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Snopes Pushing Zango Adware
DaMan writes "Here's something that isn't an urban legend — Snopes, the popular urban legends reference site, has been pushing adware, for at least 6 months, to users via ads displayed on its Web site. No one seems to have called them on it until recently."
They also run spam servers... http://xkcd.com/250/
This sig is false.
Maybe I should go check an urban myth site to see if it's real...
Adblock
All kinds of sites have those sort of crap ads. It's regrettable, but is it really news?
Stay good Snopes! Stay good!
That's funny. I visited them and didn't see a thing. But then again my adblock filter has "media.fastclick.net/*" included.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
"Pushing Zango" is Dominican slang for having sex with an elderly woman. It's true.
ObLink: http://xkcd.com/250/
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Well, if you really are are nerd, you'll be interested to know that the malware you're fixing on [insert whomever roped you into free tech support]'s computer came from snopes after you sent them there, after getting an "OMG this letterz from George Carlin (no, not really) is SOOO TRUE!!!!" type mail. Again.
Snopes isn't something built for the common good of people, it's their to generate money, and they just happen to choose one of the darker ways to do it. "Do you want to block junk sites?"
....GetALife.com has considered using adware. HD @ 11.
Snopes has long had obnoxious levels of advertising. The site really isn't usable without AdBlock.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
This summary is somewhat misleading, since the user actually has to click the banner to install the software. Contrary to what the summary implies, Snopes does not perform drive-by downloads on its users. By the logic of this summary, tons of online publishers "push adware," since those "Free Virus Scan" ads are pretty ubiquitous...
This message printed on 100% post-consumer recycled electrons.
A little on topic/a little bit just an excuse to blather about something in my mind since the Cloverfield story:
Folks in the ad game are in trouble. And I mean the folks using ads to sell another product and the folks selling the ads.
Apparently there was some sort of 'buzz' about Cloverfield for the past few months. I missed it. That may not be interesting, except I watch 2 to 3 hours of TV a day, spend more time than that on the web, subscribe to several popular (non-technical) magazines, and read a daily newspaper. I don't claim to have my finger on the pulse of pop culture, but I'm not quite ammish.
I vaguely remember a teaser-trailer (perhaps before Transformers?), but other than usual pre-release media push in the last few weeks, I know nothing of this buzz. If that's the state of advertising, then those folks are in trouble.
How does this tie in to the current topic? Well...Snopes has ads? I would guess it would since there's no subscription fee and would make a very strange charitable effort otherwise. But if Snopes has ads, I can't say I recall ever actually seeing one.
Seriously, for TV I have TiVo. For the web, there's ad buster and other tricks. For magazines, those ads are usually full page and very easy to recognize and skip without reading. For radio, there's NPR. Pretty much the only traditional advertising that gets my attention are bra ads in the daily paper. And those aren't even selling anything I might buy! (Unless the models are for sale.)
"These two popups are there practically every time you visit Snopes (see for yourself)."
Well, I did. And I didn't get any popups. I'm on refresh #30 or so.
No, I don't run adblock.
No, firefox isn't telling me it blocked a popup either.
I also tried with IE6. Still nothing.
Is the author quite sure they're not just targeting -him-? Be it my some manner of IP -> location lookup, or via an old cookie he's got laying around, or whatever?
Either that, or Snopes already changed things. Woo conspiracy theorists rejoice.
If you don't like the ads a particular ad-server gives you, make sure they're unwelcome on your network, regardless of the site hosting the ads. I make sure fastclick.net (and about 150 other unsavory domains) resolve only to 0.0.0.0 at my DNS server. If you don't run your own DNS, OpenDNS allows you to block specific domains as well.
One of the first scary emails i remember was http://www.snopes.com/risque/juvenile/lobster.asp about the woman masturbating with a lobster and all sorts of nastiness happening. That had quite the effect on this porn obsessed youth at the time
But he does say that since people trust Snopes that the software appears to be enorsed by Snopes. Which would lead people to go ahead and install it.
I've been running adblockplus for quite a while now and have effectively forgotten about issues like this. So have most others who would get upset by it. Of course then I'll unknowingly send friends/family to sites such as snopes without a second thought about malware concerns. To me it looked like a nice wholesome/clean site.
What has *science* done?!? -- Dr. Weird (ATHF)
I just checked on Snopes.com, it says this rumor is false and that the spyware in question comes from another source.
