TO:                   Oren Dobronsky                         HotBar, 166 Iben Gvirol St                         Beit Walla, Tel Aviv, Israel   63032   FROM:            Cloudeight Internet LLC                         P.O. Box 558                         Hastings, MI 49058   DATE:              March 11, 2005   RE:                   Your letter dated February, 17, 2005 (Received March 10, 2005 in USA)                         “Infringement of Rights – Your Detection of Hotbar as spyware/adware   This is in response to the apparent Xeroxed copy of letter you sent to us regarding the subject you used above. Apparently you have sent this to the wrong company. We do not make Spyware/Adware removal programs, and we do not have anything on our site that identifies Hotbar as Spyware/Adware.  Your summarized demand states “Hotbar has learnt (sic) that the anti-spyware software and/or website you have developed, operate and or/distribute detects Hotbar’s Software or portions thereof as an undesirable spyware/adware program.”  Again, as stated, we do not produce software that detects Spyware and/or Adware.   We got a letter from you last July 2004 asking us to “Cease and Decease” (which we interpreted as Cease and Desist, since telling one to cease and die is not appropriate). You asked to us to remove negative statements about Hotbar no later then December 31, 2004, which we did comply to. We removed the page that had the compiled information from the web indicating you were spyware.   We are not sure why you would be sending another letter since, as stated above, none of the “demands” you made apply to our site or our software. Again, apparently you, once again wrongly accuse our company. We think you have the wrong company since we do not have any software which remove spyware/adware or Hotbar or any pages which remove spyware/adware or Hotbar.   I am aware that many major spyware removal products identify you as Spyware and/or Adware and many are very well known, distributed in the US not only via web, but via most major computer stores, Wal-Mart and Sam’s clubs/warehouse stores. Products such as SpySweeper, McAfee, Spybot Search and Destroy, Symantec, Trustix, Pest Patrol, Computer Associates,  and a long list of others. Your letter states some of these companies do NOT identify you as Spyware and/or Adware, which is incorrect.   Many prestigious and publicly funded Universities in our country identify your product as Spyware and/or Adware, including but not limited to Harvard University, Howard University and others.    Numerous companies and online communities identify your product as Spyware and/or Adware, including DoxDesk, Adwarereport.com, Auditmypc.com, SpyFerret.com, PcHell, and thousands of others according to simple searches on the major search engines on the web. To be more specific, thousands of results come up when doing searches for Hotbar + Spyware, Hotbar + Adware, or Hotbar + Malware.  Here are some examples:   A search on Google for Hotbar + Spyware turns up 31,000 results, a search on Google for Hotbar + Adware turns up 24,800 results A search on Yahoo for Hotbar + Spyware turns up 214,000 results, and a search on Yahoo for Hotbar + Adware turns up 184,000 results. A search on Lycos for Hotbar + Spyware turns up 35,700 results, and a search on Lycos for Hotbar + Adware turns up 28,700   Finally, all major search engines have Paid Advertisers who advertise in prime areas of the search page, and all of the major search engines allow numerous companies to PAY to advertise their ability to remove Hotbar Spyware and/or Adware.   You do threaten our small company with your product, since your product removes Outlook Express’s ability to send email stationery, and that is our main product and main source of traffic. The change your program makes to Outlook Express even prevents a user from using the stationery that Microsoft includes with the program, and it prevents a user from being able to send images in their email. The setting you disable with your software is as follows:  The change your program makes is it changes the setting in Outlook Express under Options/Send/Sending Format, and it UNCHECKS the box that says "Send with Pictures". By disabling this important feature, stationery and images can no longer be sent using Outlook Express.  Fixing your program so it does not make this setting change is necessary since you threaten our very livelihood by taking away a users ability to send images normally in their email program.   We do not expect to see any more of your threatening and in our opinion, intimidating letters.