Digsby has gone to the dark side.

[+Warwagon MVC]

After recently downloading a copy of Digsby at a customers house. I was shocked what I found. I was so shocked I rechecked that I hadn't been phished about 4 times.

While all of the stuff in new install is opt out. Its still a step back. Whats funny is that after you see all of that spyware being thrown in your face a box pops up at the end of the install wanting your email address. If that doesn't make you worried on some level even if just for a moment, you need to listen to some "security now".

Here is what I posted on the digsby forum regarding the new installer

First of let me start by saying I downloaded the first beta that was made available to the public. When I say I was quite impressed I'm not kidding. Never before had I fallen in love with an IM client that I continued to use for months and still use to this day. I tried other IM clients like Pidgin or Miranda. But they got deleted after about a day of use. They just never felt right. The previous IM messenger I used was trillian. With the new Astra release taking forever and the god ugly default UI, well let's just say Digsby came along just in time.

About 2 weeks ago I was at a customer's house. I do computer repair and I was there on a repair job. I just finished reinstalling Windows XP from a malware infection. I was going to have them try Digsby, in hopes this would prevent them having to run 4 different messengers at once. I went to the site and downloaded the installer. Once I opened the installer to start installing Digsby, to say I was surprised is an understatement. I was so surprised that I thought somehow I had been phished by miss typing the URL. So I checked it, double checked it and triple checked it. Surely this installer couldn't be related to Digsby? So I checked it again. At this point I closed the installer hopping I just didn't catch some kind of infection on this nice clean xp machine. I don't know what frightened me more about that installer. The fact it looked so doggy or all of the different things I could potentially infect (yes I said infect, most of that stuff is spyware) this machine with.

I don't know if it's because I'm computer savvy, or the fact I listen to the podcast "Security Now" every week and just had a gibsonian response(a response Steve Gibson would have if he ran your installer).

I realize that you make all of the items on the installer opt out. Being in the computer repair business you see just how stupid people can be. People will infect themselves will all sorts of stuff without trying very hard. Unfortunately I feel your new Digsby installer gives people an even easier way to accomplish that.

I know you guys want to make money. After all, you are making something for free. I just have to imaging there is a better way to accomplish this than by using your new frightenly infectious installer. Remember how bad the buzz surrounding Kazza was from installing tons spyware on peoples machines? At this point in time I feel you are really no different, other than the fact you ask people before you do it. The truth of the matter is people are too stupid to opt out.

I would try a donation button first. See how that goes. If you offered free life time upgrades I'd buy a copy of your product for $20. Just please do away with your new installer. While I guess you guys mean well on some really hard to figure out level, in the end your shooting yourself in the foot. Keep it up and you will be known as the Kazza of instant messengers.

Adam

And now for the photos

Edited December 30, 2008 by warwagon

[Minifig]

As for the Research thing, we're going to be making it more obvious in the near feature, moving the setting to the preferences, making it more obvious to the user that it's there, that sort of things. Also more settings are going to be added to the research module such as control over how much CPU it will use and start conditions.

I saw some confusion about how the Research Module works so thought I'd mention a few facts:

- The research module is only loaded and running if it is enabled and the user has been idle for over 5 minutes

- The module is set to take a percentage of the CPU on low priority, meaning if something else wants to use the CPU the module should gladly give it up and only use that percentage of the leftover

- the percentages right now are something like 40% for desktops and 20% for laptops and other small form factor PCs that are plugged in; the module doesn't run at all if the PC is running off of a battery

The simple matter is that startups need to make money, otherwise they fall apart.

Bull****!

If my machine is idling, I don't want ANYONE snooping around it. Its an invasion of my privacy. My machine idles when I sleep.. so thats 8 hours your "research" product could peruse my hard drives 8 times 365 is 2,920 hours of invasions. How many home PCs do you know of that are running off of a battery? "Low Priority" .. just like Firefox was supposed to be running on Low Priority too eh? Things designed for that function don't always work.

"Simple startups need to make money."

So start another project. Adium went free, Trillian was free until they offered a payable version with more benefits.

Is it really that hard to understand that people utterly hate this ?

