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Gator Forces Site To Remove 'Spyware' Label
lurker412 writes "CNet News is reporting that Gator has forced PC Pitstop to remove Web pages that call Gator's software 'spyware.' The correct term, according to Gator, is 'adware.' The article states: 'If we find anyone publicly calling us spyware, we correct it and take action if necessary,' said Scott Eagle, Gator's senior vice president of marketing. So be careful what you say in your comments..."
Sure there is. Just re-route Gator's servers to 127.0.0.1 in your HOSTS file.
Mozilla 1.4+ has a nifty popup blocker
--Im an oven mitt, not an engineer! (SLArbys Radio Commercial)
Here's what we do know...
While we don't know the identity of GAIN-Supported Software users, the GAIN AdServer and TGC collect and use the following kinds of anonymous information:
so you track who we are (list item 6, and 7 different list items of data about us, including what kind of computer we have, where we surf, what software we use to go there and configuration information on our computers.) YOU ARE SPYING ON US.
spy
n. pl. spies (spz)
for those who are illiteratei among us, please check the third definition.
Thus I declare that you (Gator) are manufactures and purveyors of spyware onto the masses.
Until there's some kind of legal definition of "spyware" versus "adware", I certainly would classify it as spyware. "Non-personally identifiable" my ass... if someone snuck into my house and found out all that information about me, I wouldn't call it "advertising". Stealing a company's non-personally identifiable trade secrets is spying. Stealing non-personally identifiable documents from a classified government facility is spying.
Still, given the persistent, near un-uninstallable nature of it, think "spyware" isn't a good term... "Malware" or "Evilware" is probably more appropriate.
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
Gator = "The software formerly known as SPYWARE" :)
It checks at what URL you surf, and what keywords goes in said URL (between the '&' and the '?') and who knows what else (installed application?) that is spying in my book, even if you said 'yes' to it, it is still spying to me!
"Malware", people. Covers a lotta crap.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I have found little software that does more to make a user's PC using experience unenjoyable than Gator.
What about bonzi buddy... I think that stupid little ape made computers at least as annoying, probably more so.
I think people misunderstood what the parent poster was saying. Its not that he has Gator's Software installed on his machine, its just that Internet Explorer KEEPS ASKING HIM TO INSTALL IT OVER AND OVER AND OVER again until he says yes, every time he visits a page (not site, but page!) that would make a reference call to Gator's software. The popup isnt an advertisement, it is a system popup asking him to install the software.
Note that this is no less intrusive than pages that have Macromedia Flash on them, and repetitively being asked to install Macromedia Flash to view the page properly instead of somehow turning off the IE software install "pop-ups".
I am a computer tech at a small mom-and-pop TV repair and computer store. I spend most of my time cleaning up systems that have become completely useless because of spyware like, Gator, Bonzi Buddy, Xupiter, Weatherbug, Comet Cursor, the list goes on and on. Sometimes, Lavasoft Ad-aware won't get them all, and I have to use Spybot search and destroy. This crapware was turned the internet into a minefield for the non-technical, who are the majority of computer users. It is a public nusiance. The people who create this stuff are racketeers. Perhaps the people behind all this crapware believe that computers are meant for the techno-elite, and never should have reached the masses. If their goal is to make millions give up on computers, they may be succesful. If only the techno-elite used computers, I would be out of a job, but I might be happier. Cleaning this crap off of hard drives because people need their data instead of just formatting them and reinstalling is making me CRAZY!!
That's Bigboo TAY! TAY!
I don't like to use the term spyware, I prefer the term "Crapware"
In my opinion, it's more accurately termed "crappy spyware with intrusive popups", but I can see why they'd want to call it "adware" instead.
RoboForm is much better and isn't adware, spyware, or anything similar. It even imports Gator's stored information, though I'm not sure why you'd need much of an incentive to move away from Gator.
(I'm not affiliated with Siber Systems, the maker of RoboForm, I'm just a *VERY* happy user.)
QED is the abbreviation of the Latin expression "quod erat demonstrandum," which in English means "what has been proven" or "it is demonstrated."
It is typically used to signify the end of a mathematical (or other) proof. Unfortunately, I have never read Cryptonomicron (sp?), so I can't understand why the above poster would have a problem with another person using it. Maybe he thinks that people otherwise wouldn't have known the term unless they read it in the book?
Personally, one of my professors used it at the end of a proof in lecture one day and another kid asked what it meant. *shrug*
Gator is using classic bullying tactics: Keep bullying so people think you can win a fight, and they'll avoid standing up to you.
If the definition of "spyware" is defined by the courts through analysis of popular usage, then it seems that all of the sites out there calling Gator "spyware" would be extending definition of the term to include Gator, even though Gator is not according to their own definition, "spyware".
If Enron calls itself an honest company, and thousands of news articles and blogs declare it a dishonest company, who is right? Is Enron an honest company merely because it says it is?
Is Gator an honest Internet citizen because it declares itself to be, as it stands in plain view red-handed?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Okay, I know it's a joke, but there are valid reasons for synching with an NTP server - such as making sure all machines run the same time.
You might ask "who cares about a few lost seconds ?"
But sometimes it's not seconds.
A processor-intensive job can actually suck up so many cycles as to start lagging the clock. No joke.
An old raytracer I have laying around raytraced a scene that took a while - 2 weeks, 1 day, 4 hours and 38 minutes.*
However, I was notified of this raytrace being complete (finally), and when I went to check how long it took I noticed that the clock was off.
Not by a few seconds.
By 8 hours, 42 minutes and 29 seconds.
Now.. do you want to be -8 hours- late for a meeting ? I didn't think so
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Gator is short for alligator.
Gator is...
