Think twice before deleting that Kazaa-Skype spyware

The late, great Warren Zevon's "Send Lawyers, Guns and Money" epitomized his view of the roots and exercise of power.

So when someone who knows a good bit about this nexus speaks, I for one, have a tendency to listen.

Ben Edelman knows a lot about the lawyers and money part. He's a Ph.D. candidate at the Harvard School of Economics and a student at Harvard Law, and a frequent commentator on Internet-related legal issues.

He wrote me this morning to comment on my post, in which I noted that when I downloaded and installed the Kazaa-Skype bundle yesterday, I obtained more than 2,500 adware files.

Ben sent a link to an artice he wrote, in which he notes that in their license document, one of the leading spyware hitchikers on Kazaa-Skype downloads fails to list anti-spyware utilities as an authorized means of removing their files from your PC.

He quotes: "You agree that you will not use, or encourage others to use, any unauthorized means for the removal of the GAIN AdServer, or any GAIN-Supported Software from a computer."

Well, I suppose I could say that I never claimed I had used PestPatrol to make things right again. Nor did I "encourage" you to do so. I only said I was going to.

I say I am "going to do" a lot of things. So maybe I did, and maybe I didn't.

But if "they" come after me, I can imagine the cellblock conversation a year from now. "What are you in for, man?" Breaking and entering." And you? "Hot-wiring a car." And you? "using PestPatrol to clean up my hard-drive Registry."

Maybe the best solution then, would be to do what Brian Turner of Platinax Internet News wrote back in response to my post. Brian recommends thatif you don't want all that adware, then just download the separate Skypeutility.