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."

Comments

How many are Slashdot readers?

[badfrog]

Wonder how many of spyware developers are regular Slashdot readers... Step forward, cowards!

Re:How many are Slashdot readers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gonna go AC here (sorry), but since you asked, this might be an interesting story (but rather long, if you care to bear with me)...

I used to work for a company that made pretty hardcore spyware/popups. The owners claimed when they first hired me to do some consulting that they used popups to generate capital instead of going for VC money, and now that they had some income, were going to turn around and try to be a kind of Amazon/1-click shopping for useful tools (spam filters, privacy software, personal firewalls). This was a couple years ago before the market for this was absolutely saturated. So I thought, and the principals assured me, that once they had some $, they'd ditch the popup business and I'd be working on some really cool projects which I otherwise wouldn't have had the opportunity to work on, so I signed on fulltime. I was also really well paid and genuinely enjoyed the benefits, interesting engineering challenges, and people I worked with (none of the usual Office Space bullshit my friends complained about, but there were many downsides as you will see.)

However, after I joined, the owners kind of lost focus and kept delaying work on more legit projects to fix or enhance their popup distribution network or new things that all boiled down to schemes that would get our adware on more computers. Every week they owners would come up with some half baked new idea that was suddenly priority 1 (and the idea of "top priority" became something of a joke.) Because things took longer than expected and we were switching gears every week or so and could never truly get anything accomplished, the skewed lesson that the owners learned was that "software development is hard and expensive and not worth it".

At this point they stopped even fronting that they'd do legit things and just focused completely on adware. To keep the bills (and the principals' inflated salaries) paid, they started loosening their morals even more and fell down the slippery slope even more, delving into porn and other kinda shady areas which I won't go into, at which point I decided to resign since it was obvious that despite repeated promises, I would never be working on projects that had real value.

The time wasn't all wasted, though. In case anyone's curious, it is kind of interesting to see how things operate behind the scenes at one of these spyware places, and the psychology of the people who work there. I second another poster's point that the everyone who worked there -- business and developer types alike -- were otherwise normal, cool guys and not like evil masterminds or sociopaths or anything. (Ha, all of us were /. readers, too.) Everyone knows that what they're doing isn't totally cool but is sort of in denial (and we were repeatedly promised that we'd be working on legit projects "soon"), and you're so caught up in your work and the interesting engineering problems that you ignore the bigger picture (not a good thing).

The owners do a good job of sheltering themselves and most employees from the negative complaints that do arrive (delegating them to a "support" department that responds to hundreds of emails a day with "oh wow, we're sorry you're having problems, here's an uninstaller"). However, most of us did end up reading a lot of the complaints and most of us were in denial about the sheer volume of misery that the popups and other things created. It sounds strange that normal people would work on such clearly awful software, but every shady decision is rationalized in any number of ways including saying "well, it's legal" (or at least not illegal, for now), pointing to "worse" adware companies and being "at least we're not as bad as these assholes," policies like "hey, we email uninstallers to anyone who asks" (while ignoring the fact that only 1% might be savvy enough to actually figure out what's going on since most people never figure out where the popups come from). This will sound strange, but some of the projects were actually really cool technology and worth getting

They just use standard FOSS philosphophy

[Neil Blender]

Information wants to be free. Your information.

Where's the part with the burning and the fires?

[EnronHaliburton2004]

The article is missing a critical piece...

where enraged citizens storm the building, set it on fire, seize the funds from the bank accounts and distribute to orphanages everywhere and leave the Adware staff tied up to lightpoles with a note for the police.

Dark. And noisy.

[Tackhead]

> He says his company is committed to "transparency" and is making it easier for users to uninstall its software.

When pressed, he defined "easy" as "sorta like dipping your balls in sweet cream and squatting in a kitchen full of feral cats."

And you don't wanna know what "transparent" looked like.

I'm a newb

[ltbarcly]

How do you install adware in debian? I tried apt-get install virus, apt-get install adware, apt-get install malware, nothing works. man, linux is crap

The truth about Adware

[ravenspear]

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.

Re:Dark. And noisy.

[OAB_X]

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

It concerns us.... (the military)

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

We constantly have a nightmare about people on our network installing spyware (we're half green suit/half civilian). Some day, some enterprising young person will create spyware with a key logger phoning home passwords galore. We already had a problem with HotBar clogging our pipe.

Admittedly we are't suppoed to be discussing classified information but we deal with politically sensitive stuff all the time.

Re:Adware and Spyware are making me money

[mrbcs]

Same here though I don't feel dirty doing it.. I'm doing them a favour. Better to pay me to clean up their machine than to go and buy a new one because of software issues.

Most times I've only had to see people once. It's very disheartening though, when two weeks later, the same customer comes back, riddled with viruses and spyware.

Me: "where's the programs I installed? Sygate? Ad-aware? Avg?"

Customer: "umm, I guess we uninstalled them.. kazaa wasn't working right."

Me: "fine, $60, we'll try again."

I don't think I'm long for this game anymore. Users can be very draining on your spirit. Really bugs me that I've had no problems with my 10 machines in 7 years or so.