Interview With an Adware Author

rye writes in to recommend a Sherri Davidoff interview with Matt Knox, a talented Ruby instructor and coder, who talks about his early days designing and writing adware for Direct Revenue. (Direct Revenue was sued by Eliot Spitzer in 2006 for surreptitiously installing adware on millions of computers.) "So we've progressed now from having just a Registry key entry, to having an executable, to having a randomly-named executable, to having an executable which is shuffled around a little bit on each machine, to one that's encrypted — really more just obfuscated — to an executable that doesn't even run as an executable. It runs merely as a series of threads. ... There was one further step that we were going to take but didn't end up doing, and that is we were going to get rid of threads entirely, and just use interrupt handlers. It turns out that in Windows, you can get access to the interrupt handler pretty easily. ... It amounted to a distributed code war on a 4-10 million-node network."

Comments

Re:I hate it when people venerate/elevate scumbags

[dave562]

Of course they're morally bankrupt. However they also play an important role in the ecosystem.

Linux can get away with it

[Loundry]

Compare this to linux, where the interfaces haven't changed that much, and when they do, depreciated means "We're going to remove this in a year or so and we mean it."

That's because when Linux deprecates an interface, it doesn't put anyone out of a job.

Windows "backwards compatibility" is therefore welfare for lazy programmers -- welfare which puts all Windows users at risk.