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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."

6 of 437 comments (clear)

  1. Re:On an unrelated note... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I always thought it would be cool to have a video game based on the 9 stages of hell. If youve actually read his work, you might see how it would be cool to have some of the creatures and various things in each circle in hell in a video game :)

    and we can call it...DOOM 3!

  2. Re:Sorry for repeating the blindingly obvious, but by Homology · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    what spywares? what spyware removal software? what worms? what "20 minutes is the average amount of time for your computer to get infected to death"?

    I use Linux exclusively and I can relate less and less with what Slashdot talks about these days. Which is ironic if you think about it...

    Quite ironic indeed. Along Slashdotters with screaming for the latest binary only 3D driver from NVIDIA, and the latest binary only Flash, or some binary only wireless driver. So when the company deign to release something binary only, that might or might work with a particularly kernel, they are hailed as champions of Open Source. Truth is, those companies don't even release documentation at all, so writing a free driver is quite difficult. Oh yeah, I forgot : Now we can even use binary only drivers written for Microsoft Windows on FreeBSD. What a progress!

  3. Re:Cliche by jdhutchins · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    The URL in his sig is not a scam. I've seen it before, and was *very* skeptical. I did some research, and it's not a scam. In order to get your free ipod, you need to get a certain number of people to sign up for similar offers (they cost ~$20 each iirc). It's not a scam.

  4. Re:Cliche by pershino · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Who cares. Scam or not. It's just a way of harvesting more email addresses to add to endless spam lists. Just go there and feed it fake email data to taint their lists.

  5. Re:Cliche by Trillian_1138 · · Score: 1, Offtopic
    That is a pyramid scheme. At some point, people will run out of new people to sign up, and thus not get their iPod. It's not quite a 'scam' (they're telling the truth) but, like all pyramid schemes, in the end those at the very bottom will get screwed.

    -Trillian

  6. Re:Cliche by labratuk · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    You will not see that iPod.

    --
    Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.