ProfileWatcher: The Saga Continues

Doo be doo doooo be, doo be doo be doo, dooooo be

I'm siiiiiiiingin in the rain..

/ KICK

Just siiiiingin in the rain....

/ SLAP

What a glorious feelin..

/ BOOT

I'm haaaaaappy again....

/ STABBY RIP STAB STAB

...is the Stanley Kubrick way of saying, let's look at Profile Watcher 2.5! Hooray! After a tip from my pal Loren that a new version of this thing was available to download, I could hardly refuse, could I?

History: First it sucked.

Then, it sucked even harder.

Now? Man, it's sucking and blowing all at once.

This thing sticks something called a "Recommendation Engine" onto your PC - or, as I said at the time:

"A really fancy way of saying, our tool will spam the living crap out of all and sundry without you being notified, or indeed regardless of whether the services we use to spam allow you to actually do this or not."

Well, there's been an update to the License thingy - you can now "opt-out" by deleting the file "PJ.exe" (no mention of Duncan, though).

Isn't that nice? Sadly, it'll all go horribly wrong but we'll get to that later. For now, let's fire up Profile Watcher 2.5 aaaaand.....

....Crap our pants at a scary message that says FIND OUT WHO'S STALKING YOU.

That's pretty rich coming from a program that allows you to check out "who's dating who" via piles of random strangers but whatever. And wait....isn't this supposed to be Profile Watcher 2.5? So how come it says 3.0 at the top there?

Meh. "Updates and Cool Stuff", that looks interesting. At least, it did until I was told to "download the update", at which point I see...

....a page telling me to download version 3.0, the version I'm already running!

Looks like nobody knows what they're doing!

Of course, if you download it you get a big fat error message when trying to run the thing.

Next time, a bit more effort in the updating side of things might come in useful.

I decided to drop the "Recommendation Engine" into Virustotal and see what happened - the results aren't exactly fantastic for the ProfileWatcher people:

Ouch, a swift kick in the yarbles and no mistake!

No less than 5 scanners flag it as, well, a bit gimpy. When checking out the code powering this thing there's a Yahoo Email address listed as a "recipient" under a section where having to be logged into Myspace is mentioned.

That could be perfectly innocent, but it seems a bit odd, yes? Why exactly is an Email address in there at all? Is something being sent with regards login details? If so, for what purpose? And does A Clockwork Orange tail off rapidly after Alex is stuck in the loony bin? (Yes).

Already, we have more than enough reasons to avoid this program like the plague...but here's one more for good measure. Remember how we could delete good old pj.exe and wave farewell to the profile spamming aspect of this digital trainwreck?

...OH SNAP!

The ONLY way I could delete pj.exe was by uninstalling Profile Watcher completely, which sort of defeats the object of claiming you can "opt-out" of the Recommendation Engine.

In conclusion, Profile Watcher is about as appealing as ever, which pretty much means "not at all".

And for anyone who has no idea what my PJ / Duncan reference relates to, congratulations: here's the worst song ever.