Re: Spyware in Octave

[Michael Goffioul]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 4:35 AM, Thomas L. Scofield <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> My student was willing to reinstall Octave and see what report his "System
> Mechanic" software gave.  His note is included below.  In the end, I'm not
> sure he had to re-install to get this information, as one reading of what he
> says would be that some log of the earlier report was still in existence.
> Anyway, we seem to have two very different reports from two of my students.
>  The report below corresponds to the student who raised the initial alarm.
>  The other student---the one who ran Symantec and found and flagged a
> cookie---did these things after the first student raised an alarm.  He
> offered no explanation for why he thinks that cookie was tied to the Octave
> binary (Did the cookie get created at the same time he did his installation?
>  Do cookies have timestamps at all?---I'm pretty naive about this).  Without
> knowing more, I remain doubtful about a connection.
> Is there some way to check out these two "sed.exe" files?
> Thomas
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: address@hidden
> Date: September 16, 2008 8:02:43 PM EDT
> To: "Thomas L. Scofield" <address@hidden>
> Subject: Re: Octave
> I was able to find a record of the files that were reported as spyware.  The
> files were "C:\Program Files\Octave\bin\sed.exe" and "C:\Program
> Files\Octave\msys\bin\sed.exe".  It may be possible to check what these
> files do and find out what the problem is.

Honestly, I strongly doubt there's a real threat here. Those 2 executables
are completely different as how they have been created: one has been
created by me on my PC, with Visual C++ 8; the other is part of MinGW
and has been created on whatever PC with MinGW (it might even come
from a cross-compiler under Linux). The only common factor is the original
source code. Could this detection be related to some static string present
in sed source code?

Anyway, those files are not vital for octave to run. You can simply delete
them, the help system will just not work.

Michael.