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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 figure it's a matter of when, not if.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
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.
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.
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 ...
> 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.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
the lower you sink, the better chance you have of turning a profit.
_f
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?
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
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.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
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.
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 love the smell of Karma in the morning
I'm all for keeping the net legislation free, but heres a place where only a law can help.
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I just say no to:
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
Did you notice that second item?Now I'll be wondering if the articles themselves have been bought by advertisers...
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.