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The Spyware Inferno

Posted by michael on from the where-wise-men-fear-to-tread dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Ever thought there should be a scale for quantifying the evil Spyware does? In an editorial article at news.com.com, a Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist uses the levels of hell in Dante's Inferno to do just that. The article also goes into depth on how vendors, and Claria in particular, make money - of particular interest, 31% of Claria's revenue came through Overture. This may explain why Yahoo took so long to list Claria as Adware in its anti-spyware toolbar."

1 of 437 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Remember Kids... by Moraelin · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Problem solved only because noone gives a damn about something which has maybe 1/1000 of the market. Mozilla on all platforms is already a spit in the bucket. Mozilla on MacOS, well, that's got to mean... what? You and 10 other users? Hardly a market worth programming for.

    The fact is: nothing in MacOS X, Mozilla or even Linux would protect you from spyware.

    _Maybe_ I could be persuaded to believe it gives you some inherent protection from viruses and worms. (That is, if I was after 12 beers or after a lobotomy. GNU/Linux and Mozilla have a metric buttload of security advisories too. And let's not forget that the words "rootkit", "to get rooted" or even "worm" come from the Unix world.)

    But from spyware? Dream on. That stuff usually comes nicely packaged with an installer. And often hidden inside some other program's install, barely mentioned near the end of a 10,000 word EULA. (Yay! If you pay for our password remembering gizmo, you get our award winning spyware for FREE!)

    The same Joe Average who cheerfully installs Gator on Windows, would just as cheerfully install it under Linux or MacOS. Even if he has to log in as root for that. (You did train him to only login as root to install stuff, so he'll do that.) Ditto for Mozilla spyware bars and plugins, if anyone bothered writing those. It's not like it doesn't support them or anything.

    So basically you're bragging... what? That your great security advantage comes from being a minority noone gives a damn about? Well, gee.

    Besides, Mozilla is buggy enough as it is. I guess even the scum at Claria aren't _that_ evil as to inflict even more pain on its poor users.

    --
    A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.