Over the weekend, a writer at Blog Technical discovered that Skype had installed a 'crapware' program called EasyBits without his knowledge—and it has probably done the same on other systems as well.
According to the writer, Bradley Wint, "the program is legit and was actually installed via Skype itself. After doing a quick check , it seems the EasyBits company produces a number of game apps and is supported by many major brands including HP, Dell, Acer and Skype among others."
Crapware, while not technically malicious, can bloat your computer system with programs you'll never use and thus slow it down unnecessarily. Beyond that, there's the ethical issue of downloading software onto a computer without the user's knowledge.
Skype has acknowledged the issue but has not yet issued a statement. This issue is not related to the recent acquisition of Skype by Microsoft.
If you would like to get rid of the installation on your PC, Blog Technical gives the following directions:
- Disable and remove 3rd party access to the easybitgo.exe file in Skype via Options > Advanced > Advanced Settings > Manage other programs’ access to Skype
- Remove the Easybits Go program via the Install/Uninstall panel under your system’s control panel
- Exit Skype and make sure the Skype.exe is not running in the list of running processes (via Task Manager). Also temporarily disable Skype from starting automatically when Windows starts.
- Then restart your computer since the program will still be is use by the system.
- Once restarted, go to [Drive Letter]:\ProgramData or [Drive Letter]:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data and permanently delete theEasybits GO folder.
- Remove whatever shortcuts it may have placed in the start menu and desktop.
- If you are confident enough to dig around in your registry, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software and delete the entire EasyBits folder (thanks Christopher)
- Go to the Windows\Prefetch directory and look for the file EASYBITSGO.EXE-364DAFD6.pf and delete it. Also do a search for ezPMUtils.dll and delete them all.
- If you are on Windows 7, delete the go folder in this directory - Users > [YOUR USERNAME] >AppData > Roaming
