p2pnet news view Freedom | Security| P2P:- McAfee is a supposedly reliable and efficient security company. So when you see a Big Red X under the name of a site, what do you think?

That it’s dodgy. Very dodgy.

Why would McAfee single it out, otherwise?

Last summer, “McAfee targets p2pnet,” said a p2pnet post.

Today, August 28, 2008, I’m saying, McAfee targets p2pnet. Again.

Or maybe I should have said, “McAfee defames p2pnet” on both occasions.

The two charts on the right are both from the company’s so-called Site Advisor page. The top one is current and the bottom one is from last year.

“Your site has ads for some nasty spyware, according to McAfee,” says a Reader’s Write under Guns N’ Roses leaker Kevin Cogill nailed.

It goes on »»»

You (quite rightly) report on the riaa stitching up people, yet you are willing to do the same for money??

Don’t click on the ads people! Here’s the SiteAdvisor verdict: http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/p2pnet.net/msgpage?page=1#reviews

Click the link and next to a Big Red Danger Button with a Big X in the middle you read, “When we tested this site we found links to antispyware.com, which our analysis found to be suspicious.”

Suspicious? What, precisely, does that mean? Suspicious of what?  Suspicious in what respect?

Antispyware.com has been a supporter of p2pnet for a long time and to the best of my knowledge, there’s nothing even vaguely suspicious about it.

But what is suspicious is how McAfee stoops to a specious post to, presumably, suggest it’s on top of the game.

Under the Danger Button is ‘contact information (not clickable) and beside that, ‘Country - United States’ and ‘Popularity - Lots of users’.

What the hell is that supposed to signify?

Under ‘Automated Web Safety Testing Results for p2pnet.net’ you find »»»

e-mail tests for p2pnet.net:

We found 2 sign-up forms and testing is in progress.

Wow! 2 sign-up forms, eh? And ‘testing is in progress’. Jeez. Now that’s suspicious!

Could it be thinking of the User Name and Password dialog boxes, do you think? Or maybe McAfee is talking about the search bar or Torrent Site Tracker at the top?

Who knows? McAfee doesn’t say. But the implication is clear. This is highly suspicious!!!

Beneath the email revelation is,”Download tests for p2pnet.net”.

Tests, huh? hmmmm.

But downloads? What downloads?

“In our tests, we found downloads on this site that some people consider adware, spyware or other potentially unwanted programs,” says the McAfee SiteAdvisor.

Some people? Like who? Since McAfee has troubled to make this highly suggestive statement, why doesn’t it also say who’s making the allegations and what they are?

But OK. What are these ‘downloads’?

The first, with a yellow exclamation mark beside it, is to f52a1.zip. Very suspicious, that. It scores a ‘3′ on the McAfee ‘Nuisance Meter.

But it doesn’t lead to anything —- anything at all.

At the beginning of the year, I switched from the original CMS to WordPress and somewhere along the line, the link was broken and instead of pointing to a download, it now goes to ‘Error 404 - Not Found’.

But once upon a time, it did indeed link to f52a1.zip, and when we got into this with McAfee last year, “On f52a1.zip, ‘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,” said our note in red at the bottom of each p2pnet page.

f52a1.zip, in other words.

The other five all have green check-marks beside them, and according to McAfee, a green check-mark is a positive, not a negative. In other words, no problem. So why bother to mention them at all?

McAfee’s 2008 allegations

For this year’s version, “Online affiliations for p2pnet.net,” says McAfee, going on in bold black, “Linked to red sites —- When we tested this site we found links to antispyware.com, which our analysis found to be suspicious.”

In the box is:
Xinhau.
This is the official Chinese state news agency and, I ssure you, neither I nor p2pnet have any affiliation with it whatsoever

Antispyware.com.
As I say earlier, it’s been a supporter of p2pnet for a long time and to the best of my knowledge, there’s nothing even vaguely suspicious about it.

Blubster.com.
Blubster creator Pablo Soto has been a p2pnet supporter almost since the beginning. He’s currently being sued by Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG and as I write this, p2pnet has no relationship with him, beyond gratitude.

When the Big 4 launched lawsuits against him in Spain, his advertising payments stopped.

His ad is still on p2pnet because I owe him and this is my way of supporting him and thanking him for all he’s done in the past

But since McAfee sanctimoniously cites Blubster (and in yellow), it’s worth mentioning McAfee itself tried to do a deal with Blubster.

In May, 2007, “During the summer of 2002 McAfee approached me,” Soto blogged, going on »»»

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.

Back to 2008, WarezClient.com. No idea.

But wait!

Last year, “Let me be clear,” said Shane Keats from SiteAdvisor, going on:

“P2pnet.net is obviously not an adware affiliate link farm. But P2pnet repeatedly links to sites we think are rightly rated red. ”

Oh. Last year yourmercifulgod was one of the web pages cited by McAfee. But what I said then still applies today:

“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 .”

FreePascal.org? It was, and still is, as far as I know, a 32 and 64 bit professional Pascal compiler.

DivShare is a link in a Catflap comment post relating to his Television needs to stop navel gazing …’ article.

strategyinformer.com? Who knows?

nbc11.com is a link to NBC11.com, an MSNBC site cited in a p2pnet story, Facebook sued over cellphone calls.

mp3downloadcity.com is named in a number of p2pnet posts as a rogue site, and one to avoid. By way of example  —- 100% legal downloads !!! And here’s another —- Mp3DownloadCity.com.

‘ … appropriate basis to classify a site as red’

Keats goes on to explain how McAfee is an arbiter of site advertising, stating, “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.”

But visitors don’t agree. In ‘reviewer and website owner comments,’ by far the last majority of people who’ve bothered to comment, 16 rate p2pnet as No Worries, one says we spam (we don’t, and never have) and seven side with McAfee with remarks such as:

“Another site that offers other content in addition to it’s malware, so novices will be inclined to rate the site as ‘good’.

“However, if you educate yourselves enough to know that people who pay for webhosting by hosting ads with malicious content are not ‘legitimate’ news sources.  This site should remain red, those reviewing it as green should have their future ‘advice’ ignored.”

p2pnet doesn’t offer downloads of any kind. Never has. Never will. It’s a news site. Period. And the only time malware and/or spyware comes up is in stories against them.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch-house …

McAfee has held p2pnet up as a site to be avoided because of dangerous links. But we strongly suspect we’re not alone and that there must be other sites which are equally innocent of the implications waved around by McAfee, and the SiteAdvisor mentions us all for one reason —- to show prospective buyers of McAfee services just how very good it is at what it does.

But, “the bottom line,” says CNET, is VirusScan Plus 2008, “doesn’t excel“.

Stay tuned.

Jon Newton - p2pnet

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 8:29 am and is filed under Security, Freedom, 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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