Slashdot Mirror
The Plot To Hijack Your Hard Drive
An anonymous reader writes Business Week Online examines the business practices of spammers and pop-up advertisers, using much-maligned Direct Revenue as an example case. The article discusses the history of the company, their rocky road through good and bad times, and what they're willing to to get your eyes on their ads." From the article: "Among Direct Revenue's alumni, pride over technical cunning mingles with regret for exasperating so many computer users. After waffling on the issue during a long interview, one former Dark Arts wizard sighs and sums up his version of the company credo with an elegiac observation by abolitionist Frederick Douglass: 'Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.'"
should it maybe say to do to instead of to to?
Stop Using Windows!!!! Duh!!!
Patient: "Doctor it hurts when I do this."
Doctor: "Then stop doing it!!!"
--Johnny hates stupid!
Complain to the companies that advertise with these methods. If you see an ad for Delta airlines, write them a letter complaining. Bitching to the advertising company is useless because they don't care... they're getting paid from someone else. Now the companies advertising through them are getting paid from you... and they will listen eventually.
Also, use a router, firewall software, Antivirus, and Firefox. Haven't any issues ever.
http://religiousfreaks.com/I don't know why, but I am still shocked that there are people who don't mind making a living this way. I mean, they must be smart enough to see what greed has done to them, or are they just evil and do not care?
"Patience is not a virtue, it's a waste of time."
I mean, I think the real problem is that people will buy stuff from ads that randomly pop-up on their computer. And worse, those ads are the most effective kind?? I mean, if we could get people to wise up and not purchase sketchy stuff from spam or adware, then evil companies would stop making it.
'Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.'
That doesn't make it okay to be the one imposing the injustice.
From the article:
From early on, a small group of programmers at Direct Revenue focused on how to protect their employer's programs once they were lodged in a computer, current and former employees say. The team called itself Dark Arts after the term for evil magic in the Harry Potter series. One of the biggest threats Dark Arts addressed came from competing software. The presence of multiple spyware programs can so cripple a computer that no ads manage to get seen.
In my opinion, spyware that purposely damages other software without user consent(even if the target software is spyware) is really just a virus, trojan, or something like that. Seriously, these people need to just chill out and stop screwing with everyone's PCs.
"You teach a child to read and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test." - President George W. Bush
Actually, he compared them both to a "scale 'o evil" and theorized that we're already compalcent with the former and have proved to ignore the latter, and statistically speaking humans could probably score much higher in the future.
Also from TFA: "Spyware rakes in an estimated $2 billion a year in revenue, or about 11% of all Internet ad business, says the research firm IT-Harvest. Direct Revenue's direct customers have included such giants as Delta Air Lines (DALRQ ) and Cingular Wireless. It has sold millions of dollars of advertising passed along by Yahoo. And Direct Revenue has received venture capital from the likes of Insight Venture Partners, a respected New York investment firm."
People need to learn to stop following links that anger them! If no one purchased goods and services from these irritants, they would lose their 11% market share and slowly go away. I subscribe to Netflix, but I would never follow one of their links from a popup.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
In the end, Google knows how it's done. I find I much more often induldge in either clicking on or glancing at an unobstrusive (and generally relevant) google ad than I do any annoying popup which causes me nothing other than to feel contempt for the company who pulled it on to my screen. Sneaky and dirty marketing is just distasteful, and they should know that it reflects poorly on the company and the product. I suppose it still works well on people like my grandmother, who believe they are in fact the 5000th visitor.
I love how these articles talk about "your computer" as if everybody in the world is running Windows. They don't even mention that Mac and Linux users don't have these issues. Just a little mention that there is an alternative, is that too much to ask??
indeed! these people should be held liable for the damage done and time wasted. it's unpleasant to think that there are actually people behind obnoxious spyware, and that they think that pissing people off is the best way to get them to acknowledge the adverts and buy whatever they're selling.
It seems that the difference between insightful and troll is:
;p!!!!!!111111!!!!!!ELEVENTY!!!!"
"LOL!!!
Too bad that part will automatically cause most people to ignore a very insightful and accurate comment.
Mod me to hell if you want, but you can't deny what he said.
Ignore anything I said above, I actually agree with everything you believe - mod accordingly.
"They are trying to take our porn!"
(with apologies to Stephen Colbert)
"But this one goes to 11!"
