Distastful Advertising Continues: "Gatoring"

iforgotmyfirstlogon sent us a link to an article on CNet about Gatoring, a fabulous new advertising technique where advertising buy key words and pop up windows over competitors. The kicker is that this is a byproduct of a commonly installed activex plugin. And its only gonna get worse.

Comments

Circular references?

[Rick the Red]

What if going to the GM web page triggered one plug-in to open a window looking at the Ford web page, which triggered another plug-in to open a window looking at the Toyota web page, which triggered yet another plug-in to open a window looking at the GM web page, until all your RAM is consumed by dozens of self-opening web pages?

I figure it's a matter of when, not if.

Re:RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn to understand a joke, you humorless prick.

Re:just another nigger talking big over tha intern

[Anonymous Coward]

meept!

goatsex

[ccoder]

I know that guy is annoying but gator reminds me of that a-hole's graphic :-)

Re:They just don't get it.

[Tackhead]

> Some friends and I were just talking about this last night - when was the last time that you used RealPlayer?

A while ago. But the only reason was because I did some testing and discovered that you can make the ancient RealPlayer 5.0 (that didn't have a lot of spam included in its user interface) work just fine with RealPlayer G2 and RealPlayer 8 streams, by simply fux0ring around with the DLLs in C:\Windoze\Program Files\Common or somewhere like that.

Basically, you take a RP5 install, do a recursive DIR or ls over the filesystem.

Then (on an expendable system, naturally, that you've replicated from your production box), you install the upgrades required to play files encoded with the newer RealMedia codecs, and do another DIR or ls.

Then you diff the results and copy any new or modified DLLs onto your production system. Presto! RealPlayer 5 with "up-to-date" codecs.

Of course, that doesn't prevent Real from including spyware/phone-home in the DLLs, nor does it prevent RealPlayer 5 from auto-nagging you every few months to upgrade.

But it's a workable solution for all those old South Park episodes I acquired in 228K .RM files (a mixture of RealPlayer 5, G2, and RealPlayer 8 codecs) format before DiVX appeared.

Which, come to think of it, is about the only use I have for RealPlayer, since I don't have cable.

The porn industry wins again..

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen this for years in porn sites. You go & click for content and you get a full page advertisement of the same type of content. Big big pics.

Right at the bottom of the page is a small text link for the page you wanted.

And we look to who for standards?

[swordboy]

In all seriousness,

The only entity that has the power to strong-arm things like this out of existence is the same company that facilitates it.

Microsoft is very large and although I do not agree with every facet of the company, I *really* believe that they do hold the power to eliminate things like this. But why do they just turn their heads?

i worked for one of those companies

[virulent-333]

the technology we created was totally intrusive. if you're reading shakespeare's "romeo and juliet" and pfizer buys the keyword "romeo", then it will take you to the viagra page. all content was affected. this has limited potential for individual sites, but once you allow your system to get taken over and links changed to "preferred" links, we have a serious problem. there's not enough valid links on the web as is, and now whatever's left will soon to be advertisement. what the internet needs is a mute button like your t.v.

Re:They just don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh maybe we dont get it. When free TV and Radio started the only way to make money was to sell advertising space, hence commercials. Later when everyone switched to Cable and TV was no longer free, did commercials go away? No, now advertising dollars represent an important line on the income statement, and if a Broadcast Company doesnt make enough, investors go elsewhere. Now broadcasters actually advertise Commercial Free Time as a service to us, the viewer/listener. These internet schemes are not going to go away unless we refuse to put up with them. And really how is this different than a car dealer buying the billboard sign that is sitting right on top of his competitor's land?

Re:Typical

[Anonymous Coward]

Is anything *ever* changing for the better on a Slashdot story?

Yes. Apparently, we are supposed to be pleased that a bunch of fifteen-year-olds are taking over the world.

Re:They just don't get it.

[KagakuNinja]

I hear you. I just uninstalled Real on my home machine, because when trying to copy a CD it would: launch its own CD burning program (in addition to my Adaptec burner, which also auto launches), launch RealPlayer for the audio CD I just inserted in the other drive, then launch some kind of nag-ware to get me to upgrade something.

After the second time this happened, I uninstalled in a fit of rage. Of course, some tendrils are undoubtably still on my machine.

At work, I am trying to listen to some audio samples on web pages, and I keep getting "out of memory" warnings. The machine has 128MB, and RealPlayer still won't work, even after closing everything else. Just for laughs, I clicked on the "more help" button, and it took me to a worthless marketting hype page (with no trouble shooting tips whatsoever), AND it launched two popups!

The obvious solution

[krugdm]

There's one obvious solution to this problem:
J|HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH| m
a| x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x |d
f| Pre-Purchase your copy of Windows XP Today! |p
l| x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x |,
s| - - - - http://www.microsoft.com/ - - - - - |k
w| x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x |g
m|HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH| ,
and you won't have to look at them again!

Aahhh.... HELP!! call 911

[halftrack]

... it's the consumers' right because we're invited onto the desktop.

Who invited you? I didn't. Why don't you ask before you ship some extra 'goodies' along with what I downloaded? Why don't you let me deside what I want on my computer instead of almost telling me how to get rid of it? Why, why ...

This has got to be banned, because you don't have a choise whether or not you wan't it. You can turn of the TV when the comercials are on (at least look away,) you can easily ignore those banners currently advertising for Compaq and Opera and you don't have to look at all sponsor popups. (right-click, then chose close.) The regular popups we can accept because they pay for whatever service they're looking for.

I'm going to say one word: Ban it! (well, that's two actually)

another way out

[panopticon]

(I'm being serious, not trolling) Get a Mac. When you're in the minority, marketers won't waste their time with you.

So, so wrong

[Alcimedes]

You know, as a marketing major this is exactly the kind of thing that you're not supposed to do. People are exposed to advertising all the time now, it's getting out of hand. The average U.S. citizen see thousands of ads per day, and is getting to the point where they don't even notice them anymore.

At this point, the last thing you need to do is shove more ads into people's faces trying to get them to buy your product. Instead of trying to force people to buy what you make, you should be making what people want to buy.

It's all ass backwards, and in my opinion, we are seeing the beginning of the end for this type of advertising. The only way that marketing and advertising are going to succeed in the future is by giving people what they want, when they want it, not shoving their nose in it.

The pop-ups will get worse, until they are tuned out completely, like your little sister. Then the only ones left making money will be those who were smart about where they spent thier money, and actually put money into user-friendly areas. (Which is the reason for the huge surge in sponsership of sports, like it or lump it.)

This kind of crap is getting to the point where it's annoying enough that people are getting pissed off. Corporations are going to have to ask themselves if they few idiots they sucker in to buying their products through pop-ups is worth the teeming masses they alienated through annoying ads.

I know that I'll never be buying that stupid ass spy cam now, that's for sure.

Re:So, so wrong

[Talaran]

Okay, I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here for a moment. First off, I agree, popup ads, in general are evil. But I can't say I'm getting too upset by the idea that big companies are screwing each other around with this particular practice of "Gatoring". I mean, sure, it's slimy, but is it hurting the user/consumer (other than the fact that it's yet another annoying popup)? If I'm researching a particular product and someone points out to me that there's this other similar product that's possibly cheaper, I'd like to know about that. Obviously a lot of other people think that way too, which is why they do get such high click-through rates. So I'm not exactly shedding tears for the companies that have been victims of this practice, although I'd like to kick the guys that sell the popup ads in the first place.

Re:So, so wrong

[iforgotmyfirstlogon]

My GOD!

Someone from Marketing with their head screwed on straight! Are the stars all in alignment today, or is there just an eclipse somewhere I hadn't heard about?

-Freed

Re:So, so wrong

[malfunct]

The thing is, the people marketing don't give a flying flip about the product because they are 2 different entities in most cases.

I work closely with a web advertising agency and companies come to us and say "Make us an ad that people will look at and we will pay you XXX $'s" and so we make ads that we can prove people looked at. There are all sorts of ways to do this but that has nothing to do with my point.

As long as advertising is a "pay for views" or "pay for clicks" thing on the internet then advertising agencies are going to continue to make these nutty and annoying ads. Maybe they do squat for the manufacturers but in reality they actually do sell product. Its CRAZY how big of an increase in sales popup ads get. X10 was doomed from the start but their popup ad campaign actually did increase sales a HUGE amount.

I guess in the end I'm saying that even though all of you are annoyed by the ads, enough people fall for it that its worth spending the money on. If enough companies spend money advertising agencies will develop nutty and annoying ads and we are stuck. Same goes for spam, it wouldn't still be used if it didn't make money.

Re:So, so wrong

[yoha]

so as a Marketing Major, you have no real-world experience. if the book said so, then it must be true.

I don't mean to be too mean, but there are a lot of tiers of advertising. Obviously, companies like the Gap would not do this. But the Gap also doesn't do direct mail. Likewise, I get address label advertisements in direct mail, but they aren't advertising on "Friends." Different strategies work for different companies.

Re:So, so wrong

[DickPhallus]

ha! The corps will continue doing this as long as the allmighty buck keeps rolling in, I emailed gator and kazaa and hotext (all of which were already installed on my work machine by the last goon who used this terminal) and didn't even get a response. I think more adverts will be the standard to come. Relief is there for those who want it...

Re:So, so wrong

[M-2]

Another thing you can do is modify the hosts file on your machine. I cut down the ads by a tremendous amount by doing that. (I did it for my father as well - two minutes work, two weeks of no-questions.)

I snagged mine down from this link at Gorilla Designs who I don't know, but figure hey, might as well mention who it is. It keeps both Mozilla and IE mostly free of ads at the same time. (You do need to keep it updated, though, but that's simple with a text editor.)

Re:So, so wrong

[Rev.LoveJoy]

You make a great point about ad saturation. As I read the article I was thinking about how due to the explosion of web sites and online marketing in the past 5 years it has become second nature to tune everything out. I would wager I am not the only person who surfs on a windows box and has become blindingly fast with ALT-F4 and ALT-TAB.

The question that remains in my mind is: where is the scale now? You mention selling a couple of suckers at the expense of pissing off the masses, but aren't we there now? I think online marketers have not caught on to how peeved most users are about the gimmicks (read: dirty tricks) they use to redirect our browsing efforts.

Recently, I was floored to see my own mom, a calm woman in her middle years, have a cursing fit at some web site that broght pop up windows to her screen. Point being, we are not talking about just the geeks anymore; it does not take a fool to realize when they are being led by the nose.

Hey, thanks for your post, cheers
-- RLJ

Re:So, so wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way that marketing and advertising are going to succeed in the future is by giving people what they want, when they want it, not shoving their nose in it.

Yes this is trollbait, but here I go:
Napsters trading of mp3's give people what they want when they want it, but alas, it's been ruled illegal to serve the customer the way the customer wants to be served these days. Now it's: "You MUST buy our product, and you'll like it, bitch!" Today's corporate climate reminds me of the goatse.cx guy.

Re:So, so wrong

[Rev.LoveJoy]

You are totally correct. I think I posted before the blood in my caffeine system was up to the correct levels.

Frightening that you got my gist, regardless?

Cheers,
- RLJ

Re:So, so wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Just imagine how much it'll suck when all the sites you read fold under because they've lost their advertising revenue.

Re:So, so wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

if pro is the opposite of con, the the opposite of progress would be....

... regress.

Re:So, so wrong

[trcooper]

Where does Burger King build a new store? Generally across the street from a McDonalds, right? They do this why? To attract people who are interested in their competitor's similar products.

I myself majored in advertising, and this is exactly what you are supposed to do. You hit people who are interested in your product. If I go to a site looking for memory, and another site pops up an ad with free shipping on all memory orders, this ad is going to have a much higher success rate then if say, it were at the top of the page on /.

You're right, pop-up ads will get worse. Significantly, but these ads aren't the beginning of the end. It's the end of the beginning. The industry is starting to wise up and realize that silly banner ads don't work when they aren't tuned into you. The geeks and traditional advertising washouts are getting out, and people who know what they're doing are taking over.

These types of ads are going to be much more successful, because we will learn to live with them. This may seem underhanded, and it may very well be, but people will tolerate them because they don't want to pay for content. Banners caused the same response as this.

At this point, the last thing you need to do is shove more ads into people's faces trying to get them to buy your product. Instead of trying to force people to buy what you make, you should be making what people want to buy.

You're a marketing major? That will be your job someday, bud. Your job is going to make people need what you have to sell. People don't want the product? Fix the people, or hit the street.

If you're a marketing major, and afraid to piss people off (or piss on them, for that matter), or think that ethics should get in the way, you're best of to change your major. Geology would probably be nice because you don't have to deal with people. A customer your competitor has, is a customer you don't have.

Marketing and Advertising are certainly not the place for people who are idealistic about privacy, or believe "the truth will set them free". Myself, I was lucky enough to get into programming.

Re:So, so wrong

[Swaffs]

These are all very good points.

I think the only advertising on the net that has ever really caught my attention is Thinkgeek. Why? Because they sell products that interest me. Simple as that.

Consider too for a second the difference between a little banner for Thinkgeek at the top of Slashdot to a pop-up spycam ad. The banner sits up there all the time, unobtrusively, but yet still eye-catching. The pop-up ads however, I can't close fast enough, and once closed their gone. I never actually look at those ads save to gawk at the hot girl for a couple seconds. And if I do catch the name or logo of the company reponsible it just incites an ire in me for them. Now which do you think is more effective?

The same goes for radio ads. The ones that make me laugh or think or enjoy them in some way create a happy image of that company in my mind. On the other hand, the crappy, overplayed ads cause me great irritation. I usually end up switching stations if one comes on, and have been tempted to call the radio station and tell them to stop playing those horrible ads or they'll lose more listenership like myself.

I think that the old theory of getting a company's name into the heads of the masses at all costs is severely flawed. People make associations with those names which can later affect them. How many people say to themselves "Hmm... I need a long distance carrier... AT&T keeps phoning me and pestering me during supper, I think I'll go with them"? Compare that to how many people are pleasantly surprised when the telemarketer from X company actually respects your response of "I'm not interested". The latter company establishes a good image in the consumer's mind, and will be more likely to get their business down the road.

Re:So, so wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Burger King built stores near McDonalds because they didn't have good demographic research. So they just copied their competitor. Maybe they also felt that more people would perfer BurgerKing given an equal choice, but it hasn't worked out that way.

Re:So, so wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny thing about school... they always teach you the wrong things. I also went to school for marketing (specialty: PR), and boy did reality hit hard. In school, we were taught quite a few high ideals (always work to tell the truth, don't manipulate your audience, appeal to your audience's needs, etc.). It took all of three days of work in the real-world to realize that this had nothing in common with the real world. I've come to believe that my teachers really just wanted to ease their conscience -- back when they were marketers, they were 'helping their customers' back (blah, blah blah). As for these rather annoying ads: They'll work quite well. They exploit a weakness in the competition and they seem to do it very well. After all if I see a widget for $500 at one site and then an add for $450 pops up from a competitor, will I check it out? Of course. Especially, if I already trust the competitor. I hate saying this, but marketing isn't a field for someone with a conscience. Thats why I left.

Re:So, so wrong

[modemboy]

yeah, it hit home for me the other day when I saw a tv commercial for plastic. WTF? is there a human being that does not know what plastic is? What exactly is the demographic they're tring to reach here, 2 year olds just learning to talk?

Re:So, so wrong

[jariv]

Where does Burger King build a new store? Generally across the street from a McDonalds, right? They do this why? To attract people who are interested in their competitor's similar products.

