Ok,this time,we have a company that claims to workout a customizable toolbar for you,all for free!! But the fact is,this company infact hasn't been maintaining a good profile.The company,formerly known as "Effectivebrand" (now "Conduit") had been working on toolbar extensions for IE and Firefox which can be customized by us.But the fact is,this company was removed from Mozilla's Add-ons site since thier toolbar fetched javascript from a remote server.Moreover,their License agreement statements unfortunately did not reflect what their toolbar really does.whats more is that they even modified their statements after this incident.Rob Marshall (Robert Daniel Marshall) has written some beautiful articles on this toolbar,the company.He has also written beautiful write-ups on the company's tactics on changing their name to "Conduit" from "Effectivebrand".They also had supposedly claimed to give away 5000$(Now,they've modified it) if someone one proved that their toolbar contained Spyware.This too,was removed from their page.
Is it Spyware?
Well,according to Some,it was.The behaviour of the toolbar was Considered as Spyware by Some users here as well as here ( Michael Schwartz's comment).
The Company has also been cited as "Not trust-worthy" from the Bug-Zilla Site,here.
The company,though had made it to the top of the rankings in Mozilla'a Addons site,It certainly has got plenty of oppositions here,here and here.
Listing out ALL the users unhappy with this toolbar is beyond the scope of ths post.You may see this forum thread to know more about them,as well as to get an idea on the whole story.You may also read a few threads from here and here.
A BIG "Thank You" goes out to all the persons (Especially Rob) who were involved in the elimination of this Tool bar,(which has also been quoted as "Garbage Bar" , "Junk" (The very first post,by Meatus))
though the Tool Bar has now manifested in a new form,under a new Name(Conduit),it still hasn't satisfied Some users completely.
The funny part of the story is there is another site from them which displays the number of users around the globe using their Toolbar.Surprisingly,just like they have mentioned it in their site,there is a new user every for every 2 seconds,that too from different parts of the globe.I suspect that it could be more of an animation than just plain statistics,as the animation plays for a few seconds even after you plug-off your internet connection!
The best advice for now,is to stay away from unknown Apps.,unless otherwise they're from reputed companies like Google,Yahoo and the like.
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