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Gator Files for IPO to Raise $150 Million
michalas writes "Wired reports on the IPO filing of adware/spyware kings Claria who have recently changed their name from Gator.
Claria on Thursday filed for an initial public offering to raise $150 million to continue developing its 'behavioral marketing platform.' Claria had a net income of $35 million on revenues of $90 million in 2003. In addition, Claria said it has 43 million active users and 425 advertisers."
Despite what the company does, after interviewing with them, I felt like it would be a good solid company to work for. They had a great dot-com atmosphere, used open source technology, and paid well - my position was for Perl programmer. And they even allowed you to work from home. I didn't have the XML::Parser experience they were looking for, so I didn't get the job. One thing they revealed to me was that they did actually track what you were searching in Google. This part I didn't like. If they can watch you on Google, they can capture data from any form you fill out - although they claimed Google was the only form they captured data from.
It's All Politics
For someone with more time on their hands than me:
1)Start some media fear mongering about a "Claria Virus".
2)Include instructions for removing said virus.
3)Feel good about what you have done to help society.
Gator's programs are not pure spyware because they at least provide some level of functionality. The first Gator offering was a personal-info remembering "wallet" that'd nicely fill in web forms similar to what the Google Toolbar's AutoFill feature offers.
Another one of their schemes offers to download a program that will automatically sync your system time, which is useful to most people who notice that consumer PCs are usually pathetic at keeping a system time. However, I personally use the adware-free Automachron which provides the same useful function.
So, they're really a bait-and-switch operation. They actively market utilities that people want, and are rather trivial to make.... and then tag-on their adware code for the ride. Better options for all of their offerings exist, but the public often doesn't know where to go.
You'd think that (and so would I), but we'd be wrong. There are a huge number of users who like that thing, and complain if anti-spyware sofware removes it (I know because I work at an anti-spyware company, and Gator is one of the ones we have to tread lightly with, because so many users actually want the damned thing).
Partial list of advertisers, courtesy of Harvard
News story on Harvard wrestling with the then Gator corp
What sort of setups do the admins out there have for blocking this stuff? Anything at the gateway or proxy level??
For a long time, I have been using a lot of off-the-shelf scripts and utilities hacked together as an anti-spyware, anti-virus proxy. Anyone out there doing the same care to comment?
For web stuff, I use squid to block a lot of stuff that is usually spyware. It pretty much kills any software that auto-installs (except for java webstart). Usually not to big of a deal-- the business calls the help desk and we walk them through a manual install of flash or whatever it is they need. For very common spyware, we let it infect one test machine then redirect traffic through the proxy to those sites. Ideally, we block the file name or active x control with squid. It isn't a perfect solution though...
For email, I am using p3scan, a pop3 proxy, and a couple simple scripts to rename all untrusted attachments to something else. We also have a nice script that strips out all non-image, non-formatting related html in email. The email soltion seems much more elegant and nice than the web solution-- anyone know of any setups better/similar that cut gator & other companies off at the knees like this??
In practice, this is has reduced our crapware-related helpdesk calls at least 10 fold.
Remember, unlike most spyware, Gator presents a front of allowing you to store passwords. Some people find this useful. Useful spyware may seem like an oxymoron, but Gator actually sucks some people in because of this.
Very common.
At my work there is a childcare center. Their systems are always inundated with spyware. I happened to be facilitating a network migration for them so one day I found myself sitting in front of some of their workstations. I could hardly use the thing. Since I was stuck there anyway (and I needed a clean machine to make sure the migration was successfull), I blew a couple hours installing ad-aware and cleaning the things out. It was a real fight. The sad thing is that their funding doesn't allow for the same level of support enjoyed by the rest of the center.
They're not alone.
Whenever I'm digging through firewall or network traffic logs, I have to grep out all the spyware crap. It's all over our enterprise. And any time we mention this to user, they're shocked. They're more than glad to admit they installed some little app. They're clueless that it dialed home. And more than glad to whack the offending app in question once they understand what's going on.
Gator relies on the oblivious user. And the world is full of them. In spades.
If you're running Win2K or WinXP, you don't need to download a damn thing to sync your clock. Windoze has an SNTP client built-in:
net time
where servername is the name of your preferred NTP server (your ISP should be able to provide this; typically something like ntp.my-isp.com).
There. No cheesy spyware necessary. Bandwidth consumption is negligible, so gamers need not worry about additional lag.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions