On My Friend's Page, The Avast Ball Keeps Spinning and Spinning?

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

I have been to the page many times and there is no evidence of anything negative on the page:

http://qik.com/chameleon2

This is qik, a video channel sort of like YouTube, and the Avast Ball just keeps spinning and spinning most of the time. Is this something with the way the page is designed, or what?

Site Advisor gives it a green check mark. Comments?

Jack

2

Data is continually being uploaded on that specific web page. You might notice a message in the status bar stating the page is waiting on qik.com. It would make since to me that because there is a constant stream of data uploaded and a wait status downloaded Avast is continually scanning. You might also notice that the Avast Web Shield count continually increases on the web page qik.com/videos/latest as well. Btw, I put a DU meter on the web site and it did show the data being uploaded and with the reply downloaded as I stated.

3

i hope the web host doesn’t mind all of their bandwidth being chewed up.

the page has created a ‘plugtmp’ folder under my %TEMP% folder and keeps dropping a file named ‘plugin-chameleon2-###’ (### being a number starting from one) – downloading a new one every second.

4

Yea, after awhile I started noticing a bit of a drag on my computer.

5

Is this something that most likely he did or some other aspect of the page’s design?

Jack

6

I think the blue ball spins because it is scanning the items that are being downloaded every second^^(as i have read)^^

If the download is something malicious, avast! would prompt the user…^^

I dunno if the download thingy is part of ur friend’s page, maybe it is downloading without the host’s consent?

-AnimeLover^^

7

If you just go to the web page home (qik.com) then the page continues to transfer data successfully so there is no continual upload request by the web page. But when you go to Chameleon2 then once that page is uploaded there is a continual request to transfer to qik.com but nothing is transfered.

If you notice the Avast ball does not continue to spin on qik.com once the page is loaded but does continue to spin when you go to the chameleon2 page. Whether it’s a problem with qik.com or the chameleon2 page is still not determined. I noticed there is a forum on qik.com that you might want to check out possibly.

8

When I first visit the site, Firefox gets a file, named ‘plugin-latest-videos’, which is an XML file, then the browser gets a new temp file every second.

It looks like a plugin made by a company whose website is named activitystrea.ms . The plugin (which is really an XML file) makes mention of getting live video streams from users phones. Maybe the mechanism is in place, even though that PARTICULAR page is not written to use it.

I turned on a packet capture (Wireshark), the best I could guess is that it forces elements of the browser to refresh without refreshing the whole page (?? just a guess ??)

Here is more info on ActivityStreams:

http://developerwiki.myspace.com/index.php?title=Standards_for_Activity_Streams
http://wiki.activitystrea.ms/MySpace%20Activity%20Streams
http://wiki.activitystrea.ms/
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2008/12/20/where-were-going-with-activity-streams/
http://diso-project.org/
http://groups.google.com/group/activity-streams/browse_thread/thread/e88c977f5efec1fa