KaZaA adware defeated

KaZaAlite, a version of KaZaA minus the Brilliant Digital Altnet ad trojan, has been put together by a Russian programmer and made available at www.kazaalite.com.

Nicola Hemming, CEO of Sharman Networks, has claimed that Sharman will “take action against parties engaged in misrepresenting our software,” despite KaZaAlite’s author being … in another country with differing laws.

Ms Hemming has also had the breathtaking audacity to state that “Consumers are being deceived with ripped off and highly suspect code, and we are determined that their rights, enjoyment and machines are not prejudiced” and be talking about KaZaAlite, rather than the Altnet trojan – about which she firmly states that “Nothing from [Brilliant Digital] has been downloaded which breaches Sharman’s or industry standards of users’ privacy protection.” Which tells you all you need to know about the standards practiced by Sharman and whatever industry it considers itself a part of.

(The kazaalite.com site has enough popup ads to resemble adware itself. I recommend using a browser like Mozilla that lets you easily disable popups.)

In other spyware news, anyone installing the malignant crapware (that’s a technical term) passing for filesharing software these days is a bloody idiot not to run AdAware over their system on a regular basis. Think of it as an antivirus against adware. It sanitises Audiogalaxy nicely, for instance.

(The Audiogalaxy licence agreement requires you to have the Gator trojan installed, but, considering that most of its users will be turning it to massive copying of songs they don’t own on record anyway, it’s hard to see how people will take that as particularly morally binding.)