BillP Studios became the latest software developer to receive a cease and desist letter from a well known spyware company.

According to IBIS, LLC publisher of WebSearch Toolbar...

"WinPatrol detects our products running processes WToolsA.exe and TBPS.exe and
tries to disable them"

"We believe your product was developed with clear intention of harming IBIS, LLC, and preventing it from distributing its applications to users and interfering with its business relationships."

The interesting part is they provided screen shots of their programs in WinPatrol but they don't mention our PLUS information where we provide information on how horrible they really are. The screen shots also note that we detect SDHelper.dll and NavShext.dll. They obviously have no clue how WinPatrol functions and that its doing exactly what its users want.


The full letter with screen shots can be viewed at
http://www.winpatrol.com/support/ibisthreat.pdf

For information on other companies being threatened
http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/threats/

Bill

Dunno if you've followed the CastleCops response to their cease and desist, but I'm sure you can count on Paul and Robin to provide any private advice you may wish to ask them for.

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CastleCopsWiki

Hi Ikeb,

Yes, while I suspect Robin is pretty busy these days along with Paul, but I know I can count on their help.

I have also had commitments from others who have been antagonized in a similiar manner.

You will probably see this incident added to the following

http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/threats/


Bill

Just as Bill expected, I have added this matter to my threats page. http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/threats/

Well, Bill its good to see you get a laugh at these idiots. One can only hope their lawyers suck them dry persuing such absurd claims. It wouldn't surprise me if they were the same bunch of ambulance chasing lawyers who have made other claims, against other folks such as yourself, all baseless without merit. I guess they all figure at sometime, one of you will cave, much the way things, in my opinion, happened at Lavasoft and WhenU.

Keep up the good fight, Scotty needs to bite these guys where it hurts!!!

Front page:

/article-5891-nested-0-0.html

Blogged here:

http://netrn.net/spywareblog/archives/2005/04/11/ibis-llc-another-adware-company-attacking/

Edit to stir the Google juice:

DSLReports.com discussion here:

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,13144805

Thanks Suzi, I read your blog entry. Very nice. It is about time we send a unified message from all spyware-critics. We're not giving in. We're doing the right thing.

I'm spreading the word.

It's time for Scottie to start growling!

It is the behavior of the Ibis toolbar itself, not WinPatrol's say so that makes it the anathema of computer users. Having tended to quite a few HijackThis logs, I can say there was a time period when WinTools, a variant of the Ibis toolbar, ranked right up there with CWS and VX2 as the posters' chief complaint. The users were reacting to the havoc the program wreaked on their systems, not what WinPatrol's program data base or anyone else's reference defined it to be. Not a single one said "WinPatrol identifies this as malware can you remove it." No..they just complained about their PC being nearly nonfunctional. Just look at how many views this topic on WInTools received. The users were desperate to have this crap removed.



Log: /modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=503242#503242

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Negster22 - MS MVP - Consumer Security 2006-2008

Another letter from IBIS arrived today.

This time it was an almost identical letter as before but with a twist.
This one claimed to be IBIS LLC but the letterhead was
XACTI CZ, s.no.
America 23/525
120 00 Praha
Czech Republic

All the text was the same as the one from Boco Raton but it was signed by Mgr. Petra Prochazhova, Legal Department Manager.

Screen shots were the same too but on this one they underlined which programs were theirs which was helpful
http://www.winpatrol.com/support/ibisthreat2.pdf shots were the same too but on this one they underlined which programs were theirs which was helpful
http://www.winpatrol.com/support/ibisthreat2.pdf

Bill

Too much! First of all they kindly told you "OK here's the crap that's ours". Secondly interesting that they have a few anti-malware applications to keep this sort of crap out of their own machines. And thirdly, there's nothing in any of your screens that claims that any of those underlined processes has any association with spyware!

Of course we expect you to say just that in your PLUS info service ... now that they've kindly confirmed their stuff for you.

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CastleCopsWiki

Bill, I think that the best you can do is to ignore them...