Morpheus Hijacks Browsers For Affiliate Links

Posted by timothy on Tuesday March 19, 2002 @05:36PM from the oh-no-this-can't-be-true dept.

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?"

2 of 489 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:haha. i'd rate this a 10 on the funny scale by DA-MAN · 2002-03-19 18:32 · Score: 0, Offtopic

How in the hell does this unintelligable anonymous coward get +5? People think before you moderate! Although he does make a good point on the discount for people who find the site on their own.

Anyways not to be too off topic, it doesn't matter if Morpheus doesn't run on Linux or not, the original software is Gnucleus and that runs fine on Linux. Hell Morpheus src code is available on their site, you can modify it to run on Linux if ya like (unless they left enough of Gnucleus intact that a port is just a recompile away.)

--
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
Re:Excuse me... by Graspee_Leemoor · 2002-03-20 00:42 · Score: 0, Offtopic

This is on +5 as I speak- just wait and it will get editor bitch-slapped down. Or are they afraid to since it got to 5 first and more people will notice?

graspee

p.s. I liked the way the post used the concept of tooling people into a frenzy and still made +5. Way to innuendo.