Make the companies (and thier owners) liable for the cost of fixing the PCs they infect, and allow people to take these companies to court over the cost of repairing thier PCs.
People on slashdot could hire eachother at $50/hr to fix eachother's PCs. And setup a revenue stream of about $200/week each. Even if 1% of 1% do it, with 1,000,000 PCs, that means that 100 people are sucking down a total of $20,000/week. I doubt the ad revenue from infecting 1M PCs is $1M/year.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Oh sorry, that was about a different unscrupulous company.
Actually, he compared them both to a "scale 'o evil" and theorized that we're already compalcent with the former and have proved to ignore the latter, and statistically speaking humans could probably score much higher in the future.
So it's the "slippery slope" argument: implying that intrusive digital advertising leads to domination and irrevocable descent into the murky depths of human bondage.
I guess that works, if you also believe that "the Matrix" was a documentary.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The real goal of this type of advertising is not necessarily to get you to buy from them. Most of us, especially the computer savvy ones, would never buy from a popup add. But the simple fact is, we've seen them. We notice them, judging by the comments on /., which means the advertisers have done their job. They are getting a company's name and/or product out and NOTICED. Cingular and Netflix could make 0$ in sales from popups, but they certainly can claim they have been viewed by more users and more times due to this type of advertising. Coke doesn't put a purchasing phone number on their TV commercials (comparable to the ability to click on a popup directly to a sales site), yet plenty would say that Coke simply having commercials increases recognition and/or sales.
Development notes at http://devscribbles.blogspot.com
I've never clicked on an ad in my life. Except maybe by accident when the site's navigation is right near the ad. I just did a random survety of my coworkers. They all said the same thing without my prompting: That they only have done it by accident, and can't think of any specific ad they ever clicked on.
Is ad revenue no longer based on pay-per-click? Because if it is, I don't know who is clicking on them.
their product that promises to protect you against popups:
"Windows Defender (Beta 2) is a free program
that helps you stay productive by protecting
your computer against pop-ups"
Hurry up and interrupt users again, before it is too late!
I had the same take on it.
'users may install a helper program, the Windows Genuine
Advantage plug-in, to enhance their download experience'
--
Microsoft staff never sees this
if they eat their own dog food.
"The Highlander was a documentary, and events happened in real time."
Here is preceding text of the observation by abolitionist Frederick Douglass: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." How about the plot of the media companies and IT giants to hijack digital content using DRM? The spammers are small players compared to the corporate giants.
For example:
A rouge spyware removal company called kill and clean (.com) uses malware that installs some run of the mill spyware, some dialers and hijackers, but also tampers with the help system and the windows security center. The mass of malware is such the no one can miss it.
The afflicted user will get correct looking security alterts that recommend them to go the killandclean and buy their spyware remover.
It would be impossible to teach every user to maintain a manual control over running processes, startup commands and the registry and the way that it takes to see through some of these things.
(It installs itself using various browser/flash vulnerabilities from porn sites like ampland.com. The company presents it self as being based in london, but the domain is registred to a person in brooklyn. I have resisted the urge to retaliate against said person as she is probably a stooge.)
This is SLASHDOT, there is no chance of cunnilingus interfering with anything anyone here does
"I'm a humble person really,
I'm actually much greater than I think I am"
As only ads I've ever bought anything from. The reason is they are the only ads that are around when I'm thinking of something. We needed an Optura Xi camera for work. So I punched in "Optura Xi". Lo and behold there's a link to B&H on the right hand side offering it. Clicking it took me not to their front page, but to the camera itself. 5 minutes later it was a done deal.
I'm not going to buy from random popup ads, they are never selling what I want when I want it. It's not just that Google ads are onobtrusive, they are relivant. They are what I searched for and they generally take me right to the product page.
I interviewed at Direct Revenue about 18 months ago. It's funny to hear thier version of what they do - they simply call it "contextual ad-based marketing". The whole place seemed very sketchy and unprofessional. When the sketchy manager walked me past the group he called "forensic computing" - I instantly knew I was in a spyware factory. I met with some other sweaty, twitchy geek who asked me to solve some algorithmic/data-structure type problem. He was very persistent and specific - harping on the minor details. After I got out of there, I realized he was actually tring to get ideas for a problem he was working on - not tech-ing me for the position. Told the equally shady recruiter to f-off & turned them down for another offer. Glad I did it, but I'm shocked that they are the focus of an article on BW. Surprised they're even still around...
