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An Anonymous Coward writes: "MSNBC.com has the latest on the controversial Smart Tags technology that got punted from Windows XP. This time it's not Microsoft doing the dirty deed, but a couple of 3rd-party companies. And they already have 500,000 users installed. I can see the lawyers salivating already."
This kind of stuff has got to stop. I own my computer. I'm not leasing it from anybody, it's a physical product and I own it. And I'll be damned if I want people smuggling their parasite-ware onto my pc, to make money from bandwidth I am paying for. When's this going to stop?
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
So how is this any different than your old article.
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
it still amazes me that msnbc, a microsoft affiliated site, can put up this somewhat anti-corporate and sometimes anti-microsoft content.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
owns the content... it's technically feasible to change the content displayed by the client anyway you want. Maybe that's was really the incentive behind the IE/Netscape war.
It's just a BloJJ
So are there any way to protect oneself against this? How can they be allowed to hijack on others bandwidth? Spyware, adware, scumware, etc etc., I hope that there is someone who is working on a solution to these problems. They can't change the way I want to present my homepage, now the line is crossed a looooong time ago!
It's buyer beware for software. It's good to know there's published information on what these software packages are truly designed to do, and one can only hope that some of the users have decided to uninstall them based on the recent media hype.
Being a web designer and developer myself, I can attest to the fact that it can be alluring to know that by selling your integrity, you can make a few extra cents off of an unsuspecting victims' email. But in the end, I don't think it's neccessary to get a fatter pocket by helping to increase spam; aiding in slowing down the already clusterf*cked internet, or participating in an unethical venture designed to help market others' products or services online.
Webmaster: don't sell our rights away for a few cents a click!
- tre
http://piclabs.com
These browsers (based on IE, but that's an implementation detail) give users a way to "auto type" words into a search engine. I don't see how this is, in any way, "hijacking content". If users don't want this, then they won't use these systems. And if they do, who is the "site owner" to tell them how to render the HTML she sends them?
BR>This new story is about two different programs who are disfiguring pages with colors and links and then selling keywords which in some cases are to porn sites..
RTFATWLBYPSS
Don't these just affect IE on XP, or does XP actually act as like a 'proxy'? In other words, can you just use Netscape on XP to circumvent the problem? I'd venture to guess that you can't, because I can't see it being a big deal if it was just another 'feature' of IE.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Do they install a local proxy and filter the pages before they reach the browser?
Or are these plugins in IE, and mess up the pages after its been loaded?
Hey -- if some teenager smuggles an app. onto a corporate computer, he's a nasty hacker who must be punished. When corporations try to smuggle their crap onto my computer, that's smart business. Huh?
InstaPundit! Ahead of the Curve Since 30 Minutes Ago
</smart tag>
Anything that turns msnbc or disney into a pr0n site is just ducky.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
Here is more info on how to protect yourself as a webmaster: Link
I had one of those things install itself on my machine. I have to admit, though, that it hasn't bugged me enough to try to uninstall it yet. It's just sort of there. It doesn't pop up a window, or navigate me someplace I don't want to go. It just underlines stuff. And so far, it hasn't interfered with my ability to follow a hyperlink.
But what I really find stupid is that the system isn't even that helpful. Because it just tries to find words, it has not comprehension of context, so if I click on the word "software" it always takes me to IBM, whether the context is "open source software", or "programming software" or "buying software"...
The authors of this scumware are misleading people by claiming that "the user" is responsible for the changes being made to the web pagesbefore presentation: The essence of the problem is that, in fact, it is *their software*, not the user, which is modifying the pages. (The distinction being that the user is unaware of the nature of changes being made.)
Permission to read and distribute != Permission to distribute modified versions.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Avoid spyware (kazaa, activestates komodo, that means you. I wonder how long before linux komodo gets the spyware bits ported?). Pressure norton and the other firewall vendors to block spyware from installing. Adaware is nice, but there are already things that it cant clean. How long before kazaa or whatever starts installing polymorphic viral code into essential DLLs? I'd give it a couple of months. I'm sure there are security holes in these spyware apps, a worm exploiting them would hit a few million home users, once the dust settles they'll have no customers left. Or you could even use the holes to install your own spyware and make a bit of cash. Or freenet nodes serving up disk space and bandwidth. Spyware isn't a problem, its an opportunity!
