Dirty tactics from Morpheus

Authors of P2P applications who’d like to see their creation make them a little money usually follow a fairly standard formula. First they try advertising within their programs, attempting to make money off of click-thru’s. When they realise this

Authors of P2P applications who'd like to see their creation make them a little money usually follow a fairly standard formula. First they try advertising within their programs, attempting to make money off of click-thru's. When they realise this doesn't work, they resort to spyware – surreptitiously collecting information about you via the Webpages you visit and the forms you fill out. This usually gets on-sold to some vile marketing company, which uses it to 'direct market' its crap to you via 'large-scale email broadcast'. In other words, spam.

When this doesn't work as well as the author would have liked, there are a few options available. More advertising, selling your details to more spammers and even subscription-based systems are all possibilities. However, one P2P application has now sunk further than any other it its attempts to make money by providing a service that deprives others of their rightful incomes. That application is 'Morpheus Preview Edition 1'.

Referrals are a harmless way of making a little money. If you're visiting a Website and happen to click on an ad for, say, Amazon to buy the latest Tea Party CD, the Website you saw the ad on usually gets a cut – and fair enough. However, StreamCast Networks (the publishers of Morpheus) obviously weren't satisfied with the meager amount of money its application was making via referrals from internal ads. So, StreamCast decided to do something about it.

According to this article, what StreamCast actually did was to include a dll file (bpboh.dll) that detected when you visited certain shopping sites (such as buy.com, ebay.com and amazon.com). Once it detected a URL matching its internal list, the dll file first directed the browser to a separate URL – a referral URL – before going to the relevant page. The net effect of this is to give StreamCast a cut of every purchase made on those sites.

Which would be perfectly ok if it only applied to ads inside the application. However, bpboh.dll adds this 'feature' to IE itself – so directly typing www.amazon.com into your browser still results in StreamCast being paid for the referral and or any purchase you make!

The rational way to fix this would be to simply uninstall Morpheus. However, bpboh.dll remains after un-installation and continues to make money for StreamCast. The only way of ridding the 'feature' is to physically delete the file your self, or to format your computer.

Thankfully, Lavasoft were onto StreamCast's game fairly early and have now updated the reference file for Ad-aware to detect and remove this utterly useless StreamCast money-spinner from your PC. Yay Ad-aware!