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Class Action Filed Against Bonzi Software
An anonymous reader writes: "A nationwide class action lawsuit was filed on November 25, 2002, in the Superior Court of Spokane County against Bonzi Software, Inc. Bonzi is among the world's most prolific issuers of internet advertising banners. Bonzi's website has been ranked as one of the most frequently visited websites in the world. In case you are wondering Bonzi is the company responsible for those irritating popup ads which say things like 'Your computer is broadcasting an internet IP Address...' and 'Your internet connection is not optimized ...'" The attacking lawyers provide some samples of the ads they say are misleading.
It's hard enough to get my mom to use Yahoo. These windows error like popups make it even harder.
Why hasn't Microsoft gone after them for using the likeness of Windows(TM)?
' . . . to unexpectedly find both computer and computer user thus hijacked to defendants' commercial website. '
I find the use of the word 'hijacked' interesting. Is this in the legal filing? How does one make a case based on that word. Sad that court cases often come down to semantics when most people today aren't that grammatically correct. And, yes, that does incluse myself.
If you don't like this . . . MOD someone else up.
If so, I hope they throw the book at them.
- This and all my posts are public domain. I am a Physicist. I am not your Physicist. This is not Physically advice
I've long been tempted to ask the UK Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) to investigate those banners.
I've lost count of the number of support calls both at work and from friends at home relating to them.
They are designed to be confused with genuine windows messages, rather than adverts, they are designed to install fear and confusion into the standard user, basically they are deliberately misleading and scaremongering adverts, which are illegal in the UK.
I hope Bonzi are bankrupted over this case.
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. --Albert Einstein
I don't know how many time I've had to deal with a customer calling up demanding to know why we are broacasitng their IP address to hackers. Not to mention stupid employees installing bonzi buddy all over their companies servers.. guess who gets to clean that cerap up? The tech, thankfully, not me..
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
The amount of harm done isn't really that great. So people go to their website by mistake. The result is that perhaps people will learn not to click on it again. It only took them a few minutes. I feel that anyone who makes the same mistake twice is an idiot who should probably be kept away from the internet.
I am of course totally biased here. This benefits me indirectly. The continued success of these ads means that they keep advertising, and this keeps the sites I like free[ish]. Essentially, I think its good that there's at least some succesful internet advertising.
As about 95% of the computers in the world use the same OS, it is very easy to generate false error messages such as in this banners.
The same happens in natural ecosystems: the more homogeneous is a population, the higher the risk of oportunist infections and parasites.
The best solution to this problem, instead of fighting each oportunist separately, is to create an environment where computational diversity could develop.
To begin, in your own interest, never ever again buy a computer with an OS so easy to attack.
If this succeeds, it will set a major precedent - and in my opinion, a really good one. I'm fed up with misleading, stupid advertisements - I quit watching TV because I didn't like ads, and now that I've been away from TV for so long I can't bear to watch it for more than 30 minutes because the commercials drive me mad. I'm all for supporting websites by looking at banner ads, but shit like these bonzi ads are not only annoying, but they cause no end of trouble for me. My mother and sister not only keep asking me about them, but my sister has clicked OK and Yes on them and installed shit on my computer, and the only way I can explain it is "don't do that". I for one will be glad even if this case settles for minute damages ($0.01 per class member or even less than that would be fine for me - just kick bonzi's ass at least a little bit!)
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
"But really, let's admit to it, the creativeness required to think up faking an error screen to get users to click on it (think reaction vs. action) is genius. I'm not sure this suit has any merit at all...and even if it does it really shouldn't."
What on earth does this mean? If the suit has merit, that means that the advertising was both deceptive and harmful. I admire a good grifter as much as the next guy, but these people are still thieves (or perhaps vandals) and that kind of shst ought to be against the law. Nor are laws against fraud the sort of bad laws (like, say, the DMCA) where a bit of civil disobedience is tolerable. There are three reasons that fraud like this (Bonzi Schemes, if you'll excuse the pun) should be illegal:
1. Harm to end users. Whether it's lost time, lost money, spyware-infested PCs, or just a general devaluation of warning messages (making their computer cry wolf...) the results are harmful for users.
