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.'"

Comments

Hmmm...

[eno2001]

...sounds like they can just change the names and it's all about the Bush administration. LOL!!! ;p!!!!!!111111!!!!!!ELEVENTY!!!!

Re:Hmmm...

[eno2001]

OK. Maybe a demonstration is needed to make things a bit clearer. I'm all for demonstrations against the Bush Administration:

Voters have strong opinions about the Bush Administration. "If I ever meet anyone from your cabinet, I will kill you," a person who identified himself as Kim Jong Il said in an e-mail to the Bush Adminstration last summer. "I will f------ kill you and your families." Such sentiments aren't unusual. "You people are EVIL personified," Kevin Horton wrote around the same time. "I would like the four years of my life back I have wasted trying to get your stupid uninvited government off my now crippled country." Sifting through a stack of voter complaints in June, 2005, a Bush Administration staffer decided to tally the most frequently used words of aggression: "die" (103 times), "f------" (44), and "kill" (15). Tony "Snowjob" Snow, the Bush Administration's press secretary, ribbed colleagues in an e-mail that with all the death threats, it was a "good thing his office sits farthest away from the entrance."

According to angry voters and the New York State Attorney General, the Bush Administration makes Microsoft and other software vendors install NSA "spyware" on voter's PCs. These programs track where you go on the Internet and what porn you look at. The NSA Spyware can get stuck in your computer's hard drive right from the factory or as you shop, chat, or download a song. It might arrive attached to that clever video you just nabbed at no charge. Web security company McAfee Inc. (MFE ) estimates that nearly three-quarters of all sites listed in response to Internet searches for popular phrases like "free screen savers" or "digital music" attempt to install some form of NSA software in visitors' computers. Once lodged there, spyware can sap a PC's processing power, slow its functioning, and even cause it to crash. Oh yeah, it can also invade your privacy, but that's less of a concern.

This explains the vitriol aimed at the Bush Administration and the NSA. The federal government, located in a white building in Washington DC's Beltway district, has been a pioneer in a seamy corner of the booming wiretapping industry. Although it is small by some corporate standards, having generated sales of about a $100 billion deficit since its start in 2000, these programs have burrowed into nearly 100 million computers and produced billions of breaches of privacy.

The Bush Administration's swift rise illustrates the intertwining of NSA spyware, fearmongering and mainstream propaganda. The Web is the hottest game in brainwashing, but what's rarely acknowledged is the extent to which unsavory fearmongering boost the sagging presidential ratings. Here's how it often works: Large corporations, ranging from large defense contracts to much smaller weapons enterprises need jobs. In peacetime their profits are down. So they ask for the administration to start a few small wars but make it sound good. Then FOX News and the other whore news media sign up to distribute the propaganda beyond their own sites, and then those partners sign up other partners. Down the line, a big piece of the business winds up in the hands of outfits like the Bush Administration, which further disseminate the propaganda via publicity. Once the wars are in full swing, they share the revenue with their defense contractors. Oh yeah and that spyware stuff... it collects information about what you post on the internet so that the government can track what you do and if need be lock you up in prison for a long time with no trial on an island outside the US just in case you're making too much fuss about their chicanery. But that's less important. After all, it couldn't happen to you.

er...

[User 956]

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.

Did they just compare pop-up ads to human slavery? Isn't that a little glib?

Dup?

[mcmonkey]

The Plot To Hijack Your Hard Drive

Oh sorry, that was about a different unscrupulous company.