Aurora

Aurora…as in Aurora Borealis, the northern lights, from Latin for “northern dawn”. A word that evokes images of beauty and light.

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That’s marketing.

The truth isn’t so pretty.

April 26, Direct Revenue announces Aurora, a new piece of adware.

In the release, they say this:

“Direct Revenue CEO Joshua Abram said, ‘Aurora and MyPCTuneUp demonstrate our commitment to providing advertising partners, clients and consumers the best possible experience in behavioral marketing and search.'”

That is chutzpah. The best possible experience for consumers?

Here’s what that experience is like for users.

(Thanks Eric)

Alex Eckelberry

180 and “relevant” advertising

(Props to Dave Methvin at PC Pitstop for sending me these pics and the ad links, and to Simon Clausen at PC Tools who originally made these pics).

One of the more shocking things we saw at the Antispyware workshop last week was this screen:


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You can see us all seeing the screen here.

It was part of this discussion (an edited version I created from the Ziff Davis version–you can find the originals here ).

Ben Edelman starts the discussion, then you hear Dave Methvin’s (PC Pitstop) voice, and it goes on from there.

(One thing that happened during the discussion was that Ralph Terkowitz, one of the investors behind WhenU, looked very good by being thoroughly pissed when he saw this. You can hear him in the interchange. It made a good impression on the whole crowd.)

As you can see, someone who has this 180 product goes to PC Tools’ website, and gets a competitor popping up, with very similar colors. The end user is ostensibly fooled into perhaps buying from the competitor.

So this is “relevant” advertising.

180 did approve this ad. You can hear Daniel Todd of 180 say that during the conference. Note that they have pulled this advertiser.

Here are some more fun pics:


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The ads targeting Symantec and McAfee are still up. You can see them here and here (As Dave Methvin points out, the “Open CD to test your computer” is one of the stupidest and oldest tricks in the book).

Finally, here is one you would get when searching on Download.com, clicking on utilities – system utilities.




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Not Good.

Alex Eckelberry

Webroot site NOT hacked

Update: Situation looks resolved as of this morning. Thread on Broadband Reports here. ACCORDING TO WEBROOT, THIS WAS NOT A HACK.

Some jerk(s) are attacking a reputable antispyware vendor.

An apparent DNS hack. Some systems are reporting this, some aren’t. Note that if you’re seeing this hack, you aren’t going to be able to send mail to them either.

In other words, someone is going after Webroot and it’s nasty. Man, this really tees me off.

3 pm EST today

4:20 pm EST today

Just got this reported from Eric Howes when he tried to update SpySweeper.

Ouch, this has gotta hurt.

If anyone has more data, please drop a note in the comments section.

Alex

More on the antispyware conference

I’m still trying to find the time to actually write a bit about this interesting workshop, but in the meantime, I have some links for you.

There were four panels:

Session I – Defining spyware and adware
Session II – EULAs and you-knows: What is meaningful disclosure?
Session III – The Money Game: How adware works and how it is changing.
Session IV – Future of the antispyware industry

The famous PaperGhost has written about the event.

Bill Pytlovany of BillP Studios has blogged on it with pics too.

Dan Farber at ZDNET has written about the event here and here .

Links to the MP3s of the conference are here (you have to sign up, but it’s free).

Below is a picture of the 4th panel (Future of the Antispyware Business):

Below is a picture of me being a bit grumpy and asking a question of the 180 Solutions CEO about stealth installs of their software. Behind me, in order, are Ben Edelman, Dave Methvin, and Eric Howes. You can hear my chat with him here (this is an excerpt from the ZDNET MP3 of the conference). After my question, Ari Schwartz from the Center for Democracy and Technology pipes in with a comment and Ben Edelman adds a comment.

And thanks to Andrew Brandt at amishrabbit.com for the pics!

Alex Eckelberry

Still recovering

The CNET-sponsored antispyware summit yesterday was amazing.

Sunbelt was there in force; one journalist speculated to us that
Sunbelt might have had the largest contingent outside of the CNET/Download.com staff. I think he’s right.

I got in on the red-eye from San Francisco this morning and am still digesting all of the various things that occurred at the event. I hope to be posting more later.

Alex Eckelberry

Spitzer on an antispyware rampage!

As we wrote earlier this month, eUniverse Intermix had announced had it was being investigated by Elliot Spitzer.

