>From: Roger Marquis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Whenever I turn the PC on our router logs attempts to reach it from
>various addresses on a real.com subnet (ARIN:PROGNET-REAL,
>207.188.0.0-207.188.31.255). I simply turn the system on, with nothing
>running and nothing in the start menu, and realnetworks will try to
>contact it. This might be understandable if the system were running
>realaudio or perhaps even Netscape or IE but it isn't running anything,
>yet the packets all come from source port 80 apparently masquerading as
>HTTP.
[..]
>Is anyone familiar with this? I suspect some realaudio database
>attempting to gather data without my knowledge or consent but would
>like to find out if this is a known hack before sniffing it out.
There was a big stink late last year when it was discovered that
RealNetworks' RealJukebox client transmits "certain user information"
during the Get Music service update which runs periodically. I believe that
since RealJukebox starts as a service in the system tray, it doesn't need an
entry in the StartUp folder in the Start Menu, and might be the cause of
your firewall alerts on an otherwise "quiet" PC.
Since then, RealNetworks has released a revised privacy statement as well as
a software patch to the RealJukebox "feature" to disable this mechanism. You
can download it here:
http://www.realnetworks.com/company/privacy/software.html
--
Gene Lee
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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