Number 210 - November 2000

"Free": Cautionary Tales
by Tom Anderson July 2000 Sacra Blue, Sacramento PCUG
Sometimes free things can be too expensive.     The first half of this saga started at Steve Gibson's site, (http://grc.com), former InfoWorld columnist and author of the invaluable SpinRite program which rescued many hard disks for me. Gibson discovered that many of the programs available on the Internet as freeware come with a very big catch. They bring into your system hidden "spyware" programs that send data about your browsing habits back to the spyware site.     The oldest of these companies is Aureate, which recently changed its name to Radiate. Aureate convinced over 400 companies and programmers to include Aureate spyware in otherwise legitimate shareware programs. Among the affected programs are CuteFTP and GoZilla, a file download tool. These two programs have been downloaded over 8.5 million times from C|NET (www.download.com) alone.     Aureate pays companies to include the Aureate software, and specifically urges these companies to leave the Aureate software intact on computers even if the original program is deleted. Note also that Aureate's software stops working when you stop typing or moving your mouse, in order to avoid any tell-tale hard drive lights giving away the secret.     This activity seems very suspicious to me, although no one has yet shown that Aureate collects any identifying information from the computers it infects. However, Aureate's software has been shown to cause otherwise inexplicable problems and system crashes. A Solution to Spyware (See also next article - ed)     The full story of this kind of software can be found at Gibson's site listed above. But the greater value at his site is his free program called OPTOUT. OPTOUT can clean your system of the spyware components. It scours the registry, then deletes specific files it finds. All of this is thoroughly explained as the program goes through its paces. The program is currently free, but may be replaced in the future by a commercial program. You'll be doing yourself and your computer a favor by downloading and running this file.     My house has three telephone lines: a home telephone, my office telephone line, and a modem line. Unfortunately, my wife and I often choose to be online at the same time. I used to be able to say I was doing SPCUG business and get her to log off, but since she's become Membership Director, she trumps me by saying she's getting lots of e-mail about membership issues.     I solved the "one modem line" problem by routing my modem to my office telephone line, and forwarded incoming calls to my cell phone. But because we share one Internet account, that wasn't enough to allow us to be online simultaneously. "Free" ISP Service     About then my wife's son told me about a free ISP he'd been trying out Freeweb, (www.freewwweb.com). (Note: If you're a Flight Simulator fan, do yourself a favor and check out my son's site, ATC-Place (www.atcplace.com). Share your airspace with other FS fanatics, air traffic controllers, realistic airport traffic and more.)     If you already have a browser, the download is fast and simple. But the link is hidden at the bottom of a long page and I didn't discover it until I had been trying longer than I would have liked to start the download. Once installed, I ran the software and chose the one (yes, one) telephone number for the entire Sacramento area.     For about a week, I tried out the service and was very pleased. The service is free, and they even have POP3 and SMTP servers so I could send and receive	email using Eudora Pro. No slow, Web-based email, no banner ads, no pop-up windows, nothing at all to suggest it wasn't a pay service. I did get a lot of busy signals, but with only one phone number for Sacramento, Roseville, Auburn, Elk Grove, and the rest of the area, I suppose that was to be expected. I had to set my home page to FreeWeb's home page, but that was no big sacrifice.     Suddenly, though, I had problems connecting. The busy signals got worse. I also started getting repeated errors that said my username or password was wrong. I'd check my records, enter them again, and sometimes I'd connect. Then I'd be disconnected in a few minutes. Then I couldn't connect again.     I had so many problems I decided to try another free service, WorldSpy [Worldspy.com has cancelled its ISP business and deferred to Juno - ed]. I'd connected a friend, at his request, to this service and it looked good. Of course, his email wouldn't work until he called tech support and had them look into it. YAFIS (Yet Another Free Internet Service)     I signed up with WorldSpy (www.worldspy.com is now defunct. However http://mail.worldspy.net handles e-mail. - ed) and again the download was fast and easy. Unlike FreeWeb, there were multiple local phone numbers to choose from. I connected with no problem but, just like my friend, I couldn't get the email to work. I tried sending email to tech support and got a quick response from an auto-responder, but no one ever followed up.     After a couple days, I started having trouble logging on to WorldSpy. I'd get a box asking me to re-enter my password, but the user name was a strange amalgam of my user name and an unfamiliar domain name. Whether I used that default or entered my actual user name didn't matter. The login failed repeatedly. Then WorldSpy hit another problem when all their phone numbers ending in "9" stopped working. Unfortunately, that was about 90% of their California access numbers. WorldSpy has since been taken over by Juno, the original free email service.     I went back to FreeWeb and tried to connect again. I had the same problem and FreeWeb suggested that after I check my password, to try again. Because I was busy, I let the problem slide thinking it was a common problem of Internet start-ups that would eventually be fixed.     When the problem didn't go away, I got frustrated enough to go online looking for a telephone number to call. Of course, I had to go through my regular ISP to get to FreeWeb's site. Once there, I discovered that it would cost me $15 to call their tech support number. Instead, I started searching through their FAQs. A Surprising Find     Sure enough, there was an answer. The error "Incorrect user name or password," it said, could be caused by either an incorrect user name or password, or by a user exceeding the 80-hour limit on account usage. 80-hour limit? Where did that come from, I wondered?     I went back over the introductory pages and found no mention of an 80-hour limit. It may have been buried in the legal agreement, which of course I read as often as anyone else, which is to say, never. But no limits were mentioned in any of the literature an ordinary user, even a cautious one, would see. And of course an error message saying "Incorrect user name or password" is the perfect way to say "You've exceeded your time limit."     By this time I was disillusioned enough and mad enough that I just deleted every trace of both FreeWeb and WorldSpy from my system with a vow to stay away from so-called free ISPs forever... Although I hear NetZero is supposed to be pretty good.
Number 210 - November 2000