This is not new, but very thought provoking.
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/article.../03012002b.php
Its a very long, but exhausting article on these shady businesses.
What makes me wonder is that "upgrade". Usually upgrades are about new functionality, better features or whatever. None of the hot issues of previous versions were addressed in these new versions the sole purpose of these new upgrades seem to point to these events - which is of course, quite disgusting, but also, a mystery - who, why, when, how questions - it seems MC went crazy - but their public relations policy begins to take its toll on them at last. If they just knew their customers, they would not have made that joke about gnucleus.
Btw, I read some posts on grokster forum -
http://www.grokster.com/dcforum/DCForumID7/535.html -, and people are reluctant to change to 1.5 - why? its no better, only more spyware. I can't believe this is happening - it is rare when one doesn't want upgrade, it is even more rare that a company has the guts to change version number (and 1.3.3 to 1.5 is not insignificant change) and calling upgrade something that is not.