McAfee’s Blubster deal
p2pnet.net news:- Yesterday, I did a post on the fact so-called security company McAfee has marked me RED! merely because I have an ad for p2p music sharing client Blubster on p2pnet.
McAfee claims Blubster is loaded all kinds of nasty stuff and is using this assertion to warn people away from it.
This McAfee item also carries a weird graphic (right) which among other things, has me linking to something called yourmercifulgod.co.uk.
I have so many links and hundreds, if not thousands, of comment posts include them as well. So it’s quite possible there’s a link to this sinful site somewhere on p2pnet. But only God knows where it is 
And I link to SpyBot and The Pirate Bay too !!! Horror of Horrors!
So we’ll soon see Google and Yahoo and everyone else similarly honoured with unmeritorious mentions on McAfee. Right?
Meanwhile, my mate Pablo Soto over in Spain (he’s the guy who created Blubster, among other applications) has a post about this McAfee farce on his blog.
Here’s what he says >>>>>>>>>>>>>
During the summer of 2002 McAfee approached me. A nice and pretty marketing manager of its Consumer Division wanted to ink a deal with us to distribute their Security Center software with our application: P2P music sharing client Blubster.
They were so excited. File sharing users download virus 24/7 they said. Not in an MP3 only network, I replied. But hey, it was the kind of deal that couldn’t hurt neither our finance nor our users. And so we did.
Literally millions of our users opted-in to install McAfee’s software and we received a good amount of revenue.
They were paying much less than what our competitors bundled, but it was a good deal.
We were not alone, days later more and more press releases started to flow announcing McAfee’s deals with almost all other top tier P2P software distributors. Including Grokster, aka, the father of spyware. Yup, those users really needed a good antivirus, and I mean a good one.
Make no mistakes here, McAfee attracted more audience than they could have imagined. And they were obviously happy with it.
Today, I couldn’t believe it when doing my daily check in my friend Jon’s site I read that McAfee is targeting them. And for what you may ask? For linking Blubster.com (crowd wows).
Right. They bundled their software with us and now they protect our users from us because we bundle software, they say.
McAfee even removed the press releases anouncing the P2P deals.
Not only our software is totally free of viruses, spyware and unwanted programs, it was a major distributor of McAfee’s products and they loved the traffic.
These guys must be kidding.
No, Pablo. They’re perfectly serious.
Stay Tuned.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
Also See:
marked me RED! – McAfee targets p2pnet, May 28, 2007
blog – McAfee takes it wrong, May 29, 2007
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
May 29th, 2007 at 11:45 am
It seems that a big corporation can get away with Net libel, but when a small site has a link or a post about something a big company or influential person does not like, then the operator of that site gets sued. I don’t use Blubster, but if it is true that Blubster does not contain malware, then it looks like a pretty good case for a libel suit.
May 29th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
You vil find you link to yourmercifulgod (dot) co (dot) uk in the list of sites which are displaying Patti Santangelo Fight Goliath campaign buttons.
http://p2pnet.net/story/7622
May 29th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
You should talk to the Spybot S&D people. They’ve had problems in the past with companies like Symantec (and probably McAfee too) who have labeled their own product as spyware.
May 31st, 2007 at 1:46 pm
Jon and P2Pnet.net users –
This is Shane Keats from SiteAdvisor. I wanted to take a moment to respond to some of the concerns raised about our red rating of p2pnet (http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/p2pnet.net).
Let me start by saying that we work really hard to get these ratings right. We’re upfront about our methodology. (See some of our early blog entries like http://blog.siteadvisor.com/2005/12/the_down_low_on_nasty_download_1.shtml.) We admit it when we make a mistake. And we strive to be particularly careful about the gray areas.
SiteAdvisor rates p2pnet.net red for its link practices. With link analysis, we analyze outbound links and their destination sites. If sufficiently many links point to red sites, we give a red rating to the originating site. This method of analysis addresses sites that are risky not because they themselves do anything malicious, but because they pose a substantial risk of passing users on to malicious sites. Here are two blog entries that explain this in more detail:
http://blog.siteadvisor.com/2005/12/red_by_association_1.shtml
http://blog.siteadvisor.com/2006/01/the_role_of_affiliates_in_spyw.shtml
Let me be clear. P2pnet.net is obviously not an adware affiliate link farm. But P2pnet repeatedly links to sites we think are rightly rated red. For example, the current front page of P2pnet includes prominent links to (http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/warezclient.com) which has been found by others (http://p2p.malwareremoval.com/details.html#warez) to bundle LOP adware, and to blubster, discussed below. In previous tests of p2pnet, SiteAdvisor found links to other red sites including http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/freepascal.org which our tests found to result in spammy e-mail. We realize that some of these links are advertising. But we think running advertising from many red sites is also an appropriate basis to classify a site as red. Similarly, we believe that consumers should not need to be experts in which downloads bundle spyware or adware. Based on all these facts, we stand by our current rating of p2pnet.
P2pnet initially complained at length about our red ratings of its downloads. In fact, as p2pnet.net later noted, we rate almost all of p2pnet’s files green, or safe (http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/p2pnet.net/downloads/).
Lastly, a great deal is being made about our rating of blubster (http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/blubster.com). We rate blubster red because it bundles the Dealio toolbar – a program entirely unrelated to the purpose for which users seek blubster, and due to analysis from other experts at Spyware Warrior (http://www.spywarewarrior.com/uiuc/soft23a.htm) and Malware Removal (http://p2p.malwareremoval.com/details.html#blub). I can’t speak to any prior relationship between McAfee and blubster. SiteAdvisor was created in 2005, long after the events described.
Let me close with some thoughts on site ratings more generally. Site owners who wish to dispute a SiteAdvisor rating can e-mail us at complaints shift 2 siteadvisor dot com. We endeavor to acknowledge all complaints within 24 hours and to resolve them as quickly as we can. Meanwhile, sites can always use the Web Site Owner Comments link to post a public response to SiteAdvisor’s analysis.