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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."
"Interestingly, the FTC only caught onto all this because one of their own commissioners was among those getting spammed."
There's a lesson for us all, there.
"POP-UP ADVERTISING is a fact of life," said Howard Beales, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "But one company has taken pop-ups beyond annoyance."
No it's not. I use Safari (Mac OS) and Mozilla (Linux/Windows) for all my web browsing. And I use Trillian, Gaim, or Fire for IM.
So no, POP-UP Advertising is deifnetly not a fact of life. It's just that too many people are unaware how easy it is to get away from.
Shame on us! We are intruded upon every day and no one complains. Hour by hour, our eyes and ears are bombarded with advertisements, but we accept it all as a fact of life. Why do we allow this tresspass into our daily lives? Why is it considered acceptable to allow companies to push products in our faces every second of every day? Why don't we have laws against advertising?
If someone dumps raw sewage in the streets, the cops will take them away. If someone plays their boom-box too loud in my neighborhood, they will eventually be fined. So why do we allow billboards, huge store signs, and ads on cars, busses, and park benches to pollute our visual environment?
I should be able to go for a walk or ride my bike outside without having to endure constant sales pitches, without having huge logos and brand names all over the place. Don't you agree? Is some corporation's desire to sell a product really more important than our desire of a peaceful environment?
If I stood outside your house all day shouting "Buy My Product!!!" over and over you'd get kind of angry wouldn't you? So why don't you get angry when corporations do the same thing via huge billboards? What exactly is the difference?
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?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
is here.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
"On its Web site, the firm said the software could beam 135,000 pop-up ads at consumers every hour, and claimed to have a database of over two billion Internet addresses, according to the FTC."
2^32, minus subnets and netmasks, minus 10, 127, 192.168, etc...
I gotta know. Who ported cluestick to Windows? :-)
Carousel is a lie!
Not Redmond disciples...all software developers.
No offense, but I don't want to be partially responsible when someone abuses something I have written. Sure, you will say, "write better software" but the thing is, even perfectly written software, when used for something it was not designed for, can have bad effects. Should we blaim the person who wrote ping if it is used in some sort of denial of service attack?
This is ridiculous. I understand why it's difficult to block spam: the sender makes an effort to be anonymous and unknown. They aren't recognized as legitimate companies and many of them are overseas and not subject to many laws.
Read the title. "FTC Shuts Down Pop-Up Extortion Firm" This is a firm in the United States with one heck of a business model. If what they're doing isn't illegal, it needs to be. The idea that a company could do this for so long and scam so many people certainly doesn't prove the effectiveness of our system to me. Something needs to change.
I hope we all do some research and think twice the next time we hit the polls. Matters like these are the responsibility of many various lawmakers. Let's hope they can earn all those figures and get some work done at the same time. Sure it's difficult, but suck it up for once.
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.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
If any wants, I can sell them a copy of that database for just $25,000. A brief sample to show I have the goods:
192.168.0.1
192.168.0.2
192.168.0.3
192.168.0.4
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.