So you're basicly saying that if telco runs also an ISP it is OK for them to 'busy signal' competitors helpdesk because a) they can and b) they possibly get customers?

The choise thingy is important there since you have already chose where to buy.

Re:So, so wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a marketing major? That will be your job someday, bud. Your job is going to make people need what you have to sell. People don't want the product? Fix the people, or hit the street.

Well.. it's very, VERY hard to "fix the people". You're talking tens of millions of advertising dollars, and many times it's impossible to fix the people. How many millions has Apple thrown into the "megahertz myth" campaign and still nobody believes it (Hell, I use a mac and I believe maybe 10% of it).

If you're really a marketing major, you'd know that half of it is making the right product. Burger Kings are next to McDonalds because it's the same customers, you're right. But on the other hand, you DONT see Burger King putting leaflets on your windshield, that's annoying.

Talk to your customers, don't piss your product onto their face.

Re:So, so wrong

[mysticalreaper]

Yes i'm nitpicking, i know :-)

it does not take a fool to realize when they are being led by the nose.

Don't you mean that it doesn't take a genious or perhaps a geek to see when they're being led by the nose? Or maybe: Even a fool can see when they're being led by the nose. Something like that?

Of course, perhaps my grasp of english is slipping...

BTW, i totally agree with your post, and i could very well imagine my mom responding the same way
to those very annoying ads. Fortunately for her, she doesn't surf the web that much.

Re:So, so wrong

[Idaho]

You're right, pop-up ads will get worse.
...
These types of ads are going to be much more successful, because we will learn to live with them.

I already learned how to live with them. Add this line to your Mozilla's prefs.js:

user_pref("capability.policy.default.Window.open", "noAccess");

And you're fixed.

This is one of the major reasons I'm using Mozilla for everyday browsing now. Every irritating banner I see gets a 'right click->block images from this server', and voila, another Banner Advertizer that will never bother me again.

Same goes for cookies: it's really irritating when every site has to ask if it may store a cookie. Therefore, I use the default setting 'accept all cookies'. Every now and then, I delete all crappy *ad*=Your-Unique-Tracking-Id-Here-cookies using the Preferences->Security menu, while enabling 'don't allow deleted cookies to be accepted again'. Another problem solved.

I guess similar programs/plugins exist for IE (but, as you might have noticed, IE doesn't run on Linux :-)

Re:So, so wrong

[Idaho]

But irritating ads can also work the other way.

A week ago I got a popup in Explorer that

1. Didn't have a window border (so I couldn't close it!)
2. Couldn't even be closed by right-clicking->close on the taskbar

This was just on a default install of Win2K with medium security settings and no crappy plugins installed!

This annoyed the hell out of me. So much, that I took down the companies name and decided not to buy something from them, *EVER* (not that I probably would've, otherwise, but hey :-)

Again, using Mozilla with some extra options set (unfortunately some things have to be done outside the GUI, currently..) solved most of my problems with irritating ads (i.e. I never see them anymore :-)

Re:So, so wrong

[PD]

THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTH ANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHAN KYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKY OUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU

You don't know how much this make me happy.

I know it's offtopic, but I've got karma to burn and I'm FRESH OUT OF POPUP ADS!!!!!!

Re:So, so wrong

[McQualude]

At this point, the last thing you need to do is shove more ads into people's faces trying to get them to buy your product. Instead of trying to force people to buy what you make, you should be making what people want to buy.

Often it's not the advertising departments fault. The brass screams "DO SOMETHING!" and they have to do something, even if it's the wrong thing, to keep their jobs intact. It starts at the top and rolls downhill.

Re:So, so wrong

[Darth Paul]

Oh, you again! So how about you tell me all the good things about XP, just one more time?

the internet is based in the real world

[rebelcool]

and the real world has laws. Get over it already.

Re:the internet is based in the real world

[aozilla]

The real world also has physical aspects to it. Without physical aspects, laws are unnecessary.

Some more disturbing facts

[friday2k]

As many of you might be aware, Gator also offers a so called form filler that fills your personal information into merchant forms (shipping address, credit card number and such). So once I decided to install this "thing" to try it out. Works fine. Then I wanted to look a little bit into security. They do not publish how they encrypt your sensitive data, they only claim that yourt information is encrypted and absolutely secure. Well, well, I emailed them. After 3 emails to their customer service I finally got the response that they do not publish how they do security and encryption (may I assume it is ROT-13 then!?) for SECURITY REASONS! Now I can only say, be afraid, be very afraid of the next worm ...

Re:Some more disturbing facts

[Tek Neek]

The latest Mozilla build also has something similair to this. It will automagically fill in your info on order forms and such (such as name, address, email address, ...) You can also put in your SS#, credit card number, exp date and such. I'm not sure exactly how mozilla stores this info.

.:j:.

Re:Some more disturbing facts

[friday2k]

Besides, you shouldn't answer flames from A/Cs. You don't read slashdot much, do you? Well, actually I read too much /. and there might be a good reason for somebody posting as an A/C. Like working there. What you describe might be reasonable if somebody there read too much Applied Cryptography ... So it might be worth responding (like I do now). I missed the closing lie tag (maybe my eyes interpreted it as an opening tag for your little flame). Sad to hear that nobody I am aware of took the time yet to reengineer the whole application. Maybe I should ... *sigh*

Re:Some more disturbing facts

[cweber]

Users should apply some common sense!

In the offline world would you accept a low-cost, flashy looking safe from some no name company claiming it was absolutley safe and fireproof? And when you want to see some data on what sort of materials went into the construction of the box, they refuse to divulge anything. Would you still take it and use it? Thought so.

It is so easy to click and accept whatever looks good and flashy and costs little (if anything), simply because one does not have to look any further. But then you get what you paid for. Switch off your brain, spend zero thought and all the sleazebags will gladly come and start to suck time and energy from you.

Re:Some more disturbing facts

[Anonymous Coward]

However in defense of the other poster you didn't open up the lie with an opening tag
LOL!, heh. You're right.

Re:Some more disturbing facts

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure exactly how mozilla stores this info.
Then you aren't interested enough in looking it up in the source.
I guarantee you, however, that some security expert has been.
And if it had been anything less than secure, we would all have known about it long ago.
GO OPENSOURCE SECURITY!!

Re:Some more disturbing facts

[swinginSwingler]

Knowing something about how the HTTP protocol works helps a little here. All mozilla does is cache the form and the corresponding fields you filled in locally on your own computer. Also, it's very easy to disable if you want. Like one check box. Nothing sinister going on there.

Re:Some more disturbing facts

[Anonymous Coward]

After 3 emails to their customer service I finally got the response that they do not publish how they do security and encryption (may I assume it is ROT-13 then!?) for SECURITY REASONS! [...]
Actually, I reverse engineered Gator a while ago, because of just such a concern, and I found that the information is protected via RSA strong encryption with a passphrase of the private key that's based on an md5 hash of the password you give gator, with the 'salt' coming from three windows files that are specific to your computer (one having to do with the registry), and one of which is only available to InstallShield. (All this means that any trojan would have to use InstallShield in order to get the information from Gator, and it would still have to be able to guess your password. It also means that you can't just 'restore' Gator from a previous version of windows, nor can you upgrade windows without losing your Gator information -- unless you update to a version of windows that would be okay with your importing your previous registry, and even then you would have had to have backed it up yourself.) So, all in all, it's /very/ secure. Even if you publish your Gator password, it wouldn't be a piece of cake to build a trojan that, when you execute it with super privileges, sends your information out. It would be easier to build a trojan that's a password sniffer that waits until you're at a merchant site, and, once Gator (or you, manually) has filled in your information, send back the info from the appropriate fields (Even behind the ****'s that appear password fields -- remember, there's a simple hack to make these things visible. They're only hidden from the user, not scrambled in memory...).

So anyway, basically I found that Gater is as secure as typing in the information yourself.




(</lie>) Is that what you wanted to hear? Get a life, it's just merchant addresses and credit cards numbers. Yeesh. You can dispute all those credit card charges and who cares if some malicious hacker has your address? If you're going to go around executing every trojan you get, buddy there's a helluvalot more you should be worried about than that you're using a less-than-optimally-secure Gator. Like, when the last time was that you imaged your hard-drive onto a bunch of CDs and manually calculated their checksums? Because unless you're doing that, and comparing your system files to the files on your CD's (with a bootable CD you made yourself on a freshly formatted system...)your system is only as secure as the least trustable binary you have ever executed as God. And, of course, security is a moot point if, as most applications under windows are able, your trojan modifies your startup files so that windows displays a message about fixing partition inconsistencies, and unbeknownst to you as you watch the percentage bar climb up and up, your hard drive is being formatted with multiple wipes of random data on every sector, at the end of which your MBR is scrambled. A ramdrive of 60 kilobytes on loadup and a cleverly designed little program is all it takes to be able to load a program that can trash every single writable peripheral that's connected to your computer. Including windows NT. Including linux. So shut your face about "but Gator doesn't strong - freaking - encrypt all my personal files! How can I protect my privacy while executing arbitrary trojans?"

Loser.

Re:Some more disturbing facts

[friday2k]

Alright, you took the time and reengineered the whole thing. I agree that a) taking RSA as a basis and salting it from three independent sources makes it pretty secure. I also agree that it is almost as secure as typing it in yourself because writing a little keyboard sniffer is not that big of a problem (or, if you care for it, a memory sniffer that scans memory for 16 digit numbers that make sense with a LUN check). Now we are coming to your little pseudo educated flame here. I stated worms, not Trojans. There is a pretty big difference between the two, one needs to be executed, the other executes himself by making use of any "backdoors" that might be present. Like some jerk running a webserver on his default Windows 2k Server installation (I have Server, that is much cooler than your Workstation version, look I even have a webserver when I type in my computers name). Now, as CodeRedII has proven, somebody might put a little trojan on your system, execute it, and, by overwriting registry values and planting a little explorer.exe in your root drives, make it reappear everytime again. My point is, without strong protection, and, which is according to your analysis given in Gator, I can go and steal data. And, you state protection by policy, yes the consumer might be protected. But it might get very annoying if you go shopping with your Visa Check Card that somebody empties your account in the first place ...
On a sideline, you made some good points, reverse engineering the software (or maybe you work there being an AC) and I certainly appreciate that. BUT, you should watch your language because even if you made good points, you put yourself into a bad light by flaming off like you did. I also would like to see the analysis of your reengineering efforts, maybe you can post a link to them ...

Re:Some more disturbing facts

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude,
this was a troll on my part. That's why I didn't quote you far enough that you said "worm" and purposefully pretended you were talking about trojans. I'm sorry I made you type out a whole big response.

You also missed my closing <lie> html tag, which was meant to indicate that the first half of my post is bullshit.

Besides, you shouldn't answer flames from A/Cs. You don't read slashdot much, do you?

Ps. Your family eats snails and you fuck your dog. See?
lie: untruthful statement that is meant to deceive.

Re:Some more disturbing facts

[ergo98]

Hehe...the falacy of open source: Because it's open source of course some super duper expert has poured over it and deemed it viable, right? In reality for all we know it is XOR 255.

Re:Some more disturbing facts

[ergo98]

Excellent troll and indeed I was quite impressed by the scope of your fiction. However in defense of the other poster you didn't open up the lie with an opening tag.

Re:Some more disturbing facts

[Fesh]

Wrong analogy. I'd take it, but not use it for anything important. In this case, however, it's more like the box instantly teleports all your important documents into itself from wherever they happen to be...

Re:Some more disturbing facts

[jesser]

The latest Mozilla build also has something similair to this. It will automagically fill in your info on order forms and such (such as name, address, email address, ...) You can also put in your SS#, credit card number, exp date and such. I'm not sure exactly how mozilla stores this info.

There are two options for how you can have Mozilla store your form info:
- obscured: I think Mozilla uses an obscuring mechanism slightly more sophisticated than ROT13, but anyone with read access to your file system would be able to extract the information, because the information is not protected by a password.
- encrypted: You specify a master password when you enable this feature. Mozilla will ask you for the master password before autofilling a form. You can specify whether it asks you at each form, only after restarting the browser, or after some amount of idle time. Again, I don't know the exact algorithm, but I assume it's decent since Mozilla already has crypto functions built in to handle https sites.

(These options are all under Edit > Preferences > Privacy and Security, in the subcategories Web Passwords and Master Passwords.)

Of course, you can always opt to not have Mozilla store your passwords and credit card number. It always asks before storing a password, and it won't try to remember your credit card number unless you specifically tell it to.

What in the hell??!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

For the life of me, I can't understand why everyone is up in arms about this. This software is optional and easy as hell to uninstall. I've encountered it and took 30 seconds out of my day to rid myself of it. Who cares if it's included in software you download and they don't tell you about it? Tough luck, you're downloading free software. If you paid for it then you'll have room to bitch. I think the idea is innovative as hell. I'd rather have software like this that I could get rid of and never have to deal with banner ads. But I'll deal with banner ads because I'm getting free content. If you pay then you can argue against advertising. //AC

thats just a popup

[rebelcool]

but imagine typing in americanairlines.com and being sent to delta instead.

True hijacking, in the sense of the word. Technically, it would be trivial to accomplish.

Belch....

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, just what we need. More advertisements. Thankfully on slashdot there is only one ad. Unlike those geocities (yahoo) websites with 10 ads all over the places. Thanks Slashdot.

My only question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Has a business method patent already been filed for this?? :)

Re:What's worse

[bartle]

I think this post was fair game, I don't see why it was moderated down. One of the wonderful things about Slashdot discussions is that they expand beyond the confines of the original topic. Anyway,

I really hate those watermarks that appear on TV in the corners. I don't need them to tell me what station I'm watching.

Maybe you know what show you're watching but not everybody does. As the number of channels available on cable and the like increase, the stations continue to get nervous that maybe they're not distinguishing themselves enough from their competitors. I personally think it's a valid strategy, the cable stations do have a tendancy to run together and it's a benefit to be able to glance down and see what you're watching. The main disadvantage is that we'll probably be stuck with them forever, long after the technology provides a way to toggle them on and off.

Gatoring and XP

[jstrohm]

Anybody else see how XP and Gator are complementary technologies? As in, you're running XP and you encounter the word "apple" of the FreshFruits_R_Us.com website. Immediately you get redirected to microsoft.com and are bombarded with 17 gatored ads sponsored by the PC box builders who gave Bill Gates the most money this week. If you think that this scenario is repugnant, complain here: http://www.whitehouse.com When you return, let us know just HOW repugnant you think XP and gator really are.

Yes it is silly.

[cicadia]

in meatspace, if i go into a ford dealership and put a big ad for chevy up in the middle of the showroom, they're not going to keep it up. Why? Well for one its private property, but also because its just plain ridiculous.

Guess what - What you see on your monitor when you direct your browser to www.ford.com is not a Ford dealership. It is not Ford property. Hell - it isn't even the ford.com web server. It's the output of YOUR browser. It probably doesn't even look anything like the output of MY browser.

Yes, the _actual_ HTML written by a web designer for Ford is copyrighted material. And your browser, and my browser, and the broswer of that guy down the street who just installed Gator, or Kazaa, are all rendering the same copyrighted HTML. They just do it a little differently.

Now, if you hack into the ford.com web server, and "put up a big ad for chevy" in the middle of their homepage, then yes, you have probably trespassed onto Ford private property, and done a couple of other things they can get you arrested for. And they especially won't like it because it advertises a competitor.

