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D Squared To Stop Sending Pop-Ups
bizpile writes "D Squared Solutions, the company created by college students Anish Dhingra and Jeffrey Davis, has agreed to stop bombarding computer users with Internet pop-up ads to advertise its ad-blocking software, avoiding a court battle with the Federal Trade Commission. They were sending pop-up ads using the Messenger function enabled on many Windows operating systems. Their attorneys claimed the pair were not trying to extort consumers with their ads and only intended to send one a day to computer users. Lawyer Anthony J. Dain has said the ads are 'annoyances you have to deal with in a free society.'" (The San Diego Union-Tribune also has a story.)
Glad to see they're following Microsoft's lead! SP2 will be turning this off for most users... Hey, wait a second...
'annoyances you have to deal with in a free society.'
No, no I don't. Thank you, FTC.
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
And this whole "internet" thing is still pretty new to you, but that was the previous story.
Lemme guess, their popup was advertising for how to stop popups, right?
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D Squared agreed not to send pop-up ads using the Messenger function enabled on many Windows operating systems; such ads do not require an open Web browser to display. The company also won't sell ad-blocking software any longer, and it is barred from sending other ads unless users can choose not to receive them.
Looking at this it looks like their advertising days are over. That last bit will be hard for them to get around since they'll likely be heavily scrutinized by the FTC for some time to come.I certainly won't feel sorry for them, they were sending their popups using the windows Messaging function, making them even lower down than most popup advertisers. Kudos to the FTC for going after these guys!
Which? Lawyers that defend assholes like this?
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
I guess they learned about another annoyance in a free society: Lawyers
Oh yeah... Right...
Fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - can't get fooled again.
Oh, wait, that's the guy from Texas, isn't it?
.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
Anyone got this "Dain" person's IP address? I have a "NET SEND" that I'd like to throw his way.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
You know, when I first read that headline, I was thinking of the Square D company that makes circuit breaker boxes and other electrical supplies. And I was thinking "What the hell?"
Has anyone thought of sending out messages telling people how to turn off Windows Messenger?
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
Messenger should never have been exposed as a default running service on Windows XP, 2000, & NT computers.. with no authentication and no option to turn it off without going deep in to a services menu.
This proves that software developers in general were caught flat-footed by the internet, and that they failed us as customers by claiming that their computers were now "internet ready" and only meant by that that they gave us integrated no-choice branded browsers and instant messengers to save their market share, they didn't even think about us, just themselves.
Bottom feeders like Square D exist and will always exist. The real failure are software developers, and they should take the blame for the decisions they made from 96 - 01 (when XP was released with Messenger ON) and do better.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to run a virus scan and delete my tracking cookies.
There is a rage in me to defy the order of the stars, despite their pretty patterns.
annoyances you have to deal with in a free society.
Yep, we dealt with them all right. Same way we deal with shoplifting,
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
of how the government can properly work with the internet community in policing legitimate nuisences. I'd almost go as far as to say this is evidence we don't need a ton of laws specially tailored to the internet.
Ok; I should use some CSS code written by ant-slashdot extremists when I could solve the same exact problem by using light mode why, exactly?
only intended to send one a day to computer users
... that still seems like a lot.
Only once a day?
-K
This proves that software developers in general were caught flat-footed by the internet, and that they failed us as customers by claiming that their computers were now "internet ready" and only meant by that that they gave us integrated no-choice branded browsers and instant messengers to save their market share, they didn't even think about us, just themselves.
No, it proves that Microsoft had zero regard for the Internet and for their customers. The Mac OS had no problems like this. Linux had no problems like this. BSD had no problems like this. The only developers that seemed to think that allowing authentication-less control over the local environment was acceptable (and then tried to promote the view that "no desktop machines should ever exist on the Internet without being firewalled") were the developers at Microsoft. Unfortunately, for them, all their competitors did not completely ignore security when designing software, and as a result, the Microsofties came out looking rather pathetic, especially when they tried to shunt blame off onto sysadmins for not trying to patch over *their* poor design with a firewall.
May we never see th
The easy solution (from an AC post the other day) is to backspace over the it.
:)
Poof, no more tan!
