p2pnet.net news:- Security firm McAfee’s SiteAdvisor has stamped p2pnet RED for Bad, despite the fact by far the greater majority of posts on the so-called ‘advice’ site have us unequivocally check-marked Green for Good.

But no matter, says McAfee’s Shane Keats in a comment post. That’s the way it’s gonna stay.

p2pnet carries an advertisement for p2p music sharing client Blubster whose owner, Pablo Soto, revealed he once had a very happy and mutually beneficial relationship with McAfee.

“I can’t speak to any prior relationship between McAfee and blubster [sic],” says Keats. “SiteAdvisor was created in 2005, long after the events described” and anyway, p2pnet, “repeatedly links to sites we think are rightly rated red”.

I’m assuming you’ll be reading this, Shane, so why are you not similarly putting the Big Red X on Google, say or Yahoo or any of the other online sites which repeatedly link to genuinely evil web pages, applications and services?

Why has p2pnet caught your jaundiced eye? I mean come on guys, fair is fair …..

I find this particularly interesting given that in another dimension I, Google and Yahoo, not to mention Wikimedia, are being sued for linking to sites former Green Party fancier and financier Wayne Crookes doesn’t like.

Could McAfee be sued for having a link to p2pnet which links to links which link to other links? And might that even happen if Wayne is in a bad mood, given that I’ve linked to the above story in this post, and that in turns links to links which link to the links, and others, Crookes objects to?

Anyway, here’s what Keats has to say, in full:

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.

Stay tuned.

Jon Newton - p2pnet

Slashdot it!

Also See:
mutually beneficial relationshi - McAfee’s Blubster deal, May 29, 2007
are being sued - Wayne Crookes on slashdot, May 30, 2007

f your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.

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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!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 10:45 am and is filed under P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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