Morpheus Hijacks Browsers For Affiliate Links

An anonymous reader submits: "According to this news.com article, morpheus (aka streamcast) has begun silently installing a browser plugin on its users' machines that basically hijacks the web browser even when not running Morpheus. An afflicted browser will sense if a user is going to visit a shopping site like Yahoo! or Amazon, and secretly send them to a different site instead and then redirect them from this site to the user's intended destination. The user will not be aware that this is happening... however the site doing the redirecting will benefit because they are set up as an affiliate partner and will get a commission on the backs of the user. On a horrible scale of 1 - 10 for sleazy business practices, I rate this a 9. Comments?"

Comments

Sleezy, but no point in Morpheus anymore anyway.

[Raskolnk]

Now that Morpheus is just a hacked-up (or down ;-) version of Gnucleus, there's really no point in using it anyway. I don't see what it provides that Gnucleus doesn't, other than annoyance.

Corrections and notes...

[Cutriss]

An afflicted browser will sense if a user is going to visit a shopping site like Yahoo! or Amazon, and secretly send them to a different site instead and then redirect them from this site to the user's intended destination.

The final destination is more or less the same. The difference is the intermediary. Morpheus isn't stopping me from going to Amazon by instead redirecting me to Borders.com...They're just stealing referral dollars.

Honestly, though...I wonder how long it'll be before these online vendors lock out Morpheus' referral IDs, or even worse, deny the connections altogether (since the most recent source IP will be Morpheus' proxy, not your own).

And I assume that if there's a pre-existing Referral ID, Morpheus will strip it out and replace it with its own. Doesn't this constitute actual monetary theft?

Vendors taking liberties with your configuration

[Bruce Perens]

TurboTax and Quicken install advertising icons on the user's desktop. A whole bunch of Windows applications do that, often icons for Internet providers, but in the case of TurboTax and Quicken they install icons for banks.

These folks really must think that they own the user once the user buys their product, becuase even a "respectable" company like Intuit doesn't seem to have any problem with monkeying around with the private parts of the user's computer for their own purposes. Certainly those icons are paid placements.

Bruce

Are you insane?

[ergo98]

If software which does this sort of sleezy tactic put as a clear, easily obvious disclaimer "You are indirectly paying for this by allowing us free reign over your PC", then I'd wager that about 5 people on the planet Earth would actually install it. Instead, however, companies that do this sort of tactic either sneak it in entirely unintended, or they hide the details 40,000 words deep into a EULA which they know that no one reads, all the while promoting their "free" software. Why stop at redirecting the browser though? I mean surely there's some worthwhile nuggets of information on that harddrive somewhere that could be sold to the highest bidder. All's fair in the land of free software, right? (Why say just free though? Using this "anything goes" justification, anyone who believes that they are providing a more valuable service than they are charging can go nuts)

This sort of activity is atrocious, and I don't see how these people aren't facing the same punishment as the Kevin Mitnicks and Melissa virus writers are. Without any doubt there is a serious need for either a technical solution (one could say that it exists by way of Java : Sandbox every application to ensure it has no rights outside of its little world. The .NET Framework supposedly offers this but I wouldn't trust it until its evaluated and proven) or a legal solution. It's obvious that a "Dirtier-than-thou" cat fight is taking place with every sleezy vendor out slimeballing the next.

Delete Morpheus

[Von Rex]

First, they took an open source app, Gnucleus, and repackaged it as their own, adding nothing while actually degrading the software by adding popup ads.

Second, they started banning from their chat room anyone who mentioned this fact and posted the url to Gnucleus.

Now, they're installing scumware in order to control your browser for their own profit even while you're not using Morpheus.

Anyone left who still wants to argue with me about whether or not Music City is a company of degenerate sleazebags? Anyone who still disagrees with me that the proper course of action is to delete Morpheus and install Gnucleus immediately? (at least until something better comes along).

Excuse me...

[metacell]

... but this is a storm in a waterglass. I must point out what the article actually said and didn't say.

The article said that StreamCast will:

1. Redirect users to another site to collect usage statistics before sending them to the site they wanted to go to. This might be seen as invading people's privacy, but no personal data will be collected, merely usage statistics.

2. Put up a shopping section in Morpheus. That sounds perfectly legitimate to me.

3. Put referrals to online stores inside the browser window in some unspecified manner.

Please note that 1) and 3) are two separate points. They won't redirect you to another site when you're trying to go to Amazon.com, and then claim the referral bonus. The redirection is only for collecting usage statistics.
And the referrals inside the browser window have nothing to do with the redirection.

There's nothing in the article saying that StreamCast will hijack other people's referrals.

There's nothing in the article saying that StreamCast will pretend to refer people to sites (like Amazon.com) when they go there themselves.

Re:Excuse me...

[AnalogBoy]

Slashdot requires sensationalism such as this to keep up it's reader base. I propose one of the following is true:

1) The editors are complete and total idiots.

2) The editors are actually brilliant businessmen who know how to tool their audience into a frenzy, keeping them addicted to the forum, where they return to the page every x minutes/hours to continue their bitching/arguments/debates/conversations/firstpost ing/trolling to their hearts content all the while racking up $$ in ad revenue.

I'll let you be the judge.

Re:Excuse me...

[Elvis Maximus]

There is a third possibility:

3) The editors started this thing on a whim and lucked out when it became popular enough that they could make a living doing it. But they're not professional editors, publishers, or fact checkers, and they're not particularly interested in those things. And with a few thousand people critiquing every story, no amount of sloppiness goes unnoticed.

Just throwing it out there.

Re:That's really clever..

[aanantha]

Ah, but the point is that the Morpheus user isn't the customer. The Morpheus user is the product that is sold to these advertisers, the real customers. The Morpheus software is bait.