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Freemake Video Products
It is my understanding that the makers of Freemake products are asking it's
users on their Facebook page to bombard Lifehacker with emails asking them to do
a review of it's products, this post is to the contrary, I have sent an email and am asking Lifehacker NOT to do a review on it for the following reasons.
1.) Freemake products come bundled with crapware, even though one can opt out of
the crapware services.
2.) Freemake products installs WinPCap.exe as a separate program without the
knowledge or consent of the user. In order to install any Freemake product one
must download the downloader, wade through all the crapware and either accept or
deny each one, after which the downloader downloads and runs the installer separately, this
is where WinPCap gets installed without ones knowledge, this is underhanded
because WinPCap is not needed at all and has nothing to do with any the softwares
functionality.
WinPCap is a network packet sniffer and only has two uses, one being is that if you are a network administrator doing a traffic study or second, you are running Wire Shark. Any other use of
WinPCap is nefarious.
Emsisoft Emergency Kit picks up this version of WinPCap as a trojan and a severe
risk.
It is totally up to you as to whether you use their products or not, personally I
would not until Freemake repackages it's download without the downloader,
without the crapware and without WinPCap and offers their software with a
straight forward downloadable executable.
I have tested their software, there is absolutely no need whatsoever for WinPCap
to be installed with any of their software, they all work fine without it, the
only reason I can see myself for the WinPCap install is that Freemake is trying
to capture it's users traffic.
Last edited by edee; 14 Jun 2013 at 11:49.
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