Hey, whenever some piece of shit like Beethoven starts to apologize for the Akamai crapware, you have to know that it's time to figure out how to defeat it if you can.

Issues and Progress

1) The damn shit starts on system boot

Solution: Spybot Search and Destroy from Safer Networking. Under the tools section, you can edit what programs are and are not allowed to start at boot.

2) The damn shit tries to connect to the net

Solution: Disable incoming and outgoing connections in your fire wall. The Launcher will hang for less than  a minute, before the Akamai crapware times out, and you can then log in.

Unknown: Will the launcher download a game update without Akamai crapware being able to connect to the net? I will be able to test soon enough, because Turbine QA means that we will be getting a hot fix soon after any update....

3) The damn shit fires up 2 netsession_win.exe processes every time you fire up the launcher.

Solution: Sadly, the best I have for this is a desktop short cut that does the following:

  C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe /F /IM netsession_win.exe

which means I need to click the shortcut any time after I get to the DDO login screen.

There, hopefully this will ease the pain of DDOCrackhead.

Discuss. Improvements welcome.

Then again, this might have been planned for a long time. Right, Majmal?

Not being all tech-savvy, I just went into the task manager, startup tab and disabled akamai.  Will this work or will it just reset when I turn off my laptop?

Saal :/

This malware makes me want to send Stoddard over to Turbine.

Weapons of mass destruction.

OK, shamelessly cribbing the best ideas I've read....

1) Replace Spybot Search and Destroy with msconfig to stop Akamai from starting at boot

2) Keep the firewall controls in place to neuter Akamai when it is running. By the way, after Akamai times out the launcher runs through its prereq check, so I see a decent chance of it downloading any updates at that point.

3) Launch DDO with this wrapper bat file

cd C:\Users\your_name\AppData\Local\Akamai
admintool start

cd "C:\Program Files\Turbine\Dungeons and Dragons Online - Eberron Unlimited"
TurbineLauncher.exe

cd C:\Users\your_name\AppData\Local\Akamai
admintool stop

exit

which will need to be updated to reflect the directories on your system.

This automates killing the Akamai processes as the final step.

The end result is mostly what we had before this release, with the additional requirement of accepting the Akamai EULA  and watching it hang before it times out.

Not as good as what we used to have, but it is only possible to fix so much of what Turbine breaks. 

Ollie - you sure DDO-ML works?

I've got to get that when I get home, then.

We're still discussing how to best remove the malware, though.

There weren't any issues updating your client with DDO-ML? No double login problems? I use the pre-loader for that, but earlier before I left my beloved laptop downloading DDO, it started up the malware (I didn't know it was malware at the time!) before starting the update process.

Cool cool.

I'll get that then.

I got lucky I suppose.

I read the forums prior to the update and installed DDO-ML. It updated the game alright, without installing Pando, I mean Akamai, although I couldn't get it to run the game at all. I kept getting errors.

After looking around for a bit I installed pyLotro. I set it as 'run as admin' (win7 os), and now I am in game.

I never agreed to the P2P download and never installed it. I have also heard that ddo preload works with pyLotro, but I haven't tried it. I just run pyLotro standalone. No way in fuck will I install a data miner.

After getting in the game I lost all intrest. They re-gimped my Ranger and now I have to spam arrows just to get a kill. I have seen a lot of players quit over the Akami thing and I am thinking I will just take a break from DDo.

Path of Exile is a lot of fun, for about an hour, but spring is here in the Northwest so I may just go outside.

On a side note, I just love how all these "IT" experts are fawning over Akami on the mother forums. *vomit*

OK, just an update (pun intended) on how this is working.

The update today, well, updated on my system using the official DDO launcher and the Akamai crapware blocked using my firewall. As expected, the crapware eventually times out, and then the launcher itself puts up a popup which says something like "Updated needed. Do you want to update now?"

Selecting "yes" downloads all the updated files. OK, actually it downloads half of the files, and then Akamai has to time out again, another launcher popup, and then you get the other half of the files.

Certainly less than ideal, but at least an option for anyone who has qualms about using the alternate launchers.

This approach actually works pretty well when there is no update and you just want to launch the game to play. However, if Turbine doesn't get its act together and fix this relatively soon, I'll probably take the time to review the source code for an alternative launcher and build my own executable from it.

GermanicusMaximus wrote on Mar 12^th, 2014 at 7:07pm:


Been using nothing but pyLotro for ages now, simply because it's faster than the official launcher. If I had to wait for a "time out" like you're suggesting, I'd probably kill myself first.

https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php/438330-Akamai-NetSession-and-DDO

Interesting statement to read.

Bill Z Bubb wrote on Mar 15^th, 2014 at 1:11pm:



Oh please stop spamming the customer list form Akamai.. it means absolutely nothing.
It's all the customers... some of them will use the netsession thingie, but most of them will just use the regional distribution and loadsharing for websites... or just the plain website hosting ( with regional distribution ).

That least is has absolutely no meaning for the topic at hand.
I can prove that Turbine ( DDOclient.exe actually ) has been using Akamai services long before the Netsession fiasco. But they were using the hosting and distributed loadsharing service.

and if you read the fucking post I linked you'll see that they have taken most of our grief into account and that netsession will be removed and made to work like Pando did.
( so if you have already the game downloaded you will not have to install it )

mystafyi wrote on Mar 15^th, 2014 at 4:09pm:


It has not been removed... yet.

But in the end we will be able to use the launcher without akamai installed.
and we will be able to install the game ( provided we saved the files somewhere ) without having to install akamai.