Re: All Advantage Spyware

[Dimitry Andric <dim () XS4ALL NL>]

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On 2000-08-10 at 16:03 Thierry wrote:

> I have Advpack.dll, Advert.dll, amcompat.tlb and amstream.dll on my
> system. Though I NEVER installed nor used ALLAdvantage.

Advert.dll is _definitely_ a spyware component, from a company
previously called Aureate, and currently called Radiate. Seems like
slippery people need to constantly change names to get out of
trouble. ;-)

This DLL gets installed with a large number of shareware products
(see <http://www.radiate.com/advertisers/products.html> for a list),
to display banners, and to mine all data that can be gathered from
your clickstream, cookies etcetera. Since it is a DLL, it has full
access to all data which is available to your user account.

The other DLLs you mention have nothing to do with the Advert.dll
file, or with Aureate/Radiate. They are from Microsoft:

AdvPack.dll - A Microsoft software installation engine component.
This comes with Internet Explorer, and is always available in Windows
98 or later. It is used to process .INF files, which are Microsoft
setup information files (simple scripts).

AMCompat.tlb and AMStream.dll - Components of DirectShow, previously
known as "ActiveMovie" (hence the AM-prefix). These 2 files are for
backwards compatibility purposes, I believe.

If you want to get rid of it, you can just delete it from your system
directory, but that might cause applications who rely on it to refuse
to work. Those apps mostly suck anyway, so it shouldn't matter much.
;)  There's also a reasonably informative page on it at
<http://grc.com/optout.htm>.

Cheers,
- --
Dimitry Andric <dim () xs4all nl>
PGP key: http://www.xs4all.nl/~dim/dim.asc
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