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.'"
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 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.
Intelligence and virture are not the same thing.
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
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
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.
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 $1M/year.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
As with all other things, the answer to your quandry has already been answered in a Simpsons episode.
Critic: "How do they sleep at night?"
McBain: "On top of a huge pile of money, with many beautiful women."
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
The real goal of this type of advertising is not necessarily to get you to buy from them. Most of us, especially the computer savvy ones, would never buy from a popup add. But the simple fact is, we've seen them. We notice them, judging by the comments on /., which means the advertisers have done their job. They are getting a company's name and/or product out and NOTICED. Cingular and Netflix could make 0$ 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!
'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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Sorry, couldn't resist. Now, to keep things a little bit on topic, I generally agree with you about silly consumers being slow to learn their lesson, though it still surprises me how many people lack sense.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
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!
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.