But if all you're doing is installing a program which pops up a chevrolet.com website when you go to ford.com, or even if you're writing that program in the first place, you're doing nothing wrong.

I control what my computer does when it renders a web page. What you are proposing is equivalent to legislation saying that I can't write notes on the Ford dealership ad in MY yellow pages (Or that the phone company can't put a GM dealership ad on the same page as that Ford ad).

It is silly. The solution to this (if there is really a problem in the first place) is in education, not legislation.

</rand>

Re:Going to say this anyways

[Black Parrot]

> This is obviously a flame, and I know I'm going to lose what meager karma points I have with this, but I'm going to say it anyways.

Those who would sacrifice their freedom of speech for karma deserve neither freedom of speech nor karma.

To pare a phrase.

Re:Ive seen it..

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to waste a lot of time complaining about slashdot posts that or non-offensize and of about average quality.
Perhaps you should concern yourself with modding down posts like this one where people ask you to:

Please Die

thanks

I've seen this right here on Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out the NewsForge banner... "More news than Slashdot and blah blah blah..."

Does This Mean That We're Going To See

[robbyjo]

the "Spank the monkey" spanked by the competitor's ad?

Or the X10 ads popped along with pr0n...? :-) Just my 2c...

How XP will (can) solve this problem -

[sourcehunter]

Microsoft could actually help here quite a bit - and they have good reason to.

Anyone remember this article from a few days ago about WinXP blocking certain device drivers because of potential flaws based on crash data? I'm SURE that could be widended to include programs and OCXs. Here's what we need to do...

1. Get Microsoft to expand their block list to include software too
2. Have a bunch of people "Break" the OCX so it really fouls things up
3. Have these people submit the crash info to Microsoft

POOF! Microsoft's auto-update feature for XP blocks the software...

Anyone know any XP core programers?

Re:What's worse

[Anonymous Coward]

Commercials interrupts TV programs; station idents don't [look up the word "interrupt" if you're curious].

But, every 500 or so scan lines, my signal gets interrupted with a network logo that continues for 60 or 70 more scan lines, before the picture refreshes...

They put them there, obviously, to make it awkward for you to tape shows.

Ohhhh..... I thought that was what the commercials were for...

What Ad-aware can DO!

[cybersmith]

AD aware, per their website, detects and deletes the following types of spyware: Web3000, Gator, Cydoor, Radiate/Aureate, Flyswat, and Conducent/TimeSink as well as the non-adware Comet Cursor. Did I just hear a rounds of cheers?

Check out Ad Aware at:
http://www.lavasoft.de/aaw/

Re:What Ad-aware can DO!

[xXgeneric nicknameXx]

a new US lavasoft site has been launched...youll find it at http://www.lavasoftusa.com

Sounds to me like extortion

[iceT]

So, you buy add-space on a web-site, or better yet, serve up pages on your OWN site, and you have to pay 'protection' money to keep your competitors from displaying pop-up ads over the top of YOUR webserver..

I'm thinking two things:

1) copyright enfringement?

and

2) I wonder if a guy named GUIDO sells the insurance..?

Good thing Konqueror supports ActiveX

[Ulwarth]

It's a good thing the latest version of Konqueror supports ActiveX, then. I'd hate to miss out on all that great advertising!

Re:What's worse

[Anonymous Coward]

Commercials interrupts TV programs; station idents don't [look up the word "interrupt" if you're curious].

They put them there, obviously, to make it awkward for you to tape shows.

Re:It's illegal

[jeffphil]

IANAL. It wouldn't be considered illegal under copyright law. However, it could be considered a trademark violation because it is "purposely misleading" people from a site that I am assuming has trademarks. Isn't this why M$ pulled the Smart Tags feature?

Re:Again, the youthful naivete' of the internet..

[TheMidget]

> In traditional media outlets, particularly newspaper and radio, companies can specifically request or be GUARANTEED that advertisements for competing products or services will NOT appear within x-many column inches of newspaper or x-minutes of radio play.

This gatoring is actually much worse: it's more like the consumer unknowingly bought "special" batteries for his radio, which have the interesting property of changing your ad into an ad for your compitor, without your consent nor the station's.

Or like the consumer unknowingly bought "special" sunglasses which make him see poster ads for your competitor on your shop's walls that are not really there.

Or more realistically: like a billboard company that, instead of having its own billboards, just "uses" its competitors by sneaking up at night and replacing their posters...

People were outraged at smart tags, because of the rather theoretical possibility that some content of their pages might be misinterpreted due to the presence of the tags. However, this gatoring is much worse: it specifically targets the type of contents that the webmaster cares most about monetarily: ads. This plugin masterfully not only defrauds the original advertiser but also the webmaster! And all this without contributing as much as one dime to the content of the sites it defaces in such a way! At least, in the playboy case, the search engine chose to run those ads, rather than having them forced upon itself using some sneeky ActiveX.

Re:which

[WNight]

I use two configurations depending on which computer I'm at.

At work, I use Junkbuster, and Webwasher, though I really only need Webwasher. I use WebWasher because it stops popups, and is easy to turn off with a single click, if I need to access a site that depends on that stuff. Junkbuster is also used to do the plain regexp blocking on known sites, and also as a proxy for my other work computers which are on my own network instead of the main company network.

At home, Proximitron, because it does everything, and I'm never required to go to a site that uses crappy popups or anything so not having a one-button toggle isn't too big of a deal.

Re:It's illegal

[Kenyaman]

It's apparantly not changing any content. What is is doing, in effect, is stealing traffic from your competitors. This is quite possibly a trademark violation (like Circuit City putting a big Best Buy sign out front to trick people intending to go to Best Buy into going to Circuit City instead).

It's much like putting your competitor's trademarks in your "meta" tags to get search engine hits for your competitor to show your site. You can use generics, but not trademarks. That's the whole point of a trademark.

Re:You're wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Write a script that will restart artsd when it dies.
2. Explain to him why he can't play windows media files
3. Explain to him why he can't play the idiotic shockwave game of the week
4. Explain to him why the .avi hack of the week won't work on his system
5. Explain to him why "Your internet connection is not optimized" every time is shows up.

Rember this is the kind of person who want's the idiotic activex or whatever plugins.

Re:What's worse

[Anonymous Coward]

Off-topic, my ass. This post makes (albeit in a roundabout way) a great point that as long as people *need* to do this type of advertising intrusion because they aren't able to make money any other way, this kind of crap will continue. If you don't pay for content, expect that someone will make you pay indirectly.

A Note About "Privacy"

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Check this out. In the second window (titled A Note About Privacy) that pops up during Gator installation, there are a few messages regarding their privacy policy. Here's their third point:

• - To help you fill in forms and apsswords and
• bring you offers, Gator and OfferCompanion remember where and when you surf the Web. We will not share this information with anyone.

If they're going to bring me offers tailored to my interests, it would seem likely that they will track where and when I surf the Web. Yet they promise not to 'share' this information with others. Offering advertisers the chance to directly target their product at me, because I am a user of who regularly visits definitely consitutes sharing my information.

Scary how many people might click right through that without reading it...

Gator shouldn't be trusted.

[EndlessMe]

I don't know how this works with current version, but more then half year ago when I was using Gator somehow it keept disconneting me from the net. Always after 15 minuts online my modem disconneted.

Now, You may think that this was not Gator's fault - wrong. Killing Gator's process helped for current Windows session, and uninstalling it helped for good :)

Even more Gatoring...

[VivianC]

Ya know, I've been noticing a resurgance of gatoring at bars and weddings during the song "Shout".

It's gotta be pretty scarey when your website throws itself to the floor and starts thrashing like a drunk Belushi.

Toga! Toga!

Re:it's already gotten worse

[matrix29]

Would you be interested in Mailing Death ?

You can. It's cheap and easy. When you think of spyware and online scams, just give a "thank you" to the pioneering work of the Unibomber.

Or perhaps the spyware jerks and online scammers out to be thinking very much about the Unibomber. Push your customers and they push back permanently. I get angry, but there are plenty of people ready to get even.

Worse?

[Templar]

No matter what these companies claim, it is not obvious which packages are being installed. Download Package A, and have Package B, C, & D installed as processes which actively change your content. Not exactly fair play.

Far worse though (in my opinion) is Morpheus. Every time I turned on my computer, I'd be greeted with pop-up ads... before even running a browser.

Instead of outlawing software like this, let's just legalize beating the crap out of the people who write it.

Re:Isn't Slashdot pro-competition?

[Anonymous Coward]

The argument is not that Gatoring or whatever is violating copyright laws and should be illegal. The argument is that it is immoral, and should be frowned upon, and that companies advertising using this method should be informed that they are alienating customers, thus convincing them not to advertise by that method.

Moreover, the main issue is that programs like Gator and Toptext are being installed in the background by the installers of random freeware or commercial programs without making it absolutely clear to the user what, exactly, is being installed, or what it does. This is immoral, and may be illegal; even if it is not illegal, it is important to discuss and be aware of these things. I don't particularly think it's a terribly good idea to take legal action against gator, but i personally think that the slashdot community should try to push education of the Great Unwashed to the point where they understand a few basic points of Computer Safety. People should understand "carefully read over the contents of software you install for advertising trojans" the way they understand "don't run programs sent from people you don't know without running a virus check on it first". Education, and nonlitigous activist pressure (letterwriting campaigns, etc) on companies that install trojans like Gator, is the best way to deal with the problem, and i don't think promoting user education makes an anti-DMCA fanatic particularly hypocritical at all.

Isn't Slashdot pro-competition?

[JohnDenver]

With all the rants on patents, trademark disputes, and other monopolistic disputes do we really want to set a precident barring a company from advertising the competition when another companies trademark is involved???

This isn't a problem. It's clearly within a content provider's right to provide whatever advertisment they want and under whatever conditions they want.

Clearly this is in the consumers best interest if they opt to use a service that employs gatoring in the first place.

In 1999, Playboy filed suit against Excite.com and Netscape in an attempt to prohibit them from delivering adult ads when visitors searched for the term "playboy." The suit charged that the alleged practice violated its trademark. Although the court dismissed the case earlier this year, Playboy has appealed the decision, and a hearing is scheduled in a Los Angeles federal district court in September.

I can't see how anybody would want to support anti-gatoring, especially with frivilous suits like the one above from Playboy.

While we're at it, I'd like the take the time to quote Larry Flint regarding playboy.

Its like if you don't make over $20,000 a year, you don't jerk off. Gentlemen, Playboy is mocking you!

Re:Isn't Slashdot pro-competition?

[Have Blue]

Exactly... Under universal competition, it would be acceptable for 1-800-Flowers to retaliate by DoSing FTD.com, and for FTD to respond to that by mailing letter bombs to 1-800-Flowers HQ. The code of honor being used here is probably something along the lines of "You don't try to steal customers while they are actually in the middle of executing a transaction with a competitor."

Re:Isn't Slashdot pro-competition?

[Paul Neubauer]

"Isn't Slashdot pro-competition?"

Folks are pro FAIR competition.

Re:Isn't Slashdot pro-competition?

[RedX]

Its like if you don't make over $20,000 a year, you don't jerk off. Gentlemen, Playboy is mocking you!

So Larry Flynt is giving away Hustler mags for free now? Didn't think so, just goes to show who is mocking who.

Re:Isn't Slashdot pro-competition?

[Anonymous Coward]

C'mon! +1 Interesting??? Everyone knows John Denver was a no talent hack who trolled about trees all day before he died. Now his digital reincarnation is a techy troll. Mod down -1 Troll.

Re:Going to say this anyways

[Anonymous Coward]

I think our choice to ignore ads is only sending advertisers the message that they aren't trying hard enough.

listen to bill clinton

[Anonymous Coward]

oral sex isn't fucking

Here comes the /. Gestapo

[slcdb]

It never ceases to amaze me how easily the /. Gestapo becomes aroused. As soon as someone starts doing something they don't like, they all scream, "BAN IT! SUE THEM! KILL THOSE BASTARDS!"

Get a grip! If the vast majority of consumers dislike a certain type of marketing practice enough, it will eventually cease to exist. This is the way free markets work. Let it run its course and the market will decide whether this type of advertising will survive or become extinct.

Re:Here comes the /. Gestapo

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're right, then somebody sure loves getting spammed, because I don't, and yet I get tons of the junk e-mail stuff.

Re:Here comes the /. Gestapo

[slcdb]

Oh, Christ! Thomas Jefferson is rolling in his grave!

Re:Here comes the /. Gestapo

[nysus]

Hey, the way democracy is supposed to work is that if people don't like something, they bitch and moan about it and then change it. So get a grip and quit bitching and moaning about people bitching and moaning. Thanks to bitchers and moaners like Tom Jefferson and Martin Luther King, this country has made some real progress.

Re:The origin of the term?

[ajakk]

Amen Brother!

on a side note

[Anonymous Coward]

A yankee was visiting down here when he stopped by the fishing pier. He saw some white boys in a speedboat towing a negro water skier behind. The yankee remarked "My, it's a nice surprise to see the races mingle so well down here.". The locals just smiled. When the yankee drove off, one good ole boy said "Friendly yankee, but he don't know shit about aligator fishing".

again proving the online maxim ...

[Frizzled]

the lower you sink, the better chance you have of turning a profit.

_f

Re:again proving the online maxim ...

[Anonymous Coward]

If the end doesn't justify the means, what does?

Re:again proving the online maxim ...

[cavemanf16]

From the article: Excite@Home sells advertising space "keyed" to trademark company names, but said "if there are objections (from owners of that name), we take the ad down," according to John Sullivan, associate general counsel at Excite@Home.

Has our corporate society (and society as a whole) degenerated so low that as long as know one knows, or complains, about your company's disrespectful, possibly illegal activities, then it must be OK? The end NEVER justifies the means. Too bad America has bought into the lie with billions in corporate greed.

Re:again proving the online maxim ...

[TCaptain]

Isn't that part of human nature?

Its not a crime if you don't get caught

Which seems is all anyone really believes these days

Re:again proving the online maxim ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ethically, the end doesn't justify the means. IE: A doctor and a crack dealer both want to make a million dollars. The doctor does so by helping cure sicknesses, the crack dealer by causing sickness. Obviously, they both made a million, but that does not justify the fact that the crack dealer broke the law and ethical standards to do so. Nothing should justify the means by which I attain something. The means are that by which I am judged for the ends I reach. Think of the means as that part of an OR statement involving the ends and the means, where if the means are ever False, the whole statement evaluates to False.

Re:again proving the online maxim ...

[jariv]

I think that Gator is call a 'floater'.

MS Copying Again?

[MackE]

Do you mean to say that trashing someone's page like in IE6 isn't an original MS idea? Imagine that!

The origin of the term?

[rkischuk]

I'm guessing it's called gatoring because of the way unwanted Florida Gator fans pop up and extol the virtues of Steve Spurrier during the discussion of anything related to college football?

Re:The origin of the term?

[errxn]

Speaking of unwanted Gator Fans....

Re:The origin of the term?

[Anonymous Coward]

Formula? Jesus, give the poor kid a teat already... do you want a baby that's always sick?

Americans, they deny babies the breast, put them all alone in a crib, cut off their foreskins (something Americans picked up from the Jews somehow, other Christians don't do that), and then wonder why they're so maladjusted and psychotic when they grow up...

Disclaimer: I am an American, I just think the way we treat our babies is sick.

Re:The origin of the term?

[errxn]

Unwanted Gator Fans? I didn't realize that there were any other kind....

Re:The origin of the term?

