Re: Grokster and your email

[Markus Kern <markus-kern () gmx net>]

> I too got burned by Grokster, and removed it.
> After removal, the dlder.exe program, and the
> C:Program Files/Grokster/DB folder remained,
> with 2 .dbb files. I opened them, and found one of
> them had many, if not all, of my emails from my
> Outlook Express Inbox mixed in with what I had
> downloaded.

I noticed similar behaviour with Kazaa, e.g. source code snippets in
partially downloaded files. Since it doesn't make much sense to
interleave personal data with stuff you download I've come up with the
following explanation (much guesswork):

Kazaa (and probably Grokster too) can download parts of files
simultaneously from different sources. In order to do this it maps the
local destination file to memory (using MapViewOfFile() or a similar
function) and writes the downloaded file snippets at the offset in
memory they belong. Until the entire file is downloaded there are
parts that have never been written to by the application.
Windows seems not zero those parts and they still contain old data from
physical RAM, the swapfile or the disk.

The .dbb files you mention are probably databases which are also good
candidates for file mapping.

> I don't know if my firewall stopped
> them from getting this information, but it is not
> something you want to see. Time for Netscape.

I don't think the software attempted to send anything.
It just failed to zero the file before using it which isn't much of a
problem and would've just decreased performance.

regards
Markus