Slashdot Mirror
An Interview with 180 Solutions
Paperghost writes "Here's a great interview between Jimmy Daniels and an anonymous ex-employee of 180 Solutions, who portrays the company as being somewhere between turmoil and meltdown. There's so many notable quotables it's scary, but here's one that really sets the tone:
'Shutting down these rogue distributors turned out to be a lot more difficult than they expected though. When you lose them, your daily installs go down drastically and the revenue goes to hell. The layoff in September could be laid directly at the feet of this effort.'"
How can they have so many "rouge distributors" and not notice? It seems like someone had to say "Oh, this doesn't look right". I guess it's hard when you're a spyware company.
echo YOUR_OPINION >
By far the worst thing about slashdot editors--worse than the dupes, the typos, the mischaracterizations--is their apparent inability to write headlines and summaries that mean a damn thing to readers who don't already know every bit of obscure trivia about what's being discussed. I'm longstanding geek, I read slashdot more or less daily; I'm smack in the middle of the target audience. And yet, at least once a week I see a "summary" that's completely incomprehensible gibberish to me.
One has to wonder why, if the editors submit writeups that are meaningless to anyone who doesn't already know exactly what's being said, they bother writing anything at all.
"Who sets up Vmware as a permanent use type of solution like this?"
I do. I run a few public access computer centres, and this is the only way to keep them intact. The computers run Ubuntu by default, but if someone absolutely positively needs Windows (e.g. Teaching a class about Word), they run XP in a VM, which reverts to its initial state the moment it's powered off. Thank heavens for snapshots!
In public access situations, I really do have an 'infinite number of monkeys' at the keyboards, and this is the best way I've found to guarantee that things never break.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Complaining about advertising and then he pastes advertising at the end of his post. Typical of 2006 astroturfers.
Wonder what they put on their resumes
"Please don't kill me"?
Mind you, if I ever got a resume from someone who'd worked for a spamware company, it would go to the very same place as the spam.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I welcome the day when adware/spyware companies start going out of business. These companies should expect that these are not long term ventures, and most people are very irratated by their software no matter how they try to present it. Yes, a small economy surrounds the business of spyware, but it's business based on mass numbers (i.e. casualties) and not by innovation, or any sort of usefullness. Just like the old days of selling blind-link traffic and 404 traffic, except we knew it had its days numbered. Surfing the net for most people means easy access to information, it shouldn't be a blind pit of junk waiting for you to stumble upon the wrong link :)
There are 10 types of people in the world; those who can read binary, and those who can't.
Setting up to run Vmware simply to surf because you're afraid of spyware is absolutely ridiculous.
You can make a very good case that the exact opposite is true, especially if you're dealing with someone who insists on using Internet Explorer. IE has had a large number of flaws that allow hostile remote websites to do silent installs of arbitrary software. It quite likely still has some. I'm also not prepared to say Firefox doesn't have any, even though I'd expect it to be somewhat better.
So what, you say? You only browse the safe websites? I respond, oh, you mean you absolutely, positively never make a typo in the location bar? The websites you browser are absolutely guaranteed to not be hacked?
Heck, I've accidentally clicked on links in my spam when my touchpad acts up. I use Linux so I'm not too worried, but in Windows, that could have been enough!
It certainly ought to be ridiculous, but if you really examine the facts of the case as they are rather than as they should be, setting up a VM for browsing makes quite a lot of sense in any situation where the user can't be trusted to re-install their OS if necessary. If that includes home use for some family where all the members have better things to do with their time than learn the arcana of Windows, so be it. The only downside is memory consumption and the fact that it makes downloading things for the host system that much harder... something in that scenario I'd be inclined to call a feature anyhow.
Agreed, the education is the priority. Part of the learning experience is making mistakes; both the freedom to make them and to learn from them.
I would much rather take the time to explain to them how to proplerly use stuff, and maybe get them using another browser like mozilla/firefox, then come up with some asinine solution like forcing them to run Vmware.
Setting up VMWare doesn't mean the parent gets out of educating their child. It just provides an easier to support&maintain computing environment. Which remember was the original point; instead of uninstall/removing crap just copy virgin image over and you're done.
A number of children websites just don't work in non-IE browsers, e.g. ToonTown. Even in a corporate/adult environment a large number of website don't work properly in Firefox. Or worst yet work in Firefox in Windows but don't work in Firefox in unix. MBNA ShopSafe is that beast.
A lot of children & game websites install a lot of crap. The crap isn't malware but will degrade the performance of the machine over time. If the virtual machine is configured to start from a virgin machine each time it avoids your "what if they hose it?" problem. But this can also being a pain for the user, as they would need to keep re-installing stuff(e.g. ToonTown).