[sharkey]

Well, when my daughter is just fucking around with her bottle (chewing on the nipple, spitting her formula back out, etc.) my mother-in-law calls it "gatoring."

This practice seems similar. The page owners are fucking around with our browser windows and stability, our irritation levels and patience, and accomplishing no REAL positive results. I know that it makes me less interested in visiting them.

Re:The origin of the term?

[ethereal]

[Totally Offtopic, and not that I'm a Gator fan either, but]

Best sign seen during the Florida-FSU game a few years back:

"You can't spell FELON without NOLE"

Well, I thought it was funny...

Re:The origin of the term?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like this:

• Nothing greater than a Gator
• Its great to hate Florida State
• You cant spell scUM without UM
• FSU Florida's Secondrate University

Again, the youthful naivete' of the internet..

[Scot Seese]

..rears it's ugly head. To think that an avertiser can get away with these tactics is rediculous.

In traditional media outlets, particularly newspaper and radio, companies can specifically request or be GUARANTEED that advertisements for competing products or services will NOT appear within x-many column inches of newspaper or x-minutes of radio play.

If I were advertising my theoretical car dealership, what is the effectiveness of that ad if a SECOND companies' commercial runs right behind mine? What if they KNEW they could get that slot and intentionally undercut all my sale prices in THEIR ad? I'd cancel my ad run and refuse payment to the station, among other things.

This situation actually happened when I was working at a Northeast-Ohio computer company, when a popular area FM radio station ran OUR ad with a COMPETITOR'S ad right behind it! We actually called the competitor, said "do you know they are doing this?" upon which BOTH of us called the station manager threatening to cancel BOTH ad runs unless they were scheduled at least 3 minutes apart, per their agreement.

This has to be one of the better, shining examples of the "wild west" cowboy cavalier attitude so predominant on the internet running smack into the brick wall of common sense.

Hey, perhaps Microsoft should approach Andover, offer them four times their standard banner rates and plaster WindowsXP ads all over Slashdot.

Re:Again, the youthful naivete' of the internet..

[gmarceau]

Would you allow me to get into the mind of an advertiser for two seconds?

Why exactly were you *both* pissed that your adds were running together? From a consumer point of view, I get to hear two adds, decide which one is better and go there. For me it's all double A's.

Are you telling me you want to mislead as many as possible to go to your place? But won't exactly the same number of people be mislead to your competition? I don't understand.

Re:Again, the youthful naivete' of the internet..

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why exactly were you *both* pissed that your adds were running together?

Because ads are also made for brand awareness. Having two ads for the same kind of product in a row will dilute the impact.

Also, if the two ads get aired at the same time, your company will be remembered as "Yeah, one of the two companies that make product foo".

By having their ads in a row with a common products, the two brands will end beeing strongly related. This is not what the companies want. Even if they do exactly the same shit as the other company but appear totally disctinct (having strong brand differentiation).

Re:Again, the youthful naivete' of the internet..

[Anonymous Coward]

[3 examples deleted]

It is worse than that. They are not replacing competitors ads, but placing ads into the competitor corporate website/webstore/product reviews.
So a more pertinent meatspace example would be putting ads for your product into competitor store.

> People were outraged at smart tags, because of the rather theoretical possibility that some content of their pages might be misinterpreted due to the presence of the tags.

A few fundamental differences

* SmartTags are modifying the page itself. It is much much worse than a separate browser window
* SmartTags were made by Microsoft, not byRandom Sucker Inc thast will be featured on FuckedCompany.com as soon as they run out of cash
* SmartTags were pushed onto everyone, not only to the people that install gator.
* SmartTags were pushed by a company guilty of illegal predatory monopolistic behaviour.

Cheers,

--fred

Re:They just don't get it.

[ElJefe]

Some friends and I were just talking about this last night - when was the last time that you used RealPlayer?

That thing is annoying as all hell, it takes control of every filetype that it can by default, and it's almost impossible to make go away. And yet, they're still in business (the last time that I checked)...

-Chris

Re:Just Say No

[warpeightbot]

This makes linux based browsing more appealing.

You betcha. Especially Galeon, which allows you to turn Java and Javascript on and off at will from the Settings menu without mousing around (Alt-S, J and Alt-S, S respectively); there is a feature request in for the next release that will allow you to do the same with arbitrary plugins. Some sites I actually like Flash (like, say, User Friendly), but most of the time it sucks and crashes and generally annoys me because I can't just right-click on it and block it. So I leave flash chmodded 000 until I need it. (Try that on Windows and watch it barf.) Then there's the image and cookie blocking, the icons support (both favicons and icons in place of names), the "smart" search bookmarks (like http://www.google.com/search?q=%s), tabbed browsing...

Of course, if things get really desparate (like some nut codes an IE-only website I want to see), I can fire up Opera and tell it to lie to IIS... the beauty of Linux is that there are SO MANY browsers out there, each good at something. Galeon. Mozilla. Konqueror. Amaya. Opera. Links. Lynx. (they're different! Links handles tables in text. Lynx doesn't.) What? I forgot Nutscrape? Forget them. Don't need'em. If I'm going to run commercial software, it's going to be reallly good commercial software. Like Opera.

But I have to agree with the general sentiment. No flash, no Java (outside of a game), minimal JavaScript (Yahoo's address book is a good example of JavaScript done right), nothing else that's not cross-platform (and therefore subject to the Unix permission paradigm), no cookies, damn few ads (I let OSDN's go thru, because they're INTERESTING), just content. If you're going to insist on anything more than JavaScript, I'll take my business elsewhere. Seeya. Wouldn't wanna BE ya.

But no, I run Linux because a long time ago I got tired of worrying about scanning for viruses and blocking ActiveX controls and malicious VBScript and Blue Screens of Death and a whole host of other problems that I just don't have anymore. Eight browsers, five word processors, four IM clients, three games of Solitaire, two skinnable GUI's, and a groupware in beta test. And every last bit of it free at least as in beer. Now, somebody explain to my wife, who threw Windows off her box in 1997 because it ate the registry twice in as many weeks and never regretted it, why she needs to pay for software ever again.

Linux. Not because it's cool or l33+ or trendy (it's surely not that.... yet), but because it makes sense. Because it Doesn't Suck.

While Gator is free...

[atheos]

While Gator is free, the company that makes it sells keywords to marketers that lets them launch pop-ups at opportune moments--for example, when a Web surfer visits a competing site.

Oh great, at least there's something positive about Gator. It's free :) Let's put this into a different perspective. I'm sorry someone hijacked your car sir, but at least they did it for free.

herm...

[Anonymous Coward]

as soon as i clicked on the CNET link, an ad for slashdot appeared....coincidence?

how can i be sure it's gone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I got suckered into Gator, and did my best to get rid of it. Some comments in this thread make me wonder if i succeeded in killing it.

How can i be sure it's gone?

wrong again

[drc500free]

Well, reading this it turns out I was wrong. It's no longer annoying and useless; It's annoying and possibly illegal...

Disable Java, Javascript, and ActiveX. Like, Duh!

[Anonymous Coward]

And no shockwave crap wither. And if the web site doesn't work without them, send a flame to webmaster@site telling them ther site is broken, and surf elsewhere.

Besides, such websites violate the Americans with Disabilites Act because they are not "accessible". Web browsers for the disabled rely on being able to parse out text which is then read aloud via speech synthesis. These "speaking web browsers" can speak image maps, java applets, etc. So demand that the web site offer a text only option or sue them in court for discrimination.

Re:ADS!

[nege]

all your mods are belong to us!

Ad-aware

[cybersmith]

Ad-aware will remove most of the garbage on your windows box. Be careful however when removing reg keys... there was some mention about a bug? in the program that eats your reg.

Also... programs such as AudioGalaxy's satilite proggy will try to install gator by default. Gator is a crackwhore to remove too...

Re:Just Say No

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes linux based browsing more appealing. Will the consumer eat what he is fed? Or will he go to the environment where he is treated nicely.

Re:Gator Sources

[Anonymous Coward]

figure out what filenames the program uses. Create dummy versions of the files. make them hidden, system & read-only.

Re:wrong wrong wrong.

[jrockway]

> Most people DONT chose to install it. It comes piggybacked with other programs. Well isn't that too fucking bad! Maybe they shouldn't use the other software then. After everyone stops using iMesh or whatever because they don't like the adware, then iMesh will stop bundling it. It's like this line in the GPL: "This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE." They chose to install it, they get whatever goodies comes with it. Maybe some people like it? Let them decide!! > It is also extremely difficult to uninstall (for the non-technical anyways) It's also "extremely difficult" to install Debian if you are an AOLamer. So that's why they don't use Debian!!

Short term gain for long term losses?

[The Chosen 0ne]

Although this may work at the beginning, won't consumers just stop purchasing anything online when they are going to be hassled this way?

Why would I want to research a company on the net if I know I'm going to have to deal with twenty pop up ads and god knows what else they will think up next.

When will they add a no-pop-ups setting in Mozilla?

Re:Short term gain for long term losses?

[szomb]

There's been one for a while, why don't you read the FAQ?

Re:One of the most annoying things about gator

[theantix]

...is that when you uninstall it, it installs another program under a different name and icon that does the same thing gator does. It takes two uninstalls and reboots to remove it from your system, and how long will it take the average user to notice that unidentified icon among the 20 or so others. If you ask me, this self-replication and concealment is nothing more than a virus disguised as a "legitimate" program in a grey area of the law.

Not to sound too cynical or naive (depending on your perspective), but I have a hard time believing that a "legitimate" company would be that evil. But it did get modded up to five, so it begs the question: Has anyone else had experiences similar to this with Gator?

Poor Alcimedes

[Anonymous Coward]

He'll never get a job now

Re:it's already gotten worse

[Tackhead]

> > yesterday I was on my PC downloading MP3s and my PC printed out a roadmap, marked a store location on it and pushed me towards my car. It was unbelievable!
>
> Yeah, but in a few weeks, your car will be programmed to drive you there (whatever happend to the Clarion CarPC? Anybody buy one?) Even better, with the GPS feature talking to the local gendarme, you won't even break the speed limit.

Feh! You're a couple of rank amateurs!

My marketing director told me to work on a plug-in that won't bother mucking about with cars and GPS units to take you to the store, it brings the store to you!

As he said -- "Why should the consumer have to deal with the complexities of having the choose whether or not to buy a product? Isn't it our job as marketers to simplify the choice process?"

Our new version greatly simplifies the choice process. When you search for our competitor's product, for instance, our DLL doesn't just advertise our product, it doesn't just send you to our store, it saves you all this time and trouble by simply purchasing our product for you!!!

You're wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is not an option for this man ... he has to ask questions like 'Is it okay to delete kernel32.dll?'

You're wrong.

Linux is the only option for this man. Set up the system with the apps he needs, and let him be.

Show him how to log on (as a normal user), and how to start programs.

Then when he asks "Is is OK to delete /vmlinuz?" Tell him "go ahead and try - the system will stop you if it's important."

And then rejoice at the fact that you'll never have to go back there to remove Melissa, or ILoveYou, or SirCam.

Re:You're wrong.

[Jeffrey Baker]

What you said, twice. Don't even set it up so he has to log in. Get GDM, KDM, or XDM and configure them to automatically log in for him, and start his web browser. Never worry again.

Re:You're wrong.

[Bonker]

Sadly, the man bought his computer expressly for the purpose of playing games. I would be remiss in my duties to reccomend Linux as a gaming platform. That may change in the near future, but right now there is a very limited selection of games for Linux, and a zero "Off the shelf" selection.

Shiny, Happy Slashdot

[totallygeek]

Is anything *ever* changing for the better on a Slashdot story? Not everything is gloom and doom, folks...

I keep submitting things, but they get rejected. I guess Slashdot posts news, and news is doom and gloom.

Gator is easily removable? HA

[Mnemia]

The funniest part in the story was when the Gator.com executive was quoted as saying the Gator is "easily removable via the Add/Remove Programs dialogue". When I downloaded several programs containing Gator, it didn't install immediately. Instead, it would just sit invisble in the background and wait like an hour. If you tried to delete its installer in this time period it would be locked by the OS. THe only way to delete it before it installed on those programs (which I am POSITIVE did not give the option to install without Gator) was to kill the program and then delete the file. Anyone else see this delay tactic? I think it is meant to make Gator just "show up" on the computer later to prevent the user from just immediately deleting it without "trying" it.

Re:Gator is easily removable? HA

[part!cle]

A few months ago Gator(tm) was installed on my computer when my brother installed the weatherbug program. I don't know what the gator spokesperson was smoking when the statement "easily removable" was made- uninstalling mine still left a resident program which reinstalled it every time--and you cant delete the resident file because it was "in use" the only way I could get rid of the program, INCLUDING uninstalling the browser was to do to dos prompt via boot disk, delete the dll's and restart. Even now whenever i boot up i still see the warning message in WinBlows that says "Can't find "blahblahblah.dll" I could get rid of that msg but its more gratifying to see that and saying DAMN RIGHT whenever i restart.

This quote says it all

[gmhowell]

This folks, is why the internet as a geek medium, or a medium for the common man is over:

"The promise of the Internet was always one-to-one marketing, but nothing has ever proven it out. We're proving it out," Eagle said.

Pack it up, go home. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm seriously considering dumping most of my computer stuff (and it's a literal ton) and opening some meatspace business.

Maybe I'm a dreamer, but customer service can still get you a modest income and modest success. At 90% of the places I shop, I know at least a couple of the staff (and/or the owner) by name. And vice versa. If we had a non-chain bookstore, it would be an even higher percentage. No, none of them are millionaires, and they all work a lot. But they seem to enjoy it.

(Yeah, yeah, lots of flames coming my way. Let me take care of a few:

"It's just the man. We can keep the 'net for ourselves"
"You're a loser who is giving in"
"The internet is a wonderful medium for doing {x,y,z}"
)

Yeah. Whatever. Let's face it, assholes like this (and the ones at Kazaa, verizon, M$, etc.) have moved in and taken over with a little help from their friends in the government.

I'm beginning to wonder if Ted Kacinsky didn't have some of the right ideas.

Or at least the separatists living in the Rockies.

Re:This quote says it all

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you can continue to troll all day long at -1 with Raging Idiot, Tollificus, and AC's ASCII goatse.cx guy. I saw your discussion with those trolls in one of yesterday's posts. Unfortunately, you're whacked in the head, where the other posting trolls are just doing it because it's funny.

Re:This quote says it all

[gmhowell]

>>If you set it up properly I bet you couldn't find an ad online if you went looking for one.

This week.

Re:This quote says it all

[Have Blue]

Look in your browser preferences. Uncheck Java, Javascript, Flash. Set up some site filters or install an ad-blocking proxy. Set up some email rules (guaranteed method: reject all except a specific allow list). This will take you about half an hour. If you set it up properly I bet you couldn't find an ad online if you went looking for one.

Re:This quote says it all

[gmhowell]

Another chickenshit AC. It's one thing to post AC if you are divulging company secrets. But so that you can be a karma whore? Be a man (or woman, as the case may be) and stand up and let your opinion be heard.

It's not trolling. It's an attempt to discuss what the point of the whole thing is.

this is not so bad

[yoha]

This practice already occurs at the grocery store. If you buy Coca-Cola, you get a coupon for $.30 off of Pepsi. The marketing practice is sound and legitimate.

Also, if you don't like the Gator software, don't download it. If you like AudioGalaxy and you don't like Gator. Tough Luck! That is how AudioGalaxy makes money.