Probably just a bad advertising provider than anything else. ... I get the whole "check who provides your advertisements" thing, it's a duty of the webmaster and all - but wasn't there a case where a provider only showed malicious ads outside the country of origin? Or something? Is checking even reliable?
Ethical policy here would probably just be to poke Snopes.com via their forums first...
Snopes isn't obscure--they're probably the most authoritative debunker of urban legends on the web. On the linked blog post, you can see several comments saying "I used to refer people to Snopes all the time when I got some glurge email."
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
The ambiguities of the English language provide ample motivation to English speakers to read articles. Four word headlines are often misinterpreted but those misconceptions can be corrected by doing what you did. Thanks for the good hard work.
It's funny that you would defend Snopes. Now, you might be a little put off if you try to read the Zango license. That's good because it will cause you and many people to turn away from the disreputable advertiser. Just the same, a naive user might just take the advertiser at their word and click through the little "I agree" button. Surely, you don't have people like that at your company that you might wish to warn? They will listen to your warning so that you don't have to put in rules to block Snopes, I'm sure. After all, Snopes is such a valuable workplace reference that no company could live without their least technically sophisticated employees having constant access to it.
Talk about a user-unfriendly feature! They use some very annoying javascript to disable the ability to select a portion of text. No idea why...
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
I'm sure I'm not the only one that would like to block Zango at the network level. Does anyone have the repository of information needed to create an effective block? I'm talking about RIR assignments, ASNs, SWIPed allocations, domain names, etc. Does anyone know of such a source? With this information I can ensure that none of my users ever have to put up with this Zango horse shit again.
Snopes claims it's an urban legend.
I get the same result. I thought I had sent my complaint (reference this post via their web form, but upon clicking back over to that tab I noticed the same error you got. So, to contact them about Zango's abusive business practices, I have to install Zango's abusive software to interact with their server, or it generates an error? Wow. Somebody's smoking some good stuff at Snopes. WHIOS has the following registry data for snopes.com:
:
Administrative Contact , Technical Contact
Mikkelson, David
snopes@best.com
P.O. Box 684
Agoura Hills, CA 91376
US
Phone: (702) 988-4047
Fax: (818) 261-3054
The phone number appears to ring to offices at "best.com", who says their offices are presently closed and offer to take a message. Keying "best.com" into your browser will redirect to Verio. And round and round we go. I think I'll send a fax to the number listed in WHOIS.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
A quick primer in online advertising, for those of you who block it:
At one end of the chain, we have Content Provider A. At the other end of the chain, we have Service Provider Z. Z wants to place advertising on A's site but, importantly, doesn't know how to do it, doesn't generally know specifically who A is, and needs this to scale to potentially thousands of As. This is where participants B, C, D, E, F, Google, H... etc come in. There are advertising aggregators, affiliate networks, affiliates, affiliates of affiliates, affiliates of affilates of networks of affiliates who subdivide the advertising market into smaller and smaller slices before it finally gets on A's site.
Now, somewhere in the chain, let us inject one person who is less than scrupulous. He doesn't work at Snopes -- this would tarnish a brand for a week's worth of income, not a smart play. He probably has a steady stream of relationships with each of the numerous advertising concerns on the Internet, picking up and moving from one after he has collected a check or three and then had the banstick for TOS violations catch up with him. He is the one working for, most probably, affiliate of an affiliate of an affiliate of Zango.
This is the way most malware makes its way onto ad networks and, from there, onto high-trust sites. Volokh Conspiracy, one of my favorite blogs, had a nasty browser hijacker which affected non-US users for months before their advertising network caught wind of it. A few popular MMORPG sites have ended up hosting keyloggers in the same fashion. It is an unintended consequence of a system without central control -- much like the Internet itself, actually. (The system being split up this way does have its advantages, for both endpoints of the chain and for everybody between. Google's business model is based on snapping the chain and replacing it with a big cloud labeled Gooooooogle, but they're not yet the only game in town.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I just checked on Snopes and this whole thing is a hoax, so there's no need to worry.
would be snope's credibility circling the drain...
I've been meaning to block those for a while now...
It might be Adblock Plus, then. It automatically prompts upon your first Firefox load (after installing the addon, of course) for a subscription server. After that, you don't need to touch a thing. I didn't know Snopes (or most sites for that matter) even ran ads until I saw this article.