2. Harm to the market. When users are confused about whether something is an advertisement, they make decisions on bad information. This rewards the wrong sort of economic behavior -- the company that can best trick people wins instead of the company with the best product.
3. Harm to society. We don't want our best and brightest to believe that the easiest way to get ahead is to steal or hurt other people. We would like them to go into productive activities that generate new wealth, not unethical and deceptive practices that siphon off wealth from others.
So yeah, if the suit has merit then it should have merit. This is exactly the kind of thing that users, the market, and society as a whole need a good set of laws to handle.
Make cheese not war 8:)
I'm having a hard time thinking of this as deceptive advertisements.
If my computer isn't broadcasting its internet address then an advertisement that claims it is is deceptive. If my Internet connection is optimised then an advertisement that claims it isn't is deceptive. If the advertisement looks like an alert put up by the operating system but it isn't then it is deceptive. That was easy, wasn't it?
oh yes and if bonzi stop advertising on the internet then then we will have to help pay the website costs as the ad revenue dries up. It is us the internet users who are benifiting at the moment from these adverts. It's like taking money from the stupid to pay for the websites of the informed. 1) Site gets money from advertisers 2) someone clicks on link, buys rubbish software 3) company buys more advertising 4) more free sites
Luckily, Ad-Aware came to the rescue and removed 99 spyware/adware files. Suddenly everything was much nicer...
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
I wonder if dotted quads > 255 are going to be the holywood equivelent of the annoying 555 area codes in US telephone numbers (interstingly, here in the UK Film and TV companies can get fake but genuine looking telephone numbers from OFTEL for showing on screen, so we don't have the same problem).
i know we're headed stragiht for it, but we need to stop internet laws. for the past 10 years its been free flowing mass, democratizing the world. yet when something like a popup ad annoys people, they want to sue. i dont understand it. i thought the people here were against any regulation of the internet.
You're missing the "deceptive" part of the ad, name that it PRETENDS to be a windows alert. In other words, they're using trickery to get you to click on it. I'm a Mac head, so I once accidently clicked on one when I was using a friend's Win98 PC. I thought it was just a message and I just wanted to close the dumb thing.
IMO, it's the whole "false pretenses" thing. Advertisements can't pass themselves off as consumer alerts or unbiased articles, but they try. And since the print/radio deceptions get spanked, so should these bozos.
Actually, while I'm here, regarding the "Your Internet Connection is Not Optimized" message, does their software include features to disable seeing this popup once it's installed?
If you install their software and still get the "....Not Optimized" popup, then I think the lawsuit deserves to, and will, succeed.
I don't like the trend towards scare tactics in advertising. Pharmacutical companies with the "Every year 10s of thousands of people die a slow and painful death from _____... Ask your doctor if the _____ is right for you..." pitch... "Your PC is broadcasting an IP Address... hackers can use it to gain access to your computer click here for magic solution..."
It's got to stop. Using fear to generate business is just one shade of grey from coersion. I hope the lawyers clean their clocks.
$G
-- $G
All I've seen in the discussion so far are people mentioning pop-ups that look like Windows dialog boxes, and 'Your Computer Is Broadcasting an IP address'...but what about those pop-ups that look like Windows Explorer...I would think that would be even more confusing to an average user than a dialog box.
I wonder why it's so hard to run an Ad supported website these days? This kind of litigation makes me sick.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
That being said, these banners are more than misleading, they're downright deceptive. See here. Look at banner one: "Your computer is broadcasting an Internet IP [sic] address." No, broadcasting is an actual technical term for sending data to an entire subnet or network and is not part of routine Internet activity. Let's not even try to figure out how your computer could possibly communicate without an IP address. Banner three: "Your internet connection is not optimized." Since an animated GIF is incapable of analyzing my IP stack's configuration, I'd have to say this is incorrect information.
Only banner two is legit, because it says your current connection MAY be capable of faster speeds.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Given that it's fraud, given that there are two options for legally stoping it, one requiring action by a department of the federal government, the other requiring action by private lawyers (both in name representing citizens) - you'd really rather have the government get big and all-responsible rather than encouraging individual initiative to pick up the slack? Which creates the more free society? Is a rich lawyer more of a threat than a powerful bureaucrat?