What if they hose their install and you're not there? Suddenly they fire up the browser in the host OS and go to town.
This is really a trust issue. If they are only allowed to use the virtual machine and it got hosed, they need to wait for an adult to repair it. If they disobey a rule, then they get punished.
Going back to your education theme, you could teach them how to restore the virtual machine to a virgin state. e.g. if your virtual machine breaks, run this batch file. The batch file overwrites their virtual machine with the virgin image and they are back in business. This is the beauty of VMWare&virtual machines.
VMWare is basically being used in place of a seperate kids PC.
If the govt becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites man to become his own law, it invites anarchy
You know, not everyone is a vendictive bastard.
Yes the representive of the firm did a bad thing, and yes the firm in itself is probably a bad thing. But two wrongs don't make a right unless you are going left - so calm down, smile and try to be polite even though people are pissing on you.
a link in your signature is fine. we can turn off sigs so we dont have to see your retarded product placements.
a link pasted at the end of a post for ANYTHING is an unwanted advertisement.
Good call, and its worth pointing out that this is not a security concept limited to Windows and Microsoft software specifically either. Its the reason why an increasingly large number of *nix server daemons are set to run in a chrooted or jailed environment - Apache, many of the OpenBSD-affiliated projects like OpenSSH, OpenNTP, etc all can run this way.
/etc files, /sbin binaries, and anything else that can be used to compromise the system further. The same justification of IE browsing via a VMware environment that is either locked down, or easily restored back to a known-good state.
The idea of course being that a remote compromise will only gain access to the chroot environment rather than your juicy and tender
Its simply good security practice regardless of the OS.
Well you know when you, or somebody else, installs that addictive new flash game? Well one of the 15 yes buttons that you click is your permission to install that spyware and adware.
Yeah, saw that. But I'd consider that a rogue installation too, by exploiting the user instead of his/her software.
Simple, they're usually MLMs or some other crap. The people on the other end of those sites are probably going to charge you a fee for participation -- they make money. You sign up for some silly scheme, you might make money, or you might just waste your time and the money you have now.
Classic money making scheme:
Send me $20, and I'll send you instructions on how to make a fortune. They send you $20, and you tell them to get people to send them $20 in exchange for secret money making secrets. For every person you sign up, I get a cut.
Somewhere in the maze, there might be one or two actual products -- there has to be, or it's a straight up fraud. But mostly it's comission structures and fluff that says if you can sign up other people or market to other suckers you'll make a fortune. The money is made by all sorts of intermediary comissions, not on the actual product -- unless you're the manufacturer. [ In the case of spam, the guys sending the messages are getting paid if you buy, so you annoy a million or so people with "g3t a big p3nis" crap ]
The people who have large amounts of people below them in the pyramid
Think referral programs. Think Amway. Think of 'affiliate' programs from the 90s. Think spammers, cold callers, or other creative ways of seling. Advertiser pays promoter for qualified hits/leads/sales/eyeballs. Promoter hires lots of little promoters to do the volume, then make their money of economies of scale.
Any time someone wants to get you to listen to a 'business opportunity', and won't tell you what it is up-front, is probably hawking one of these. Frequently, it's accompanied by trying to get you to come to a presentation, where hopefully they can fill your head with ideas of being rich, and have some more experienced shark button-hole you and sign you up. Run from these people -- very fast! They're very slick, and they generally over-represent your odds of actually making any money. [ You could make a fortune selling red smarties, and get your own supply of red smarties at wholesale prices. The real money is in finding other people who want to make a fortune selling red smarties ]
The guy who signs you up is hoping to make money from you. The guy who signed him up is hoping to make money from you, and so on. You're just grist for the mill. The more people they sign up at the bottom end, the more the guys at the top roll around in piles of money they no longer need to work for, because a large number of guys are schlepping the products they no longer remember anything about.
At best, most of these things are dubious. At worst, they can be quite cultish and downright scary (*cough* Amway *cough*) -- these people approach the whole 'free money' game with almost religious zeal. It's in their interest to convince you that your family and friends don't recognize a good business opportunity (and who needs 'em anyway), and that the snake-oil they're selling is really worth the money.
Make a fortune by working at home for 2 hours a day in your underwear? Yeah, right. They just prey on vulnerable people who are currently not making enough money and can't get a job that lets them. Or unscrupulous people who don't mind working in grey areas.
There is no free lunch.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
In the article's history, click on the IP address in question, and you'll see the other articles that person (or persons) have edited. Then click on a link labeled "diff" to see what was added. Here's a funny example...
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
How can an interview with an ex-employee be regarded as "An Interview with 180 Solutions?"
He complained about spyware and then posted a link to a free web forum in his (hideable) signature.
In other news, yesterday I hypocritically complained about noise pollution and then tied my shoes.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?