Going From Gator to Claria

Ant writes "Wired News has an article on the famous spyware company that went from Gator to Claria. From the article: 'Three years ago the company was considered a parasite and a scourge. Today it's a rising star -- selling virtually the same product. How a pop-up pariah won the adware wars.'" The name change happened about two years ago, and a lot has changed since then.

Comments

Two Words: Law Suits

[gbulmash]

Claria has threatened anyone anti-spyware company with massive lawsuits for classifying them as spyware. They've gone on a very offensive offensive to try to change public perception of their products by silencing their critics.

libel == !(legal power)

[woodsrunner]

It's libel if you can't afford the lawyers to fight it.

Step 7: Lobby HomeSec

[Tackhead]

>... From TFA:
>
> Lydia Parnes, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, says it's possible to track people online without being underhanded. The FTC is in favor of online advertising, she explains, "and sometimes tracking makes advertising work better for consumers."
>
> In other news, cats are in favor of open birdcages.

If step 7 is "..." before "Profit", then I humbly submit that the answer for "..." is to "lobby HomeSec".

Gator CPO at the Department of Homeland Security

D. Reed Freeman, the "Chief Privacy Officer" of Claria Networks (formerly Gator), the creators of the pervasive spyware package GAIN, has been appointed to the Department of Homeland Security's "Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee"

In United Soviet States of America, privacy watchdog watches YOU!

Still VERY VERY hated

[Stormwatch]

From Wikipedia , emphasis mine...

Claria is perhaps best known for the Gator spyware products, which display ads on the computers of web surfers. It bills itself as the "leader in online behavioral marketing". As a result of the problems relating to its software and the way it has often been installed, Claria Corporation may be the Internet-based company with the worst corporate reputation.

Re:What does Claria do for the user?!

[AscendantOat]

The end-user benifit is the use of Claria-supported programs for free, instead of paying for the ad-free version.

Claria lets developers release an ad-supported version of their software without developing their own ad framework, thus allowing them to release free software and still make a profit. Popular programs Go!Zilla and Kazaa both used Claria at one point.

Re:A Rose of a Different Name

[Tony Hoyle]

I've got it by leaving the machine logged in overnight. Damned if I know how.

The other day I had to recover an old access database. Nobody remembered the password, of course, so I donwloaded the trial of one of the password recovery programs. 1 second after clicking on it the nastiest scumware I've ever seen appeared (Spy Sheriff).

This thing:

Changed my background, and locked it to 'you have been infected with spyware'.
Ran no less than *four* copies of itself.
Installed a service that went 100% CPU, and downloaded more spyware in the background (well it tried to.. I pulled the cable after about 10 seconds.. still managed to get a hell of a lot though.. damned broadband).

And here's the clincher:

It killed MS Antispyware, then found its install directory and erased it. Not only did Antispyware not detect it, it was powerless to defend itself.

Took me nearly a day to get rid of that bastard. Spybot would say it had cleared it, then it'd all come back again after a reboot. MS Antispyware was the same... it'd see it, but fail to remove it properly. Of course neither of these run in safe mode (Antispyware won't even *install* in safe mode... some use that is). I eventually killed it by manually tracking it down in the registry and finding its 're-spyware' routine (which was a priviliged service it had installed, that *none* of the anti spyware apps detected.. because it had managed to rename itself in memory to svchost.exe).