These kinds of programs are short lived. So many people are against them, it's just a matter of time before lawyers suck the blood out of the software manufacturers. What would be really scary is if these programs simply over wrote regular hyperlinks on the web site - rather than just words in text. Or worse yet - make it appear that the changed page came directly from the main web site - not a third party. What's a shame about the whole technology is that people may actually enjoy this type of service if it were done in a more user-accepted way. I can't imagine what that would be - but someone out there must like it. Furthermore, this type of model could finally be the way to making Internet advertising really profitable for the advertiser, instead of just the web site owner. What I don't understand about everyone getting upset is that end users install the dang thing. It's not like it just suddenly appears on the user's computer and starts interjecting green links all over the place by itself. If users don't want it - then they won't install it (or software associated with it). But with hundreds of thousands of installations already taken place I really doubt that people are avoiding it. In fact, I would assume that most end users either don't care, or like it. Of course the individual web owners are upset, the on-line advertising market just became a little more competitive. Still, it's just a matter of time before the lawyers (or some idiot with a patent on this kinda stuff) sues the crap out of these little guys and put them out of business.
as another new feature of the browser era!
Anyone try IE this morning? Try hitting a URL that does not exist. auto.search.msn.com is now on-line! And believe me -- it's logging is ACTIVE!
The 500,000 people who signed up for this must be the same ones who think that AOL=internet.
I see a concerning tendency in these discussions for people who normally seem to understand that the other people cannot be allowed to dictate how we run our computers, to suddenly label this sort of software as evil.
Just like I will not allow the movie industry to be in control over my computer when I watch a DVD, and the Publishing industry cannot be in control of my computer/palmtop when I read a book, the Internet's website publishers have NO right to demand that I view their sites in any particular manner. Software that replaces adds with others, or software that adds links to websites, has as much a right to exist as any other software. If I choose to run it, then it is my freedom to do so - if you do not like people being able to read your documents while replacing the adds, I would suggest you stop putting your content on the web in the first place - not that you demand that web browsers should suddenly serve you rather than the person browsing.
User agents must serve the user and only the user. Demanding that browsers serve the interests and expectations of website publishers is in no way different from demanding that DVD players serve the interests and expectations of the MPAA, and that MP3 player serve the interests and expectations of the RIAA. The concept that of these "User Hostile" agents is the basis for the future that those who are attacking Freedom on the Internet are planning. If we value freedom and self determination in the information age, we cannot in any case condone and support an attitude that preaches that software is responsible to anybody except the person using it - even when it is the form of sleazy marketing.
That said, there is of course a more sinister angle to what these programs are doing - that is that they sneak their way into peoples computers without people realizing it. That we should not condone - but let us face it, it will be impossible to get away from as long as people are using software written without the intentions of the user in mind. We already have the solution to that problem, it is called Free Software, and there is enough of it to cover every computing need. When was last time you got a piece of spyware off apt-get?
So in closing, do not confuse the issues here:
- Programs installing functionality the user didn't ask for or want = BAD
- Programs doing what they (and presumable the user, given the previous) wants rather than what the website owner/music company/film company/book publisher/etc wants = GOOD
"And they are starting to understand that they must accept some advertising in order to support free content on the Net."
This reasoning by itself, I can understand. There is just one problem with it - I don't see the part where I am "supported" for the free content I provide .. it would seem that eZula is going to get money for "supporting" the 'free content I provide and pay for on my website. How is this "supporting" free content then? Is eZula going to send me some money for each hit their advertisers get from links they inserted into my web page? Of course not. So how can they argue that their TopText software is "supporting free content" in *any* way? They're just riding off the success of other people's websites, literally, like parasites .. in fact, TAKING AWAY advertising revenue that those site owners might have gotten from their own adverts, as site owners would get fewer hits. This is thusly damaging to free content providers.
Will there come a point where I have to write a notice on the front page of my site that it contains no third-party advertising and/or banner ads... and that anything that might appear of that nature on the page was not put there by me?