Today from Spitzer’s office:

Attorney General Eliot Spitzer today sued one of the nation’s leading internet marketing companies, alleging that the firm was the source of “spyware” and “adware” that has been secretly installed on millions of home computers. The suit against Los Angeles-based Intermix Media, Inc. is the most sweeping case to date involving programs that redirect web addresses, add toolbars and deliver pop-up ads.

BroadbandReports thread.

ZDNET here.

Blackbox for Windows…

Longhorn will have a “blackbox” style crash reporting mechanism. This will allow MS to get what the user was working on at the time of the crash, to help them figure out how to fix these problems.

In general, I think this is a great idea. But this quote in a recent CNET article is a bit freaky: “Sullivan said users will be prompted with a message indicating the information to be sent and giving them an option to alter it, such as removing the contents of the e-mail they were writing when the machine crashed.”
So this really is pretty darned comprehensive, this little black box.

In my experience, MS is actually very responsible with sharing data. It’s just that for this level of granularity, I posit that it’s a little safer to sign up, say, 100,000 users as an “advance testing lab”, fully opted in, that gives them this information. I’m not sure I like the idea of my Mom (possibly) not fully understanding what will be sent to MS.

More commentary: Inquirer and Slashdot.

Alex

Ad business spyware meeting

New event: “The NAI Strategic Forum on Spyware: eCommerce in the Age of Spyware will bring together leading experts from the current debate.”

Leading experts from the current debate?

Please. Look at the agenda: The only person representing the antispyware industry there is Richard Stiennon from WebRoot (he’s a good guy, but one person can’t hold off the entire adware industry). Ari Schwartz from the CDT is there, but what about people like Ben Edelman, Eric Howes, or some of the journalists who have done lots of work in this space?

Whatever.

Alex Eckelberry

WhenU gets 20 mill

There’s a big CNET spyware conference next week in San Francisco, and I noticed one of the panelists is a general partner from ABS Capital. I was wondering why he was on the panel, as I saw no investments on their part in either the adware or antispyware space.

So this morning it became clear, ABS just put $20 mill into WhenU.

Sunbelt Spyware Research Center listings for WhenU and other adware.

Alex Eckelberry

MS Antispyware Enterprise version “first half of 2006”

Interesting article in CMPnet (currently only in the Asia edition).

Gordon Mangione, MS veep for security spoke with a group of editors at CMP.

Lifted from the article:

– A for-fee enterprise anti-spyware product is expected as early as the first half of 2006.

– 14 million users have downloaded Microsoft’s free anti-spyware beta

– Additional upgrades of the client-side anti-spyware tool are due this summer

– About 40 percent of those have opted to send information in to give the company access to detailed information about malware threats.

Alex Eckelberry

3 out of 10 remove cookies because of antispyware programs

According to this article in Online Media Daily, 27% of consumers (nearly 3 out of 10) use an antispyware program to sweep cookies off their system.

I do wish some in the antispyware industry were not so alarmist about cookies, which for the most part are relatively harmless.

Alex Eckelberry

DoubleClick’s “Decade of Online Advertising”

Certain to appeal to the marketing wonk, DoubleClick has released a report entitled “The Decade in Online Advertising“.

From the report:

Yet, in this world of hyper-fragmented media and too many marketing messages, consumers are acting to avoid the overload, paying for the unadulterated media they want and investing in technology to strip out unwanted ads, if necessary. Advertisers have to accept that fact not only to be more polite; it’s increasingly a legal requirement. In the past few years, the U.S. Congress, responding to voter outcry, has passed a bevy of policies restricting intrusive marketing practices including telemarketing, fax marketing, email spam and, as of this writing, web “spyware” legislation is making its way through the House and Senate.

Edmond Thomas, chief of technology at the Federal Communications Commission, bluntly warned attendees to an AAAA breakfast this March: “Your challenge is to stop being annoying. You’re almost forcing regulators to get involved.”

I wish the spyware adware guys would get that message.

Alex Eckelberry

Legal angle on battling spyware?

I got this helpful note from a a lawyer in Texas about battling spyware. “There is a little used cause of action in Texas entitled “intrusion on seclusion.” The elements are: (1) Defendant intentionally intruded on the plaintiff’s solitude, seclusion, or private affairs; (2) the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person; and (3) the plaintiff suffered an injury as a result of the defendant’s intrusion.”

Interesting.

Alex