Friday, March 04, 2005

“Messenger Plus!” is Spyware, Stay Away.

I've had a few people tell me I should install a program called Messenger Plus that purportedly removes the ads from MSN Messenger.

Well, against my usual good judgment I actually did install the thing, and now I've had days and days of battling a particularly harsh piece of spyware called “lop” that was installed along with the program. Neither Ad Aware nor Spybot S&D could fully get rid of it, and it would cause constant pop-up ads whenever I ran Internet Explorer, and put this awful looking toolbar at the bottom of my screen.

A near total excavation of my computer later and I think it's gone, I hope anyway.

Let this be a lesson, never install anything without googling around for user reviews from semi-computer literate people.

Related links here and here.
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By al - 12:21 a.m. |

Comments:
With a name like Messenger Plus, I'd be pretty skeptical to install that. I've been using aMSN for a long time now and it's actually quite functional. It's GPL, no ads, no spyware, free, and cross-platform. Does all the basic MSN IM functions plus pictures and sending files. It looks pretty good to. I originally used it because I hate MSN Messenger and at the time I used Linux pretty much exclusively. I still use aMSN on my new Windows boxes. I only use MSN Messenger occassionally because:

1. aMSN has problems with file transfers over my new router (still working on the problem).
2. aMSN doesn't support audio/video chat.

Project website is http://amsn.sourceforge.net
# Posted by Blogger Ming : 12:34 p.m., March 04, 2005
 
Yeah, amsn isn't too bad. On OS X I'm currently using Adium which is just a beautiful piece of software, and supports all the usual IM protocols.

On Windows I've been playing with Miranda, another good slimmed-down version of MSN Messenger.
# Posted by Blogger al : 10:29 p.m., March 04, 2005
 
I'm not used to fighting a battle with my software any more, since I'm on a Mac most of the time where installing a program means dragging it into your Applications folder.
# Posted by Blogger al : 7:33 p.m., March 05, 2005
 
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