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The Spyware Inferno
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."
What's the difference between advertising supported software which gathers marketing demographics and spyware?
Sweet sweet kickbacks to Yahoo, that's what.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
It's like the old detective cliche, follow the money. The problem with both spyware/adware, and spam, is that they're profitable. Beating this stuff with technological measures alone is never going to be easy. If we really want something done, we've got to find ways to make sure these people and/or companies can't make money doing it...
.. is apparently a good way to make cash.
I think people should be forced to take classes or seminars before using the Internet, teaching them how *not* to be fooled to install adware and spyware. They should also be told not to use Internet Explorer.
Of course, with this seminar, everyone would get a free software CD with Claria included.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Besides spyware, what annoys me is "user agents". Quicktime, RealPlayer, and Winamp all have little TSR's that load at start-up and eat megabytes of memory for "quality assurance" and "ease of use" purposes. I don't know how many times I've tried to disable qttask.exe or realsched.exe in my start up only to have it come back unexpectedly. Winamp's is easy to disable at setup, but Quicktime and Real require you to dig.
I don't say they're delivering ads or sending back personally identifiable info to their manufacturers, but they are using my resources without giving me what I consider to be any perceptible advantage.
If we're going to legislate spyware, these user agents need to be considered and the law needs to require Apple and Real to provide better notice of them and make them easier to shut down permanently.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Of course, this implanting of spyware only works if you give away binary versions of your product. Open source that you compile yourself would not last long in the community if it tried to imbed spyware code. Never trust a free executable. That has been true since I got my first Amiga virus from "cracked" copy protected code, and it is true now.
I know it's elitist to say this, but what happens is that Windows users will make the tradeoff of malware to allow them to steal music and other content. They don't protest, because deep down they know what they're doing is wrong.
:)
Not really.
Being both a Linux user and a Windows user, I don't tolerate any kind of adware or spyware either.
The typical windows user:
* Does not understand that AdWare/Spyware/Malware is acutally on thier computer
* Does not understand how AdWare/Spyware/Malware gets on thier computer in the first place.
* When they realize it's on thier computer, they will often belive it's nessecary for software to function. (I tried cleaning up my sister-in-laws Win98 PC, and she immediately blamed me for screwing it up the first time something didn't work the same way -- that's the only real anecdote I have, as I stay the bloody hell away from that kind of job).
* Assuming they realize that it's on thier computer, and they realize they don't have to live with it, then they can get rid of it. Once. But being able to get rid of it by getting a friend to install AdAware and Spybot S&D in no way affects thier ability to detect it on thier computer, or realize that something might be installing it.
Comparing Windows to Linux in this regard is just ignorant. There are is basically no Malware/Spyware programs on linux (I know there's some Adware out there, but I can't imagine it being terribly successful). And Linux users as a whole are self-selecting in this regard, and are used to having to live without software that they'd like to use.
That, and there are several pieces of very popular Adware (MSN Messenger for example) that are sufficiently useful to outweigh the cons of it being Adware.
So, really, the windows users who put up with this garbage simply because they don't know any better and trust the companies when they claim this garbage is nessecary, or that they choose to put up with the Adware to use a program that they want to use.
I also find it ironic that you're saying piracy is a tradeoff for running adware, when any person who is going to pirate things won't think anything of cracking adware to get rid of ads...
BTW, if you think Linux users don't pirate media, you're on fucking crack
Here's the link - now, what in that made it necessary to be distributed as a PDF, and not as an HTML/XML document? The proliferation of PDFs for information that can be displayed consistantly in other, more compact and less processor hungry formats, is frankly disturbing.
Cash prize, guaranteed!
I can't believe something a post as stupid as the parent's gets modded up, even for a few minutes.
Windows users don't allow spamware because they're guilty about piracy. Most of the users I've seen with large amounts of spyware wouldn't even download a free MP3; the only thing they download is their email or the latest forum page refresh, off AOL. They get spyware because of cluelessness about computers, not guilt.
The 15-year-olds who install spyware-filled filesharing programs don't feel guilty either; they use them for the same reason they use Internet Explorer. They don't know any better program, and their friends all use the same thing.
On the other hand, the savvy Linux copyright violator (not thief; copyright violation is not theft according to the law) will just use Mutella to share his MP3s, which has no weird restrictions and runs on the command line if so desired.
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
The copyright system says that the only way you can expect to receive substantial revenue from your efforts to create useful content is to prevent free access to your content. If you provide your content in the most useful form, to the largest number of people who might find it useful, your income is guaranteed to be arbitrarily close to $0.
Spyware/adware is a natural response to this problem. Closed source is less useful than open source to users of software, but the intellectual property regime says it is a better business model, precisely because customers don't know what is in the software. Spyware just takes this principle to its logical conclusion: if it is good for the customer not to know what is in their software, let's exploit this ignorance to the maximum extent possible.
This will gradually kill the market for individual developers of mass-market software. Previously you had to convince your customers that it is worth the effort to download and try out your software, and then you had to convince them to pay you for it if they liked it, even though it is dead easy for them to not pay you and to keep on using the software anyway. Now you also have the hopeless task of convincing your customers that someone they have never heard of is not a spyware author.
Music: a super-stimulus for the perception of musicality. Musicality: a perceived aspect of speech.
I can't believe how nearly everyone in this topic seems to accept spyware and adware as a fact of life, and that you accept the necessity of buying programs to detect and remove this stuff.
Have you all been completely brainwashed by Microsoft? The existence of spyware is Microsoft's fault, and all the time you waste over this crap is owed to you by Microsoft.
First of all, it should not be possible for software to get surreptitiously installed on your computer without your being aware of it. To the degree that this is possible it is the fault of the OS developer.
I just don't get it. If adware and spyware started showing up on Mac OS X you can bet Apple would institute sweeping changes to prevent it from happening.
Frankly I don't know why there isn't a huge class-action suit against Microsoft for encouraging spyware and adware development. And how much crossover is there between spyware and adware developers and the developers of detection/removal software.
Seriously, someone explain why you put up with it?
-- thinkyhead software and media