Occasional Observations

And so my BBC iPlayer trial has hit the rocks. "Sorry, you appear to be outside the UK" and therefore no downloads. Ah well, it was worth a try and to be honest I'd never heard of any of the programmes that were on offer, so just chose one at random to test the download.

What's particularly interesting is that even though I "closed" the iPlayer application, "Kservice.exe" is still running and seems to be the cause of a lot of network activity. This little beastie was installed as part of the iPlayer set-up.

Could it be that although I'm outside the UK and therefore "not allowed" to watch the BBC, I'm still able to "help out" in the file-sharing process?

According to its entry in the Windows console, Kservices.exe is a "Delivery Manager Service". It's pretty easy to switch off (for good) - run services.msc, go into the properties of kservice, change its startup type to disabled, and don't forget to manually stop the service if it's still running.

Immediately I stopped it, the network activity in my VM ceased.

Kservice has a sister - khost.exe, or the "KonTiki Secure Delivery Plug In". Today, Kontiki belongs to Verisign, but their website doesn't return any results for khost or kservice.

Deep on the BBC's website is the Kservice removal tool, Kclean although I'm going to leave the software in my VM, in its disabled state - ready for the next time I'm in the UK.

Labels: iptv, nerd