The Slashdot community in general damns Microsoft users to their fate because they are too "dumb" to use a "real" operating system. Likewise, wise up, and download responsibly.

Re:this is not so bad

[rajslashdot]

The software installs without user consent or knowledge, and is difficult to remove...that is what is wrong about the practice. If a user wants to knowingly install a software that points him to competing sites...that should be fine !

Re:this is not so bad

[SlaterSan]

But you've already bought the Coke! I think it's similar to going to pick up a 12-pack of pepsi and a clerk running up and saying "Hey you should try this instead!"

Re:this is not so bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I checked... you could opt-out of AudioGalaxy's Gator install. Maybe they removed that.. but I don't think you HAVE to install Gator with AudioGalaxy. You can, but they're not forcing your hand..

Ive seen it..

[xfs]

I've seen gator come with AudioGalaxy, and iMesh too I think..

Re:Ive seen it..

[xfs]

Whoa.. Slow down a second and try that again, you seem to make up words when you're angry.

Re:Stop the 'net...

[Anonymous Coward]

OK,here you go! Or did you mean something else?

When the going gets tough,

[Apuleius]

the weak get slimy. 'nuff said.

Re:Just Say No

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree! In fact, I've been surfing all day with Lynx, and haven't seen a single pop-up ad.

Re:They just don't get it.

[spookyfluke]

Surprisingly, you'll find that the most effective ads are also the most annoying ones.

What's worse

[Dancin_Santa]

I really hate those watermarks that appear on TV in the corners. I don't need them to tell me what station I'm watching. I don't need to know what time it is. I already know what show I'm watching. If I wanted news bulletins, I'd watch the news. I'm trying not to think about my stock portfolio. I don't care "What's up next!".

I just want to watch my television show without interruption.

But I guess that's the price I have to pay because I'm not paying for my reception.

Dancin Santa

Re:What's worse

[Chundra]

I really hate those watermarks that appear on TV in the corners.

Somehow I don't think they're really watermarks. That'd be dangerous you know. What with the electricity and all.

Re:What's worse

[bmongar]

I have to agree about most of the tv stuff, but being from the midwest, the storm warnings are important. I would like those to stay, the time, station, and show can go.

Re:What's worse

[ryanwright]

I personally think it's a valid strategy

It's bullshit. Do you know how many projection TVs I've seen with some station's watermark burned into the screen? I have a nice high-def projection set, and I refuse to watch any station that does this. Static images on any projector for a significant amount of time will cause burn in. Not cool.

BTW, I've never had a problem figuring out which station I'm on.

Re:how long will it be...

[Bigger R]

Per the article, it's already happened: "One e-tailer that's been bitten is 1-800-Flowers.com. When certain Web surfers visit the site to browse for bouquets, a pop-up ad appears for $10 off at chief rival FTD.com. The same sort of thing happens at AmericanAirlines.com, where a Delta Air Lines promotion is waiting in the wings." R.

Even worse than Rosie O'Donell

[Yanna]

I dare you watch Roseanne Barr eating BBQ ribs without a napkin. Now THAT would be a good punishment for said marketroids.

So wrong, but it's the way it is done.

[kaszeta]

You know, as a marketing major this is exactly the kind of thing that you're not supposed to do.

Unfortunately, I've actually taken advertising classes (About 8 years ago now, but it can't have changed that much), where the professors insisted that as an advertisor you were supposed to do exactly this---make the name of your product stick in the viewers head. Whether you do it by convincing them the product is good, the marketing jingle is catchy, carpet-bombing with advertising flyers, or just plain irritating the heck out of the viewers. It didn't matter. The only thing that did

In fact, most of the class was about watching ads, and listening to the professor talk about which ones were effective advertising, and which weren't. Almost universally, he insisted the best ones were always the ones with irritating jingles that didn't talk at all about the products, and just pissed you off. Heck, he spent an entire lecture talking about how Crystal Pepsi was the greatest marketing campaign ever.

The worst part was, all the students bought into this. And hated me because I was always irritated that the ads never told me about the products...

Advertisers are like this, since they were trained to act like this.

(In my own defense, I'm an engineer, not an advertiser. I just took the class to fill up my schedule. I should've listened to one of my engineering classmates who had a degree in adverstising and came back to school to "get a real degree")

Sneaky bastards

[4n0nym0u53 C0w4rd]

I recently installed Snood and it came with Gator and OfferCompanion. Here's what sucked:

• During the install process I was told that Snood came with the "coolest" new software, and that Gator would be automatically installed. No option to install without it (unlike Bearshare).
• After installation, Gator didn't immediately start up, appear in the start menu, or appear in the "add/remove programs" menu. It waited about 5-10 minutes before popping up. This prevented me from immediately uninstalling this parasitic software.
• After killing Gator, my firewall caught the "Onflow Player Installer" trying to access it's web site.
• When I was finally able to uninstall Gator, it's uninstall program warned me that "Deleting your user information will erase all your passwords account numbers and login IDs." I can imagine a novice aborting the uninstall after a warning like that. It doesn't mention that it is only referring to the data that you gave Gator.
• If this software was really useful, you'd think people would want to install it. Remember ThirdVoice, it was a tool that let users annotate web pages with their own content that was visible to other ThirdVoice users. It never acheived the market penetration it needed. There's a program that people could actually find useful, and it didn't make it. I can only imagine the sheer contempt for the user that these companies must have. To resort to such deceptive and misleading practices just to show some unwanted advertisements...

I've said it before and I'll say it again: finding new surface area for advertisements is not a creative endeavor. These people are the biggest hacks in the world, and deserve to watch Rosie O'Donnell eat BBQ ribs without a napkin.

Re:They just don't get it.

[dfenstrate]

We often bitch here about Microsoft, and how they push their browser and media codecs so aggressively...

But when their only mainstream competition is that piece of shit realplayer and netscape, what do you expect?

Keep in mind, I did say mainstream. Opera and mozilla may be great, but try getting joe blow to use them.

Not dead yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an ActiveX plug-in thing.
You don't HAVE to run ActiveX.
You don't HAVE to run the plug-in.
Just like you don't HAVE to run Java.
Just like you don't HAVE to run javascript.
Just like you don't HAVE to allow animated GIFs.
Just like you don't HAVE to French-kiss a live light socket.

I admit I will do some of those (no, not the light socket thing) but the others either never (like the light socket) or seldom.

Result? Some say a "dull web experience." Fine, but I want information, not an "experience" (The Vietnam "Experience"..oy). What do I get? The info I want. And no pop-up ads, no pop-under ads, no scrolling javascript ads, no sudden loss of browser control (my machine, my rules, no compromise). I want to browse the web, not be dazzled by a freaky videogame. Well, if I do want that, I'll just go play one outright.

The web is far from dead. It's just a matter of actually asserting control over the things within your control. It's YOUR machine, make things play by YOUR rules.

Re:Not dead yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice try.

Re:Not dead yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

EXACTLY. They should get rid of HTML and Javascript and Java. Everything should be in Flash. Flash is the only thing that seems to work ok for me.

Well then

[Anonymous Coward]

that's when you get him to sign up with a real ISP and install junkbuster, AdAware, etc, and a firewall. :)

Re:Just Say No

[glowingspleen]

Yeah, but waiting for Pong 2.0 to come out is really getting boring...are you still coming over to my house to play backgammon later?

The internet will be destroyed

[ioman1]

Marketers and advertising will ruin the internet just like it ruined TV. Television ratings are at an all time low and less people are watching TV. There are more commercials on now than there are actual programs.

The new "New Tech" excuse

[grammar fascist]

"It's one of the nuances of this medium; it's changing some of the parameters that we traditionally thought were sacrosanct," I-Traffic's Quinn said. "There's now this third party between you and a customer within the browser, and that's changed the rules. There's generally no third party between you and the TV. And a lot of people want to cry unfair."

Well, DUH. If I'm surfing to a web site, I want the content on that site. That site wants me to see their content. If somebody butts into the middle, OF COURSE I will cry unfair. Then Mr. Quinn gets all amused by it: "Ha ha, isn't it amusing. But you have to put up with it because it's a New Medium!"

The unfortunate thing is that most people don't have the technical know-how to get the tech-savvy third party to butt out.

just not getting it

[xerxes7]

i'll admit it's been awhile since i sat through my base level commercial design classes, but i could have sworn that among the chief aims of any advertising campaign are: 1) making consumers associate your comany with the service you provide; and 2) encouraging positive feelings about your company. so why are there so many annoying ad campaigns these days?

when i think of companies i can get a webcam from, sure i think of x-10. but i also remember how much they got on my nerves with their damned pop-ups. and though i'm not really in the market for a computer these days, all track record aside i sure as hell don't care to encourage a company that puts that fucking fevvercorn commercial on all day and night. and 1-800-collect with their long run of bullshit most recently crowned by carrot top of all people...

i guess negative association is association nonetheless these days.

Re:just not getting it

[ayeco]

....um, Carrot top is on the ads for 800-callatt - not 800 collect.

Re:just not getting it

[xerxes7]

lol

then i guess their annoying branding isn't even serving its intended purpose of making me remember their service.

Re:just not getting it

[Owen Lynn]

Then why are car dealer ads on TV so annoying? You would think if they really weren't profiting from them, they'd quit placing them.

From what little I can tell, advertising has to be annoying, but not so annoying that you're motivated to find ways of not looking at the ad.

Sort of the same idea that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

We are fighting the wrong fight.

[DoubleD]

Advirtising seems to be a fact of life now. Get used to it. This new strategy by Gator and others is just part of that. We should not fight against advirtising itself, just to keep that advirtising from adversly interfering with our lives.

The big issue we (as consumers, businesses are another story) should have with this type of practice is it should be voluntary. As long as someone knows they are getting the gator competitor advertising service it is fine, even useful (reference the car buying service). It's when they secretly install the software and make it difficult to get rid of when we sic the slashdot trolls on them.

DD

Re:simple solution

[The Minus Man]

ahh, but then I can't play Alice, Max Payne, Dune Emperor, or Diablo 2 expansion. Nor can I use Cubase/Soundforge/Cool Edit Pro. Or make sure the code I'm writing on my linux box is really platform independant. So it's not so simple of a solution for everyone. Linux is rad, in all sorts of ways everyone already knows, but until I can get Cubase for it (I do a lot of techno producing, the MIDI apps I've seen for linux...suck in comparison), or until I can play the games that I really enjoy on it, it's not quite a simple solution. Sure, reject these reasons as useless, but it's the only reason why I keep windoze around, and they're the same reasons I keep hearing my friends and others cite when I try to convince them to start playing w/ linux and give up MS: "Where's my music composition tools, and where's my games?". That's a key point for a large amount of people. Kudos to Loki for at least porting some bad ass games to Linux, but with such a tiny market share, I'm not expecting to see a Linux Cubase, or D2, or Alice/etc. I suppose you could just run Mozilla and that'd be the end of that, or do what I do and just use your windoze box for the games/music tools.

Don't support Trademarks

[JohnDenver]

how long will it be... instead of ads just popping up you'll be redirected to a competitor's site?
I'm all for keeping the net legislation free, but heres a place where only a law can help.

Do you REALLY want to support the basic arguments for even more frivilous trademark disputes like the one below?

In 1999, Playboy filed suit against Excite.com and Netscape in an attempt to prohibit them from delivering adult ads when visitors searched for the term "playboy." The suit charged that the alleged practice violated its trademark. Although the court dismissed the case earlier this year, Playboy has appealed the decision, and a hearing is scheduled in a Los Angeles federal district court in September.

As far as your redirection concern: You do have options.

1. Don't use the plug-in or service.
2. Don't use the plug-in or service.
3. Don't use the plug-in or service.

Just as rest of us should have rights to develop any piece of software that does not intentionally inflict damage, Gator should have this right too.

Those who give up a freedom for a little security
deserve neither freedom nor security" -Thomas Jefferson

All trademarks should be pornolized
Pornolize it today!

They got Snood?! Those bastards!

[whatnotever]

Geeze. I guess I should blame the Snood guy more, though. Yeah, he has to make a penny, but somehow I doubt he's very heartbroken over bundling that crap...

I guess I'm glad I'm no longer the compulsive downloader I once was. Back in the day (and I'm talking *years* ago), you downloaded something, and that's what you got. You used to be able to download Snood and get (surprise!) Snood.

One of the most annoying things about gator

[sheetsda]

...is that when you uninstall it, it installs another program under a different name and icon that does the same thing gator does. It takes two uninstalls and reboots to remove it from your system, and how long will it take the average user to notice that unidentified icon among the 20 or so others. If you ask me, this self-replication and concealment is nothing more than a virus disguised as a "legitimate" program in a grey area of the law.

Re:how long will it be...

[gmhowell]

No time at all. I can't believe it hasn't been done already with a simple redirect tag.

Actually, the redirect might be overkill.

which

[Anonymous Coward]

which one do you use? just curious. currently, i only manually block ad servers.

Yet another reason for ad-blockers

[why-is-it]

I run one at home.

Never see banner ads. Never see popups. Never see pop-unders either.

It does not matter what the advertisers do, because someone will find a way to eliminate the ads sooner rather than later.

The biggest problem with this form of advertising

[Synn]

Is that it doesn't pay out to the content providers.

If I'm surfing slashdot and see adds, those adds should pay out to slashdot: I'm using slashdot resources.

But by ad hijacking a 3rd party(Gator and Kaazaa) is basically selling revenue off of bandwidth they're not paying for.

Re:They just don't get it.

[Negadin]

Its different in the fact that its not just there like a billboard is, its like you interacting with a toyota salesman for the purchase of a new car, and a honda salesman jumps between you with his own sales pitch. This is not only distracting, but could also be confusing to some people new to ecommerce, which could lower sales across the board for both companies.

I Hear Ya :)

[BlenderHead-2001]

Ah, how many times I've thought the exact same thing :)

Cheers

Re:If you're using windows.........

[Flounder]

So, what can I use to get rid of Windows?

Rocks will rid your existence of those pesky Windows. Just heave our patented Window Uninstaller(tm) and you'll never have to deal with those Windows again.

Kinda makes you think every copy of RedHat and Mandrake should come with a Windows Uninstaller(tm). That'd be a sweet marketing campaign.

What stocks got purchased more?

[BluedemonX]

The advertised, hyped, dot-com stocks that were touted at making millionaires out of just about anyone?

Or those of well managed companies with sensible and attainable goals?

Never underestimate the American mindset that wants new and improved, in your face, NOW.

Make a product that actually works. Please. If that was the case there'd be no diet industry. "Uh, eat less and exercise?" NO! BUY MY NEW FAT INCINERATOR 2000, YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE TO GET UP OFF THE COUCH! USING A SYNERGISTIC BLEND OF PLACEBOS, (our) SATISFACTION IS GUARANTEED OR YOUR MONEY BACK!

Re:What stocks got purchased more?

[e-gold]

That's not the only question to ask. "What companies survived, and are now in the black?" is also an interesting question, especially if you've happily chosen the stock less-purchased.

I'm also amazed that companies deliberately choose pop-up ads. Even adult sites are moving away from them, as users complain. I wish I could set my browser to always ask if it should really pop up another window titled "XXXXX"? with the default being of course "NO!"
JMR

Speaking for me only, as always.

Re:What stocks got purchased more?

[BluedemonX]

I'm not talking about what ended up being a good buy, I'm talking about what got sold. Marketing is about getting product out the door, not about it being useful.

