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No Honor Among Malware Purveyors
metalion writes "True to the saying 'no honor among thieves,' adware company, Avenue Media, is finding that competing adware company, DirectRevenue, is detecting and deleting their software. Now Avenue Media is crying foul and have filed a lawsuit against DirectRevenue stating that DirectRevenue 'knowingly and with intent to defraud, exceeded its authorized access to users' computers.' DirectRevenue acknowledges that it may uninstall competing applications in its user license agreement. A researcher at Harvard University, Ben Edelman, reasons that 'Once the computer is infected with 10 different unwanted programs, the person is likely to take some action to address the situation.' Just how far will adware companies go to continue to attempt to bombard us with their ads?"
We all have been complaining about malware for years. . .
Now they are complaining about themselves.
When does it stop?
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Now if only we could make these malware programs only target other malware programs and not the operation of the PC...
We could have a little battlebots competition! The Amazing Bonzi takes on reigning champion THE GATOR.
We should require by law that when a spyware application installs itself, it must uninstall another spyware application without damaging the host system, and further that it put itself into add/remove programs.
Just because it is listed in Add/Remove Software doesn't mean it is removed entirely.
I hope they win the lawsuit. If they were to get the courts to agree that hiding malicious wording in the EULA is fraud then that would be a nice boon to shutting some of these people down.
In fact, just about any attack on the concept of click-through EULAs is pretty good in my book. Scream "contract!" all you want, they're bad for me personally and bad for the industry. Consent and informed consent are two different things and it appears the industry has completely abandonded any pretext of the latter.
TW
It's nice to think that at least one adware purveyor is going to be inconvenienced by this little tussle, but it's not so uplifting when you consider that the choice of winners is "adware company #1", "adware company #2", or "lawyers who represent adware companies".
And is my mom and other not-so-savvy users granting said authority in the first place? This suit seems riddled with assumptions that it was legal in the first place to install such software.
And since when has malware displayed any EULA - or any UI, for that matter?
I wondered how long we would have to wait for this to happen. I always imagined it would be university students or black-hats. I never imagined it would be spammers/spyware authors trying to kill each other's programs.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Nothing. Ad-Aware's advertised main function is to remove adware.
This lawsuit is about some adware going outside the boundaries of their advertised function, and removing other adware and only telling the users by the fine print of the EULA.
We have, It's called Linux.
Mozilla is the key along with a system that is better suited to internet attachment.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
Clearly, its the customer who is giving the other application permission to uninstall the exisitng malware. The vendors of the other application have no influence or stake in the agreement between the exisitng malware authors and the user. The only party that can breach the agreement is the user.
So, the users should be punished for violating the copyright on the software they didn't want in the first place, and was installed without their knowledge.
A lady in El Paso gets a telemarketing call. She says no, repeatedly. Telemarketer ignores her, repeatedly. She hangs up, forcefully.
She later gets a letter saying:
So, we have:
OK, I move that we commit all advertisers to institutions for the criminally insane, right now.
Any seconds?
www.eFax.com are spammers
Unfortunately, we don't get to pick an arbitrary fitness evaluation. If spyware does damage to our network infrastructure, and yet delivers the most advertising, spamming and phishing revenue, it is fit as spyware.
Actually it only needs to deliver advertising/spamming/phishing revenue. If it hitches a ride on a worm, that would make it even more fit.
Damage to the network is a "neutral" trait until it starts to interfere with spyware downloads.
Not benign - there's nothing much benign about malaria, for instance. It's not about not affecting your host, it's about not killing it, and that's true of malware as much as it is of a biological parasite.
I think all the EULA's are out of control as to how much control and ownership these companies have over your PC and what right's we as owners of the PC should have reserved.
I keep hoping someday, someone, somewhere will really bring all these EULA's that we are all subjected to each and everytime we install something, under a microscope and start really questioning the legality of said EULA's.
Just my 2 cents...