Throughout our history, Red Swoosh has worked very hard to be good guys and produce a good product. Part of that has included being an invisible infrastructure -- I mean, your website doesn't say "brought to you by Comcast Cable" all over it, so we thought "why should we?" This was working great, and customers and users sung our praises. (Or, at least, didn't complain and even appreciated the effort.)
But those days are over. Spyware, adware, malware -- whatever you want to call it, it's here, and here to stay. Unfortunately, this tide of crapware took us a bit by surprise, and the anti spyware companies started jumping at shadows. And in one of those shadows, working diligently as we have done for years, was Swoosh. Though we've been entirely up front with our activities from day one (and those activities are all entirely benign and valuable), many companies decided to "shoot first and ask questions never", and our name appeared on a bunch of lists it shouldn't have.
That needs to change.
Clearly, we're working on it. But we're a small company and there's never enough hands to go around. Thus if you are willing, we'd greatly appreciate your help. Specifically, if you see Swoosh come up in a context where it shouldn't, could you please do us the favor and drop them a letter explaining that we're one of the good guys? How you do that is up to you, but you might consider pointing them to our site:
Or, even better, fill in the blanks in the letter below and send it their way (and be sure to cc [email protected]), and let's see if we can't turn this boat around.
-david
To whom it may concern,
My name is [YOUR NAME HERE] and I'm a user of Red Swoosh, Inc., a Peer-to-Peer content distribution network located in San Francisco, CA. Red Swoosh recently tested your Anti-Spyware software "SOFTWARE VENDOR AND PRODCT NAME" (VERSION DETAILS) and the Red Swoosh product (usually named "RSEDNClient.exe" and "RSInstaller.cab") is incorrectly labeled as “LABEL THAT SOFTWARE GIVES REDSWOOSH". I would like to be able to use the product without you guys scaring off me or any of my users as Red Swoosh does nothing malicious to users or their computers. I and Red Swoosh would like to help you understand the product better so as to provide you sufficient reason to remove them from your spyware list.
{OPTIONAL: Attached is a screenshot of what happens to our product after running a scan with your software.}
When I went to Red Swoosh’s site to find out what was going on, I found a good amount of information on the client and am concerned that they have been unfairly labeled by your anti-spyware product/s. It is important work to make sure people’s PCs are protected, but just as important that software providers doing the right things by end-users do not get lumped in with the bad guys. I have cc’d Red Swoosh, and look forward to this misunderstanding being mitigated in short order. The following information was provided by Red Swoosh on their site:
"Red Swoosh, Inc. founded in 2001, offers websites commercial-grade Grid Delivery services for high-performance, low-cost distribution of media over the Internet. With secure, P2P Grid infrastructure, our website customers achieve unlimited video delivery at a fixed cost with improved streaming and download performance. Some of the world’s largest media companies are customers of ours (NBA, Viacom, News Corp, and many others) and we have saved them millions of dollars in infrastructure costs while vastly improving the economic viability of their online initiatives.
"Our software delivers no advertisements, does not monitor user activity, and simply enables users to connect to a private Grid to download legitimate content they have been authorized to retrieve. We do not store or retrieve any personal information on any user as we simply act as a networking system. In addition, we present all users of our software with basic information about the client, an FAQ, a fair EULA and email support.
"When users remove the Red Swoosh client from their computers, their ability to enjoy content from sites that use our software to distribute their media, such as is adversely affected. More importantly, by labeling our software as you have, it has become more difficult for Red Swoosh to engage in the normal course of business.
"We understand there may be a lack of information available about our software that has possibly led to our software being mislabeled as "spyware", "malware", or "adware", etc. We'd like to understand your concerns about our software, so that we can directly address the issues, and hopefully resolve accordingly..
"As of April 12, 2006, The Red Swoosh client has been approved and white-listed for use by AOL Safety and Security Center, Microsoft's Defender Beta 2, Ad-Aware SE Professional, F-Secure Internet Security 2006, Kaspersky Antivirus Pro, McAfee Internet Security Suite 8.0, Norton Internet Security 2006, Spybot 1.4, and Trend Micro PC-Cillin Internet Security 2006. Hopefully we can add your software to this list soon. Let me know if you have any further questions about our product, including any technical aspects, so we can give you the confidence to remove us from your malware list."
Please take a moment to visit the Red Swoosh site and evaluate for yourself whether their software deserves the label you've given it, and I'm confident you'll agree that they're a valuable and honest member of the internet community.