Slashdot Mirror
Inside an Adware Company
Haikster writes "Brad Stone of Newsweek wrote a great article exposing DirectRevenue which is actually a combination of the old Dash guys with IPInsight, abetterinternet, offeroptimizer and blackstonemedia and the others... it's a bit lengthy but a great read."
This is good because it is completely amazing to me how the adware/spyware problem has received very little coverage in the media, certainly orders of magnitude less than the spam problem. We have seen many stories on /. over the last few weeks about how millions of Windows boxes are so infested with spyware that they are basically unusable, and yet most non-technical people still seem ambivalent.
If the same amount of effort currently used to fight spam is not applied to the spyware/adware situation, it will get just as bad if not worse than the spam problem.
As intrusive and annoying as spam is, at least it's influence doesn't extends past your email client. Spyware has the potential to totally screw up machines that do important tasks, which could be far more harmful.
New steps to uninstall:
Add Remove programs -> spyware program -> uninstall window -> im sure i want to uninstall -> i dont want to reconcider -> i dont want to provide a reason for uninstalling -> im still really sure i want to uninstall -> yes i know some features maybe deactivated -> i dont want to install any companion programs -> i dont want to have programs from your sponsors installed either -> i dont want to have more msn smilies -> why do i need to go to a website to uninstall? -> i still want to uninsall reason: i hate spyware -> uninstall -> please wait while you download the uninstaller -> program uninstalled successfully, 5 more programs installed by uninstaller