Urlseek.vmn.net or the Evil that is Hidden in Toolbars
Recently, I needed to capture the output of a program in a PDF. A few minutes of googling led me to PDF Creator (hosted at SourceForge). The application itself is great, but when you install it, a toolbar is bundled with it—pdfforge. You don’t get an option. It’s simply installed on your behalf—as a “benefit.” The worst parts of the license agreement are shown below:
1.1 Rights You Grant to Spigot.
By installing the Toolbar on your computer, you expressly authorize and request Spigot to:
a) act as your search agent to conduct inquiries on your behalf using Spigot’s search engine and technologies and partners’ sites, and collect relevant information and display it to you;
b) take actions Spigot deems appropriate to provide the Toolbar to you and to act on your behalf in obtaining information from partners and displaying that to you;
c) read and interpret your search requests and results on certain sites and use this information to conduct searches on your behalf, offer alternative results and to personalize The Toolbar for you;
…f) modify your Microsoft Internet Explorer and/or Mozilla Firefox browser settings for the default search engine, address bar search, “DNS error” page, “404 error” page, and new tab page to facilitate more informative responses as determined by The Toolbar;
…
The real offender here is stealing 404 error pages. At my current client, my wireless Internet connection is sometimes less than perfect, and when “404” errors, I was redirected to Urlseek’s obnoxious website (sorry, I won’t link to this crap). Some digging proves that you can uninstall the toolbar separately from the PDF creator, but even so this is low, underhanded, and unpleasant. In addition, I suspect Sourceforge would be a little unhappy to hear that this nastiness is hosted on their site.
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April 1, 2009 at 12:55 am | SeanJA
Rogers does that too (the 404 thing)
April 1, 2009 at 2:16 am | cerberis
Maybe you should try PrimoPDF :)
April 1, 2009 at 7:07 am | Anonymous Coward
You can install PdfCreator without that toolbar. You have to unselect “PdfCreator Browser Add On” on the “Select Components” screen.
April 1, 2009 at 9:08 am | Mark Levison
Another reason not to use Rogers for my home internet. Thanks. As for Anonymous Coward, you’re right if you pay close enough attention (as I just discovered) it does include a check box for a “Firefox and IE addon”. It doesn’t say toolbar and it is automatically checked, so I still think its deceptive.
April 1, 2009 at 7:42 pm | mario
Poor old windows users!
You could still just use OpenOffice with built-in PDF support. Unlike a printer pipe for creating PDFs, it embeds useful document meta data (e.g. hyperlinks) without guesswork.
Just because you have astrayed your money on Microsoft Office or went thorugh the hassle of finding a crack, doesn’t mean you cannot use the superior tool (OpenOffice) for this particular task. (Yes again: PDF support is built-in.)
April 2, 2009 at 9:16 am | Mark Levison
Mario on this you’re wrong. I’m not printing from Office but a development environment.
May 5, 2009 at 1:43 pm | Citizen Truth
The accomplice in this subject (the company that the malware addon component) is this one:
http://www.download3k.com/Press-New-VMN-Toolbar-Wizard-allows-Web-publishers-to.html
They seem so proud to be distributing malware and hijackware!
Sourceforge that provides the hosting, for open source software only, so the inclusion of this toolbar should illegal under their terms of service, does nothing to stop the spreading the untrustworthy software!
So much for open source security!
Look how they claim to be 100% clean on their web page:
http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator
The people responsible for this are the developers: Philip Chinery (http://sourceforge.net/users/jahwe2000/) and Frank Heindörfer (http://sourceforge.net/users/thesmilyface/), Yahoo, Visicom Media Inc. (the producer of toolbar, redirection, browser hijacking software) and Sourceforge that allows this to be distributed from their website.
Malware; BHO; Firefox; Internet Explorer; VMN; Toolbar; Spyware; PDF Creator; PDF Forge; Untrustworthy; Unsecure; Browser; Search; Windows
August 1, 2009 at 6:58 pm | Andy
Anyone got a clue how to remove this pest. It’s driving me mad enough to ditch Mozilla.
September 21, 2009 at 5:02 pm | _m
any word on an way to remove this nasty critter?
November 17, 2009 at 3:50 pm | Mark Levison
BTW the solution – Urlseek.vmn.net has a separate installation in the control panel. So you can uninstall it. In addition if we had paid more attention to the installer as it whizzed by we might have spotted this puppy and choosen not to install it.