Slashdot Mirror
Web Publishers Sue Gator
shofmann writes "The Washington Post is reporting that a number of publishers, including the Washington Post, is suing Gator Corp. over their obnoxious spyware, saying that Gator is "a parasite that free rides on the hard work and investment"
of other people's web sites. The lawsuit alleges that Gator's spyware contributes to trademark infringement, misappropriation of the news, and
represents unfair competition." The publishers seem to be distressed about Gator replacing website ads with its own. Several people submitted this related article about blocking internet advertising - nothing really new here for geeks, but a good URL to send to your less technically-inclined friends.
Yet another reason to use Ad-aware.
Human/Ranger/Zangband
The thing is that there are people who are paying money to put those ads on a website. The difference here between the magazine or television and the web is that the guy who runs the site gets money when people click/lead or whatever the pricing plan may be. If you cut ads out of a magazine, the magazine doesn't care. They made their money because the advertiser paid for the ad to be in there, and it was in there.
On the web the advertiser not only pays for ad placement, which in turn brings them direct profits (e.g: online casino), but the person with the website depends on those ads being shown so he can get paid through cj, or whatever system he uses.
Gator most definitely sucks because not only is it evil spyware on peoples computers. But it takes money away from people who are trying to pay the hosting bill for their very cool web sites.
I mean, even slasdot is getting paid for the ads on the site. And if those ads don't show up because gator replaced them, then gator is indirectly stealing revenue from slashdot. Instead of say google (with its ultra cool google rackmount box thing) paying slashdot, company X pays gator.
Do you now see why suing gator is the way to go?
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
the problem is that most people don't really know what it is. for example i have never met a single person that actually installed gator knowingly. My wife for example installed audiogalaxy (i wasn't home , so i would have given her the pyware free one, of course) And i came home and saw gain popups. Then i went through the installer for audiogalaxy. there was 1 checkbox asking if you would like gator installed for you. and it was cheacked by default. my wife, not being a big geek simply just clicked next. Now, my wife knows a little bit about computers and stuff, so i would imaginfe that there are TONS of people out there who simply clicked "next". These people don't read the EULA that actually tells them what it is. If gator was a program you downloaded by itself, i could agree with you, but it is virtually forced upon other people. For the most part when you install a program and it asks you if you would like a specific component installed, they will say yes, just to be safe, like maybe that component is vital to the program.
So, here's what you do.
Install ZoneAlarm (free version works fine) then install Gator. When Gator tries to connect to the internet, don't let it.
Now you can enjoy Gator's software, without them making any money from advertising. Kind of like what they're doing to the websites!
(NB: This assumes you actually *want* the Gator software to store all your passwords & credit card numbers on your hard drive)
rOD.
Rod Begbie done this, and he's not
You're wrong about both. Mozilla displays titles with little pop-ups. Opera (6.03) displays the titles in the status bar area.
No. The gator software often installs itself without your permission if you are on win32 and use MSIE with lax enough activeX permissions. It is a trojan that masquerades as a utility that fills out web forms for you.
In fact is puts its own ads exactly on top of the a web page's regular ads so it disguises Gator ad content as the web site's content. It also sends in the popups. I believe but I am not certain that it collects marketing information based on your surfing patterns.
A lot of the latest versions of AudioGalaxy and such do you not give you the option to opt out of installing Gator. Besides, shouldn't you be doing school work at school instead of downloading mp3's or uninstalling software. Computers are in schools to use as a tool for learning, not for wasting time.