Come to think of it, maybe that's not a bad idea...
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
This is not to say that the technology is well thought out. Many of the complaints are valid. It is not a good idea to mark commonly used, generic words to be sent to a specific site. It is not a good idea to spread or propagate those links to people who do not want them, or sell to the highest bidder. IMHO, only end-users (or businesses running a company wide intranet) should be able to control exactly which links where. And this is done because only they know what kind of links satisfy their needs
Face it - the idea behind this is as old as the annotated work. This is just the problem of indexing all over again - which words do you want to put in the index, and which ones not to? The engine that enables one to do this should be lauded, but one should realize that the choice of words to highlight is dependent highly upon one's judgement. Those who think that this judgement can be pushed onto a machine just have not thought hard about what it is that they are automating. Employing such potentially useful functionality for advertising, and the criticism of that as "taking away the hits" seems so banal, so idiotically lacking in perspective.
Petty criminals go to jail when they do bad things.
Corporates can bribe governments into having them receive no or almost no punishment when they do bad things. There is no difference between the two groups, except one can lobby to have themselves not punished, and condition the public into thinking it's a good thing.
As always, there is a flip side to this. If this is made unlawful, that would probably apply to filtering/adbusting proxies as well; for the content providers there isn't much of a difference between replacing their ads and removing them. And once you're down that slippery slope, you could see blocking graphics, disallowing popups or animated gifs or even having your own typeface as intruding upon the websites' rights. This could conceivably mean that websites could legally demand that users use only a certain browser in only its standard configuration, whether the site would work with other setups or not.
I think the problem with this software isn't what they do, but the fact that they are being deployed in a dishonest way. Most people getting them installed will have no idea they are doing that, and they don't give paople an easy way of removing them. The dishonesty stems mainly from the fact that the users are installing an application to do one thing, and these change an unrelated application without this fact being advertised as part of the description of the original application.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
If it comes built into their OS then they can either put up with it or move to a free OS.
In either case, why should I have any sympathy?
These three things are illegal to distribute today:
Yet the author of each piece of modified content could get around that law by only giving out a program that, when run from the end-viewer's computer, uses a legally obtained copy of the unmodified content and then creates a locally modified version with the desired changes. (There are technical obstacles to applying this technique to each of those examples, but they're surmountable).
At no point was copyright law broken- but as a software engineer will tell you, deciding which part of a system should go on the client and on the server is an implementation detail that should be decided by technical performance concerns, not legalisms about which piece of data you can copy where.
To the end-user, the result looks exactly the same either way ("Hey! They just waved to JarJar, and kept right on walking!"), so why should one implementation be less legal than the other?
(This situation is rather like an inverted version of the "GPL ASP loophole")
For example, users of software from msnbc.com find that pop-up ads appear while they are surfing, overlaying existing Web site banner ads. The practice has so frustrated Internet sites and advertisers that the Internet Advertising Bureau announced this week it is considering a lawsuit against msnbc.com -------->crime popup message -> CatchCallA ;)
I wish they could fabricate something which can assail the eye to arrest the attraction;)
quote:port 17 udp
The cause for the article just seems too convenient for Microsoft. What's written here reads like a kid who go in trouble for breaking the rules, then pointing to another kid who broke the rules afterwards so that the first kid would get into less trouble.
Would it be at all surprising if this "Surf+" nonsense is just a program written by Microsoft drones, released under another name, to generate publicity somewhere else. To make someone else the bad guy (cuz this is worse - common words as ads). BUT, the whole concept seems so absurd, that I get the impression that we are meant to be highly offended by it.
Why bother.
Why is this such a problem for everyone? The only people that are having their bandwidth "hijacked" are those that voluntarily download and install this software.
This is another great example of overreaction on Slashdot.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
"But the companies involved say they are just doing what the Web does best -- providing hyperlinks to relevant information."
:)
Yeah, shitload of links to p0rn sites or x10 web cams... is that what the internet is really about?
oh... erm......sorry I asked.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
There has to be SOME limit. The ability to have SOME control over who knows where you go on on the web to say nothing about where you actually go has to be a basic human right. Else the web is no nothing more than a passive media like television.
