Slashdot Mirror
Bonzi Class Action Suit Settled: No Foolin'!
An anonymous reader writes "According to this
article in the Toronto Star, a class
action suit against Bonzi Software has reached a settlement.
Bonzi will not pay damages but will be required to stop using fake user
interface (FUI) style error messages to trick users into clicking on their
banners. This is a big win for the community as it will help to improve the
Internet's ailing perceived user experience.
Most of you have seen Bonzi's banners, and probably most of you won't admit
to having been fooled by them at some point. Well, imagine how many novice computer
users were tricked into installing again, or paying for software they really did not need.
Congratulations and thanks to Lukins & Annis
for a job well done.
Interestingly, bonzi.com has been returning connection refused all day. This is usually one of the net's busiest sites."
It doesn't, truthfully; but those novice users are still responsible for their actions. More importantly, this will help future novice users from falling for the same spiel. Sometimes, that's all you can do.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Spyware Blaster (http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.ht ml) is nice because it prevents spyware from installing by fooling Windows into thinking its already installed by making regisitry keys with the spyware ClassIDs. It also prevents you from seeing ads and spyware by changing IE's privacy host to reject anything from a list of spyware domains. (even doubleclick.net so about half the ads on the internet disapeared in IE for me) It also auto-updates its known host list. This will only help you prevent spyware, but it also comes with a tool for reseting your browser pages. (So if you installed yahoo bar and can't figure out where it reset your default search page and error pages at in the regisitry this will help).
Ad-aware (http://www.lavasoft.de/index.html) is a nice client side product for scanning and cleaning out spyware from your system. Its free version will do almost everything the paid version will but it won't doing anything automaticaly.
mynetwatchman.com does a very good job at listing bad hostnames and ips so if you want you can check that site for more info.
Hope that helps!
No.
I don't think settlements have any value as far as precedent goes.
IANAL, but they do...
See, this settlement means that it's not correct to say that Bonzi lost the lawsuit, but it does allow somebody to say that Bonzi didn't win either. They gave up, indicating that Bonzi didn't believe enough in its own argument to bother to take it to a judge or jury.
So, to the next Bonzi-like company that comes along the message is that FUI isn't likely to be defendable in court. Yeah, there's a chance somebody else could defend the use of FUI in court and end up a winner because in the eyes of the court this is still an undecided question. However, in the eyes of the greedy businessman there's already a precedent logged in the world's history that says the first company to try to use FUI in a bold way got a public embarassment and was forced to accept an agreement that made them promise to never use FUI again.
Will there eventually be somebody willing to take the chance that FUI will stand up in court, of course. However, there's a good number of business people who when shown what happened to Bonzi will take that information and conclude that "somebody already tried that and failed" and take their company's marketing in a differnt direction, so it's going to be a good long time before somebody bold enough to make heavy use of FUI comes along.
FUI's not dead, but this settlement has it hospitalized.
nope -- I don't see any of them anymore thanks to the userContent.css style sheet.
it will match urls for ads and replace the image with nothing. So, you get the web page without any irritating ads at all.
The css lines are customizable as much as you like. They look like this:
A:link[HREF*="?click"] IMG { display: none ! important }
A:link[HREF*="?banner"] IMG { display: none ! important }
more details and the file at this url:l laCustomize
http://www.fogcat5.com/twiki/bin/view/Fogcat/Mozi