Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: 1 May 91 20:58:23 GMT From: Gordon Burditt Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Prodigy or Fraudigy ??? Message-ID: Organization: Gordon Burditt Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 324, Message 2 of 10 Lines: 65 > [Moderator's Note: Thanks very much for sending along this fascinating > report for the readers of TELECOM Digest. I've always said, and still > believe that the proprietors of any online computer service have the > right to run it any way they want -- even into the ground! -- and Prodigy doesn't have the right to rip off copies of my company's software from its customers. Regardless of what's in the service contract, people can't sign away rights they don't have in the first place, and third-party commercial software doesn't generally come with redistribution rights. If Prodigy is uploading the contents of hard disks, how can they avoid doing this? Proprietary software need not consist entirely of .COM and .EXE files, or any other formula based on file names to avoid. > that users are free to stay or leave as they see fit. But it is really > disturbing to think that Prodigy has the nerve to ripoff private stuff > belonging to users, at least without telling them. But as I think > about it, *who* would sign up with that service if they had bothered > to read the service contract carefully and had the points in this > article explained in detail? PAT] I suspect that MOST contracts are written in a way that no sane person would sign up for it if they assumed that the other party (who wrote the contract) would take full advantage of the terms to their disadvantage. For example, PSI offered an e-mail service where you were allowed to send mail TO psi and FROM psi. Nobody else! (That they didn't mean it that way is besides the point). Telephone companies can change your phone number at any time. Would you subscribe if you knew they're going to do it every half hour? Would you buy expensive electronic equipment from someone who was going to sell lists of names, addresses, and what was purchased to organized crime? I was inclined to believe the uninitialized-disk-space theory. The test with a fresh-formatted floppy (assuming that this means what everyone but MS-DOS thinks it does - a destructive format that erases data) seems to disprove that. I wonder, however, about uninitialized memory. A lot of things showing up in clean-wipe tests seem to be data likely to be accessed during boot. Could someone prepare a bulk-erased and then formatted floppy, delete all TSRs from memory, run a program to clear user-available memory (without booting), then install Prodigy on the floppy? I'd expect to find directory contents (including the hard disk) of directories in the path, read while scanning for commands. I would like to see evidence that this data actually appears on the line. Since it's compressed, how about demonstrating sufficient volume of transmission back to Prodigy? Of course, it's possible they are hiding a few bytes in each packet ACK. It is, of course, possible to conduct "marketing research" on the contents of customers' disks without any huge STAGE.DAT file with "incriminating evidence" in it, just given a proprietary program to access the service. Every five minutes, the service could send a query "does this user have ", and all the program has to do is look around and send back one bit with an answer. This, they match against the registered owner list. So what if they don't have a trademark on the file names for Lotus 1-2-3? It could also upload files deemed interesting while the user is reading the interesting advertisments :-). Gordon L. Burditt sneaky.lonestar.org!gordon