was made in Anti-Spyware to not block notorious
cookie plants to preserve relationships or avoid disputes. Even a
billionaire has his price!

What does Bill Gates have to do with it. Blame Real Player. Use a cookie
manager if it would make you feel better.

I also use Ad-Aware which fortunately detects such nefarious cookies
and allows me to eliminate them. Usually this is sufficient on a one
time basis per cookie. However, Real Player installs its tracking
software very time you use it. Therefore, since I was only using it
to view the Shuttle activities I have erased it and I also blocked
Internet access from any remnants in the Zone Alarm firewall.

The refusal to allow detection, and optional erasure of tracking
cookies, is a sad commentary on Microsoft and an obvious bending to
other commercial interests at the expense of the general public.

The "sad commentary" is that you haven't been following this group or didn't
bother to notice that you are using beta1. I hope you didn't "erase it Real
Player. You should uninstall it. Of course anyone who would depend on Zone
Alarm is lacking a little upstairs anyway.

 

[sntholiday]

Why not just use IE to track and delete your cookies? Don't
like the Real Player cookie? Delete it. it's as easy as
that.

And remember, MSAS is just in the Beta stage, perhaps it
will detect such cookies in the future release, but so what
if it doesn't.

 

[Ron Chamberlin]

From my observations every time I used Real Player a tracking cookie was
created and activated.>

Yup.

< While some feel these are harmless their naivety is their problem.>
Still up for debate. Is it a privacy or a security issue?

< Such things do nothing to serve me and may be used for very nasty
purposes.>
May is a big word.

My solution: No Real in my house. Nope. Not allowed.

Ron Chamberlin
MS-MVP

 

[Alan]

HELLO, a cookie IS NOT A program, IT'S a DATA FILE!

Let me guess, you listen to what all these "experts" tell
you about such things?

DO NOT listen to these idiots. They are trying to make
an issue out of NOTHING! Just like the so-called experts
did back in 1999 with the entire "Y2K bug." All these
people did is ended up making a**es of themselves when it
turned out, NOTHING happened. These "experts" WERE NOT
very experienced in computers, most were in fact did not
have degrees in engineering or a technical field. Some
might have been programmers, but some programmers don't
have degrees. All these people did was create a public
panic. I worked at a retail supercenter at the time, and
many people thought that the power was going to go out
because of what someone said on the news, so they were
stocking-up on water and batteries. This caused massive
problems the next year for the ENTIRE retail industry, as
a good amount of the sales that Christmas season were due
to Y2K, and many companies bought too much for the next
season, leading to huge losses in sales (both in amount
of products sold and in revenues). Some retailers never
recovered from this. So in a way, Y2K DID cause
problems, only it wasn't Y2K dut it was the entire hype
about it that caused this to happen. NOTE: Most
television news casts are driven by ratings, the more
interesting, and usually gloomy, the news is, the higher
the ratings. Because of this, many TV stations looked
for the worst of the worst-case senarios and played those
over and over to drive up their ratings, while we learned
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about what steps had already been
taken to fix the issue. FYI: The entire Y2K bug thing
had been addressed by most companies as early as 1995!

What these idiots did is create an entire new industry,
the sell-you-things-you-do-not-need industry. Many
people fell for the buy-this-product-to-fix-the-Y2K-bug
gimicks that companies were promoting. Most system that
were produced from early 1998, if not sooner, were
already "Y2K-compliant/ready." It wasn't until the media
made a huge issue out of Y2K that the computer
industry "started" selling "Y2K-compliant/ready"
computers. My system that I bought in 1996 WAS Y2K
compliant/ready from the factory! Some companies have
even made products that do nothing but delete cookies
from a system. You can do the same thing from within
your web browser. If you are using IE, all you have to
do is right-click on the IE icon on the desktop, select
Properties, and click the 'Delete Cookies...' button! No
need to spend any of your hard-earned money on any of
these so-called must-have applications!

Unfortunately due to the massive amount of information
available on the Internet you have to ask the REAL
experts what's really the problems, as many things on the
Internet are just not true and are nothing but a bunch of
BULL. Some people try to make a name for themselves by
writing these types of things, even though they know that
what they are writing IS NOT true. For web-based
concerns, the best people to talk to are web
designers/programmers, electrical engineers (such as
myself), computer scientists, and/or computer engineers.

Alan