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.'"
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.
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.
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 $1M/year.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
The real goal of this type of advertising is not necessarily to get you to buy from them. Most of us, especially the computer savvy ones, would never buy from a popup add. But the simple fact is, we've seen them. We notice them, judging by the comments on /., which means the advertisers have done their job. They are getting a company's name and/or product out and NOTICED. Cingular and Netflix could make 0$ 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 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...
It is like all these meaningful parents feeding thier kids junk, buying them junk, not knowing any better because why would the government let stuff be sold to kids if it weren't safe? All these people buying SUVs, driving them inappropriately, and then complaining that they roll over. All these people smoking in the last 40 years, and now complaining they have been taken advantage of. The first reports on the harm of smoking were published in the 19th century folks. The list goes on. We have to hassle anyone named Muhamod for out own safety. We have to get rid of all guns for our own safety. We have to allow all conversations to be monitored for our own safety. God and his appointed prophets will save us, we don't need to think.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Then the obvious answer to both is that we need to work on bringing that low-end up to somewhere more reasonable. Such that a basic American education (eventually internationally) includes that sort of basic common sense.
The government very clearly saw what happens when you have a well educated youth during the 60's. The fact that public education has been on the decline since those days is no accident.
It is much easier to control a populace which is fat, dumb and happy. They got the first two down, now they just need to figure out the happy part and their job is complete.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
You don't have to buy something from the pop up ad. There exists a phenomena most marketers are aware of, that when you have several brands of a product to choose from, most people narrow their choice down to a grouping of 2-4, usually by "hunch" or "intuition", before making any drill down comparisons. It's a compromise of search breadth vs search depth. The pop up's main goal is to preprogram their brand as one of your intuitive choices - if you happen to click and purchase directly then that's an added bonus.
As for stopping the local infection version of the pop up - write a letter to your congressman. Tell them that instead of worrying whether or not gays can be gay, or a dissident can burn a flag in protest of his governments actions, maybe they could write a quick law that makes it illegal to install software on another machine without the owner's explicit consent. Then the websites that distribute this shit will have fines to pay, sucking the profit right out of the whole scheme.
(Oh noes, a spammer might lose his job!)
Here's an interesting website, not sure if they read the letters sent but at least it's a start:
http://www.congress.org/congressorg/home/
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
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.