The True Story of Website Results

Henry V .009 writes: "Salon is running a story on a dot.com called Website Results. Maybe you've heard of them. Viral Spyware makers. My God, these people are sick. Interview question: 'Imagine there's a peasant somewhere halfway across the world. If you could push a button and kill the person without getting caught, would you do it for a million dollars?' 'For them, it was yes, in a heartbeat.'"

Comments

Re:What you won't see...

[CProgrammer98]

You mean like this button???

The Connection to the Flowgo Incident

[Alien54]

these are the guys who were involved in the Flowgo story from last April:

Under the auspices of their newly founded company, Intellitech Web Solutions, the three devised a plan to strip the visible front end off the toolbar, leaving only its snooping back end in place.

According to former Intellitech employees, the company also polished up some code designed to automatically and silently install the mutated toolbar when an Internet user viewed a specially designed Web page.

"At that point, it started to become a virus," said a former staffer who worked on the project.

Last March, Intellitech began to seed the Internet with copies of the backdoor program, using specially designed pop-up ads it purchased at sites, including the family entertainment portal Flowgo.com.

In violation of Flowgo's policy, the pop-ups automatically sent visitors to another site, where, according to virus researchers, special code exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser and forced the spyware onto users' computers.

From the end of the article (last page)

see Milgram's depravity study

[ChrisCampbell47]

Imagine there's a peasant somewhere halfway across the world. If you could push a button and kill the person without getting caught, would you do it for a million dollars?

Psychology 101 -- in the early 60's, Stanley Milgram wrote the book on how depraved people can be.

http://www.new-life.net/milgram.htm

What he was really studying was the varying levels of conformity (or conformability) in various cultures, and how willing people are to follow orders, even when those orders are morally wrong.