You're right, they have every right to be creepy, and you and I have every right to bitch about it, and put pressure on them to quit being creepy.
hosts file
Several months ago. But my Wikipedia edits (complete with verifiable references) were quickly undone by Snopes fanboys.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
1: Unless you went through the code yourself, don't trust it. Maybe you can trust the maintainer of that code, but either way you end up trusting a third party.
2: Spelling it "Windoze" and "M$" just makes me think you're a moron. You're not a moron, are you? Why would you want me to think that?
3: Microsoft takes my money and gives me software that is as good or better than what I can get elsewhere. (Otherwise, I don't go to MS.) Zango would take my privacy, and give me... what, exactly? Third-rate software I can find better from a freshman off his first coding binge?
Claim: Snopes are in bed with Fastclick, which serve ads via Snopes.
Status: Irrelevant
Examples:
[Collected via Sunbelt Blog 2008]
[F]or a long time now (probably at least a year), I've noticed that they are in bed with Fastclick, which in turn constantly serves one annoying ad on Snopes.
Origins: All joking aside, despite Sunbelt Software passing themselves off as vendors of anti-spamware, they have a sordid spammy past themselves. Go to http://groups.google.com/ enter the newsgroup `news.admin.net-abuse.email' and search for keywords "Sunbelt" "spam"/"spamming".
Cheers
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
All I see when I go there is: "Privoxy blocked http://www.snopes.com/common/include/adsdaqsky.asp."
The internet is a beautiful place when you remove all the crap.
If people only knew this was an option there would be riots in the streets.
My email contains no spam and my browser contains no ads. Things don't pop up, under, slide around or tell me to "Punch the monkey". Life is good.
Don't you mean [citation needed]? :-)
(Or at least "By whom?" to satisfy the grammar nazis.)
I didn't know snopes had ads. If people would run an ad blocker, perhaps they wouldn't get hit.
Don't encourage Twitter. Pity him, sure, but don't encourage him.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
80%?! Where are you getting this number from?
Sure, Slashdot has a higher-than-average rate of adoption for open source software, but just based on the sheer number of Windows boxes out there, and the also higher-than-average rate of Slashdot users who work directly on computers (and presumably enjoy being employed), the statistics indicate that the number couldn't be anywhere near 80%.
Provide some evidence or go peddle your anti-Microsoft propaganda on a site with a less intelligent userbase.
Could it be everyone smart enough not to fall for urban legend forwards is also smart enough to block adware?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"You're not a moron, are you? Why would you want me to think that?"
Whatever your point(s), why would anyone care what a random guy on the internet thinks?
If you answer that, I'll answer your question.
I dunno about 80% either but: /. (fat lot of good it does with the libertarian bias... damn, just insulted myself again). /. crowd about 80% appear to use FF and of those the vast majority have ABP installed based on page hits with and page hits without ads pulled down. I assume the remaining 5% or so set ABP to download the ad but not render it.
About half of my gripe site traffic comes from
Of the
FWIW I don't try to make money on the add (It's for batteries, been up for a year or so, and I think I've made almost $2.00 off it), just proving to Arent Fox that it is not illegal for me to have an ad on a site nit-picking them and their clients.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Microsoft better watch out when he rolls deep with his leet skillz, he'll bust a cap in that closed source shiznit. Word.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
I always assume, and I could be wrong, that m$ is a way for someone to say "I remember windows95 !", while pointing to their tattoo of tux screaming 'Live free or die !'.
Fanatic more than moron.
I doubt that. Malda used to release his server logs, but he stopped doing that back in 2000 or so. Without those logs you really have no idea what the proportion really is. I doubt any website is 80% anything at this point, unless you have access to numbers the rest of us don't?
they trouble themselves with a monthly wipe and reloads for that fresh M$ smell.
A couple of things. First, I tend to call it just "Linux", or Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. The "GNU/Linux" thing is starting to feel like something that's being crammed down our collective throats. I respect Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, but I don't necessarily agree with them on everything, the naming convention included. Just as RMS asks everyone to call it the way he wants for his personal reasons, I usually ask people to call it Linux, or use their distro name. Would you reconsider as well?
Second, while I use Linux at home, I also use Windows at work all the time and I can tell you that "wipe and reload" is a thing of the past, unless you are really careless with your machines.