Yippee

[nontrivial]

One more reason to use Mozilla instead of MicroShaft Exploder. Flash was bad enough, now we've got this keyword crap. What's next, the browser just randomly jumps you to different advertiser's web sites? I liked the the web a hell of a lot better before it was invented/improved/innovated by Microsoft. Sure it wasn't as pretty, but it was faster and a lot more useful.

Re:how long will it be...

[Kenyaman]

We have laws to handle that. That would be a clear violation of trademark law. This is dancing on the edge, but that would be open and shut.

Just plain not fair.

[Mactire_Dearg]

I think a point people keep missing with most of these damned programs is that they change what you see before you decide what to do with it. I dont have any where near the problem with the pop-ups/unders since they differentiate themselves from the content I went to the site to see. However that damned TopText (or whatever they changed their name to in the last hour) and its like is a completely different ballgame. Changing/adding links on a site is complete Bull Shit. As the content provider I did the work to attract the user there, I paid for the bandwidth to provide that content. Now some shithead is putting his links(which he gets paid for) on to my site with out him having to do a damned thing. Is it legal, maybe, maybe not, I cant afford to spot a laywer enough cash to make it worth his wild to find out. Is it moral or right? Hell No! I did the work, I got the user/visitor there, I provided the page that they then change to make their fast buck.
As for them not changing the content, you are splitting very very technical hairs there. From the point of view of the AVERAGE user (not the average /.er) the content changes because the links change. Technical people(/.ers) would be curious why the link is yellow and find out and then know better. Non-technical (everyone else) will just think I was somehow highlighting a special link on my page for them to check out. Try to keep in mind that most web users can barely spell HTML, let alone tell you how it works or understand the difference between links generated by the page and links generated by the browser.

Am I a selfish bastard because I'm getting pissed that they are making money off my work without me getting a cent? Probably, but I just want to make enough to keep my sites live.

Going to say this anyways

[jchunter]

This is obviously a flame, and I know I'm going to lose what meager karma points I have with this, but I'm going to say it anyways.

You all know very well that there are reasons why you have to put up with this.

All of these are technologies that you can turn off in your web browser, whatever the web browser may be.

C'mon, even if you don't want to turn on Javascript, you can even *shock horror* get a different browser that doesn't implement this stuff, or wasn't considered when they did the popunders! Gosh darn!

Frankly, as far as I'm concerened all of your having to put up with these ad issues is a direct result of your choices.

I do have sympathy for those who don't know better. My grandmother doesn't even know what Javascript is; I can't talk to her about deactivating things like that. And because of those people I still don't think all that highly of companies that pull this crap.

But, geez, people, we're all geeks here. You ought to know better. Right? Shouldn't you try dropping your bloat^H^H^H^H^Hmodern browser setup for once instead of bitching all the time and whining about how "this bothers me oh so much" and so on?

(to moderators: My apologies. It's just that in one particular circle on IRC I'm the local Web Expert and I get a *ton* of back-of-hand-nailed-to-forehead whining about this stuff, and so I'm kind of a loose cannon on the subject. :) )

Re:Going to say this anyways

[awills]

Agreed, I use Opera (with everything extra off) for my usual browsing, and IE for those webpages that require it.

Re:Going to say this anyways

[Anonymous Coward]

> Shouldn't you try dropping your bloat^H^H^H^H^Hmodern browser setup for once instead of bitching all the time and whining about how "this bothers me oh so much" and so on?

Note to poster: use ^W to erase words

Note to self: print this rant and study it. In particular try to understand if he is pro or against gator. In any case try to get confirmation/infirmation that the underlying idea is something like 'we are geeks. we can work around that'. As soone as confirmation is done, choose between the two options:

1/ Explain him why the fact that _we_ can turn the thing off is of little use compared to the fact that his grandmother cannot. Try to make a point comparing demography of grandmothers versus geek. Point that some grandmother of non-geeks have also been reported as beeing unable to turn off javascript. Use big words like geek responsibility/egoism. Even if of little use, make also the point that knowing how to turn javascript off never get anyone laid (seek evidence for this)

2/ Drop the ball. (I actually like this idea. After all, his thickness is probably the 'direct result of his choices', and I should not interfere with his basic freedom)

Cheers,

--fred

Re:Going to say this anyways

[isorox]

I'm glad I got out of windows when I did, I went to look at a printer problem on my mums computer, it had popups everywhere, it has a 17GB HDD - I'm not sure what is installed on it, ICQ has a ton of adverts, same as real player. It wasnt like that the last version of icq (99) and rp I used.

I'm still worried because:

1) People may mistake their "content" for my content, and email me enquiring, complaining, flameing or suing me for it.
2) Whenever I use someone elses computer, I'm innudated by these adverts.

And as for my south park eps - realplayer unix doesnt have adverts that I've encountered.

Re:Going to say this anyways

[isorox]

having said this, konq just crashed thanks to the hidden javascript popup things that pop up at (100000,100000) and I dont know how to close in enlightenment. bloody things mean I have to now take the default javascript off for every ite and enable it for the sites I regularly visit.

Has anyone got a "clean" site list I can pumpp into konq? Howabout a "dirty" site list I can DROP at iptables?

Re:Going to say this anyways

[tswinzig]

To pare a phrase.

I once heard Julia Childs "pare a phrase." She was preparing a fruity dessert, and stated in all seriousness:

(In your best Julia Childs voice...)

"Now here I have a pair of pared pears..."

Re:it's already gotten worse

[gmhowell]

Yeah, but in a few weeks, your car will be programmed to drive you there (whatever happend to the Clarion CarPC? Anybody buy one?) Even better, with the GPS feature talking to the local gendarme, you won't even break the speed limit.

Re:it's already gotten worse

[gmhowell]

The sad thing is that while you may be joking, someone, somewhere is pitching this idea to a VC.

then why have laws at all?

[rebelcool]

certainly, nothing physically keeping people from doing illegal things.

Theres plenty of laws against untrue statements in advertising - and while there is certainly untrue advertising, the FTC will come down on your ass like big tornado for it too. The thing about the gator is that there is a central point for the pop-ups - Gator itself. There are only a handful of these programs around. And if you're large enough to have an audience that matters, you'd better be obeying the law, or the FTC *will* shut you down.

Ximian was one of the first examples of this

[Sanity]

Remember the fuss that was created when Ximian paid Google to show adverts for their software whenever anyone did a search for KDE? Of course they rapidly backed down when their scheme was exposed ("oops, it was an accident, honest guv, we fired the intern in question").

In retrospect, it was one of the first examples I can recall of Gatoring, and like so many other things, we saw it first in the Linux world!

So you're saying that ...

[Rev.LoveJoy]

Sales and marketing continues to be a slimy business ...

This is different how?

It's going to get worse?

[RESPAWN]

I don't see how M$ could make things worse .

The sad thing is that this really works.

[Bonker]

Recently, I was setting up an internet connection for my father-in-law, who is decidedly of a non-technical bent. Linux is not an option for this man. Hell, Windows 98 was barely an option for him. Even then he has to ask questions like 'Is it okay to delete kernel32.dll?'

At any rate, immediately after I fixed all the problems with his cheap-ass winmodem and got the whole mess to work to dial into one of the short-lived ad-based ISP's, the guy punches in URL to a website he read out of a magazine.
The *first* thing to come up is a popup add for polarized sunglasses, as sponsored by the ISP . My father in law was *amazed* and called over his fifteen year-old son (Who thinks CB-Radio is high-tech) to see the wonderous display of marketing. Between the two, they had all but forgotten the original website they were trying to find, which was buried in a stack of software-controlled popups by this time. By the time I left that evening, both my father-in-law and my brother-in-law were pleading with my wife's mother for the number to her mastercard so that they could get some of the 'incredible bargains' that were there just because they had signed up with whatever ISP.

"You're related to them, you know," I told my wife after we left.

Her only response was, "Please don't remind me."

Re:The sad thing is that this really works.

[Anonymous Coward]

Recently, I was setting up an internet connection for my father-in-law, who is decidedly of a non-technical bent. Linux is not an option for this man. Hell, Windows 98 was barely an option for him. Even then he has to ask questions like 'Is it okay to delete kernel32.dll?'


Try to be more respectful of your "beau-parents" as your children will bear their genes.

RTFA

[Have Blue]

It's called gatoring because it's usually done through an ActiveX plugin distributed by Gator.com.

Re:RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Once again proving the need for the "idiot" moderation reason.

I haven't seen...

[Edward Teach]

a pop up ad in weeks. Of course, I did install Mozilla and killed them all. I doubt that I will be installing any active x plugins, so I don't have to worry much. Freedom from those damned pop-ups is invigorating!

Re:Just Say No

[Black Parrot]

> I just say no to:

1. JavaScript
2. Java
3. Shockwave
4. Flash
5. ActiveX
6. The Cutting Edge
7. Planned Obsolesence

You go, bro! I'm a technophilic luddite too.

Or luddophilic technite -- I can't decide which name suits us best.

The Cutting Edge still tempts me now and then, but that other crap was out on the street about the third time I got an ad that used them. PO was out about five years before that.

it's already gotten worse

[canning]

yesterday I was on my PC downloading MP3s and my PC printed out a roadmap, marked a store location on it and pushed me towards my car. It was unbelievable!

It's from apocalypse now

[ColGraff]

I suppose I should have credited it. The original quote reads: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like...like...victory."

By the way, apocalypse now redux is coming out soon. See it, it should kick arse.

Original purpose of e-business

[s20451]

When will ad companies realize that your not going to have alot of positive interest in the product when all you do is annoy the userbase?

Firstly, most ads are designed simply to be memorable, whether the memory is positive or not. Irritation is one method for achieving this in a negative way. As annoyed as we all are at those wireless camera ads, we won't easily forget them, will we?

Secondly, I'm old enough some of the original hype over e-business. In particular, it was supposed to make comparison shopping quick, easy, and more beneficial to the consumer, by automatically requesting the lowest competing prices from every supplier (and, potentially, having them bid against each other for your business). As long as these technologies are opt-in rather than opt-out (i.e., I have to actively choose to enable these competing ads), I don't see the problem. In fact the consumer may benefit in the end.

It's illegal

[Mattcelt]

There are a lot of these types of things going on right now... Kazaa is another one. A lot of what they're doing is illegal - you can't change someone else's copyright content (and web pages *are* copyrighted, at least as far as I can tell), and most of these services do change it to some degree, *for profit*. That's an important distinction.

Re:It's illegal

[funkman]

The content is not being changed. A popup window is being displayed to show a competitor at the same time as the content you wish to see is being displayed. Sleazy yes. Illegal no.

Re:It's illegal

[wishus]

Read the article instead of rushing to get a post at the top. Gator doesn't change anyones web content. It pops up an ad - in another window - on the user's desktop.

This was all clearly outlined in the article you obviously didn't read.

Re:It's illegal

[QuoteMstr]

I take it Junkbuster is illegal too, then? Bullshit. I can take a book and scribble in it, and even make notes. Am I violating the author's copyright? NO!

It comes to MY computer, and I will treat it as I want. Web authors have NO RIGHT to DEMAND that their content is displayed exactly as they intent it.

Re:It's illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

On one hand, you have managed to get the 8th post, which is a good number for karma whoring. Hence the +2.

On the other hand, your post is so full of crap that that you may have wanted to check reality before hitting 'Submit'.

1/ The don't change pages
2/ Even if they did, it is not totally sure that it would be illegal if done on the client machine and if the user is okay.

They have an addon that adds popup based on which site the users views.
If it is not deceptive (ie: if the user know what is happening and is not fooled into thinking that the popup is voming from the site he visits), it may even be quite a good idea.

Of course, it is not a good idea, because they will keep your viewing habits, which popup you clicked on, what kind of promotion is necessary for you to change products (ie: if you are happy with a 5% rebate, theyt will probably never propose you a 10% one), and will sell this to the highest bidder. They'll probably kill your dog too, if they can.

Cheers,

--fred

Re:It's illegal

[isorox]

No, but something is illegal. This software tricks the user (and doesnt tell them unless they read some wierd EULA etc.) into thinking that the advert is somethign to do with you.

Unless it is obvious that the additions are not part of the original site (a scribble in a book is obviously not part of the original text, you know that, even if someone else scribbles), then it should be illegal (dunno if it is), as it is basiclly reselling your copyrighted material (they get a profit), but without telling the end user. Its like buying full proced software which is a nicely pressed copy of a cd. Its one thing to alter things

1) you(user)rself
2) With your(user) knowledge.

It's another to attempt to secretly change it.

It's akin to me taking a radiohead song, and inserting an instrumental in the middle, then selling the edited CD
1) without paying radiohead
2) pretending that my inserted instrumental is radiohead.

Re:It's illegal

[aka-ed]

I don't know about that.

AT&T's cut-rate internet service (4.95/mo) does extensive profiling of its users. It's not likely to be popular with the /. crowd, but it's very clear when you sign up that you are exchanging privacy for the low-cost service.

If you go to automotive sites, the ATT software will start delivering car ads. These ads will be unrelated to the sites you are visiting, except by topic. Are you contending that, if a customer mistakes one of ATT's ads for part of a site, that is deliberately misleading?

If you go to a Circuit City site and a Best Buy ad pops up, are you suggesting that the typical surfer is so ignorant that he knows no difference between the two?

Rentibng a billboard across the street from Circuit City and putting up a Best Buy ad is not illegal. This does not seem much different.

When you install these bundled packages, the software installed is listed with a series of checkboxes. It's your choice whether to leave the items checked or uncheck them, your option to read the EULA or not.

I'm a liberal on most issues, but the obligation of law to protect people from their own stupidity has its limits.

hacker wanted

[TheSHAD0W]

Would someone please take that !@*$@)#$* OCX, disable it, and give it a version number so high it'll never be "upgraded"? Thanks.

Re:hacker wanted

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent idea, and would be nice as worm droppings.

Stop the 'net...

[weefle]

I wanna get off.

Re:Gator Sources

[marcovje]

Kazaa also has some annoying ad stuff that is
installed if you install default.

One of them is new.net that ruined a lot of people's
machines on the ISP that I work.

New.net is a TLD "extender", but it is problematic.

If you're using windows.........

[sometwo]

Get adaware. It'll get rid of that stuff. (the spyware and gatorware not windows)

how long will it be...

[rebelcool]

instead of ads just popping up you'll be redirected to a competitor's site?

I'm all for keeping the net legislation free, but heres a place where only a law can help.

Re:how long will it be...

[kurowski]

what sort of legislation do you propose?

what's wrong with the fact that some people have installed software that brings them to proper websites (i.e. Ford) when they mistakenly click on a link to the wrong site (i.e. Chevy)?

if people want to install that sort of crap, let them. it's silly to try to write laws that define what a web browser must do when presented with a URL.

Re:how long will it be...

[Bigger R]

Doh! I misread what you said. I read the articles - I just need to read the COMMENTS! Sorry - it is not autoredirection. R.

Re:how long will it be...

[Anonymous Coward]

A law won't help dishonesty, only a better moral and ethical standard will help that. And unfortunately, that's why we have companies doing things like this today: a poor ethical standard has been pushed to the American people for the past 30 years. :(

Re:how long will it be...

[Mr. Protocol]

Funnily enough, one famous instance of this was not only solved by technology, it was the spur to create that technology.

Back in the days where all telephone exchanges were run by humans, there was this town with two undertakers. No doubt the telecommies will correct any errors of fact I may make, but the basic situation was that THE telephone operator in town was related to one of the undertakers, and any time a call came in for either of them, she directed the call to her relative. The other undertaker never got any of his calls.