How ironic. Just this morning, I was attempting to clean one of their pieces of crap, ABetterInternet, off of my wife's computer. They have made it really difficult to find their stuff and clean it off. It was a few hours before I had even identified what exactly it was, and although Adaware was aware of its existence, it was unable to remove it.
Norton Antivirus was completely useless. I'm going to have to try a series of Spyware removal tools to get it off, I think. Maybe the kids will listen now when we tell them to use Firefox, and not IE.
It's about Them taking whatever they can get from you without you complaining/caring enough to do something about it
Where does it say that the slavery of this millenia is actual bondage? Who says it's not a combination of the things above?
- Kal`Goblez
You're an idiot. It was a fucking quote. Nobody "compared" anything.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. EULA's are a big part of this problem. Specifically, the way above board software forces users to accept pointless pages of legalese. It serves no real purpose, but trains users that it's OK, and in fact expected, that they should click through some agreement whenever they want to run a new program. But while the 'legitimate' software companies don't really get any benefit from the EULA's, the spyware folks depend on them to keep themselves out of jail. These fsck'ers would all be in jail without EULA's providing them cover. And if only spyware was making users click through pages of legal mumbo jumbo, users might actually stop and take notice.
I don't know why people feel that caveat emptor (buyer beware) should apply less today than it did many years ago. Pop-ups and spam to me are the equivalent of P.T. Barnum unloading a bunch of tuna as "white salmon, guaranteed not to turn pink in the can". Especially with all the vendor/product/reseller review sites out there, one would think it would be easier for more emptorii to caveat. I don't feel any different about my grandmother thinking she's the 5000th visitor than I did when she bought that Ronco rotisserie abomination.
This sig is exempt from disclosure under the privacy Act of 1974.
one former Dark Arts wizard sighs and sums up his version of the company credo with an elegiac observation by abolitionist Frederick Douglass: 'Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.'"
I can tell you that if any of these people submit a resume to me, they can absolutely count on NOT being interviewed. There is no room for people this lacking in ethics.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
Is it just me, or are these weasels begging for a DDOS attack. Their attitude about damaging other people's computers reeks of entitlement and self-rightousness. Would anyone cry if their servers were fried.
Education is going to be the most effective way to put a stop to spam and other addware. There must be a massive campaign to teach people what spam is and how to stop it. Videos that come up when you first load a new computer should be included to explain spam and how to prevent it. Work places need to spend time explaining to employees what to avoid. Schools of all grades need to teach people about safe internet use. If the campaign was big enough it'd help a great deal, maybe even stop it all together. The problem is that people ARE clicking adds, they ARE buying junk from spam adds! If they no longer clicked adds, deleted all spam with out looking at it, I'd bet it wouldn't pay any more. Laws won't do it, attacks against spammers doesn't work. Our best way to fight it is to stop people from making it profitable. Once the money goes the adds will go too.
Thermal depolymerization - Lazy recycling.
The quotation is the general principle, which enables you to understand a lot of different things, some of which are more important than others. It explains, for example, why the American people are subject to the Patriot Act, DMCA, and eternal copyrights. None of these have much in common with either of the things youi mentioned.
... I interviewed for this outfit for a linux position, and boy did it dishearten me. It seems that all that's left in NYC tech is consulting, banks/investment houses (which are often bastions of dumb corpthink, except for the more technical hedge funds), and shady outfits like this. There's very little in the way of new tech going on in NYC anymore, and the stable work has in many cases moved out to NJ and areas beyond.
IMHO stable back-office jobs in NYC are going the way of the dodo. Even if they don't offshore, they will migrate to states that are friendlier to business and have lower operating costs. I've already left NY, and so far I couldn't be happier. To be honest, I could sit playing WoW in my underwear in NYC and pay a fortune for electricity, cable, insurance, etc.. Or move somewhere else with broadband and do the exact same thing for less?
(and get paid the same, quite honestly, at least in tech the NYC job market has been squeezed so hard that the reputed higher wage level is a bit of an illusion now, so while wages remain stagnant or decline, costs go up up up.. I'm making more as a full timer outside NY than I did as a 'consultant' working in midtown, and that's just net take-home pay, before factoring in insurance and whatnot)
Don't browse the internet as Administrator on Windows, ever. Don't even browse as a "power user" - create a restricted user (no install or registry change privileges).
If you are going to browse while logged in as Administrator, right-click on your browser, select "Run as" and run it as a less-privileged user.
