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A Day in the Life of a Spyware Company

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the get-rich-quick-schemes dept.

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)."

6 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Dupe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic


    even the link is the same

    http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/07/155 1237

    now enjoy re-hashing the same arguments over and over

    Windows sucks, get a mac/linux yadda yadda yadda

  2. Dupe by FooGoo · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Dupe Dupe

    --
    People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
  3. thts right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    wht else you can get by spywares?
    http://www.secgeeks.com/

  4. $%*&^! web-designer BS by coats · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    I'm running
    SeaMonkey 1.0.1
    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.2) Gecko/20060405 SeaMonkey/1.0.1
    but the web site gives me:
    Message boards - unsupported web client
    This feature requires a more recent version of Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. To download the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer, visit the Internet Explorer Web site.
    Damned incompetent web-site designers!!!! P?
    --
    "My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
  5. Re:Oh, What Hath Marketing Wrought? by vadim_t · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Oh, I understand that you can get Windows to kinda work. But that doesn't make it any better.

    To use the car analogy that's so popular here, Windows is like a decrepit car held together by several rolls of duct tape, and plugged holes in the radiator. Sure, you can manage to get somewhere with it if you know its various quirks and what needs taping, or getting plugged when it leaks. But that doesn't really make it a good car, does it?

    One guy I know has a car exactly like that. Older than he is, crappy, beaten up, but it still works, until it starts to rain. You see, the wipers mechanism is broken and he couldn't find a suitable replacement piece, so he has something held by wire there. One time he was giving me a lift and it started to rain. Damn that was scary. He had to stop on the *highway* to exit the car and mess with the wipers, as the pouring rain and non-working wipers resulted in having about no visibility.

    90% of machines running Windows I've seen are exactly like that. Sorta works, until something crashes, it reboots spontaneously, 20 ads pop up out of nowhere...

    Now, this guy has very good (economical) reasons to putting up with crap like that. But since Linux is free, I don't really understand why would anybody insist Windows is any good when there's an alternative that actually works. Obvious exceptions are if you really need to run something not available on Linux, but Wine is pretty decent these days, and vmware is now effectively free.

  6. Re:Sleep Well? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=190598&cid=156 81262