Using technology similar to NBCi's QuickClick or Microsoft's smart tags, the green words are really links to outside Web sites.
They send a pop-under ad for X10, they have a similar technology, and they have the balls to say "That effectively turns sites like MSNBC.com -- in fact, any site -- into unwitting portals for the seedy side of the Internet"
Sorry guys, but until that seductive chick in the X10 ad is gone, you don't have the right to discuss the seedy ads on the internet.
PS: No, the pop under ad does not come up on my screen anymore, but it is still there until it gets munched, and a lot of inexperienced users don't know how to get rid of it.
I was just about to congratulate Microsoft on making a smart move. Grant it you were able to turn it off in IE, the other companies' software may not be as forgiving. I must say, the smart tag feature was some real annoying shit, if a bunch of companies start carrying through with it, there are gonna be some virtual riots.
. .
claiming this is just leeching risks appearing like a whiner to the few lusers who are actually pleased at some other (possibly illicit)functionality they received wth their viral browser plug in.
Putting up yet more terms and conditions on my web site doesn't sound like any fun or use. It's no news that reader's initial attention span and patience with a new site is short. So making them read a whole treatise, or - possibly worse because there's not lkely to be a back link to your referring page - diverting visitors to another site so they can read up on the plague, doesn't sound good either.
I presume these things work on a standard browser plug in architecture. You can detect Flash and other plug ins with javascript. Why not Top Text and all this crap, the politiely divert visitors with the offending code to a page that says actually does given them the info on what is going on, and that reminds them that in your eyes and in the eyes of many reasonable content producers, they are keeping very bad company indeed, and may not presently view your work.
I would feel just fine casting Top Text plug in vistors away from my site. For all the talk of legal remedies, involving parasitic behaviour or any more subtle arguments that have been put forth to me this the web equivalent of fly posting? If my web site were physical these people could be arrested for criminal damage.
I'm sure I could think of a few nicer arguments such as destruction of trade dress, contributory misrepresentation, alteration of registered trademarks (which is protected) and who knows what else. To someone who mentioned this elsewheer, this is likely _not_ a direct and clear copyright violation, as - on one point at least - the user is modifying your work only for their on use.
The basis on which the providors of such leechware could be sued for copyright infringment I am not clear. This is a grey area because of the free will aspects, free distribution of the offending leechware (though if this was directly sold you coudl claim copyright breach with intent to pander or profit therefrom which would be serious) and in essense the keyword advertisers are only paying for modifications to the code of a freely distributed "gift". Has anyone thought if these leechware things update themselves automatically? That might at least indicate the producers of this crap were _actively defacing_ website properties, and that they were n control and not the viewer / luser/
So until there's a legal remedy, is there a technological one : can I filter visitors by plug in or whether they have this crap installed?
He he, I guess you could quickly sell your defeater code to a bunch of upset content providors.
Isn't this rather like the guys who claimed they could sell a $50 box that's blank all the ads on tv, hyped it and sold the "defeaters" tosome channel for $x MLN?? I mean, are these people making a packet outta these keywords, does anyone know?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Someone should post the User Agent info for the browser that runs under XP. That way we should be able to configure our servers to see it when it flys by, and when it does, we just post a page that says their browers are misconfigured. If the unwashed masses get enough of those messages, they'll take out those third party modules.
Release a virus, trojan, gatorware whatever... that installs an ad busting proxy... I'd love to see the effects of such a thing and watch as the entire web advertising industry goes down overnight. (except slashdot and some warez sites etc.) lol :-)
oh dear, i'm gonna get flamed and modded for that one.. oh well, there goes my karma.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I had an extremely similar idea back in 1995 while I was working for Inso (now EBT) in their electronic references group (now long gone). Basically I envisioned a system where news stories would be automatically populated with links around recognizable terms (proper names, scentific words and terms, historic events, etc). Of course, in my much more socially beneficial idea, those links would point to articles in online (subscription-based) versions of our reference products, like the Cambridge Encyclopedia, the New Heritage Dictionary, and the Information Please Almanac.
