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FTC Shuts Down Pop-Up Extortion Firm
An anonymous reader writes "The FTC has shut down D Squared, a company that's been spamming via the Windows Messenger Pop-Up Service. In some cases, ads would pop-up every 10 minutes, and only advertised a $30 product that disabled similar pop-up ads. The FTC is slamming the extortion gauntlet on them. Interestingly, the FTC only caught onto all this because one of their own commissioners was among those getting spammed."
The popups are annoying, but they can easily be blocked by installing Zonealarm, or any other good firewall.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
is here.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
This is not about Javascript pop-up ads, this is about the Windows Messenger service, which is a service that listens to a different port, and will pop up a dialog box when it receives a message from the wire.
This is similar to the service that Novell used to have, and the purpose is for local sysadmins to send out messages like "Server going down in 5 minutes, save your work and log out".
You could have your browser closed, and be doing nothing, and these will still come through.
Now, why the HELL do ISPs allow these packets on the wire, as they are a LAN service only, is beyond me (no, it is not - I understand all too well the stupidity and laziness of most ISPs).
www.eFax.com are spammers
Uh, no it's not Howard. I use Mozilla with pop-up supression as do thousands of others. $30? Try free
Not sure about XP, but if you do a default Win2K install, the 'messenger' service is set to Automatic - meaning it is up and running when you start your computer. What is key here is this is essentially a windows application, not anything to do with the far too frequent HTML popups everyone is use to.
On Win2K, go to Administrative Tools > Services, find the messenger service with the description "Sends and receives messages transmitted by administrators or by the Alerter service.", stop it, and disable it so you don't have to deal with the (messenger based) pop ups again.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Advertisements are a necessary part of a free-market economy. Without ads, there would be no broadcast TV or radio. People would not be aware of new products and services that are available for them. Without ads, there would definately be no free internet. The point is, that nothing is free. Someone has to pay for it, and this usually comes in the form of advertising. If companies were not allowed to go around blasting their wares in your face all the time, our economy would collapse. YOu don't want the economy yo collapse, do you?
The difference is commercial speech, which is subject to all sorts of restrictions that things like political speech are not. Google for "commercial speech", check out some of the Supreme Court cases.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Or we should find out who this one individual is, and get him on ever single spam list and fraudster's radar.
Him and all the exec's at the big companies. Then make sure the CTO's are "properly advised" by their head techies as to what needs to be done:
aka:
- don't buy Microsoft
- co-operate and support an IETF standard on authenticated e-mail
- etc etc.
It's funny seeing people not complain about billboards or saying that they are ok. These are people that haven't lived in a BBRE (BillBoard Rich Environment).
As I said elsewhere in this thread, move to Mexico for awhile. There are days I literally feel claustrophobic because of the saturation of the skyline (at all levels... ground level, 30 feet, 100 fet) with advertisements. Yes, I tune them out. You HAVE to tune them out. They've gone past the point of "they don't notice it but will remember it subconsciously." There are so many that they are just a blur of color as you drive by... They're on corners, on tops of residential and commercial rooftops, on stand-alone supports that some business decided to mount in the middle of their microscopic parking lot, painted on brick walls, hanging from or mounted above pedestrian bridges, overpasses--and most of them are at least partially blocked by other billboards anyway. It's like being in Time Square but without the general coolness and flashing lights that makes Time Square cool rather than an advertising eyesore.
Really... It's something I think every politician in the U.S. should have as part of their "initiation" or "orientation." Live in Mexico for a week and truly observe how bad advertising can be if not carefully checked.
I'm not sure if there's less advertising in the U.S. than in Mexico because advertisers intentionally don't want to saturate to this level and numb everyone completely or because the local governments *DO* have a decent level of restriction that prevents it from getting this bad.
If it's running as a service, it can't display a message box.
I use the Google tool bar and it stop 99% of all pop ups. It also is site by site configurable so I can have usefull pop ups on some sites
> Does it do active X yet?
No, it doesn't. However, there is a plugin which allows you to open the current page (or a link) in Internet Explorer, from the right-click context menu. So you could easily switch to Firebird for your primary browser, and still view your company's ActiveX pages without any significant extra effort.
Economics is the study of a very complex system, and the explination of that study through simplistic models that are used to predict the outcomes of the system. In this way it is like physics, but at a much earlier stage of understanding. Think chemistry during the days of the alchemists, they were making progress, but were going about it in a very slow fashion. If the models don't assume perfect information, they don't work correctly, even though it doesn't take a very observant economist to see that perfect information is a pretty poor assumption. So just as the current model for gravity doesn't explain everything down at quantum level (or even for Voyager I, apparently), it is close enough for many purposes, and useful. Economic models are close enough for many useful purposes, although they are under much more gross refinement. There are many sharp economists wondering why there is so much ad spending, given that the assumption of perfect knowledge works so well.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Most radios that I have used have a dial labeled TUNING or FREQ, etc. and a switch labeled ON/OFF or something similar. Perhaps you should try them out.