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)."

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Oh, What Hath Marketing Wrought?

[NihilEst]

See, way back when, there was this guy Bill Gates and his company, Microsoft, who invented the market for computer operating systems for people too stupid to run and administer a computer. It was called Windows. "What a great idea!", people said, and the market mushroomed. Gates was a zillionaire overnight.

Fast forward 15 years. Now, seeing the size of this market (TFA says 20 million machines are infected), of course the advertisers (through their overlords, the marketeers) reacted. They tried being nice guys over the years; but even trained monkeys had learned what happens when you pressed that browser button that said "HERE!! FREE SOFTWARE!!". So they got a little more devious, as advertisers are prone to do. When something for nothing doesn't work, there are more subtle ways to grow your market share.

Since Windoze is -- in and of itself -- so lame that it will allow its heavily touted, unique controls (DirectX, for example) to do so many things for all those unsuspecting sops without their having to know anything about what's going on or what they're doing; wouldn't it be natural that people intent on controlling what you see (advertisers) exploit weaknesses in those controls for purposes that even the morons at Microsoft never saw coming?

Just look at how bad MS' TCP/IP implementations have been over the years; holes you can drive a truck through. Even the IP stack in XP still sucks. Microsoft's OS development operations are a textbook case of how not to design, develop, and test operating systems.

The true irony is that the Winidiots are finally imploding. These were the guys who -- back in the day -- ran Wingate (thinking it was a powerful, admin-free firewall), binding all its services to 0.0.0.0, giving spammers and skript kiddiez alike free phony IP addresses and bandwidth behind which they could cause all sorts of mischief. Today, these same losers are threatening to kill people who infect their computers. It's sweet justice, says I: your choice of the same poorly designed, top-secret, commodity OS that the rest of the ignorant mass uses now threatens to turn you into a bonafide criminal (issuing death threats is still against the law).

If you run Windoze, you've done this to yourself. Windows: the OS for idiots invented by idiots. Is it any surprise this should be the most hacked OS on the face of the earth? Nobody except Microsoft knows how it really works, and the devious geniuses out there have figured out how to exploit the mile-wide loopholes MS has left for them to use. If you're a windoze user, there is no longer any way for you to remain free from malware/spyware/virii by modifying your behaviors. And I suppose there are people out there who didn't see this coming. MS sure didn't.

Now, quick: hang the real criminals (the marketeers, advertisers, and Dark Artists) before they learn how to infect the rest of the OSes out there for fun and profit. Hurry: make an example of these scum before anybody else invents any more 'brilliant' advertising paradigms (at least they could patent this shit and sue each other to death, ya know?). At least the Windoze experience won't have been in vain.