Unfortunately none of this became reality (I hear even the project I was working on when I thought of this ended up just being merged with ESPN SportZone). I wonder if I have any copies of my prototype for this.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
has anyone seen what page you get if you type in an invalid domain with IE5+ now? instead of the usual error page, it now goes *straight* to an MSN search page.
now that's some shit.
In addition, I'd think this software must notify the web server of its presence somehow. As far as I know, it doesn't. Again, a complain to the FTC might be in order. Or maybe just a happy class action suit. Lawyers love class action suits. The lawyers usually get several million dollars and the people who were actually harmed by the actions usually get a coupon or something. I'm sure you could find a lawyer willing to file a class action suit...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I work at a major ISP helpdesk, and all these proxying programs are rapidly becoming the
second major problem most helpdesks are facing.
(First is, and remains firewalls, including
NAV 2001)
The reason is simple. They sometimes go haywire
and block IE traffic. (I can get pinged, even
ICQ etc, except IE goes dead).
Give this half a year to trickly through from
the unwashed massed to ISP-management, and you have yourselves a firm partner against
these programs. (Yes that is slow, I know)
These programs only seem to regognize text (if you can copy + paste it into notedpad its text). Creating an image from the text (screenshot or whatever) should prevent this from happenening. Although this would be a bandwidth wasting, time consuming thing to do if you dotn want your pages modified its an option.
If I'm wrong please correct me, im running on theory with this one.
Being a curious and somewhat masochistic person, I decided to try TopText and see what happened.
I normally use Opera, but I fired up IE 5.5, updated to the latest stable patches (6.0 beta is out but I didn't bother with it) and installed TopText.
No yellow links, but my pages are randomly reloading, usually bringing up something further back in the browser history.
It even destroyed my efforts at Meta-Moderating!
I'm using Windows ME (Don't ask why, we have sales reps in the field using it and I had to become familiar. Don't install it. IF you must use Windows use Win 98 SE or W2K, perhaps XP when it comes out, but NOT Windows ME)
www.matthewmiller.net
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
But what if I'm an ISP, delivering cached (and altered) copies of your work? Does it matter if my customers give me permission to do this (after all it's your copyright, not theirs)? Does it matter if my ISP only has one customer? Does it matter whether I change the page before I send it to you (on the cached copy) or after (through a link-adding browser)?
I don't know what the courts will decide, but it seems to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of copyright law to for anyone to modify your words before they reach the reader, whether they have the reader's permission or not.
I'm getting sick of reading about this smartlinks stuff like it's something new... Hasn't anyone seen those ads NBC was running about 6 months ago for that "QuickClick" program? "Click any word, find information!" Well anyone try it? Its Smarttags. Anyone ever install the program FlyCast in the past 2 years, by accident or otherwise? Smarttags. Flycast has been doing this for a LONG time, way before Microsoft. And from the looks of those screenshos, those products are using Flycast technology. Maybe if you were so concerned about this (which I don't see why you should be... On the web, its up to the user how the content gets displayed, not the publisher.. And it is very easy to distiguish what are Smart tags and what aren't) you should have spoke up long ago.
Some people are arguing that that's a good thing. Well, it's not, and the reason it's not has nothing to do with advertising software or "no-click" search engines. The reason it's a problem is that it destroys the possibility of effective cooperative annotation software.
There's stuff on the Net right now that lets any user of the system add annotations to the pages she sees. Those annotations are made visible to other users of the same system. There are two ways to do that: proxies (e.g. CritSuite, sorry, no link, because I don't want the server slashdotted, and it seems to be dead at the moment anyway), and servers similar to the ones under discussion (e.g. the now defunct ThirdVoice").
This is good and useful. It makes it that much more difficult to put drivel on the Web, whether it be advertising, political propaganda, or just plain misinformation, without there being visible dissent. It completely short-circuits, for example, the practice of registering <yourcompany>sucks.com to prevent people from finding your detractors, since the annotations don't have to come from any particular domain. Furthermore, the wide deployment of such software would be a wonderful step for collaboration and cooperative discussion, and preventing the software from working on Web pages in general would be a huge blow to that deployment.
