Since last fall, Brilliant Digital Entertainment has been distributing 3D advertising technology in concert with the popular Kazaa's file-swapping software. Since the legal demise of Napster, Kazaa has picked up much of the MP3 swapping business around the world. A minor clause in the contract for these software applications allows Brilliant to send software updates and modifications to the user's PCs without notifying them. Recently, Brilliant transmitted a modification that will turn each PC that runs Kazaa into a node on Brilliant's network.

In effect, the software patch creates a distributed network out of all the Kazaa users' PCs, the processing power of which Brilliant to tap and use, because the Kazaa users didn't read or understand the licensing contract before they installed the file-swapping program. Brilliant uses the Altnet Secureinstall application, which is bundled with the Kazaa software to create the massive peer-to-peer network.

Here's a snippet of the software license agreement that gives Brilliant permission to hijack your PC, "You hereby grant (Brilliant) the right to access and use the unused computing power and storage space on your computer/s and/or Internet access or bandwidth for the aggregation of content and use in distributed computing. The user acknowledges and authorizes this use without the right of compensation." Users must agree to these terms before they can use the Kazaa file-swapping service.

Dave's Opinion

Wow! This makes Microsoft's strong-arm tactics look like a loving hug. I did a bit of digging and found an article on ZDNet that describes how to uninstall the Altnet Secureinstall program without affecting the Kazaa services. Here's a word- for-word excerpt from that article; a link to the complete article is included below.

References

Kazaa
kazaa.com

How to: Uninstall Brilliant software
zdnet.com.com/2100-11-875278.html