A large carnivorous reptile of the Crocodile family, peculiar to America. It has a shorter and broader snout than the crocodile, and the large teeth of the lower jaw shut into pits in the upper jaw, which has no marginal notches. Besides the common species of the southern United States, there are allied species in South America.
I believe that's an appropriate name for the company. Spyware they are. They take info, sell it to advertisers and return the skewed results to you.
Gator IS SpyWARE!
By royal decree of ___INSERT_NAME_HERE___ Gator shall hereby be know as SpyWare for the extent of eternity.
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
> Anyway, I thought Gator's primary purpose was pushing ads?
You thought wrong. It's not adware. Even calling it spyware is somewhat
on the generous side, as that implies that what it does is passive, some
kind of watching or monitoring -- but while it does hide as spyware does
also, it's also very disruptive; as far as I'm concerned, it's malware.
As near as I can determine, calling it adware is an outright lie, because as
far as I can see it does not advertise *anything*, including its presence.
A few weeks ago I found Gator on the Win98 PC that my family uses upstairs,
and removed it. We didn't know it was there, and certainly we didn't see any
ads. (My family would have noticed if it were popping up any ads, because
the browser they use does not pop up any extra windows on its own; if you
want to open something in a new window, you have to right-click and choose
"Open in New Window"; otherwise, everything stays in one window. If Gator
were causing the computer to deviate from this pattern, we would have known
much sooner that something was running in the background creating the
problems, and it would have been much easier to find and remove it.)
The reason ultimately that I went poking around and managed to find Gator
and remove it was because of the system instability it was causing. I was
looking for any possible cause and was this close [holds up fingers virtually
touching one another] to swapping out the hard drive. I knew it wasn't bad
RAM only because the system is multiboot, and the other OS was fine. So I
figured major filesystem problems. But scandisk turned up nothing. Finally
I found Gator, removed it, and *bang*, overnight, the system was stable.
(Well, stable as Win98 goes[1].) It can now run for hours and hours without
rebooting, the whole day most days, from when my Dad gets up at 6am to when
my mom goes to bed at 2am, if my youngest sister doesn't fire up the IM
software[2]; before I removed Gator, two hours was pushing it.
So, the primary purpose of Gator, clearly, is to screw up your system.
They can make all kinds of bogus claims about other things it might do in
theory, but in practice the main thing it does is screw up your system.
It's malware, simple as that.
[1] Yeah, I know one day is not impressive uptime outside the context of
Windows 98. I actually use Mandrake myself; it's the rest of my family
that uses Windows. Hence, I have my own computer and they all share.
But the family PC is usable for my family if it can run all day; it
wasn't terribly usable when it was crashing every hour -- which was
my point about Gator; it makes the system unusable.
[2] In which case, it does have to be rebooted after that, but I've got
a registry merge in autoexec.bat to prevent the IM stuff from starting
up at system start time, so it only runs when she actually uses it,
which really isn't all that often. I forget whether the one she uses
is AIM or YIM, but whichever one it is, I recommend against it.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
"Synchronize your computer clock with one of the world's most precise timekeeping devices - the U.S. Atomic Clock. "
.0006566547866787 pico seconds late for meetings!"
:)
:)
The U. S. Atomic Clock? That's pretty cute. Makes it sound like some uber-techno-gizmo locked away in some shimmering tower of steel and glass. Maybe it even uses only one atom as well, The Official U. S. Time-Keeping Atom (with 55 red electrons, 78 white neutrons and 55 blue protons.)
But I guess "syncrhonize your clock to the one of a dozen or so of time servers (each operating off of the average of dozens of individual atomic clocks), operated by at least two different federal agencies, synchronized with the main atomic clock array operated by the U. S. Naval Observatory, which in turn is averaged out with several other similar facilities around the world to define UTC" just doesn't sound as interesting or as "important."
It's probably also better not to mention the monsterous (relatively speaking) errors you'll get trying to synchronize time across the internet. Computer users that really want to syncrhonize their clocks use a radio, or at least a direct dial-up connection to the server.
"Awesome! I hate being
To be fair, when last I heard UTC isn't accurate to much more than the nanosecond, which is as accurate as anybody could need it to be for all intents and purposes (can we say "nanometers along the Equator?")
Not that most computer users even know why we have these clocks to begin with.
"Date Manager - Never miss another important date(.)"
With a post like this, it's obvious I don't have any.
Google Toolbar has a fantastic popup blocker... and you get to keep using IE!
You know thats really Wil, right?
Not to mention that you can't uninstall gator by normal means. The %ProgramFiles%\Common Files\CMEII\ directory is hard to find if you're joe user, and oh, is that on purpose that the registry keys for gator.com don't disappear after I uninstall? Oh that's right, according to the Terms of service, those are 'enhancement technologies' and they don't necessarily get removed during the uninstall.. Interestingly enough, this information is listed under the 'Right to Remove' section in the Terms Huh!?!
Speak for yourself.
There are laws (anti-SLAPP laws - SLAPP stands for Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) that are designed to let judges throw out libel suits designed to silence critics.
:)
Only in ENLIGHTENED states, alas. At a guess, either they are not suing people in California, or the sued parties don't know how easily that they could give Gator a quick adult circumcision.
C//
I have yet to meet anyone running Gator who knew they were running Gator. The last time it showed up on my Windows machine, I had just visited one of those dodgy sites you reach when you type a URL in wrong. It kept popping up a dialog box saying "Do you want to install somethingorother" (with a certificate from Gator corp) and I kept clicking "no" over and over again and it still somehow ended up installed on my machine.
I found it installed on my dad's machine last month. He had no idea how those mysterious extra toolbars that you can't get rid of suddenly appeared in Internet Explorer. I showed him how to use AdAware and he was very grateful.
Any product that installs without your knowledge and consent is clearly spyware and not adware. I'm not sure why that would be so hard to prove in court.
-a