zCodec Video Codec Is a Trojan 188
Bride of Chucky writes "There's a new video codec out there that claims to offer 'up to 40 percent better video quality' but that resets your computer's DNS settings — opening the way for Trojans, rootkits, or whatever. Techworld warns that zCodec looks professional enough, is widely available, and comes in at 100KB. What's the bet the media companies are behind this somewhere?"
Re:and nobody's doing anything.....why? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yahoo turned up the following:
Amilcar Perez
7319 13th Ave
Brooklyn, NY (map)
Tel.: (718) 236-4275
Does that help anyone?
thats news - heres a tip (Score:4, Interesting)
Virtually every bloody codec pack you could download contained spyware/adware - some of them put in by the developers themselves. I've got some lovely versions of Nimo, K-lite and gordian knot to prove it. Hell, DivX pre 5.2 had GAIN in it and if you didn't know where to look on their website you had no way of finding the version without it (it didnt have the encoder so wasn't gain supported) . VLC is all I download for video playback now. If they don't support it I don't need to watch it - I've an flv file convertor for those of you who know how to download the dang yourtube/google videos that vlc cant handle perfectly.
Learnt the hard way not to download things from any third party site even if its trusted back in high school. I run XP because I like playing games. If I had a tinfoil hat I'd read the source and then compile and do MD5 checks but I'm lazy and will take the binary packages, and I suspect one day I will pay for that laziness, despite my use of Tea Timer and the Spybot S&D hosts file and immunization databse, Lavasofts ad aware, windows defender and rootkit revealer, hijack this, peer guardian 2, and spyware blaster. One day I will be an idiot and download a binary with some spyware that is still under the radar for all of these and I will be pissed when I realize it. Atleast, I will realize it, but most users wont.
Why take the detour? (Score:3, Interesting)
Music companies have huge legal departments that can (and do) get their info from ISPs with subpoenas. Trojan distributors are constantly trying to find new ways to push their junk onto your computer, often by paying heavily for 0day exploits.
Who is more likely to buy a "cheap" way to bug your PC?
Re:Rather than the conspiracy theory. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Appears to be from Inhoster, known spyware sour (Score:3, Interesting)
Mycroft
No ducks, but cats maybe.. (Score:1, Interesting)
See Operation Acoustic Kitty [damninteresting.com]
Even though to a first approximation they are always wrong, I have a lot of sympathy for the conspiracy theorists. Almost no matter how outlandish the scheme, it seems, someone somewhere has tried something similar for real, so in a way you really can't blame people for being paranoid.
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
If it installs/allows malware, then you're right; "the media companies" probably aren't behind it. However - I've been wondering for a while how long it would be before "the media companies" got around to releasing a codec that "phones home" and lets them know what video file you're playing and from where you're playing it so that they can flush out "piracy". Codec's are native code that we blindly download and let run, after all... it seems like it would be trivial to insert a bit of code that sends a quick HTTP GET request to some random web site with the details of what it was playing.