This situation caused the unlucky undertaker, name of Strowger, to invent the first fully automatic telephone exchange, known then and forever after as the Strowger switch. The bane of his existence was rendered redundant by technology, and he started getting his calls again. One wishes one were able to see the operator's face when she was told the unhappy news: "That guy you've been pimping all these years? He's just eliminated your job."

Re:how long will it be...

[tswinzig]

instead of ads just popping up you'll be redirected to a competitor's site?
I'm all for keeping the net legislation free, but heres a place where only a law can help.

This is exactly the problem with the US: Let's outlaw everything distasteful, right?

THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN!

Well, the simple fact is people CHOSE to run this software. Therefore, they can CHOOSE to uninstall it! Gator can then CHOOSE to continue with this bullshit tactic, after which they will probably go out of business.

It's called a FREE market, and no more laws are needed!

Unless something is being taken by force -- a time where you have no choice in the matter -- then no laws are needed. We have too many laws.

The thing sucks your bandwidth too.

[UnnDunn]

If you get Gator piggybacked on another application, you only get the installer. That installer will then spend the next ten minutes sucking up your bandwith (without your knowledge) while it downloads the rest of Gator. Problem is, you have to dig around to find this information. I only know this because I read a note that the AudioGalaxy folks left on their part of the installer. The Gator installer made no mention of this.

Just Say No

[Autonomous Crowhard]

I have never experienced these problems. Why? I just say no.

I just say no to:

1. JavaScript
2. Java
3. Shockwave
4. Flash
5. ActiveX
6. The Cutting Edge
7. Planned Obsolesence

I you didn't buy into all this crap that you don't need then people will not be able to take advantage of your machine.

If enough people say no, then the web pages have to cater to the masses if they want the eyeballs.

Re:Just Say No

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, you need to get out more. Only Javascript makes of you a well rounded person! And get some fresh air some time!

Re:Just Say No

[jesser]

I just say no to
...
6. The Cutting Edge
7. Planned Obsolesence

You mean you buy things when they're already obsolete?

Re:Just Say No

[Swaffs]

You forgot about text and images too. Those can transfer ads as well.

Re:Just Say No

[tswinzig]

I just say no to:

1. JavaScript
2. Java
3. Shockwave
4. Flash
5. ActiveX
6. The Cutting Edge
7. Planned Obsolesence


8. Useful websites

That's right, there ARE websites that use JavaScript/Java to make their sites more useful.

The site I maintain at work uses JavaScript for good, not evil...

Mod the guy up!

[botik32]

%Subject%

Typical

[Johnny Starrock]

"And its only gonna get worse"

Is anything *ever* changing for the better on a Slashdot story? Not everything is gloom and doom, folks...

Ads as DoS

[boster]

I have to wonder at what point could you legally treat agressive advertising as a hostile net attack? I would think that if it's interfering with the normal operations of your machine you'd might have some grounds for legal recourse.

Think adversiting DoS. Even if you actively agree to do something, if you are misled (they don't tell you what's going to happen, do they?) then that's fraud (in my book anyway).

ADS!

[nege]

All your ads are belong to us!

IE? Similiar ...

[kimihia]

It isn't quite so advanced, but simply add advertiser domains to your restricted sites zone. In the restricted sites zone they will have no Java, cookies, or Javascript - all of which are annoying.

You'll still see the images though, but that's what my Squid proxy is for. (I don't want to pay to see your adverts. It's my bandwidth and money dammit.)

simple solution

[cweber]

Don't run Windows and you're completely safe from this.

There's something to be said about not running an OS with 90% market share. Many of the issues that plague most people just go away. If the marketers have to cater to more than half a dozen differnet OSes and platforms, it gets much more complex and expensive. That will put some breaks on such abusive tactics.

Re:Fighting This

[nege]

For some reason I could see this becoming "Circumvention" software and being banned by networks such as MS "Passport" etc. i.e if you want to be a part of the network and reap the rewards, you have to deal with the ads... (bend over...)

bad analogy

[rebelcool]

well, ignoring a possibly nasty debate on property and the internet, where nobody is right or wrong...

You CHOSE to write notes in your yellow pages. You did so YOURSELF. With gator, most of the time people did not choose to install it (it comes with other programs).

Further, gator is what picks the ads.

A more comparable thing would be southwestern bell placing post-it note ads over competitor's ads in the yellow pages. I dont know if thats illegal (advertising law aint my thing), but I would imagine it is.

Re:not so silly.

[Asgard]

Around my town there are a number of mattress stores. In front of almost all of them are sandwhichboard-people with signs of 'half-price mattress sale' all pointing to the same place. Sort of similiar, but they have to stand on the sidewalk.

how long after that will it be...

[aozilla]

that someone starts their own virtual internet, where such stupid laws do not apply (either through explicit contracts or through anonymous software distribution).

Re:They just don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason there are annoying ads on TV is because despite the fact that people hate them (Old Navy commercials for me), they do get the brand name stuck in people's heads. Only the really vehemently opposed people will boycott, all the rest will know the brand, hate the commercials, but buy the products anyways.

Distasteful Spelling Continues: "Distastful"

[tjgrant]

How much effort does it take to get the headlines spelled correctly.

Re:They just don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, they seem to be going down. They just layed off a bunch of people. Sucks for the employees, though.

Great news

[blang]

Since it's been months since I last logged on to a windows machine, I am blissfully unafected. Go Gator!

Another nail in the coffin for Microsoft. They've introduced so many horrible technologies under the pretext of providing extra value to the customer. As the saying goes: "what comes around, goes around". Or "as you sow, you reap", etc.

Code red, sircam, gator, .NET, powerpoint, bsod. At some point the users, and the MIS departments will figure out the real cost of ownership for these wonderful features, technologies, and unintended (but anticipated) side effects, and real operating systems can once more rule the day. Maybe Microsoft will have no choice but slim down their office apps, and release them on BSD and Linux to make a buck.

Maybe 15 years down the road, we can refer to the 90's as the dark middle age of computing.

Re:Great news

[Negadecimal]

Maybe Microsoft will have no choice but slim down their office apps, and release them on BSD and Linux to make a buck.

The fact that Gator exists has nothing to do with Microsoft. I could easily produce a trojan utility for Linux that pops up advertisements over Netscape windows...but I'd have to find gullible users willing to download it. And those people almost always use Windows.

If Microsoft were to shift to BSD/Linux, there'd be even more incentive to develop such scams.

Re:Great news

[blang]

You are absolutely right. What as I thinking. ActiveX has nothing to do with Microsoft.

Gator Sources

[Raetsel]

It comes with Snood, too...

Or, at least it did, last time I watched someone install Snood. It's been a while. The concept was quite annoying, but at least there was some warning of the payload...

It was a real pain, too -- we cancelled the install, it installed anyway. I had to go in and remove it manually with extreme prejudice... and it had bits scattered all over the place. It's sneaky, too -- you can easily get rid of the system tray icon and the 'password saving' function. But it seems that if you don't get all the bits, the adware / spyware is still there, working just fine, and looking just like an interstitial 'pop-over' ad! No hint whatsoever that you missed part of the damn thing.

The problem is (from the perspective of a network admin in a permissive company), this kind of thing turns your users into agents of the enemy. Sure, I can block their servers at the firewall, but I'm not fond of whack-a-mole. The next time someone finds the next cool program, I have another one to find! (Aargh!)

Marketdroids who pawn this crap off on other people should be charged with violation of the Computer Trespass laws. They're running unauthorized code on your nickel, claiming you consented when you clicked on another program's license. I hate 'em, they're worse than spammers!

Re:Wait a minute!

[leviramsey]

According to this page, it is!

Interesting ad techniques I hate.

[Scoria]

- The Flash banners on /. These things should DIE.
- Pop-under ads
- Pop-up ads with an embedded movie
- The pop-up ads that try to switch my homepage to the homepage of the manufacturer (x10, cjb, anyone?)

And finally, the X10 software that changes your (Windows, don't flame me, some of my hardware isn't supported by Linucks) system settings around... Ew...

Ad companies should figure out that if they're intrusive, sure, we'll remember them and their products. However, it's very unlikely we'll actually buy anything from them after being spammed to death.

Modded back up...

[JohnDenver]

Someone replied to my post with this:

...and he made a good point

The argument is not that Gatoring or whatever is violating copyright laws and should be illegal. The argument is that it is immoral, and should be frowned upon, and that companies advertising using this method should be informed that they are alienating customers, thus convincing them not to advertise by that method.

Moreover, the main issue is that programs like Gator and Toptext are being installed in the background by the installers of random freeware or commercial programs without making it absolutely clear to the user what, exactly, is being installed, or what it does. This is immoral, and may be illegal; even if it is not illegal, it is important to discuss and be aware of these things. I don't particularly think it's a terribly good idea to take legal action against gator, but i personally think that the slashdot community should try to push education of the Great Unwashed to the point where they understand a few basic points of Computer Safety. People should understand "carefully read over the contents of software you install for advertising trojans" the way they understand "don't run programs sent from people you don't know without running a virus check on it first". Education, and nonlitigous activist pressure (letterwriting campaigns, etc) on companies that install trojans like Gator, is the best way to deal with the problem, and i don't think promoting user education makes an anti-DMCA fanatic particularly hypocritical at all.

Would you morons learn to spell??

[fuckface]

To think that an avertiser can get away with these tactics is rediculous.

I see this same word misspelled at least 4 times a day.

R-I-D-I-C-U-L-O-U-S

one more time

R-I-D-I-C-U-L-O-U-S

Re:Would you morons learn to spell??

[DivineOb]

a fucking men brother

Good reason for Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the major reasons that I will be using Linux after I get a new computer is to avoid this crap. Can't these people realize that they are only ticking off potential customers? I guess that the lure of more money is enough for these sleezeballs to do anything, no matter how ridiculous, stupid and/or irritating their ads get.

http://cexx.org

They just don't get it.

[Negadin]

When will ad companies realize that your not going to have alot of positive interest in the product when all you do is annoy the userbase? They really need to find a medium for advertising that doesnt involve irritating the customer.

No, it isn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

We had this discussion already, in the TopText thread.

If you are going to claim that it is against copyright law to alter something you are viewing for your personal use, then you might as well just throw out fair use altogether.

I have the right to install software on my computer which alters content i view (assuming it is legal for me to view that content in some form) in any way i see fit. I have the right to take a content work i have purchased the right to read and insert advertising, or filter out advertising, or make every word a link to the word's respective node on everything2, or make the text 3 times as big (or have the computer read the text aloud) because i have poor eyesight, or replace the CSS with my own, or run a program on the text that uses complex heuristics to censor out anything that conflicts with scientology. I have the right to do these things by hand; i have the right to have a software program do these things for me; i have the right to create a software program and sell it to others to let others have my software program do those things for them. I can't necessarily turn around and sell other people the altered content, but i have the right to alter the content for personal use. Fair use makes this quite clear, and if you try to erase the parts of fair use that say that.. well, everything falls apart. You can't logically or legally draw a line between a program which randomly inserts advertising and a program which, say, renders HTML. Because Gator does its unethical magic within the computer, it's completely legal on copyright grounds.

This may still be illegal in terms of deceptive business practices-- i don't think ANYONE installing Snooz! (or whatever the hell that lame-ass bust-a-move ripoff with the faces is called.. i don't remember. it installs gator.) is aware that they are installing it, and those that are aware they installed something called "gator" probably think. (Making matters worse, people sometimes wind up accidentally installing Gator on public computers-- last year somehow Gator got installed on every computer in the school's computer labs (the security on the NT boxes was completely worthless), and nobody knew who did it, and so lots of 9th graders who don't understand computers got confused by this Gator thing they didn't install. That's not good, although it's the school's fault, not Gator's.). However, this is WHOLLY an issue of nefariously installing software the user doesn't want by preying on user ignorance or confusion. Copyright law does not come into play here.

That being said, i haven't the foggiest idea why anyone would want to install Gator. I hate that goddamn thing.

Re:They do come with uninstallers...

[Anonymous Coward]

I love the smell of Linux in the morning. It smells like...like...victory.

Hah! That's the funniest thing I've read in ages. Exactly whom do you feel victorious over? Smells like victory... heh, time to wake up, fanboy.

not so silly.

[rebelcool]

in meatspace, if i go into a ford dealership and put a big ad for chevy up in the middle of the showroom, they're not going to keep it up. Why? Well for one its private property, but also because its just plain ridiculous.

I believe there is a 'reasonable expectation' that you wont be seeing advertisements for competitors within (or on top of) another site unless you the site has explicitly chosen to do so.

There is also no free speech issue here. Commercial speech has long been ruled that it is not covered by the first amendment.

The legislation should forbid this kind of thing. It's unfair advertising. If you think microsoft bundling all sorts of software with their OS is 'unfair to competitors', the difference between the two is slight.

Note that most people dont choose to install gator, either. It installs along with other programs.

Make a difference

[n-baxley]

Don't just bitch, let the people who use gator know that you don't like the type of advertising they are using. Here is a list of gator clients from the gator.com website.
Barnes & Noble
Cheaptickets
Chrysler
Columbia House
CSFB
Dell
Delta
Diners Club
Discover
Earthlink
eBay
Eddie Bauer
ESPN
Expedia
Fortune
FTD
Half.com
Handspring
Hotjobs
Mazda
MSN
New York Times
NextCard
Omaha Steaks
People Magazine
Priceline
Progressive
Providian
Radisson Hotels
Reflect
Segrams
Sears
Sports Illustrated
Time

Attention BearShare users: Beware of Newdotnet.dll

[Anonymous Coward]

If you installed BearShare then you probably have a DLL in your windowl directory called newdotnetxxx.dll which was installed without your knowledge when you installed BearShare. This DLL nicely hooks into your winsock and gives the company, New.net , a way to sell additional TLDs like .shop or whatever. The prob is you will have a very *fun* time to uninstall it. I eventually scrapped my whole operating system (WinXP) because I cannot connect to the Internet after AdAware removed the DLL. Lesson learned: don't use BearShare, use LimWire.

Re:Gator in Pop-Up killer!

[Sarah Thustra]

No kidding -- the first time I encountered Gator, it was bundled with a piece o' freeware called "Pop-Up Stopper". SOMEBODY explain that to me.

It took me two days to realize I had Gator, because of course I wasn't getting any pop-up ads...*rotfl* I mean, seriously now!

(BTW, strangely enough I have to recommend the Pop-Up Stopper program. In spite of being laced with GatorAIDS, it has worked damn well for me. It seems to have 100% success stopping ads--hehe even if its own spawn is sending them--and you can disable it for the duration of a click by holding SHIFT or CTRL, which is nice when you want to bring something up in a new window. Just thought I'd point that out.)

What is this supposed to prove? That cockroach companies like Gator aren't even LOOKING at what kind of software they're infecting with their program?? Or that the world is becoming so saturated with people scrambling for a buck any way they can get it that all the *sensible* ideas have been taken?!

--ST

"It is one of the triumphs of man that he can know a thing and still not believe it." --John Steinbeck

Oh well

[Anonymous Coward]

The web is dead. Maybe Microsoft can make a better one.

Fighting This

[BlenderHead-2001]

The article does mention Ad Aware to get rid of this if you accidently let it get installed in the first place. In addition I use the Proxomitron to just get rid of those annoying pop-ups/unders/whatever completely. It's fully configurable and let's you create your own filters in a manner similar to Perl's regular expressions.

