manleystanley opened this issue on May 19, 2012 · 119 posts
TJaiman posted Wed, 23 May 2012 at 2:48 AM
Quote - I was not talking about rumors. I was talking about fact because I have personally experienced it. It has to do with using the old installers (as of August 2008). At the end of the install if you left the check mark for the readme the screen flashed so quickly that you couldn't see the information (like a DOS command) that redirected to a previously existing statistics server. In Win 7 the browser opened and showed the previously hidden information that was being transmitted. In XP, for example, this did not happen, so people didn't notice, but it revealed itself in Win 7. The three pages that opened are:
- file://localhost/path of your install (readme)
Hosts:
http://www.data.your country code/poser
http://www.downloads.your country/readme's/product name
The DAZ product readme does not open in Win 7 because it's actually redirected over the other hosts. In theory, the installer sends out install time, product and install location to two servers. These send back the info to your localhost to open the readme on your machine. But, as the hosts do not exist anymore and data is not collected, the info does not get back to your machine and the readme will not open. The readme can only be opened manually from the installed folder.
It might be a fluke that this happened, but using other installers from other companies created in 2008, for example Illusions Designs product installers or any simple installers, don't show this phenomenon of opening three browser pages, two of which collect personal data. So does this mean that DAZ had corrupt installers for years without their knowledge? I don't think so.
Which installers were involved?
There are security sites all over the place. They can walk you through diagonosing what's actually happening. (Since you can't legally send them examples). Anybody there would be delighted to discover a new malware and spread the word, far and wide.
I agree with nDelphi, this sounds like a curiosity, a minor goofup with template files, or whatever. But why not find out?
With Zone Alarm, and all the variety of other protection suites & utilities that people run, it'd be astounding that nobody noticed spyware behaviour with widely distributed files, before (regardless of OS). Especially considering the tech-savvy of such a large percentage of the Poserverse customers.
.