Its truly sad that Windows XP Service Pack 2 sets the messenger service to disabled by default. It was always nice to know that no matter if you friend on a lan was on AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, etc, you could send them a message. Its a shame marketing agencies abused this. I for one leave write on in *nix and messenger on in windows because I'm behind a NAT and dont get these annoyances, and sure every once in a while at a LAN party someone will annoy you with it when your playing a full screen game, but none the less its a shame that this functionality is going away by default, it was truly a cool feature in windows.
Oh, yeah, this is slashdot, um, in Soviet Russis you annoy popups
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
But seriously, it's quite amazing that they are admitting in court that their business model is a regretable annoyance. There are so many ways to make money which are a) legal and b) not annoying. I do agree with their lawyer that they should be allowed to continue; users should turn off functions which make their computers accessible to the net in general if they don't want to receive such things.
So we can strip the annoying slashdot theme prefix and maybe do other neat stuff, like convert news links into regfree google links :)
She's no ceren, that's for sure!
To the cyberspacial gallows!
http://www.ftc.gov/os/caselist/0323223.htm
Step away from the keyboard, sir!
Color harmony
They were sending pop-up ads using the Messenger function enabled on many Windows operating systems :))
Yup yahoo messenger is annoying simply use zinc http://zinc.sourceforge.net/ or curphoo http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/curphoo/ for Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD etc all. They just not block the advts; but also got facility to ignore users, stop booters and other features
The important thing is not to stop questioning --Albert Einstein.
So if I come 'round and kick them in the groin once a day and then leave, is that another of those 'annoyances (sic) you have to deal with in a free society'?
Seems like assault and battery, but really, it's not! And those ads they're sending, they only SEEM like an invasion of privacy, but trust me, they're not!
You know other annoyances you might have to deal with in a free society? People throwing excrement at your house and car if you're a scumbag lawyer.
Hell, it's biodegradable, so it can be argued that it takes even less action to clean up than a windows messenger pop-up.. just leave it there long enough and it'll go away.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
He will go down in history as being the first of the hindu mud people to get rich by cracking our computers. Now that they're losing jobs to africa, they've got nothing left but to turn to crime!
Log in, select Light mode. Done.
No, he's trying to ignore the much more pervasive RFC-822 design flaw, which is that anyone in the world has append rights on my mailbox.
There's some hypocrisy here: when we talk about viruses, we blame the system vendor (Microsoft) for producing a vulnerable system. But when we talk about spam, we lay all the blame on the abusers of the vulnerable system, not the DESIGNERS of the vulnerable e-mail system or the USERS who insist on continuing to use a vulnerable system.
Seriously, print this shyster's email address, IP range, etc.
It's time to show him what his words really mean.
Now they'll just send Pop-unders
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Funny how you can net send spam millions of the world's computers and get away with it, but spam one gov't agent and you'll be promptly(after months of legal stuff) shutdown. Because of the inconvenience of not being able ignore them like traditional email spam I'm going to side with the FTC on this one.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
http://www.procopio.com/profiles/attorney_detail.c fm?id=13
nuff said. what a strange excuse for bad marketing habits. "Hey it's a free world, that is, no rules... or isn't it?" I don't want a free world without rules, I want a free world with proper rules. That's a difference.
Just find out where they live and drive around the block with the windows open and the radio turned up and play "how much is that doggie in the window" the dog chorus version. Get a team and take shifts. All perfectly legal. Just an annoyance they got to put up with.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
In the red corner, at 110 pounds, we have a pencil-necked geek from UCSD, who is an accused spammer.
In the blue corner, at 250 pounds, we have California's Special Prosecutor for Spam, the Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger!
Let's get ready to rumble!
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I dont know why everyone is complaining and demanding stricter laws? its not like theres no way around this. They are able to do this because of a bug (and dont bother telling me its a feature) of windows 2k/xp that defaults to leaving this security hole known as "windows messenger" turned on. Sure these people are scum and i'd love to see them both burn at the stake, and technically they've been doing something that any of us would get life over because its "hacking into a remote computer system" or some bullshit like that but really we should be fighting to make stuff like this legal. All it takes is for Microsoft to default the service to off and for people who dont need it to turn it off or make sure it cant be reached from outside their network (or get a bloody firewall). Once thats done theres no more problem, no need to stick stupid laws in to complicate what is already a very crap constitution. Same goes for pop-up windows - they are part of the javascript implementation, just turn that functionality off and you no longer have a problem. If it was a service that was needed and there was no forseeable fix to stop its misuse then just maybe legal action would be needed, but thats not the case here, its just a stupid function that can be disabled in 10 seconds.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Obligatory and traditional post stating that the Mac is OS is superior because it lacks such "features" as Messenger, is unaffected by Windows viri and that iCab , the Mac only browser has a popup blocker built into it.
