Malware license agreement tells it straight

You normally need a law degree and the patience of Job to make sense of End User License Agreements (EULAs). These seldom-read legal screeds have a reputation for being both hard to fathom and often one-sided in protecting the rights of software suppliers. So it's refreshing to find an agreement that gets straight to the point …

[t3h]

Censored?

How come the screenshot has the four-letter-word censored out and yet it's printed in the article? Censorship double standards?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I click "I Agree" and install this..

..are the developers contractually required to give me a good seeing-to?

[Daniel Snowden]

A little truth?

Simple, to the point and true. Now if only other software vendors would follow suit...

[Kim Hancock]

Lovely

At the end of the day isnt that what most EULA's try to say?

[Mike Iwan Phillips]

Seen it before

It just seems to be a summary of the Windows EULA.

[Rich Kavanagh]

Ah but

Maybe that is the agreement.

You install the codec and therefore agree to the licence.

There is a knock at the door and there you find 4 hopefull looking malware coders.

[Mike Iwan Phillips]

Seen it before

It just seems to be a summary of the Windows EULA.

[Craig Roberts]

2 words...

... to say the same thing Microsoft have been using a thousand words to say for years...?

[Pascal Monett]

It's a shame, really

The EULA is supposed to be a "contract" between the maker of the software and the buyer.

If that is true, then the EULA is the only contract mechanism in the world that does not obey the simple principle of commercial law that the rest of the world abides by, namely that no contract clause can be changed with explicit consent from both parties.

As such, it is indeed a shame that the only software maker to actually write an EULA like it should be is one that actually follows through on it with great diligence.

[Craig Poxon]

I wish you'd get your standard straight

In this story you blur the image, yet reproduce the word in text, and in the story about Pipex's rude automatic password suggestion you star out the letters in the offending word and blur the image!

[Merton Campbell Crockett]

Fixed fee versus Commission

Were Microsoft's lawyers paid a fixed fee, they would have most likely produced a similar EULA but being paid on a commission basis it is, clearly, in their best interest to use many words as possible to say the same thing.

[Dam]

Windows EULA - NOT

Quote:

Seen it before

By Mike Iwan Phillips

Posted Thursday 9th August 2007 12:21 GMT

It just seems to be a summary of the Windows EULA.

---

Aaaaactually, there's a slight difference.

Windows' EULA says "FuckED you".

IE: Before you even started reading or agreeing the EULA, you were done for.

Because, once you've got your hands on the stupid software (ie bundled with your PC (quite frequent eh?)), GOOD LUCK getting the "if you don't agree, ship this back for a refund" clause to work...

[Pseudopath]

Makes editorial sense to me

In the Pipex story, the offending word was censored in the headline of the story as El Reg would have no doubt received a lot of complaints about the c-word being displayed proudly on the main page. The image accompanying the story was obviously sent in by the reader and displayed uncensored.

In this story, the image was taken from the Stop Badware website where it was already censored. I don't blame the writer for not wanting to download and install the codec in question just to get an uncensored picture!

[Anonymous Coward]

Click Next to continue...

...And are people stupid enough to continue and accept this license agreement? (rhetorical question)

And the text is censored in the photo because Reg got the screenshot off another site, where it was censored.

[Jon Tocker]

Before clicking "I Agree"...

I'd want some form of written guarantee that the other party is an attractive and clean female of consentual age and not some over-weight male teenager with pimples, halitosis and a sweat problem.

[mechBgon]

Zlob is not DNSChanger, and furthermore...

The EULA shown here is not the one that an end user would see if he were suckered into installing running the hotelcodec Trojan from an actual affiliate site. It's just the EULA you see if for some reason you go straight to hotelcodec.com and download the dummy file like a newbie. ;)

The "real" hotelcodec.com Trojans are DNSChanger. Zlob is not "aka DNSChanger"; they are different families, although the tactic used to get users to run them is the same.

As for hotelcodec.com being blacklisted, it is already more than halfway through its lifecycle (the Zlob and DNSChanger gangs typically rotate the hosting domains out after just a few days), and SiteAdvisor's glacial 2-4 week reaction time is far too slow to be much use against current "live" Zlob and DNSChanger domains. Too little, too late. I specialize in doing SiteAdvisor reviews on Zlob and DNSChanger, so this is a bit frustrating ;)

The best blanket defense against these Trojans, aside from user education, is the one that's free, doesn't need definiton updates, and is already sitting there waiting to be put into effect: non-Administrator user accounts. http://www.mechbgon.com/security2.html

[Anonymous Coward]

@mechBgon

I would SO love to have non-Administrator user accounts, but unfortunately developers still exist that think "All my user-base are belong to Administrators" (sorry) - especially in the niche market of Healthcare.

I find myself asking every day "why does your crappy little database NEED the user to have God-like power over their desktop?" It's very disillusioning...

[mechBgon]

@Doc Dish

You have my sympathies. I relish the thought of those developers finally being forced to face reality someday (or fired). If you haven't already done so, you might see if Software Restriction Policy has something to offer you on WinXP and Vista clients:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/aa940985.aspx