Palm using Kontiki "Secure Delivery" Virusware

[John Faughnan]

I downloaded Palm Desktop 4.1 today. I was having trouble synching and
decided to reinstall.

The download process is quite different from the innocent days of old.
Palm forced me to install the Kontiki "Secure Delivery" software [1]
to get their software. This appears to be some kind of peer-to-peer
video delivery system. Palm is using it to distribute software, but I
suspect Kontiki is paying Palm to use Kontiki for s/w delivery so they
get Kontiki's software installed on Windows desktops. The long term
intent appears to be to create video distribution system. Maybe Palm
gets a percentage of video revenue for every desktop that acquires
this virusware via Palm.

This thing installs into the OS. The default behavior is to enable
peer-to-peer file sharing -- but they don't put it nearly so clearly.
You have to uninstall it to get rid of it. (Exit the tray, then
Add/Remove programs.]

This thing is a leech. Imagine when every vendor tries to put some
competing thing like this on our systems. Imaging the security issues,
software conflicts, resource depletion, etc.

Palm is really, truly, desperate if they're inflicting this software
on their customers. I'm actually appalled -- and that doesn't happen
very often nowadays.

Be warned.

john

[meta: Palm, virusware, leech, Kontiki, P2P, software distribution,
video distribution, Palm Desktop, backdoor, peer-to-peer, firewall,
LAN]
[1] http://help.kontiki.com/enduser/category.jsp?node=789

[m...@home.com]

On 26 Jul 2003 20:40:19 -0700, jfau...@spamcop.net (John Faughnan)
wrote:

>The download process is quite different from the innocent days of old.
>Palm forced me to install the Kontiki "Secure Delivery" software [1]
>to get their software.

Just choose the "Standard Download" option and you don't have to have
anything to do with Kontiki.