In general, always run as a restricted user, and use "Run as" to elevate privilege of software that requires it (cd burning, etc.). Leave Administrator alone.
If you have no firewall, examine the services that you have running (right-click My Computer, manage, services). Look up every running service (on google or whatnot) and make a decision to shut it down or leave it operating.
Also, ensure that your SYSTEMROOT resides on an NTFS filesystem. If it's on FAT, none of the above will help you.
Firefox helps, but this works better.
Nothing wrong with using slippery slope as an argument as opposed to a logical proof.
Interesting that as of right now, you have an insightful mod and he doesn't.
The article talks about "trailer cash" and that is indeed what this is about. Forget the scum spyware companies, instead consider the real culprit, the end user.
I am not just talking about people still running Windows/IE, that in itself is stupid enough but it can be done safely.
No the trailer cash people are not the victim of shoddy MS coding or brilliant spyware coding, they are the victim of their own greed and stupidity. Greed because the fast majority of spyware programs come from dubious source, P2P programs (and no they ain't using P2P to download the latest linux distro) and "free programs". It is similar to that "test" someone did were people gave away personal information on questionares for tiny rewards.
Smart people know their is no such thing as a free lunch. If someone therefore offers you a free lunch this is probably because they want you to sit through a 3 hour sales pitch before. This is a sales techinigue I was warned about by consumer programs as a kid, that my mother was warned about even my grandfather and it is still going on.
But even worse then the people that install this crap hoping to get something for nothing are the people who actually respond to the ads.
Believe it or not but the entire ad business is about making money. Nobody is going to pay for an ad campaign that doesn't produce results. The sad fact is that these spyware and spam ads are very effective at producing sales results.
It is here that the real problem lies. As long as people keep buying from these kind of ads someone will be serving up these ads.
But frankly I don't see the problem. I guess I have always had a soft spot for scammers. They are such nice evidence of evolution in action. If you been infected by spyware that is natures way of telling you are to stupid to breed.
Pity is that in our society it is the stupid who breed the most. Now with viagra spam they will become even better at it. The stupid are going to overrun this world. Good news for the spyware and spam people. At least these IT jobs ain't being outsourced yet.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You haven't read my sig, obviously.
The latest Slashdot meme.
No. Not a DDOS attack. That is completely illegal, and would lower you to (below?) their level.
However... despite the distaste I have for lawyers, I think a class action lawsuit would be an appropriate retaliation. I would love to see the adware companies given a complete cash-ectomy, and that would make others think twice about it.
I volunteer my share of the proceeds to the EFF.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
People need to learn to sto--
This will NEVER happen.
NEVER!
I think the better advice is:
People need to stop posting on slashdot that people need to learn to not click on spam and pop-up advertising.
Queue the cascade of "people need to stop..." posts.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
If only you could make money by running a consumer reports site that listed all the companies who advertise this way. And all the companies that install root kits, etc.
It would be nice to have a site that I could run to before I purchased things to see if the manufacturer/distributor/reseller is on the blacklist.
If the site had counters for each company to show how many people read their review and avoided doing business with that company because of their review...
If you think about it, it is just a re-statement of "Alll that is need for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing." Can't remember who said it, and may have the quote slightly wrong, but in essence it says the same thing. Heilein once said something to the effect that we get the government we deserve.
Oh man, if only I had mod points right now. You are so lucky I used the last one earlier today.
The key thing to remember in all this is that when it comes to advertising, you aren't the customer, you're the product. Cows can't complain to the farmer that the slaughterhouse isn't sanitary.
As someone else said, you can complain to the people who buy the ad space, but like cattle, that's likely to be just as effective. Therefore, the only thing you *can* do is fight, with alternative browsers, adware removal tools, good browsing habits, and by warning the rest of the, ahem, herd.
If we make the product unsavory, we can run the slaughterhouses out of business!
but i got it off. do your work in safe mode - it wouldn't come off unlees you are in safe mode. iirc, it didn't come off in safe mode, either, unless you followed a strict procedure. google for solutions - they are out there.
good luck - i burned a weekend removing ~2k malwares off his machine, installing firefox and hiding and relabeling internet explorer as "Do Not Use."
... to find such high quality pr0n as this.
