http://www.abctella.com/

scroll down a little, i think this says it all! Pretty conclusive wouldn't ya say? Now i'm wondering WHO will get the Apology...

Never doubted ya Vin! Now can't we all just get along?

This was based upon someone running a port sniffer for 20 minutes after first installing Bearshare. Not a conclusive test, by any stretch of the imagination.

Use Open Source and you don't have to worry about any of this crapola.

Yes, of course we can get along. But, we have some work to do first. The "Port Sniffer" is useless for everything except probably deliberate exportations of data. Really, that's not what we're talking about. Vinnie has made some good points, but hasn't explained what we're <B>most</B> concerned about, being able to download <u>yourname@bearshare.vstoremusic.txt</U> from Gnutella. Of course, you might say "Wahhhhhhhh! Its just some people sharing their entire hard drive, and its just a cookie." Well, true, but its a quite odd cookie. It has an IP, a DNS name, <u>and</U> a date tag. What do ya think about that??? And the test was run after the installation. The spyware probably didn't have time to get set up! No, seriously. we have a few issues to solve. We should work on that.

Kirby

I think its the cookie that their shopping cart writes, in order to track you as you travel around their site.

FYI, I pulled the plug on V********** when I realized they were under-reporting both sales and visitors.

Cookies are quite common for shopping carts - I don't see the point here.

I think that all this blah blah about cookies is just the rabble rousers stirring the shiznit again for no good reason.

GIVE ME A BREAK!

OnFlow, in their *own* privacy statement, admit their plug-in associates a unique ID for every user. DoubleClick has show how this can be used to identify you, and unlike cookies, this can't be turned off or cleared!

I won't even mention the SaveNow travesty. Common sense should tell anyone it *must* spy on your surfing to do what it does. How can it show you (ugh) pop-up ads for a competing websites unless it monitors where you're surfing too?

Sure they try and make like it's harmless and "no personal identifying" information is sent. This is simple bullsh*t! It doesn't need to "send" this info because the unique identifier alone can be used to associate you personally the first time you make a purchase at an affiliated site.

Do they say unique ID for every user? or for every Onflow player ? &nbsp;There is a difference in level of privacy.
Personal info is not required for this type of monitoring. I mean, what possibly could they need to know other than "Hey, this guy went to that sports site, so let's pop up an ad for an online sports store" ?? They don't need any personal info for that, I'm sure.
It can associate me personally ???? WOW! You mean if my wife surfs around, then I do some surfing, they can tell who's who??? DOUBLE WOW!!

Look, everyone needs to settle down and take a pill. Paranoia will destroy ya. You have no idea how much your personal info is "spied" on each time you go online.... and NOT by Onflow or SaveNow, that's for sure.
And okay, you wanted a choice whether to install it or not; well, that choice is now there. &nbsp;The fact that it took Vinnie awhile to do that for us is a moot point now. Why bring it up anymore? The "problem" has been fixed!

All in all, rehashing this spyware garbage is getting very old. All that can be said has been said. Why don't we just get on with sharing files and contributing to the network in positive ways.

If you like Bearshare, keep using it and work with Vinnie to make it better. If you have a problem with Bearshare, go ahead and tell him about it - in a mature, productive manner, no matter if he lashes out or not (which he wouldn't do unprovoked anyway).

All this bashing and trashing is a waste of time.

What about these people that say that Vinnie made some safeguard password to bypass stuff. Is that mindless junk or does it mean something? This guy said that the 'Bearshare' password was the reason you could download revealing text files of Gnutella. Wheter that's the reason or not, these cookies are quite revealing. I would like to reply to Vinnie on my previous post. He said it was some "shopping cart" cookies. Well, tell the damn vstore people to tone down on the personal info! GEEZ!! Anyway... to find any real answers to the questions we want, we have to search through scores of threads and lies.

Oh yes, just because they can't tell who's typing on my keyboard I should feel safe? I'm sorry, but no thanks! Maybe you're willing to sell out your privacy for some free software but don't expect everyone to follow suit.

The sad part is most users are never aware what they're giving up until it's gone. Even if you manage to make it through all the convoluted privacy statements, unless you're a lawyer and a CS major you're unlikely to know what the real "cost" of the software is.

Yes, and to know it's a sports sites it must send the URL (along with your unique ID number) to some central database somewhere. Don't think they don't keep that info.

Don't worry, that's on its way...

http://www.msnbc.com/news/578203.asp

However, unless you're using a public PC it makes little difference. So they Spy on your family instead of just you. I'm glad that gives you a warm cozy feeling, but somehow I don't feel reassured.

Vinnie's attitude and the fact that it *had* to be fixed in the first place is enough to turn me away. Believe me, if people hadn't made such a fuss over it do you think you'd have that choice? Now Vinnie has started attacking LimeWire for not fully bowing down to his idea of what gnet should be. It's become clear he wants to co-opt the network for his own purposes.

I did try this for awhile. I really liked BearShare and thought it an excellent application, but after trying to warn Vinnie that some of the new "features" could hurt other peers, I discovered he really didn't want to hear (many of these features backfired and had to later be removed BTW).

Hey, what are you talking about? Which features are these? I don't remember any of that, refresh my memory.

Well, this just goes to show you "you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't."

If I didn't do anything about the presentation of bundled software, I get lambasted as a jerk.

I go and put some time and effort into responding to user feedback, and I'm still lambasted as a jerk.

GIVE ME A BREAK!

Note to myself: stop wasting time with responding - it is clearly useless.

One I can remember off the top of my head was having BearShare prefer to make outgoing connections only to other BearShare peers. Apparently you decided to do this without consulting the others authors (I know the LimeWire folks didn't find out about it till much later).

As I recall your position was since you left inbound connections unrestricted, it wouldn't hurt anything. I tried to warn you it was likely to throw things out of balance and force non-BearShare peers outside the main part of the gnet (in fact I suspect that might have been the real intent).

As I recall, it starved the gnet for inbound connections for awhile (after all, those outbound connections have to connect somewhere) and even hurt BearShare's connectivity. You removed it from later versions.