[AbandonedTrolley]

I saw some confusion about how the Research Module works so thought I'd mention a few facts:

- The research module is only loaded and running if it is enabled and the user has been idle for over 5 minutes

- The module is set to take a percentage of the CPU on low priority, meaning if something else wants to use the CPU the module should gladly give it up and only use that percentage of the leftover

- the percentages right now are something like 40% for desktops and 20% for laptops and other small form factor PCs that are plugged in; the module doesn't run at all if the PC is running off of a battery

Thank you for this bit of info, knowing that now I'm quite happy to activate it again as if my PC is idle then feel free to use it, makes no difference to me as long as it's unobtrusive.

[Broken Halo]

Thanks guys, for all the support stuff being posted since I last posted. Also thanks for the calm constructive criticism. Civil discussion about this sort of thing is the only way things like this get smoothed out in a way that works for both sides

That being said, Andrew-DB, if your going to be snarky, you could at least do some research/checks your facts first.

If my machine is idling, I don't want ANYONE snooping around it. Its an invasion of my privacy. My machine idles when I sleep.. so thats 8 hours your "research" product could peruse my hard drives 8 times 365 is 2,920 hours of invasions.

The research never looks at anything on your computer, it just get's numbers to crunch from the server, crunches them and sends them back, so actually, we respect privacy and this is not relevant to this discussion.

How many home PCs do you know of that are running off of a battery?

What does that matter? The point was laptops drain the battery faster when they're performing calculations, so we don't waist laptop users battery.

"Low Priority" .. just like Firefox was supposed to be running on Low Priority too eh? Things designed for that function don't always work.

Uh... Firefox runs at normal priority.... You can see this in the process manager.

So start another project. Adium went free, Trillian was free until they offered a payable version with more benefits.

Adium is a open source project, they use libpurple, neither of those things are true about us, we are not volunteers we do not have other sources of income as OSS devs often do. We love working on Digsby but it is a full time+ job, bills need to be payed, developers fed, and who doesn't want to buy cool things now and again?

Trillian was a very different beast way back then. I know, I used it. They started a Pro version and started packaging software with the free one for a reason, see my last block of text for that reason.

[Snowl]

I know quite alot of people(including me) who just want it installed, now, so we click [Accept] As many times as possible. It would help everytime on the ad section it said when you click Accept, a popup comes up saying "Do you want to install "AD PROGRAM HERE" On your computer with Digsby?"

[Astrophizz]

I'd like to know who exactly the research is for. Not it's "like" folding@home or "like" seti@home. What research group is paying to have their software packaged with other, non-research-related software?

[migo]

I noticed this too after my most recent re-install.

BTW. Shrink the images please. Having to side scroll is terrible.

[jettraill]

The bottom line with multi IM interface is to be able to trust the software developers and their respective companies. When a company, such as the one that produces digby, starts to ship their software out with various forms of scum/spy/mal/wares, they can no longer be trusted with your various emails and passwords. If you do any form of online banking or even shopping in ebay, you place yourself at risk. But more over is a world of intelegence gathering, where your personal information is collected by large corperations involved in orginized crime. These are not conspiricy theories, these are hard core facts that investigators and other orginizations have been trying to stop for years and now even you know by the fact that it is on the news almost daily. Ralph Nader once tried to stop the corperations from diminating humanity and changing or breaking laws to suit the corperations. But Naders attempts failed and back fired, while he did stop the corporate corruptions or at least hindered them for a while, it made an assult back and turned around to make new laws protecting corporations from further such retaliation from do gooders like Ralph Nader. Thanks to this battle, we can talk freely with out worry that some corporation will attack beack, but it doesn't matter because the corporation think tanks have made it futile to protest their actions. Ever notice your complaints seem to fall on deaf ears, well thats by design! The only way to correct such tragic cercumstances is to have a world war 3. Or God will have to cleanse the earth his way.

So if you want gizmos, gagits and widgets just be aware that corporations have design them to sit you down every night after work at your computer or television to keep you from thinking about taking action and on your weekends you seek the entertainment of activities that you so desperately need. Thus leaving you no time to think about whats happening to the world.

[ViperAFK]

Just use this download link for the old installer... it's right under the main download link.

http://update.digsby.com/install/digsby_setup.exe

Also the research thing can be disabled, go to help> support digsby and disable it there.

[hopp58902 Member]

ViperAFK +1 (Y)