Re:Fighting This

[Ibag]

Yes, the article does mention Ad-Aware, but did you see the context?

Scott Eagle, chief marketing officer at Gator, said consumers can easily uninstall the software by accessing the "add/remove programs" in their settings. He added that consumers can opt out of receiving the program during downloads of partners' technology. A program called Ad-Aware, from LavaSoft, also helps consumers remove remnants of programs installed surreptitiously on their machines.

From what I understand of Gator and problems people have had with it, unless you have Ad-Aware, you might as well forget actually getting rid of Gator. The uninstall you get from them doesn't actually fully remove the product. Although, I can't say that I'm surprised that a company who would piggyback spyware with their "partners'" products would provide a faulty uninstall program and then sell adds for products to show up on competitors web sites. Advertising on the net just seems to get worse and worse...*sigh*
Ibag

Re:Fighting This

[Kris_J]

Hey! That's my post ;)

(A happy Proxomitron and AdAware user)

Re:Fighting This

[theancient1]

My personal favourite ad-busting program (Windows/Linux/Mac) is WebWasher. It removed everything that has ever annoyed me (scripts that run on close, scripted changes of the window size, status bar, scripts that prevent you from using the right mouse button, cookies, looping gif animations, and of course banners, popups, cookies) and is free for personal use. Every advertising annoyance gone. (With the additional help of Ad-Aware, of course.) Of course, Mozilla could probably do that all as well (as others have mentioned), but WebWasher is a cross-browser solution.

They do come with uninstallers...

[ColGraff]

...they're called "partition tools". Not only do they destroy windows completely and utterly, but the very FAT32 filesystem itself. It's a thing ob beauty, man. A thing of beauty.

I love the smell of Linux in the morning. It smells like...like...victory.

Isn't this an open specification?

[Helmholtz]

There's noway this is possible. The AC-3 Specification is an Open Standard! And the ac3dec Software is "A free (GPL) AC-3 stream decoder". If Dolby wishes to dispute that the code within the decoder has been stolen from them, then that's a matter they need to take up with the software writers.

I just don't see what possible infrigement there could be, especially on the part of Dolby.

how i removed it

[rebelcool]

(mind you, im using win2k)

First tried the add/remove programs method, of course it couldnt get rid of the file that gator starts from, because the file was *running*.

Had to go into win2k's process list. Find the process (i believe there was more than 1) and shut them down. THEN I had to go and use add/remove programs.

Finally, i had to go into explorer and delete the remnants of it that wasnt uninstalled.

I cant imagine what id do without the process list.

I'm almost on the boat with you...

[ragnar]

I am a part owner of an internet company and I run a technology site, but I'm getting tired of it all. A little bit of advertising never hurt anyone and it wasn't a problem that people wanted to sell things on the Internet, but when you have idiots who think the 'Net was made for privacy invation and pilfering wallets of their neighbors I get sick. Sometimes I seriously want to shut down my email box and go do something else.

These feeling go away after a bit, but I miss the good old Internet. I'm referring to the one before everyone thought it was a well spring of financial bliss. It is getting embarrassing to tell people that I make my living on this medium. Some days it feels like a theme park, with all the cheesy sound and lights. Shudder.

Re:I'm almost on the boat with you...

[gmhowell]

It is getting embarrassing to tell people that I make my living on this medium. Some days it feels like a theme park, with all the cheesy sound and lights. Shudder.

If only it were as good as an amusement park. They're generally inocuous. A more apt analogy might be Las Vegas: fun for adults, but funded on allowing a lot of debauchery. Even more to the point: the house always wins.

Is OSDN guilty too?

[bgarcia]

When I loaded slashdot, there was a banner add at the top asking me to fill out a survey and be entered for a chance to win $1000.

So what the heck, I click on it. They're trying to gather some information to help with their advertising. No problem, that's what these surveys are usually for. I'm merrily filling out the survey, and everything's fine, until I hit this question:

13. Which of the following actions have you taken as a result of visiting an OSDN site? (CHECK ALL THAT APPLY)

• Clicked on an ad and visited an advertiser's Web site
• Clicked on a link to a vendor site from an article
• E-mailed for more information through the advertiser's e-mail address
• Recommended OSDN network to a friend, relative, or business associate
• Purchased a product or service reviewed by OSDN network
• Purchased a product or service advertised on OSDN network
• Other (please specify)

Did you notice that second item?

Now I'll be wondering if the articles themselves have been bought by advertisers...

What's ActiveX? I can't run that on my boxen ...

[WillSeattle]

I try to run it, but while I can get Xwindows, I can't get ActiveX. Is this some new code?

Seriously, hasn't everyone turned that off, along with all JavaScript, even if they have a Win box?

Wait a minute!

[DejaMorgana]

So, is it okay to delete kernel32.dll?

i just uninstalled it.

[jon_c]

After reading the artical i installed gater, after filling out my lifes story and fake credit card info i was left with little gater eye's peering from my system tray.

The little eye's creeped me out so i uninstalled it, the little gater's gone, right now all i have is

Winamp's Agent
Download Accelerator
Geoscope Banner Filter
Volume control
MSN Instant Messenger (freakin Brian)
Aol Instant Messenger (most everyone)
Streamripper for Winamp.

-Jon

Re:i just uninstalled it.

[theantix]

I guess that means that I (and others, judging from the moderation) fell for a troll. Not the first time, that's for sure. OH well, thanks jon c.

Re:i just uninstalled it.

[sheetsda]

Keep an eye out for "OfferCompanion". Its possibile it only comes with the versions of gator that tag along on AaudioGalaxy or Snood. Or perhaps they finally removed it.

Gator / Smart Tags..

[Davewpw]

Looks like we know were M$ got the ideas for smart Tags. It is sad how everyone points out how MS removed the smart tags from Windows XP. But No one lets you know of the smart tags that are in the Office Suite.

The really sad thing is friends of mine will say this is just FUD from the Linux users.

Its time to bring back Lynx

Re:just another nigger talking big over tha intern

[sporkraper]

I've been to Brooklyn; they don't do that there.

Trojan: What a good idea

[t_allardyce]

An even better tactic would be to install an ad-busting proxy such as junkbuster. Now that _would_ spark complaints from businesses ROFL...

It would also be welcomed by the users, and it would be very amusing watching the entire online-advertising business go down over night.

Imagine the court hearing - "[X] company, you must cease and desist implementing the trojan in this software, and make all users uninstall their ad-busting proxies... weather they like it or not."

-tfga

ACtually, i kinda liked those

[Unknown Poltroon]

They keep changing my fucking cable stations every other week. They were really helpful in figuring out whats on. But i dint think about the burn in. Couldnt you sue for that?

Re:Fighting This with junkbuster

[Corporate Gadfly]

The junkbuster project has been revived as well. It is a proxy software with a lot of desirable features. The code is alpha quality but some of the features are:

• perl regexps for matches
• content filtering
• header crunching (outgoing/incoming)
• aiming to be cross platform
• open source

The documentation is a little lacking but we want a stable product first.

Opportune

[TroyFoley]

"Gator is a so-called online helper application that has millions of active users and manages passwords and user IDs."

This is like having a roomfull of cocaine and claiming you sell weed to a couple very close buddies.

The easiest way to avoid such ads

[agni]

The easiest way as far as I know is to use a firewall like atguard. I have it setup so that the gator app cant connect to the gator servers, and that essentially stops it from popping up. And its kinda cool cos I can still use gator to fill my forms!

Don't disable Java use Lynx or Links

[Iron Webmaster]

When I got sick of it I took a look at where that annoying crap appeared. 90%+ was from newspapers while getting my daily news fix. So I switched to Lynx and later Links for the news. If I want to see a particular picture I have jpg and gif associated with display from Imagemagick. And this leaves Netscape to use where I really want to have Java(script) functioning.

Re:Disable Java, Javascript, and ActiveX. Like, Du

[Lunastorm]

That'd be funny if a case like that would win, especiallly if it was against one of those pop star sites made by a 13 year old girl. Next, we could sue id Software for discriminating against the blind in Quake 3 Arena. Have you tried playing that game with your eyes closed? It's hard!

I Own My Upstream Packets

[reallocate]

The CNET piece gives us this dismaying assertion from Gator: "The promise of the Internet was always one-to-one marketing,,.".

Heavy sigh.There's an inverse relation between the value of the Internet and its use as a marketing medium.

What I want is a browser that tells me where my upstream packets are going, and lets me permanently block those paths.

Can someone with Gator test a few things?

[jesser]

When a pop-up ad for a Delta Airlines appears while you're surfing AmericanAirlines.com, is it clear to the user that
a) the advertisement is coming from Gator, not from American Airlines, and
b) the user can stop this type of ad from appearing by uninstalling Gator?

Also,
c) Can a user who has been using Gator for several years uninstall Gator without losing his/her passwords?
d) If not, does typing this bookmarklet into the location bar at hotmail.com (after Gator fills in your password for you) show your password in a dialog?

javascript:x = document.getElementsByTagName( 'input' ); y=false; for(i=0; i < x.length; ++i) { if (x[i].type == "password") { alert("Password: " + x[i].value); y = true; } } if (!y) { alert("Use this bookmarklet on a page with a pre-filled password field."); } void 0;

Assuming the javascript URL works with Gator-filled passwords, a Gator user could place that bookmarklet on his/her personal toolbar, and then activate it on each site where Gator remembered the password by clicking the personal toolbar button.

huh?

[Reckless Visionary]

iforgotmyfirstlogon sent us a link to an article on CNet about Gatoring, a fabulous new advertising technique where advertising buy key words and pop up windows over competitors.

Is that a sentence?

Using this in the real world

[rubak]

First time poster, so forgive me if I offend y'all.

OK, plenty of you will consider this as an ad for my latest article but since /. inspired it, I'll give you a quick portion of it.

Here's a question: What if Chevy sent tons of people to stand outside BMW dealerships with bullhorns. Whenever a customer comes onto the BMW lot the Chevy people would yell through the bullhorn, "HEY, YOU THERE, ON THE BMW LOT. COME ON OVER TO THE CHEVY DEALERSHIP AND I'LL GIVE YOU A COUPON FOR $50 OFF A NEW CAR. I'LL EVEN DRIVE YOU THERE FOR FREE." Those people aren't on private property, they're just marketing to people just like these keyword popup ads.

I'd love to see businesses doing this. That would be great during lunch.

HEY, YOU IN THE MCDONALDS DRIVE THROUGH. I'LL GIVE YOU $5.00 OFF YOUR NEXT MEAL AT WENDY'S IF YOU DRIVE THROUGH WITHOUT PAYING.

Maybe I need to start selling bullhorns. I'd be rich.

HEY, YOU. $9.00 OFF YOUR NEXT BULLHORN FROM ACE HARDWARE!

Who said that?

You can read the rest at http://www.rubak.com/article.cfm?ID=13

Crytsal Pepsi?

[cpeterso]

he spent an entire lecture talking about how Crystal Pepsi was the greatest marketing campaign ever.


If Crystal Pepsi had such the greatest marketing campaign, why did it disappear after only a few months? I'm curious what your prof liked about it..

Re:Crytsal Pepsi?

[kaszeta]

If Crystal Pepsi had such the greatest marketing campaign, why did it disappear after only a few months? I'm curious what your prof liked about it..

That's why I mentioned it. Crystal Pepsi was a new thing then. And he was sure it was going to revolutionize the industry...

Beware ads for "nothing"!

[cpeterso]

is there a human being that does not know what plastic is?

and notice that there is actually no product called "Plastic" which a customer can go buy. When you see an ad that is NOT for a product, you have to wonder what they are actually advertising. Usually, the company has a bad reputation and is advertising lies to change their public perception.

Ponder Chevron's "People Do" pseudo-environmental ads pretending that Chevron's primary interest is saving cute animals and making the environment greener. Or ponder the "Eggs Got a Bad Rap" ads showing freaky eggs being released from prison. The egg ads lies to us, telling the viewers that eggs are not high in cholesteral. Plus, would you really want to eat an egg that had been in prison!!

Kernel32.dll

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Oh, yes.

AC Tech Support for Windows. We're there when you need us. Just call 1-900-HALFWITS.

actually

[cpeterso]

I shoved my cock so far into her mouth that I pumped the cum straight into her stomach.

While you were fucking her stomach (a stomach job?), I was fisting her ass so deeply that I reached into her stomach and gave you a hand job. Don't worry, I'm not gay. I thought I was crushing her esophagus; I didn't realize I was actually jerking you off! sorry!

What the...

[RedBear]

The pop-ups will get worse, until they are tuned out completely, like your little sister.

Are you saying there are still ads on the Internet? Where are they? I've been on the net for like 6 years now , so I saw a few back when they tried it the first time, but I thought they gave that up... because after a while I just... didn't see... uh...

oh.

nutrition facts for software

[aechols]

perhaps some sort of standardized labeling for software should be implemented, much in the same way that we have a standard recognizable nutrition facts label on all manufactured food products. it would have to spell out exactly whats being put on, separated by component. something like this:

kazaa ------------- 5.0 mb [i][u]
gator ------------- 1.4 mb [i][u]
offercompanion -- 642.0 kb [i][u]
other adware ---- 426.8 kb [i][u]

clicking on the [i] would bring up more information on what exactly it is, [u] would bring up complete uninstallation instructions. i doubt anything like this would ever be done but it would sure be nice. besides that some cheating could be done, like the info could read "enhances consumer experience by presenting additional relevant product information" instead of "attaches itself to your browser and reports the web sites you visit so we can guess what you'll buy next"

wrong wrong wrong.

[rebelcool]

Do you know anything about gator? Most people DONT choose to install it. It comes piggybacked with other programs. It is also extremely difficult to uninstall (for the non-technical anyways)

Lord, the libertarian bent of geeks is so amazingly shortsighted. The reason laws (like this) need to exist is to maintain FAIRNESS in the marketplace. A FREE market is a *fair* one. Didnt you learn anything in economics?

It must be good

[kindbud]

For their part, marketers appear both drawn to and repelled by the practice of "Gatoring."

If the marketdroids love it when they use it, and hate it when it's used against them, then I absolutely LOVE IT.

"The promise of the Internet was always one-to-one marketing, but nothing has ever proven it out. We're proving it out," Eagle said.

Scott Eagle is chief marketing officer at Gator. I agree with him. As far as marketers are concerned, this is what the techies told them the Internet was going to be good for. And now, at last, they got some techies who figured out how to deliver on that promise.

Three cheers for the hapless Kazaa users, who are helping to make marketdroids the world over understand just what was meant by that old saw "Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it!"

Why did CNet not advertise on this article?

[beynos]

I don't know if anyone else has noticed over the last few months, the ads that have been popping up on CNet. They're these annoying flash boxes that take up 3 quarters of the page width, that have been slapped into the middle of an article. I actually got asked to do a survey on them, and they actually asked me if I liked the ads. I did notice that whenever they asked me what I thought about the ad, they didn't provide room for a text answer, which I thought was kind of lame...

To the point, I thought it was quite funny, that these "exciting" new ads that CNet has been showing to me on all of their pages recently was missing from the one article talking about advertising...

Supermarkets do this too

[olddoc]

When I buy Herrs potato chips, the register spits out a coupon for Lays.

activewho plugin?

[jelle]

I don't think my mozilla supports that.

Yet another good reason not to use the client part of the Code-Red-virus-spreading-server.

Re:Fighting This with junkbuster

[meldroc]

Hallelujah brother! It's time to show X-10 & Gator who's boss of my machine.