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."

Comments

AOL reconfigures your system... ok, fine

[RobertB-DC]

You know, when I saw in the article that AOL was automatically turning off users' Messenger Service, I wondered if that was stepping over the line. After all, we Slashdotters *hate* it when someone messes with our configuration without our permission!

Then, I read the process, and remembered doing the same thing to turn off the oh-so-obvious "Your print job is complete" messages from the laser printer in the next cube. It would be so easy for a non-geek to either screw up or freeze like a deer in the headlights:

Beales recommends that current Windows users manually shut the service off to protect themselves from unwanted pop-ups.
To disable Messenger:
* Click Start, and then click Control Panel (or point to Settings, and then click Control Panel).
* Double-click Administrative Tools.
* Double-click Services.
* Double-click Messenger.
* In the Startup type list, click Disabled. Click Stop, and then click OK.

Not to stereotype AOLers, but considering what their tech support would face if newbies were given those instructions, I think they did the right thing to shut off a service that nobody uses anyway.

I'm trying to think of why the Messenger Service was a good thing in the first place. I recall way back before Win95, we used to prank each other with dire "system messages". Was that all it was ever good for?

Re:AOL reconfigures your system... ok, fine

[TopShelf]

The merits of Messenger Service may be debatable, but the fact that it is activated by default in Windows installs is downright absurd...

Not until it bothers me...

[zbowling]

I posted this on an ASK Slashdot a while back.
::History::

Its funny how the goverment doesn't seem to care until they get experience it for them selves? That fast against the messanger pop up stuff.

Wooooo..

How long will it take until they can't stand spam in their email and they decided to finally decide to take care of it. How about all of us legimate email users get together and spam the FCC and maybe we can piss them off anough to do something about it.

I wrote this really amusing application a time ago

[Eudial]

I wrote this really amusing application a time ago, it listened to the ports used for MS win msg, and if it received a valid message, it replied once every 5 seconds, 600 times with the same message + the text "\nQuit spamming ffs!". Quite efficient.

Why? Well, my son is a student at a computer college, and he was sickin tired of people thinking that broadcasting MS windows messenger popus was fun, so he asked me for a tool to repent the spammers.

M$ has changed their tune

[El]

Last time I checked, I seem to recall they said "You really shouldn't disable Windows Messenger; buy a firewall instead." (Followed by instructions on how to disable.) Now they seem to be admitting it wasn't necessary in the first place here

Microsoft gets no blame

[t_allardyce]

An entire business set up on the basis that Microsoft leaves this stupid thing turned on. They get caught, (and yes the burgler is still responsible even if the door is left open) and Microsoft gets absolutely nothing, no "you should be more careful leaving un-needed services like that on by default it just encourages them" no bad press coverage about how all these things (pop up windows, pop-up messages, VB viri) could have been prevented if microsoft had changed 1 line of code.

Re:Not quite right.

[zymurgyboy]

The article is talking about exploiting the Windows Messenger service, not instant messenger or using equally irritating and far more common web browser based pop-up ads.

This would be more accurately classed as yet another stupid on-by-default, security-decreasing idiocy on the part of Microsoft. Why the OS would install with this on by default is a mystery to me.

I'm just glad MS didn't decide to remove it from future versions of the Windows. I've actually used this feature at work and found it quite useful.

For instance, I've had to sit in on training classes as few times that one of our vendors was putting on for some of our users. It was a fly-on-the-wall type thing; I was there to get feedback from our users, primarily.

A few times some configuration shortcomming became apparent and people would start wispering to each other. Rather than let it go and wreck the class, I quickly fixed the problems on each machine in the room and sent one of these messages to each PC in the room, telling them it was fixed.

I didn't have to stop the guest trainer, I didn't have walk over and stop anyone from paying attention to him, and I could I easily communicate that the problem was identified and resolved. It was sort of cool.

Normally I would have just e-mailed them, but we don't have users use their accounts in training, none of the training accounts have mailboxes.

That's how it should be used, I think. Too bad the FTC doesn't take as much interest in browser pop-up advertisers. I've seen IE popup ads for this crap. Which appears to be similar in concept only the delivery is through a different pop-up. The product/service looks just about as useless. You could accomplish everything they're trying sell you on with add/remove programs and dumping IE for a browser that deoesn't subject you to this type of torture.