The proxy implementation of annotations has copyright problems because the proxy clearly redistributes a derivative work. If people get all upset about this advertising software and try to get it banned, that ban is almost certain to sweep in the client-based annotation solution, and that could destroy annotation completely. That would be a huge victory for the Forces of Evil. No, it wouldn't be a total victory for them; a person can still put up an opposing view on another page, and a user can still use a search engine to find it. It would, however, make critical debate just that little bit harder, and that is never a good thing.
And, no, you do not have a right to completely control how your Web page looks on my screen.
Hidden scripts. Web bugs. Pop-ups. Cookies. Ad trackers. SmartTags (a contradiction in terms if I've ever seen one). We've entered an era where companies and unscrupulous marketeers (yes, this is a purposeful allusion to the term buccaneer) hijack our bandwidth and piss us off on a daily basis.
So what do we do? We try to protect ourselves with counter-measures, we spend time and effort getting rid of things that shouldn't be there in the first place. There's got to be a better way. If the corporations can hide behind the law, why can't we, the users, the techies, the people, make legitimate use of it, in order to adequately protect ourselves from the vultures?
Currently, this is difficult. The companies that annoy the hell out of us hide behind a single fact: 'You came to my site. Suck it up, and watch what I'm serving you.' Or, take another infuriating fact: Click-through licenses, which are written in such a convoluted manner so as to make them absolutely useless. But what if users and content providers (for, after all, they get hit by the various gator/smartTag technologies too) worked together to create some kind of structure which would indeed make it illegal to serve such ads to the user without their express consent?
How can technology and common sense be used so that each user can expressly define what he or she consents to viewing? If such 'preferences' were the first thing a remote server processed, for example, would it not help people avoid unwanted content? Would it not become illegal for companies to disregard your wishes and hijack your bandwidth serving you up with a load of crap? It should.
Or what if 'click through' licenses were required to stick to a common format in simple, plain English, Q&A format that even the least advanced user would be able to understand? Eg: 'Does this software install anything that might at any time perform an action without my express consent, such as serve me ads, or communicate information to a server? Yes/No: ...'
So what would it take? Adaptations to the internet protocol? Browser/OS support for this scheme? How would people pushing for such a structure make it a de facto standard, or even make companies/sites disregarding this content liable under law? And is more litigation the answer to it all? Or is it a double-edged knife? Step back for a minute from what you know -- you are fighting a war on someone else's terms. What would it take to redefine the battlefield and take over?
Pathway
So long, and thanks for all the fish
Back when we had real enforcement of consumer protection laws, the more obnoxious forms of this would have been stamped out quickly. Now it's going to be tough. But those laws are still on the books and can be used. Start sending those complaints in to the FTC and your state department of consumer protection. (The FTC site is down today. That's a bad sign, given the current administration.)
Exercise: Go to the Surf+ web site and find the uninstall directions. How long did it take you? Here they are:
To Uninstall Surf+ please follow these steps: /u and hit the O.K. button
1. Select the Start Menu
2. Choose the Run command from the menu
3. Type in surfplus.exe
4. Answer 'Yes' to the question that pops up
5.After you uninstall Surf+, please close all the IE windows.
To restore your original home page, right-click on the left side of the SpediaBar and choose Spedia options from the menu. Go to Startup and uncheck the box that says "Make Spedia my home page".
Note that uninstalling through "Add/Remove Programs" isn't offered (this disqualifies Surf+ for the Microsoft Windows Logo Program), and that the home page apparently can't be changed in the usual way. Now that's hostile.
(I haven't actually tried these directions. Someone who runs IE on Windows might try them and see if they work. I wonder if you can in fact execute the uninstaller with the default path from the run menu.)
If so, then would not that suggest that protecting my company's network from this be possible by polluting the company's internal DNS with a bad entry for this entire domain? I am thinking in the same vein as putting in DNS records so that anything in the doubleclick domain resolved to 127.0.0.1 or similar.
This is something I would obviously test myself before putting onto my company's network, but I'm asking if anyone else has already tried this.
Recently I was having problems with my development Windows computer. When I would visit controversial sites like The Register, I would get pop-up ads for porn sites. Believe me, these were not even R-rated pop-up ads. The first couple of times it happened I was wondering why The Register would have porn advertisement associated with their site.