Finally, please reconsider your usage of terms like "M$" and "Windoze". I'm sure you think of yourself as member of this community, but it makes us all look childish and conveys the idea that we cannot discuss issues intelligently because we're too busy being clever. Judging by your posting history, you really are abusing that to the point where it tends to simply eliminate your credibility.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
That happened long ago.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You already posted in this thread. The fact that you use sockpuppets to get around the 2-post per day restriction for negative karma accounts does not mean you have a free reign to shill your own comments on the same threads of the same articles.
That's true to some extent. There is, however, a large difference. In closed software the third party you are trusting is often limited to the people who actually wrote the code. In open source software, you just have to trust that some people out of the many on the internet capable of understanding the code have actually looked at it, and that at least one of the people who looked at the code would call the project out on any suspect parts of the code. Personally, I'd say that the second set of assumptions is probably more likely to be true (at least for non obscure projects) than the first.
I tried to download the trial version, but Net Nanny had it blocked.
"Unless you went through the code yourself, don't trust it. Maybe you can trust the maintainer of that code, but either way you end up trusting a third party." I've never read through Wiles's proof of the Fermat conjecture, but I'd still bet my life on its correctness, because I understand the process by which it was reviewed. I don't claim free software is free of problems. But, other things being equal, I *do* trust code that I know could be publicly reviewed by anyone over code that couldn't be.
---WAIT!!! --- Sites have Ads?!!? next you'll be telling me that there are still pop-ups on the web.
except for particularlly big projects there is little chance anyone outside of the project will bother to do an audit of the code and IMO there is little chance of someone looking at the code casually spotting a competantly inserted backdoor.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I love AdBlock. Before today I had no idea snopes had advertising!
Surely you mean "OpenOffice Writer", my home-dawg?
This sig is certified free of self-referential humour!
...it tends to simply eliminate your credibility. Your helpful suggestions are well-intentioned, albeit misplaced, so I commend you for that. Twitter, however, has no credibility left here. Even the normal Windows-haters who speak up in discussions wouldn't consider him worth their time, I'd imagine."16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
All pardons to Guns N roses:
"What we have here is a failure to communicate."
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Right on, bro. I must be trippin. Code gone to my brain, yo.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Microsoft better watch out when he rolls deep with his leet skillz, he'll bust a cap in that closed source shiznit. Word.
Uh hem: This article is about SNOPES.COM not SNOOP.COM. Who let the dawgs out?
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
Checking the "snopes.com" page source code, there's Javascript from "as.casalemedia.com". This is Casale Media, a Toronto-based firm. "We provide web users with relevant, personalized advertising that adds value to the browsing experience. ... The network serves more than 30 billion ads every month to users in 200 countries." Something else to add to the list of advertising server domains.
I'm not getting a Zango popup, or any popups, or even a Firefox popup warning, though.
Interesting...
1. You can't trust the code totally unless you have checked it yourself, and sometimes not even then, but obviously you can always place much more trust in open-source not to screw you over than closed source.
2. Complaining about a meme that has been around on the internets for decades makes you look like a shill. You're not a shill are you? Why would you want to look like that?
3. Microsoft takes your money and gives you the illusion that you are getting something for it... nothing more. Remember, most people here have experience of both M$ and proper software.
>>1: Unless you went through the code yourself, don't trust it. Maybe you can trust the maintainer of that code, but either >> way you end up trusting a third party.
Nah, you just have to trust that enough other people DO go through the code. And they do. Some of them are adding functionality, some are looking for security problems, some are just reading the code to see how it works.
If it's open sourced, unless there's a grand conspiracy across everyone who can read code, then someone will find any "evil code" and out it.
