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A Day in the Life of a Spyware Company
prostoalex writes "Business Week has a detailed expose of Direct Revenue. The article has some juicy details on the everyday workings of a spyware outlet, talks about the the business model and advertisers who funnel cash to Direct Revenue, and even mentions Direct Revenue's anti-spyware achievements (the company's installer blasted away competing spyware apps, so that the user's computer wouldn't be overwhelmed with redundant pop-ups)."
No, they did it so that users are more likely to click their popups rather than someone else's.
How to stop them in three easy steps:
find executives
kill them (or pay a crackhead to do it)
rejoice
Thus illustrating the old saying "for every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." When it becomes OK to kill anyone that does something you don't like, it also becomes equally possible that others will kill you when you do something they don't care for. But of course you're a good enough troll to know that already.
How about we vote? Me: give him death via organ donation
Long ago I stopped reading email bounce messages. If my email bounces, oh well. It's just lost. I get hundreds of bounces each day for emails that spammers sent in my name.
My email does bounce though, all the time. It bounces because everybody and their dog invents a brutal spam filter, each one differently flawed.
Just today I failed to communicate with somebody. Gmail sends from *.google.com instead of gmail.com, which is enough to bounce and/or silently delete the mail.
Even after filtering, much of the email I get is spam.
Lately, I don't even bother reading email that claims to come from banks that I actually do business with. Figuring out the legitimacy multiple times per day is too time-consuming.
Email is my primary communication method. It has been ruined. I can no longer rely on messages to be delivered and read. This has been a grave loss for me. I'm just one of many. So yes, the spammer should die. Humanity loses too much from this sort of behavior.
It amounts to stalking, spying, possibly breaking and entering, and stealing, and the porn pop-ups break federal laws.
When you go to many websites, such as Amazon or Adam & Eve, you can expect as much privacy as in a local mall. But if someone were to follow you around from store to store, at that point it would be stalking.
Now when that "someone" (spyware company) breaks into your property (your computer) to install something without your consent (spyware programs), it's beyond just your typical stalking and into spying. Add to the charge that this "person" didn't have permission to enter your property in any way and you can add breaking and entering to this.
To run this program that you didn't consent to having uses power you are paying for. If it causes your system to crash, if you are someone who can't fix it, you've got to pay someone to repair it for you. Money out of your pocket. Theft. At the least of your own time to fix it.
When you go to a porn site, you usually have to click something saying you are at least 18 or of legal age to view sexually explicit material, and that you consent to doing so. If you were to sit a minor in front of the computer, or were to allow a minor to be nearby while viewing said material, you've commited an offense for which you could be required to register as a sex offender. But yet porn pop-ups happen on sites that aren't sexual in nature, sites that kids sometimes visit. The spyware company is giving no notice whatsoever that sexual material is about to pop up, no chance to consent or for children to be removed from the room first. Would this not be a violation of federal laws by the spyware companies by exposing minors to sexual material?
So I repeat, why is spyware not illegal?
It's a girl!