Also included in the traditional post is a gratuitous slam against Windows users: "Windows users are poopieheads for using Windows!"
Finishing up with a "In Soviet Russia..." joke
In Soviet Russia, you annoy popups!
It has been my pleasure to provide the Slashdot Community with the obligatory and traditional posting making fun of the Windows OS and WIndows Users, contrasting the Windows OS with the Mac OS,in a snarky, superior and uninformative manner, in a comment thread about yet another flaw/fault/sploit in the Windows OS.
Thank you for your gracious attention!
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
click here if you dont want any more popups!
are you also annoyed by ads? here you can get rid of!
yeah great, an ad against ad's.
bombing for peace, anyone?
For me, it is a shame that MS has disabled the messenger service with SP2. I used to administer some networks for the army, and found a great use for it.
I had a relatively small number of IP addresses to assign to users compared to the number of client machines we had on the network, and some folks couldn't get as many machines on the LAN as they wanted to. Now, the smarter ones who wanted more IPs than they were allocated would just start taking the IP I had assigned them and incrementing or decrementing it by one or two until they found an unused IP and hopping on the network. If the person assigned to this IP was on the network then it didn't work...however if the IP wasn't in use then it was easily stolen. A few hours later the legitimate user would turn their computer on and get the dialogue box stating that their IP was already in use by another machine. So, following their instructions they contacted their system administrator...which meant that I got a ton of phone calls. Unfortunately, DHCP wasn't an option for us for security reasons so I had to make static addressing work.
After some thought I wrote a very small (like five line) batch file using the NET SEND command and a recursive loop that sent a message to the pirated IP address...something like, "Hey dummass, you are using an IP address that is assigned to someone else. Call (my phone number inserted here) and I will let you use your computer again."
Since the overwhelming majority of my users had default installations of win2k running, this mini-program would pop up windows on their computer faster than they could close them, and they couldn't do anything other than take the computer off the network to stop the messages or shutdown...Either way, problem solved. It was a nice combination of naive users and a silly quirk of windows.
Seems to me that LAWYERS are 'annoyances you have to deal with in a free society.'
Like someone pissing on the back seats of your cabrio ?
... and promising to do it only "once a day".
... and you can still clean up his mess if you don't like it ?
My freedom ends where the freedom of other people begins.
Lawyer Anthony J. Dain has said the ads are "annoyances you have to deal with in a free society." Hmmm...let me see. According to Mr. Dain, a Free Society is characterized by a lack of property rights. For example, strangers are allowed to use my PC in an unauthorized manner and, in the process, disrupt my activities. All of this done with impunity on thier part. Hmmm...this doesn't sound like Freedom to me!
SP2 turns off the Messenger and alert service so they would need to rely on different methods.
Course looking at all the zombies out there most computers wouldn't have it installed.
What are these "pop-ups" you speak of?
F.O.Dobbs
it's not going to stop messanger spam. These are grey text boxes sent directly to the PC using the messanger service of Windows using the netsend command. It has nothing to do with the browser.
I have blog like everyone else
...annoyances you have to deal with in a free society
They seem to be very selective about that freedom.
I assume they're more than willing to call on the agents of the government (the police, for instance) to protect them from people exercising their freedom to visit the company offices and beat the living crap out of them. And I'm sure that they would not be so dedicated to people's freedom to slam every system they own with a DOS attack. The only "freedom" they're concerned about is their freedom to commit extortion without that mean ol' FTC interfering.
They're all fired up about their rights (is there a right to commit extortion?) but they're conveniently ignoring one thing: rights come with attached responsibilities. You can't separate the two, and when you try, you get problems. For instance, if you have the right to swing your fist around, it comes with the responsibility to stop short of my nose. If you have the right to drive a car, it comes with the responsibility not to squash pedestrians. A society which granted those rights but does not acknowledge the associated responsibilities would be murderous chaos.