I hereby propose a DRCFMSS:
Direct Revenue Customer Funds Misallocation Screen Saver
Basically, a virtual-machine-like sandbox that runs a DR-infected IE "clicking" on ads popped up as the "user" (networked spider/p2p agent) "browses" around, comparing notes with other agents and causing view and click fees to be charged to the asshat corps that pay DR for ads.
You can even choose to participate in specific campaigns: "Hey folks, we're 'doing' Vonage this week!".
Then you can also compile nice tables to show the same asshats how much of their ad budget was pissed away in this fashion.
That's a different problem. In this case the problem isn't what they're selling, it's how they're doing it. Nobody (within the statistical margin of error) would agree to having an ad pop up 30 times/day, and have it crash four times/day on top of that. So how did this software get onto those systems again? Were users given reasonable notice and a chance to decline installation of this software?
Compounding that is the "dirty hands" observation that legitimate companies do not go to extreme measures to keep their software from being uninstalled. (Setting aside Microsoft and MSIE for the moment...)
BTW it might have been legal for P T Barnum to get cute like that, but there is no doubt that anyone selling tuna as "white salmon" today would be breaking several laws. We can shake our head at the person who believes in "white salmon" without ignoring the fact that the seller committed fraud.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
yeah, yeah, yeah. Some people started to notice some of the dangers of smoking in the 19th Century. So what -- there were ads with the show's stars or "doctors" recommending specific brands of cigarettes into the 1950s, and the first gov't mandated warnings didn't appear until the late 60s. Even then tobacco companies threw up a smokescreen for decades.
But that misses the broader point that one of the best predictors for whether you will smoke (iirc) is whether your parents or other close relatives smoke. Teenagers make a big production of being different from their parents, but the parents still model 'adult' behavior to a tremendous extend and teenagers aren't very open to being told what they can't do by authority figures. There's still far too many smokers, but you don't hear about 3- and 4-pack-a-day smokers any more.
BTW, a good contemporary example is High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). Twenty years ago (or so) it didn't exist, but now it's nearly impossible to avoid unless you prepare all of your food from scratch. The government says it's safe, but obesity has skyrocketed over the same period. How do you think your actions today will be seen in 40 years?
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
We get DDOS attacks all the time; not just from dissastisfied users, but also "distributors" that we cut off because they are not making us company. Presumably Direct Revenue, being much larger, deals with that too.
"I will f------ kill you and your families."
Sheesh, what's next? Throwing chairs at their doorstep?
How to enable garbage collection on a system without protected memory: #define malloc() ((void *) rand())
So, WTF is our government good for?
Then build better antimalware tools. It's simple. I have a bunch of machines under my 'domain' and no matter how much you tell people what to do they don't. So don't make people download updates, don't make people run the scanners, don't make people decide whether to run the realtime portion and don't ask them to interpret a warning message when it finds something. Or just go back and build a better OS and browser like I said.
I can hardly wait till Microsoft takes over the desktop security space. Because that of course will fix everything.
People like you who get infected by spyware just want the world to believe that it is not their fault, that they can't help it, that you are not to blame for your own stupid mistakes.
It is the same mentallity that tries to ban games/movies/books because they make you violent. Blame everyone else but yourselve.
Avoiding spyware and spam has nothing to do with computer knowledge it has to do with common sense. The same common sense that tells you not to enter those fake lotteries that tell you you have won if only you send in your order right now. The same common sense that tells you something is a pyramid scheme. It is what most of us use to tell us something is a scam.
Most of us know when we are being hustled and walk the other way. When you do not that is your fault. Do not expect the rest of us to bend over just because you are too stupid.
If that makes me elitist then good. Your kind seems to think that this is somekind of insult, it is not. It is praise. What ever you call me is fine with me just as long as you never ever claim I am like you.
I don't want to live in a world with thousands of laws limiting everyone because a minority can't protect itself. Bans on smoking because some assholes can't be considerate and not smoke in front of other people. Bans on drinking because some people can't just take a cab home. Bans on games because some people can't control their violence. Bans on software because some people can't stop themselves from downloading everything with the word "free" on it.
Oh and as for mentioning sourceforge. Opensource is not a free lunch. If you can't even spot that you are an ever greater moron then I thought. The really big difference between opensource "free" and spyware "free" is in the advertising. Spyware just tries to hard. Just try to find an opensource project that splashes "free" all over its webpage. Just check out getfirefox.com. One mention of the word free in a regular font size. Now compare this with spyware riddled sites like those "free smilies" sites.