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
I am not a moron I run a successful computer game developer employing over 100 staff. Because we program for the Xbox 360 (amongst others) we need to run a windows environment. Given that on average I swear at Windows once a day when it prevents me from doing my job, then I feel the term Windoze is relatively mild (and don't get me started on Vista). Furthermore, MS do make some good products, some of their dev tools, and the office suit (albeit now bloated) are great, and yes they make a lot of money from them, fine that I what their shareholders expect, nay demand of them, so I would take the M$ moniker as a complement. On a related note, I also object to the way many MS product treat me like a moron, is there a switch somewhere to say I am an experienced user, and if I ask a program to do something, I problem mean it, no need to double, triple check, etc. Petty I know, but here is an example that really annoys me, being a programmer at heart, when typing an opening bracket, I am in the habit of then typing the closing bracket, and backtracking to fill in the relevant sum, good practice, however the MS programming boffins feel otherwise and feel compelled to pop up and error dialog, patronizing stating the formula I have typed contains an error, where in fact it is their assumption I have finished typing the formula is wrong. Imaging in the real world when you were talking if someone kept interrupting you and telling you that you were not making sense, before you had a chance to string more than a few words together? In this case its MS that assumes you are a moron, and by doing so expose their own idiocy.
Try LittleSnitch outbound firewall. You'll realize just how bad ZoneAlarm is.
If Scientology and Linux had a baby, twitter would be the offspring. Loud, obnoxious, little social skills, and an overwhelming "I need to save you all from yourselves and the evil Xenu / M$."
Linux
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
1. How is that? Do you guys just spend all day auditing open source applications? No matter how small or big?
2. The meme is retarded, you look like a shill when you use it...
3. Funny that people keep shelling out money to Microsoft and getting nothing for it, I guess everyone besides you is a fucking moron.
~S
While most of articles on Snopes are at least somewhat correct, it contains some amount of opinions and apologism that have nothing to do with dispelling urban myths. Ex:
http://www.snopes.com/business/alliance/coors.asp
http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1895exam.asp
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Hmm... Firefox no script and adblock keeps me ignorant.
How sweet it is.
Oh wait was I supposed to say something witty here?!?
Mit? Is that you?
Homo homini lupus
re #1- yes, and as it turns out, ALL the code we use is from a third party whom you have decided to trust by default. (unless you wrote the code yourself. did you?)
re #2- denigrating MS is a long term tradition done for the same reasons that Lucas Electronics is called the "Prince of darkness" Both are done because of the tradition of the low quality and lack of reliability in their products.
re #3- Sorry,but your opinion that MS gives you good software is a general indicator that there is no reason to care what you think, (see #2). Its interesting that you percieve Zango as being "worse" than MS.
Actually. MS gives you a program that calls home, sends them information, and makes arbitrary changes to your system at their whim. In some of their latest work they actually are taking steps to hold your computer hostage with their WGA and new Vista protection crap. I know I like it when my computer decides that I may have done something its true owner doesn't like and shuts down on me. Oh, and they take your money to do it. It is like purchasing golden handcuffs and then saying "See, they are made out of gold, that means they are better".
On top of all of this there is that whole MS/Claria business since they are so keen on "fucking killing google" and getting into the ad business. At least Zango screws you for free.
I agree that M$ and Windoze may sound childish, but a chair throwing rant and "fucking kill google" by the CEO pretty much makes anything said by anyone in almost any community about the company in question seem highly educated comparatively.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Or you take the time to understand the code yourself and verify that it has no nasty unintended items. Of course, it would be foolish to expect everyone to do that, but you do have that option...
FUCK OFF!
Unless the name itself is actually really dumb, like "I wince every time I have to use WinCE" or "Windows Vista? I just don't see it."
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Hello, did you look at who posted this? This is pretty typical of what /. is when it's kdawson's shift
I run a successful computer game developer employing over 100 staff /., then you must be severely lacking something. Go back down to your mom's basement & finish writing HelloWorld.cpp.
Get over yourself. If you need to "big-up" your credentials before you bash Windows on
I don't get it. What's the point of linking Snopes with adware? They run a website and they are trying to make money, so what? Is there some sort of correlation between Snopes (urban legends reference) and malware that would make Snopes look hypocritical? Maybe it's this particular adware? Somebody please explain.
Given the earlier statement that a Wikipedia entry had been altered to hide the Snopes/Malware connection, it seems to me that it's unlikely the people running the site are unaware of the predatory advertising practice occurring under their aegis.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I'm with you 100%.
Besides, I don't see ads, I use Opera!
Only a moron would think spelling it "Windoze" and "M$" makes anyone else a moron. You're a moron M$ fanboy.
Harden the fuck up.
