A guy on the DAZ Hexagon site posted the following:

Free version of Houdini" Beware of Houdini, it installs an auto updater, and a web link{key logger} that can not be uninstalled; it will be in your services, you can turn it off, but there is no way to uninstall it.

What is he talking about? Is this something to worry about?

I think its safe to say that the guy on the DAZ Hexagon has no idea what he is talking about. The free version of Houdini that you download from Side Effects is the same version that production studios use across the world.

Sounds like kids are spreading FUD [en.wikipedia.org] about other software packages. Can you provide a link to the discussion?

That's what I thought, I noticed he didn't mention the file name. We'll see if he repies.

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=1078056#1078056 [forum.daz3d.com]

It looks like in the past, some trojan writers released a file that is named Houdini 8.0.0474 ($17,000).exe according to this link.

http://spywarefiles.prevx.com/spywarefiles.asp?FXC=CJFI22210251 [spywarefiles.prevx.com]

It does serve to reminds us, however, that the Houdini Uninstall should support a “Remove License Server Service” checkbox - which is something which was suggested about a year ago during H9.0 alpha.

If I recall correctly once the last install on Houdini is uninstalled then the license server should be removed to. (For Houdini 9.+) Its possible that this broke though.

Well, that needs to be an option. I'm uncomfortable with it being ‘smart’ about whether our not you want licensing removed. I think a click option as Jason suggests would be just fine and less work.

Cheers,

J.C.

Apparently this uninstall has worked fine, at least according to to DAZ post. That's good news

I know I've personally tried to add some web documentation out there to describe what sesinetd and hserver are (like the link from sysintermal's ProcessExplorer). It seems some people are suprisingly very aware of each and every process and service runs on their machine.