If you can't spot the difference you are an idiot. Nothing to do with computer skills, you will fall for any other scam as well. Your fault and not my problem and no need to turn goverment into a nanny-state.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
My favorite part of the article was where the spwyare company realized they were fsked because they were hosing their own computers with their spyware. Poetic justice, or just divine payback?
It only makes sense if you are familiar with the old saying that "...a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged." It's simultaneously a complaint that one's government may be more dangerous than the local crooks, and a justification for being a libertarian.
Gotcha. It makes sense now. I haven't heard the old saying before. Are you a Libertarian?
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
MOD PARENT UP!
Its people like the grandparent poster who make Linux completely inaccessible to the masses. Can't use Linux, its because you're too stupid, and not because I'm too (a lazy, b arrogant, c clueless) to program a simple working UI that works. 3 Linux distros, 4 days work, what do I have to show for it, an XP laptop. Of course, that's because I'm stupid according to people like you. But wait, Perhaps this in an inferiority complex? After all, I put an XP cd in the drive and 20 minutes later I've got a fully functional computer, no kernal recompiling, no driver hunting, it just works. Why didn't you program linux that well? For crying out loud, the latest version of Ubuntu doesn't even natively support WPA encryption. Perhaps the reason you don't have spyware is because you're not actually on the internet? (joke, I know, but I hope you see my point)
In your opinion, perhaps Linux people with all their specialized knowledge should be the arbiters of who procreates and who doesn't? Then again, if its only specialized knowledge that's needed regardless of esoteric field, maybe the auto mechanics should be that arbiter, or maybe quantum physicists, or farmers, perhaps economists, or maybe roughnecks? Get over yourself. So you have specialized knowledge, so do most other people on this earth, you're just too blinded by your own arrogance to see it.
Yes, I know this is flame bait and a troll, but sometimes a guy just can't take the 24/7 condescension from some of the Linux folks, purporting to have a great system. Saying 'My grandma can use it' is all well and good but when you can say your grandma can INSTALL it, then it will be a great system. For now, the most virtiolic ones really seem to be overcompensating, or at the very least are extremely detrimental to their own cause.
Yes, Virginia, Linux really is inherently more secure than Windows. There are many ways that one can make the point; one of the more graphical illustrations is here.
I'm a bit puzzled as to why it took the general public 100+ years to realize smoking is bad for one's health.
In the old days, walls and ceilings would get discolored and stained from years of candle smoke.
Did people really think that directly inhaling smoke from cigars, pipes, and cigarettes would be significantly different? (yes they don't burn wax, but still!) What about the housewives that had to clean things? Didn't they see the grime?
The only think that has changed now is that the mainstream presses are publishing 'smoking is bad'. Now the public is felling silly and wants to blame someone else for it.
I know this post was intended as humor (but got modded as Insightful. This is slashdot, after all).
I just wanted to draw attention that, using several layer of condoms (or any other latex-based protection medium) that wasn't specially designed to be used so (like the multi-layered gloves used in legal medicine for highly dangerouse environnement) is, in fact dangerous.
Because the different layers rub against each other, which makes them poreous and weakens their protective capability.
Use 1 normal condom (or alternatively, 1 condom of the thicker "anal" type), pour enough lubrificant on it (to diminish risk of tearing), retract and discard condom right after use.
If the condom breaks, both you and the prostitute should run as soon as possible (within a few hours. Don't kill yourself driving too fast, but don't wait a few days either) to a hospital for tests and, if one is found to be carying some virus or bacteria, starting an adapted treatment for the other one.
Even AIDS, if treatement is started within the first few hours after the incident, can have a good chance to be treated.
(The problem is, the treatment can be toxic. It's too dangerous (and btw too expensive, too) to just give it to anyone who comes to the hospital complaining about a broken condom. The sexual partner should be tested to evaluate the risks of transmission vs. risks of treatment.
I repeat : This is not a Moning-after-pill but much more dangerous)
Don't be afraid to go to a hospital, the medical staff is supposed to keep discretion.
Of course, this may be a little bit trickier in countries having silly laws making the prostitute illegal.
---
To return back to the joke : just as it is very clumsy and un-optimal to use several condoms, there's a high risk that if a newbie is trying to setup a huge pile of several dozens of security, the newbie will very likely do it clumsily and end up offering a mush wider range of security gaps to potential hackers due to many misconfigured layers.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]