Real Player is spyware

Real Player is spyware.... AGAIN !!!!

http://stopbadware.org/reports/reportdisplay?reportname=realplayer01282008

 

scribed:

Quote:
"The advertising software bundled with RealPlayer is misleadingly called a
'message center', and is described incompletely and inconspicuously in the
EULA as software designed to provide useful software updates. When
RealPlayer 10.5 is installed, the advertising features of this 'message
center' are enabled by default for users who choose not to register their
personal information with RealNetworks after the software is installed."

So turn off Message Center.

"RealPlayer 11 does not disclose that it installs Rhapsody Player Engine,
and does not remove this software when RealPlayer is uninstalled. Users
are not informed by the installer or uninstaller of the connection between
RealNetworks and Rhapsody Player Engine."

It can be uninstalled via Add/Remove Programs on Control Panel. I'm not
sure if uninstalling it would affect Real Player, anyone done it and if so
what are the results?

--
Rob

http://www.flickr.com/photos/canopus_archives/
http://canopianjournal.blogspot.com/
http://canopusarchives.multiply.com/

 

Endure it yes. Fix it how? Other than remove Real Player how do you
deactivate it's ability to feed popups?

 

Frank scribed:

If you are talking about Message Center popping up now and again, well it
never happens to me. It's been a bit of a while since I installed/updated
it, but, from what I remember somewhere in Preferences under Message
Center or Notifications or something like that you can select what
notifications you want and if you deselect everything it doesn't pop up

--
Rob

http://www.flickr.com/photos/canopus_archives/
http://canopianjournal.blogspot.com/
http://canopusarchives.multiply.com/

 

That's it. Thanks. Under tools, preferences, I choose to select check
once or twice a month rather then the couple of times a day they had
defaulted.

Frank

 

I have not installed Real Player since I was running Windows 3.x. For
those fairly new to computers, RP was one of the first companies to
put spyware in their software, over 15 years ago. For awhile it
seemed they had cleaned up their act, but once again they are doing
it. It seems that most of the history of RP had been that of spyware.
Years ago, it was hard to view many online videos without RP, but
these days RP videos are not used all that often anymore, because most
are now Flash type .FLV files.

Besides being spyware, RP was notorious for crashing and playing havoc
with Windows 3.x and Windows 9.x. I dont know what it does with newer
versions of Windows.

I crossposted this to the Mozilla website because there are references
to Firefox.

For those of you who replied with flames, and who can not click on a
weblink to verify this, you now own a permanent place in my killfile.

There is unlikely and fix for it, at least not without reverse
engineering it.

If you are considering Real Player, DONT INSTALL IT. There are
alternatives, and for the record, Real Player media is a dying, if not
dead video format anyhow.

 

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Personally, I prefer to stick with VLC media player. Does
all that but it's free, has a GPLv2 license, and you don't
have to dig through options to make it behave.

http://www.videolan.org


- --
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Quilljar scribed:

I would tend to agree with you, I don't have any problems with it these
days. I don't use it much though, just for videos in the Real Media
format that Power DVD or WMP can't play. As far as audio is concerned I
don't use RP at all for it as Foobar2000 can play and stream anything.

One annoyance with RP is how its update manager will look for updates even
if RP is not launched. This means whenever I use RP I then have to take
out it's update manager from Start Up when I close it. There is a
registry hack to stop RP putting its update manager back into Start Up,
but, I've never bothered doing that as I hardly ever use it.

--
Rob

http://www.flickr.com/photos/canopus_archives/
http://canopianjournal.blogspot.com/
http://canopusarchives.multiply.com/

 

Ed scribed:

This looks very useful. I've tried MPC, but, I always had issues with it
and it's no longer being developed so I'll try out VLC at some point. If
it allows me to watch streamed Real Media without the necessity of
launching RP then it has me won over...and it can be integrated with FF
with an extension

--
Rob

http://www.flickr.com/photos/canopus_archives/
http://canopianjournal.blogspot.com/
http://canopusarchives.multiply.com/

 

That would tell me that it's doing it's spying ALL the time. In other
words it's running at least some of its processes whenever your
computer is operating. That would really piss me off if it asked me
to upgrade when I was not even using RP.

Whenever I install any software, the first thing I do, is disable
automatic upgrades. If anything annoys me, is when I click on a
browser or any program and I am rushed and just want to get a weather
report or something, and I got to deal with a piece of software
begging me to upgrade. When I'm ready to upgrade, I'll do so on my
own time, and quite honestly, I think most software is upgraded far
too often, and most of the time for no useful purpose. The author
just wants make another sale, so they add more useless bloat to it.

I often prefer the older software......

LM

 

scribed:

Quick Time player does it too. Also, BBC iPlayer and Channel 4 player
puts back into Start Up the entry to auto launch them at boot up every
time you launch them...very irritating

--
Rob

http://www.flickr.com/photos/canopus_archives/
http://canopianjournal.blogspot.com/
http://canopusarchives.multiply.com/