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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.
Is still a turd. I can't count how many times I have had to uninstall that gator trojan from family and friends computers. And before firefox/google toolbar for IE was around, you would look up and 15 windows would be open trying to sell you crap.
No punishment is too lean for these cockroaches.
If it looks like spyware, installs like spyware, is removed like spyware....it's spyware
AT&ROFLMAO
Is it Yet Another Public Relations Stunt? How much claria paid "wired magazine" so that they will write something positive about them, huh?
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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- Toned down their intrusiveness on victims' machines
- Become a known quantity rather than a shocking intruder
- Survived and made some money, thus earning de facto legitimacy as a business
They're still a scourge -- just a legal and known one.1. That they are still purveyors of one the most insidious brand of spyware.
2. Most of us still know it.
3. My already-low opinion of them remains so.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Al-Qaeda changes name to [insert something totally benign and arbitrary here]!
Wow, because they changed their name they must be a peaceful and genial organization now...
I meta-moderate because I care.
a lot has changed since then
Nothing has changed, not at all. Even the article admits that it is the same old same old, but with a brand new spiffy suit. Changing the name does not change the function of the software.
I remember Gator from when I was a freshman in college. Everyone was installing it on their computers, I even admit to installing it on mine once. However, it was a beast to get rid of. I think I had to put a fresh install of windows on there to clear it up. Claria is no different from Gator, or any other spyware program, except is has a PR department. Well, whip-de-do!
Well, if they move to being a service that allows for targeted ads on advertisers pages, that's semi-acceptable to me. No popups, mind. But relevant picture ads are certainly better than irrelevant picture ads. It's at least a decent goal.
The question is, can Claria be trusted to gather enough personal information to allow for accurately targeted ads, and not use that information for evil? I think the answer to that question is no. Gator/Claria has the soul of a whore, and they'll sell you out to anyone for a nickle. Look how little time it took them to transition from being semi-useful to being pure evil in the first place!
Given the opportunity for profit, they'll go pure evil again.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
...that advertising people, particularly those who infest the sphere of personal computing, live in a universe that's parallel to the one in which the rest of us live.
There's a lot of talk about revenues. There's a lot of talk about private lawsuit settlements. There's a lot of talk about how effectively these guys can invade your user experience on a personal computer. At one point in the article, I read a line about Gator (Claria) suing another company for "(interfering) with its right to deliver pop-ups."
As P.J. O'Rourke would say, "What the fuck, huh?! I mean, what the fucking fuck?!" Where on Earth did these scumbags ever get the idea that they have the right to do these things? I don't see anything at all mentioned about about ethics or otherwise doing the right thing. When a few weeks ago Stewart Baker admonished Sony BMG (not directly, but everyone knew who he was talking to), "It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property -- it's not your computer," I was astonished that someone in such a position as his would step up to the plate for people like us.
Thing is, whether they're Claria, or Gator, or whatever name they want to call themselves, I still think they're still bad news. I'm just glad they're myopic enough that they haven't targeted Macintoshes yet.
As an aside, Annalee Newitz first came to my attention in the entertainment paper Metro distributed here in the South Bay area. I'm not sure if she's syndicated, but I like to think of her as a local. She's pretty sharp.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
I used Microsoft AntiSpyware today to remove Claria. Microsoft AntiSpyware reported Claria as a threat but the default action was set to "ignore" instead of "remove".
To whoever is maintaining Microsoft AntiSpyware: People are annoyed by Claria. Even the most computer-iliterate understand that something is wrong with their computer and it reflects poorly your product. People think they have "a virus".
I think Microsoft AntiSpyware is a great product, please modify it so it removes Clarias' software by default.
Regards A.C.
They're still the same hated company. They havent been accepted by any end user.
I resent the statement that a "Spyware" company won the adware wars. There isnt anything to win, other than the total obliteration of these kinds of software.
Gater lives on, the war continues.
The real evil here is that if people understood their computers, they would never allowed this to be installed, if it was, the would remove it and Claria would not see these huge profits. If you can only make money off stupid people you are evil by definition.
People have all kinds of problems with Claria because it used to create these evil popups. Well, Google, in a much more surreptitious manner keeps profiles of all who sign up for their services. Oh, and Google uses cookies to track logged-in users and using its toolbar tracks the sites users visit when logged out of other Google services (Gmail and such). So, Google is doing it in a much more hidden manner than Claria had in the past. That is also mentioned in Wired. Before you so quickly diss Claria, do keep in mind the kind of data mining Google does.
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
The rise of open source software elliminated the need to download "ad-sponsored software". I still remember the days where Gator was used to download big files over the net. But now we have bittorrent, or Shareaza (which happened to be spyware at first, but now went open source). And let's not forget about Opera, which, in the beginning, was also ad-sponsored.
Want free email app? Thunderbird. Want free wordprocessor? OpenOffice.
And this is why the term "adware" has slowly vanished from download sites, to be replaced with "open source". If Claria has faded into a low-profile company, it's because the world has changed.
When did they ever have legitimacy?
Nice catch. This is one of those ways PR types love to manipulate the English language to give their product or actions a sense of nobility. Here are a few more examples:
They're not draining wetlands, they're reclaiming them.
They're not forcing creationism into public schools, they're just reaffirming their freedom of religion.