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  • Browser opened after installation (suspicious url)

    After installing Daemon Tools lite v 4.30.3 (most recent at time of writing) the setup program launched a strange looking url

    daemon-tools.cc/activate? followed by about 100 characters that seems to me to be some sort of encoded ID information about me or my system. The url showed some generic "Thank You" message. If you just want to say thank you then why send these HTTP parameters with the url?

    I tried to copy the url to the clipboard but it redirected to some other url quite quickly, the new page used javascript to disable the browser back button so i couldnt go back to see it again.

    What is this information that is appended to the activate url?
    Why is this information sent?
    Why am I not given the option wether to open the browser to this url?

    The answer "Trust us we're good guys" won't suffice. If you could answer the questions I have asked that would be great.

    Thanks. Alan.

  • #2
    DT Pro requires an activation, even for the trial version. I'm guessing they've incorporated some of that into the lite version now, too.

    Look at it this way, if they wanted to do something malicious, why wouldn't they just send the data directly instead of opening your web browser?

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    • #3
      Originally Posted by Jito463 View Post
      DT Pro requires an activation, even for the trial version. I'm guessing they've incorporated some of that into the lite version now, too.
      Daemon Tools Pro may very well require activation, but I did not install Daemon Tools pro, as I stated in my original post.

      Originally Posted by Jito463 View Post
      Look at it this way, if they wanted to do something malicious, why wouldn't they just send the data directly instead of opening your web browser?
      It's not so much the incoming data I'm worried about. I downloaded and installed the binaries so, rightly or wrongly, I trusted them implicitly. My concerns are about the outgoing information. i.e. the values of the HTTP Url parameters appended to the url.

      These are clearly user/machine specific values. they are not generated random ids either as the length is far greater than the randomness needed for that.

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      • #4
        Keeping in mind that I'm not speaking as a representative of DTools - merely as a customer - my guess is that it's an activation ID based on your hardware. If it's like any other activation ID, there's no way to reverse engineer the code to decipher what hardware is used. It's a one-way algorithm, much like the activation codes for Windows.

        Again, this is just my educated guess based on my years of experience, both with DTools specifically and with computers in general.

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