That's a possibility regardless of size (it probably has more to do with size-to-developer ratio) and closed vs. open source. (Surely the occasional disgruntled employee gets a back door into closed source software.) And it depends on the details of their process. I think the Linux kernel process, for example, would be relatively resistant to that kind of attack, since it favors very small incremental patches that are (ideally) always reviewed on public mailing lists. Not that it's perfect, of course. If I were to attack it I suppose I'd probably try to hide the backdoor in a largish patch in the git tree of someone maintaining an obscure driver or filesystem. So it depends on the details--a public process is a positive, and a major positive in my opinion, but it can certainly be outweighed by other problems, like an inadequate developer community or poor review process.
How about:
- you don't know any better
- it's foisted on you by your PC salesman (in many places, it's still exceedingly difficult to find a Windows-less PC)
- it's foisted on you by your employer
- it's foisted on you by the manufacturer of a gadget that you like or by a radio station that you like to listen to
- some of your personal (digital) belongings are being held hostage by MS because at some point in the past you were impacted by points 1-4 above.
- you get it in order to test some code on it in order to help a friend impacted by cases 2-5 above
Yeah, monopoly power is a bitch, isn't it. In a free economy, you'd have the choice of only buying the software that is good or better than what I can get elsewhere. In the real world, unfortunately, you might not have that choice.However, the more people become aware of this situation, the sooner it is going to change. So, spreading the word is not useless. Even if most of your audience can't do anything about it, some of them might be, and help the situation improve for everybody.
Oh. My. God.
I use almost exclusively linux so when I encounter ads that purport to scan my .dlls and then find spyware, I make a point to inform the main site that one of their advertisers is being blatantly dishonest at the minimum and probably infecting PCs with malware. I simply note that such advertising seems to be below their otherwise high standards and it is a disappointment. I have observed some sites actually taking the ads down.
And this happened.
Come on, don't you aspire to be more than just a bit more mature than Balmer?
I ran into this the other day. Quite apropos.
Oh no, he was right the first time:
http://media.ebaumsworld.com/picture/ttbardj/LARGE_word.jpg
[DISCLAIMER: This post is a work of satire and should not be misconstrued as a holy text upon which to base a religion.]
General Petraeus? or General betray us
At the bottom of that flame article there's a link saying that Snopes had stopped pushing those ads, so this story was already old and obsolete before it was posted. http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/update-on-snopes-pushing-adware.html
His credibility lies with the other fuckwits.
The Mikkelsons -- or at least one of their "subalterns" -- are not the nicest or the most honest people in the world. They do NOT like to be questioned, or called on any questionable practices. Some of the items they have up -- notably in the "glurge" section, the item on the risks faced by the Founders in rebelling against the Crown -- depart sharply from the usual "nothing but the facts, m'am" in favor of politically motivated shibboleths passed off as "debunking".
When I called them on it, I got what looked like the most bizarre form letter I've ever seen ("form" because it didn't seem to be related to my initial email at all), filled with paranoid screeching about "my subalterns" (it's where I learned that word, ironically) as if I were somehow the master of perpetrator of urban legends.
WTF? I emailed them back about that "form letter" to ask if some wacko had hacked their mail server, but all I got back was a snarky "No, THIS is a form letter!", which it plainly was after that.
I put it down to the well-known bomber pilot's maxim: you know you're over the target when you start getting flak.
I spent Sunday afternoon wrestling with my neighbor's XP box to get it functioning after a mass of malware infections. I got rid of everything except the above mentioned Zango / Fastclick stuff. Every time IE opens, two more windows open on ads that rotate automatically. AdAware did not find these. I told him to keep updating AdAware daily and scanning, thinking they might find a way to get rid of it.
Anybody have a removal process? Again, it's Windows XP and IE (was 6, I just upgraded him to 7).
AdTHANKSvance!
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
s.clementmonkey@sympatico.ca, remove the 'monkey'.
You're a douchebag.
Why hasn't somebody taken action against them, and why do people use the site, do they just not realise what has happened to their pc?
How does Linus's penis taste?
As a matter of fact, I emailed them about this very problem last November. Their response was that "folks were copying the text of our articles and circulating them in e-mail, despite our copyright notices and even our asking them to stop." I will concur that not being able to even select text is extremely annoying, along the lines of a dialog saying "Copyright 1992" when you right-click. Unless, of course, you've got NoScript.
I won't mess with your revenue model if you won't serve pr0n ads or hide sneaky code, 'k?
"A witty saying proves nothing." -- Voltaire