This is TRULY amazing!

[Rags]

Kindness,

Semantics aside, they are correct about the ad banner on the application. The banner is from aureate. What they do is not only install an ad banner, but they document which sites you go to, which ads you click, what you download, etc. They use this for marketing research. Normally people are told about this before they are studied. But with the advent of the internet, it seems that these marketing research companies have found it their duty to not tell anyone who is being studied. They do this without your permission, they do not even tell you they are installing the aureate software on your machine. Now, if they are doing this, who's to say they couldn't do more without your knowledge?

Rags

[Gurm]

Kindness,

I'm not trying to perpetuate some "moral thing". Ask around in here, we have been over it more than once...

The issue is that this program is run by you, and therefore your firewall won't catch it. It has priviledged authority on your machine.

Now, how does it know which ads to give you?

Think about it for a minute.

...

...

...

It... get ready... WATCHES THE WEB PAGES YOU VISIT. It then reports them to the parent company which builds an ad profile for you.

Now, _I_ don't want anyone seeing all the web pages I visit. Do you?

*shrug* And I think you're missing the point of the whole multiple download thing. On most of the servers I frequent, you could get banned for life for leeching in this fashion. Public servers, no. Private servers, yes. So perhaps it's not such an issue for you, but for some of us, it is.

Last but not least, there are much better ways to optimize your connection. If you don't routinely get close to your theoretical maximums on a single connection then you need some tweaking. You can adjust the various MTU settings to improve your connection fairly easily if you check out any of the various speed tweaking sites.

- Gurm

------------------
Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Liquid Snake]

http://www.dslreports.com/tweaks

[Pneumatic]

LS: Thanks for the link. Here are my results if anyone can interpret them:

* Results
TCPopts hex string is 020405b401010402
Max Segment Size is 1460
* Your MTU is set ok
SACK Permitted (RFC2018)
Ping stability 68 61 60 59 58 58 61 58 57 60
* Quick packet-loss tested ok
DefaultRcvWindow (RWIN) is 23360
Your RWIN limits you @60ms to 3114kbps
Your RWIN limits you @200ms to 934kbps
* Your RWIN is set ok at 23360
Your Path MTU Discovery is ON
Max sized data packet from you 1500
* Conclusion.. HEALTHY SETUP!
* End

All things considered I am actually pretty happy with my connection speed. However, if there is a tweak or two that I can make I will definately do it.

Gurm:
To answer your question, no I don't care if someone is watching what sites I go to. I have nothing to hide. Don't get me wrong, I am conscious of the prescence around me on the net. That's why I have a firewall and a virus scanner running all the time. I just don't spend every moment online in fear of others "spying" on me.

[Rags]

Kindness,

Just because you don't doesn't mean that the rest of us don't. Most people care when they find out they had used some piece of software some months ago, long since uninstalled it, and find that some piece of it still doing marketing research on their machine. I am sorry, but if you find this type of activity fine, you are amongst the minority. I mean they don't even tell you what they are doing to your machine, what they are monitoring, that they even installed the aureate software, or even how to really get rid of it.

Rags

[Liquid Snake]

Even if I have nothing to hide, I still don't like people watching over me. I just don't like it.

About the results - You can increase the RWIN; it may help. Set it to 64K. You can find out how on the DSLReports tweaks page.