Since I always say no to downloading everything, I assumed that I was totally immune. Then I remembered a site that I needed to look at that required me to download something for me to just see the text on their screen. So I am assuming that they placed this program on my computer, since all I use this computer for is web surfing... Uh, I mean testing web sites.
The solution - I found this great freeware tool that will scan your computer and allow you to clean it. All that it scans for is spyware, but as soon as I used it, the porn ads were gone. Ad Aware is freeware. Download it, you might be surprised. I came up with 140 files and my friend (who says no to everything) came up with over 150 files.
Wait, what do you mean that I don't have any choice in the matter and that someone might throw in adverts where none previously were? Hey, you suck MSIE!
Duh. You MSIE trolls are such a DoS (Denial of Slashdot). I wish I could send you a virtual kick in the balls.
I really do think that's a good idea. When I redesign my splash page, I think I'll be adding something like that to it. I'm afraid things like this are just going to get worse, and even if I beg for money, I'm still proud of the fact that there aren't any obnoxious banner ads on my site. :)
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
it is a double standard
saying modified by AddCrapp2000
you know it's been altered then... would that provide legal protection for the companies that do this?
changing the display of content in a way that changes the meaning of the content is a bit like misquoting someone, or editing the quote to suit the meaning you like... isn't that illegal?
no mod points since the new slashcode :(
it'd be good to be able to search the title of your download on a site to see if it has any nasties inside
This is how we can KILL this type of scumware marketing. Some porno guys create one called PornText and gorilla market it everywhere. Soon MSNBC, /., Yahoo will turn in to virtual pornsites. This will piss off everybody and the courts will slap this trespassing crap all the way down to scum hell where it belongs.
eTrade SUCKS
Why in hell is everyone and every company against Microsoft?! Who cares if only MSN appears on the desktop? It's Microsoft's OS, so why should they have to include stuff from other companies? If AOL and friends want their junk on people's desktop, why don't they write their own OS?! Microsoft worked for a damn long time on their's, no shit little half-assed newcomers can't beat them!
Wow, that is so true, that it must be flamebait. Bundling competing products must be bad if it's with another piece of software (which buries details in the EULA), but bundling things with windows (which does not even mention the other products in the EULA, and when you don't even have the choice of not using the OS) is good and must be forced on Microsoft.
Actually, this is a warmed-over version of a Slashdot discussion on July 31.
The difference is that the prior story centered on eZula's TopText/HOTText (bundled with KaZaa), and this one also deals with Surf+. Surf+ is a classic trojan: described as a popup killer (useful), but also inserts ads on third-party web sites in the same way as eZula and SmartTags.
Uh, eZula's TopText already does hijack existing links. See screen shots and explanation at scumware.com.
DAMN I'm sick of the idiot arguments this "debate" provokes. If you don't want to "lease" your computer then don't install software that modifies your browser to increase advertising when you surf. Because that is ALL this is about. Nobody is hijacking anything. The real freedom killer is if the protesters to this kind of thing are allowed to make it the "right" of site owners to have their content displayed in only one manner. Because that is playing directly into the hands of the RIAA and the MPAA and the publishers who want to convince us that we do not have the right to view content we access legally in any manner we choose. Basically, this is equivalent to making it illegal to read a book with a bookmark in it that has an add for MacDonalds, or to tape a pizza hut coupon to your television. It's all by the surfer's choice. Mind you, I wouldn't download a program that increased advertising when I surfed. But the only people being "hijacked" are those hijacked by their own stupidity for not reading the terms on the software they purchase.
Really, it seems that these adware parasites (Transform Engines) can't be made illegal without dragging other TEs (ad-filters, regexp'ers, translators, Swedish Chef-izers) down with them. But would they be commiting an illegal act by invalidating statements of guarantee that you make on your Web site, e.g. privacy policy? Not to mention the obvious effects on your (commercially-valuable?) goodwill when you state prominently that your site contains no advertising links, no popups, does not set cookies, gathers no information, will never link to doubleclick, etc... and a dozen X10 camera ads pop up.
I see a big whistling teakettle of legal hot water being put on the burners...
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Hmm .. I was wondering about that :/ I've have over 10 positive moderations and still no sign of mod points. Whats with that?