Cause for concern to all ...

[Dean B]

Don't know if anyone else with FQ is running Opt Out but they just issued a statement via their website.[nbsp][nbsp]Worth reading, particularly if your browser suffers from frequent crashes.

http://grc.com/optout.htm


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Regards, Dean.
**DMCity**
www.dmcity.com (http://www.dmcity.com)[nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][nbsp]
**********

[MG Doran]

Thanks for the link Dean.
I found this to be very interesting and helpful.
Here is some more info on the same subject:
http://www.zdnet.com/zdtv/freshgear/mindthegap/story/0,3679,2495501,00.html

[Dean B]

Interesting reading reading eh :)[nbsp][nbsp]I'd strongly recommend that everyone gets the latest version of OptOut.[nbsp][nbsp]Believe me if you've used any of the programs they list it's a serious invasion of privacy.[nbsp][nbsp]I found 11 of these rogue dll's on my PC which were immediately zapped.

Dean.

[Maverick]

25 of them here, but I'm an addicted downloader who will try out almost any software that looks even vaguely useful. OptOut is great.

[tedloh]

The only problem with OptOut is that if you are using a program that depends on Aureate/Radiate, OptOut removes them and breaks the program.[nbsp][nbsp]That is unfortunately not an option to me.

I will tell you this, though - it is entirely possible that Aureate/Radiate is the cause of my having to reinstall Win2K 5 times in the past month - losing all settings, passwords, installations etc. (but fortunately any data can at least be recovered).
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Ted (Chief Do-It-All)
Got2Bet.com - The Net's Winner's Circle
http://www.got2bet.com
ted@tygresystems.com

[DB]

It seems that not all of Aureate's files are necessary to run the programs that run the ads. Over the summer I installed Go!zilla, and not long after started having more than the usual share of problems with Netscape. Eventually it got so bad that I started paying more attention to the reported cause of the crashes and noticed it was mostly a problem in "advert.dll." From the file properties I saw it belonged to Aureate so next I looked them up and made the connection with Go!zilla. I decided that Go! wasn't worth the aggravation but did a little experiment, instead of uninstalling (which I know now wouldn't have helped anyway), I added a .bak extension to advert.dll. To my surprise, Go! still worked but the NS crashes went back to their "normal" frequency. So it seems you can disable some of Aureate's files and still use the ad supported programs. Might be worth a try if you need those other programs but don't want Aureate looking over your shoulder the rest of the time.

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--Tom aka DiamondBack
[nbsp][nbsp]http://diamond-back.com
[nbsp][nbsp]http://smartasses.org