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Still More Advertising Links
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."
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
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
Unfortunately, they can. It's the way the Internet works.
Right now I am voluntarily running Proxomitron, a web proxy which strips out ad banners, popups, and assorted misc.trash from the pages I view. And there's not a damn thing webpage designers can do about it except convince me to disable the proxy.
Things like surf+ are like anti-Proxomitrons that introduce spam instead of filtering it out; the only "cure" is to educate consumers and provide information on removing this software if they've installed it. As long as they can be uninstalled, you can't hope for much more. Of course, the kind of integration Microsoft was developing for XP is another kettle of fish altogether.
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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
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
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
No, because you have no assurance that the default and the checkbox will remain in future versions. Remember, what started out as a nose becomes an entire camel in your tent if you don't take care of the situation early.
The browser has no business modifying webpages. The browser has no business calling itself part of the operating system. The browser, proxy, and OS are three separate programs and should remain that way so you can choose the one you want from three separate vendors if you wish.
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I think you make some points... This is a clear violation of copyright. There might have been some gray area for MS's smartlinks, which didn't alter the content in any way other than to put links on "keywords" to MS pages or to paid customers of MS.
That was bad enough, particularly for those who have anti-MS pages, it amounts to rape.
But this is even worse... This "technology" completely alters your page, and even uses it like part of their site. It strips out your own links replacing it with the marketers. This is something that likely can't be protected by "fair use", as it's likely something that the marketdroids can't get permission to do from the end user.
Certainly the big sites will sue, as will the OTHER marketing companies.
As far as I'm concerned, marketers who are as offensive as these clowns DESERVE to have the sharks unleased on them. Which will happen. That is, until a MS or AOL buys them...
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
"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.
" 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?"
It's getting all the more common. For example, you can't even install some hardware anymore without getting adware... Creative Labs pretty much has a monopoly in sound cards (ever since they sued Aureal into extinction with a frivilous lawsuit that Creative lost). Installing the drivers (which aren't packaged as drivers, you have to run their installer, NOT just install the drivers) you get a trojan called "newsupd" which tracks your browser AND sends you ads.
My guess is that this sort of thing will only get more common, particularly as two companies (NVidia and Creative) have a virtual lock on the medium/high-end sound and video segments of the PC.
What is most offensive is how these massive corporations don't even give us the dignity of dealing with us as CUSTOMERS. No, they see us as sheep to be mined again by marketers, just for USING the product that we bought!
If adware hardware was cheaper to buy BECAUSE of the spyware/adware it has in it, then I might have less of a problem with it. But, in the case of sound cards, it's clearly not, as the SB Live! (which has not advanced any in 3 years other than adding some minor bells and whistles) hasn't really gone down any in price in the same period.
When you consider that harware always gets cheaper to make as it gets older in design, Creative obviously is using it's monopoly to fatten profit margins at their customer's expense. The Newsupd trojan only being another part of it.
I'd guess that NVidia will soon do the same thing with the GeForce, now that 3DFx is dead. In fact, I'd imagine that their marketing departments will be looking into this new web-defacing adware.
After all, corporations have no morals other than profit, and marketers have even fewer morals.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
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.
The user installs the plugin, so in a sense, it's their own fault. Problem is that they are promised one thing, but now they're getting something very different from what they expected.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
According to ScumWare it appears that they are plugins. This makes sense, since every version of IE has a different (and progressively better hidden) method of setting the proxy, but the plugin interface is standardized between versions.
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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")
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.
"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.
"The browser has no business modifying webpages."
Erm... My understanding is that HTML is (at root) just a markup language for text. Until CSS and layers and whatnot got totally out of hand, it wasn't even POSSIBLE for the designer to dictate how a webpage would be rendered. I know I always change the default fonts and sizes; maybe the author of the webpage WANTED it displayed in ANNOYING-HUGE or illegibletiny or even *shudder* BLINK!
I think any end-user who wants to modify their browser (by recoding it, by installing a third-party program, or by viewing it through one of those red plastic decoder rings) has every right to do that. So the text on your web page triggered my auto-link-to-search-engine software? How is that a PROBLEM?
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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?
"The copyright grants, among other things the exclusive right to create derivative works, except in the case of parody."
So remember, unless specifically stated by the author, you can't:
- Change font sizes
- Change colors
- Resize auto-sizing browser windows
- Display in less or more color depth than intended
- Use screen-reader technology (audio or tactile)
- Allow your browser to add links to the text
- Display page in an unauthorized browser.
Any of these modify the web page significantly, so they could be called derivative works. So now I'm getting confused. Does information want to be freely usable by the end-recipient or not?
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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)
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
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.
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.)
Well see here. I just cut and pasted your paragraph, and removed all your bold formatting and inserted a link. Did I, or did I not change your message?
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.