My definition of spyware is software that:

  • Installs without your knowledge or consent
  • Does not appear in add/remove programs
  • 'Phones home' with information, normally about Internet browsing activities

NewDotNet claims that their software is not spyware, and yet it meets all of my criteria above. I discovered it on my laptop yesterday, it's one of those annoying 'search' programs that replaces the 'Page cannot be displayed' page when you type in a bad URL (like ww.google.com). I wonder if anyone actually uses these search programs?

The thing that really annoyed me was the removal process for this software. It doesn't appear in Add/Remove programs. You cannot simply delete the folder containing the DLL from your C: drive as you get an 'Access Denied' message. OK, so how about deleting all references to newdotnet and new.net from the registry, rebooting and then deleting the files? Not a bad approach, and I've used it to clean spyware from my machine before. But, you can't do it with newdotnet because it will break your winsock stack, and therefore all of your network devices will stop functioning. The next time you reboot you will get an error message and be unable to access the Internet.

But why would a program want to re-engineer your winsock stack though? The answer is because doing so can allow all DNS queries to be forced through the newdotnet DLL, so that when you request a bad or malformed URL such as http://ben.stokes in your browser, newdotnet will perform the DNS query instead of your usual DNS server, and if the domain does not exist, it will redirect your browser to 'quickbrowsersearch'.

So you can see it's truly awful software, one might even so far as to call it "a pile of wank". There are stories in forum posts about people who have reinstalled Windows just to get rid of it. Below are some links including more information on what newdotnet does and how to clean it off your system:

Since newdotnet have been known to file lawsuits to people who accuse them of writing spyware, I will point out now that the article above is based on my personal thoughts, opinions and experiences, rather than facts.

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