In a truly civilized society, people are as aware of their responsibilities as they are of their rights, and act accordingly. Only in such a society can there truly be freedom.
In modern US society, right and wrong have been equated with legal and illegal -- or, even worse, with getting away with it and getting caught. Rights are everything. Responsibilities are not in the picture at all. Civilized behavior is mocked. This has cost us many things, including the expense of feeding an ever-more-bloated government. But most of all, it has cost us freedom.
I've actually grown kind of used to the scheme and like it. It's very neutral and...just...soothing? I like it.
Here is lawyer-scum Dain's info:
619.515.3241
ajd@procopio.com
Let's see how HE likes 1 message a day.
No, but the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (yes, over a decade old) is supposed to protect you of that. If you get an unsolicated, commercial call from some entity with whom you do NOT have a pre-established business relationship nor had you given them EXPRESS permission to contact you in that way, then you can sue. You have an immediate cause of action and can sue for not only merely initiating the call (even if you did not answer the phone), but also other aspects, such as failure to PROPERLY identify tehmselves, failure to send a copy of their company policy, etc.
- not-call.com/
I had a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company (Traffic-Power.com) call my cellular phone trying to sell services to get my website listed higher in search engine rankings. Though I have not desposed them yet, (my pre-trial hearing is set for Aug 5), I assume they got my number from my website whois. None of the websites that I won are cimmercial in anyway. They cannot call me merely because my number is in some directory. It is their responsibility for them to determine if my exchange is connected with a cellular company (easy by even using a web service [http://www.fonefinder.net/index.php]).
Because they failed to ID themselves, ailed to send a copy of the policy, failed to properly train their telemarketing staff, and placed the call to my cellulr phone, I have filed for a sum of $5000 (the limit for my small claims court).
Resources:
www.tcpalaw.com
www.junkfax.org
http://www.do
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
Most people think Free Speech means they can do and say anything, anywhere. Free speech only applies to the government itself not being to censor you. Private entities can do it all they'd like.
Second, this right to speech only extends so far that it does not trample the rights of someone else. That is why we claim free speech in this country yet cannot harrass someone, or stick billboards on their private property, and so on.
I could go off on a rant against P2P piracy at this point, but I won't. Point is, free speech has been twisted by too many people in this day and age, because today's generations have a sense of entitlement to everything. "Why shouldn't I be able to spam someone's computer?? FREE SPEECH!!! INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE!!"
the ads are 'annoyances you have to deal with in a free society.' should read: the lawyers are 'annoyances you have to deal with in a free society.'
"It's not just what you say, no it's mostly how you feel it." - Tim Buckley.
blah.
What's a pop-up?
Mozilla User
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
No, but the normal colours are fucking ugly anyway, which is why I've been using Light mode for several years.
Still feel so blaise about it?
Note, I like F911, but I bet kmweber doesn't. But he's quite willing to give anyone a free pass with intrusion and theft of resources as long as they're trying to make a buck from it.
Oh, and as long as an evil "socialist" government agency is the opposition too.
For we Americans, "freedom" is the crack cocaine of the English language. I found it helpful to remove it & try to same the same thing w/a more descriptive, less emotive word. Unregulated, is that what they mean? Ah, that gets to the heart of it. But it's not unregulated, it's regulated by the handful at the top. And damn if it doesn't benefit them, but at our expense.
We aren't more free. Our jobs are being sent away and our income is being transferred to the top 1% in inc. profits. Profits are now soo unimaginably vast that they can afford to buy up lots o' people - politicians, lobbyists & journalists to front for/rationalize their system.
Economics serves power. We have to ask ourselves, is this the system from which we most benefit, or would other arrangements benefit us more? The answer is obvious.
Then again. These are Libertarians we're talking about. Ayn Randies. The guys who have their thumb right on the pulse of the nation, who can see perfectly clearly how the problems of the nation could all be solved: if we just had fewer public parks and schools; worse health care and roads; and more corporate greed, wealth inequity, guns, pollution, and low-wage jobs -- we'd reach utopia.
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
And is it me or have the people who used to do credit card calls all switched over to doing "non-profit" debt consolidation services. Heck, for all I know, the actual debt consolidation service is really non-profit, but I suspect the telemarketers are still making a bundle making calls for them.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.