When Republicans urge "legal reform" it amuses me because Republicans are supposed to be in favor of leaving things to private initiative and shrinking the role of government. Of course, what most of them really seem to favor is that citizens have no recourse to effective action either via government or via individual (or group) initiative against business which have defrauded or harmed them. This is basically a transfer of the government's power to the corporations this would shield.
Given the alternatives, I'm all in favor of encouraging as many greedy lawyers as we can get into the field. As in any ecology, if one species gets all the good stuff, the ecology as a whole is degraded. But if you get different, individually greedy species into balance you can get a highly-functioning system. Having the government come in to support one greedy group (businesses) against another greedy group (lawyers) just because they're greedy throws the whole system - in which greed can balance itself out for the larger good - out of whack.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Yet another nice pointless lawsuit. Another amazing waste of time and resources for the district court that will hear this case.
After reading other posts here, you have to stop and wonder who exactly is at fault here? The Bonzi Creative Ad department? Or the average end user for being stupid?
Most of us here have done some sort of user support over the years so we have been acquainted with the wide myriad of strange problems that have come up that really were nothing more than silliness on the part of the user not knowing any better. Yes, they are a waste of time and a good source for jokes when you sit around with your programming and sys adm pals in the evening. But, perhpas people should remedy the problem not with a lawsuit, but perhaps with education. Take this for example:
Having too much time on my hands this past summer, I volunteered to teach a course on Introduction to Computers at the local county library. Many of my students showed up for one-on-one tutoring, and as I helped more and more people, I realized that it's not a fear of the computer that is the problem, but just the general lack of knowledge about the entire concepts of how the computer works and what the Internet is, etc. Even the tools and materials that the Gates Foundation provides, which may be nice of them to give free technology to libraries around the United States, are completely useless. Go in and ask your librarian to let you see the 500+ page manual. While it is nicely printed, and actually decently organized, if the average end user or even library professional is asked to explain how to do something that is described in the book, they can't. People want to know, but for all the classes on the Internet that can be taken, and all the beginners information, these resource authors forget that many people in the population do not understand terms such as "Right Click" or "Shift Click", or "To Format a floppy, you need to do this..." I made the most headway by simply going home and creating both a simple web page and a printed document to simply explain such concepts as what is meant by the term icon, the term shift-click, what does the acronymn HTTP really mean, etc. After giving the document away to the library patrons free of charge, I noticed that people were more easily able to use the resources that were available, and the types of questions changed. So, perhpas if there was an easy way to educate the masses in an easy to understand manner, advertising methods such as the Bonzi popups would not be as effective. I'm sorry, but I wasn't aware that someone could sue a corporate entity because 90% of the population possesse little to no ability regarding TCP/IP networking? Perhaps the suit should be filed for the amounts of wasted time I and others experience because of the numerous popups, but I don't click them because many years ago (in the late 1980s when I was a teenager), someone explained the whole concept of TCP/IP and networking topologies to me. A simple explanation then still works today. Provide someone with an intelligent answer to their question, and they will be more productive and feel empowered and competent. And as everyone knows, when you feel you can do something, you usually do.
So, thumbs up to the Bonzi people for using something to their advantage - the general lack of knowledge amongst the population. However, thumbs down to them for wasting my bandwith.
I understand how the Internet works. Perhaps I should file a lawsuit against this legal firm for slander by saying that I am unable to know what the deal is here, because obviously they don't.
> the user does not perceive it to be an advertisement, but a
> compulsory upgrade.
It's worse than that. Go to a public library and watch people who
don't have a computer at home. By far and away the most common way
they follow these deceptive dialog-banner links is by clicking the
upper-right-hand corner, the part that resembles a close box.
They think it's modal. (They don't know the word "modal", or the
term "dialog box" for that matter, but that's irrelevant.) They
want it to go away, and the advertiser is deliberately harnessing
the user's desire to make it go away. That's why it's presented
as an error, rather than a positive message. The thing is designed
so that if the user tries to make it go away, they will have the
target content rammed down their throat -- obviously against their
will, since they tried to close the thing.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.