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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.
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.
(I'm being serious, not trolling) Get a Mac. When you're in the minority, marketers won't waste their time with you.
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.
I think our choice to ignore ads is only sending advertisers the message that they aren't trying hard enough.
the lower you sink, the better chance you have of turning a profit.
_f
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
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.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
"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.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
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.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
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."
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I'm all for keeping the net legislation free, but heres a place where only a law can help.
-
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!
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
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.