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Zango Caught in Lies About MySpace?
An anonymous reader writes to mention that Zango's still under suspicion for problems on MySpace. ZDNet has the story, discussing rumours of multiple accounts, paid Zango hawkers, and mass emailings. From the article: "Boyd posted some choice snippets from the email, like this: 'Zango is fairly new with myspace sites and it took me some time to see what works and what doesn't ... more profitably, *go to a bunch of your friends* who have popular profiles and pay them (it's up to you so much. One of my partners said 5$..maybe offer to split the money with them?) to put a zango video into their profile through your site. This will give you hundreds of extra installs a day (this probably works even better than having them on your actual site).'"
...am glad I have absolutely no idea what that summary means.
The email contains the following fun snippet:
2) MOVING GIFS. This really gets peoples attention and vistors love this shit. Heres an example of a perfect site: www.free-extras.com
Look at the karate guy doing flips: its awesome. Click on it: it links to a gallery of a 100 zango videos. THIS IS WHAT YOU SHOULD DO. Its simple, cool, and WAYYYY more profitable. Find a moving gif online and put it on your site. Make it link to a gallery.
Ok, what fucking planet do they live on, and more importantly, WHY HASN'T IT BEEN DESTROYED YET?
This isn't the first time I've seen them engage in this. I first encountered Zango when its predecessor company, 180 Solutions, told me to install Install026.exe, which had 180 Search Solutions infect my computer with its spyware. I had been installing a video game at the time, while browsing the webcomic hosting site Keenspot, so I thought it was part of the installation process and clicked the button. My computer fell to the spyware and I had to end up doing a system restore. Since then 180 Solutions has merged with another spyware company to become Zango.
Keenspot suffered massive outrage, and coldly responded that they outsource their advertising to the Burstnet company, which used iFrames to distribute their ads, so they had no control over it, and that everyone is evil and stealing when they use Firefox's AdBlock.
The next time I encountered them was when I went to the website Newgrounds, which apparently had become infested with spyware since the last time I visited, and said I needed to install Zango to access portions of the site. This spyware problem was in the Wikipedia entry for a few months, but now it appears to have been removed?
The last time, incidentally, was when I was searching Wikipedia. I came across this revision of a Wikipedia article on Zango Messenger, a spyware laden IM service made by Zango. Look how glowing its review is. Wikipedia records the IP addresses of every user that edits when they aren't logged in, and when you look at the IP address that made the edit, you will see that the address traces back to a company by the name of "180 SOLUTIONS HOOKED-2", with 180 Solutions being the company's old name!
It's hosted by Time Warner Telecom, by the way. That's another reason not to use AOL.
So apparently Zango makes some crappy adware toolbars. Then they get video's to link back to the Zango website and bring up installers when they try to play. Webmasters can sign up and push Zango crapware in return for $$$s per install.
This is where that mangled piece of English in the summary comes in. That piece is from an email where Zango reveals there evil scheme to the Zango pushing legions. In the email, Zango tells its associates to target kids and make it easy to embed Zango vids in their MySpace profiles. Then all their friends come, have the installer pop up, and let it through so they can see the cool new video.
There, just in case you were confused after trying to read only the summary like I was.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
I think it's only fair that since they give you a place on their systems & let you call it "myspace", that they get to take some space on your system & call it their space.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.