Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 They do not publish how they encrypt your sensitive data, they only claim that yourt information is encrypted and absolutely secure.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 After 3 emails to their customer service I finally got the response that they do not publish how they do security and encryption (may I assume it is ROT-13 then!?)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 ...
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.
...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.
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.
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.