I saw this floating around in IRC and on a couple of hacking forums:
I guess script kiddies and malware authors must really be pressed for time, because here comes a Terms of Service generator.
You simply enter your name, email, product name and country then hit the “Generate” button.
As you can see, there’s lots and lots of text. So much text, in fact, that it almost becomes a kind of Adware EULA, especially as regular Malware doesn’t tend to have a EULA and it contains many references to promotions and the like.
With that in mind, I started to wonder if the ready rolled EULA was actually any good, or if it needed a little work. If you’re going to fool people into running things, you should make sure the language is nice and clear so you have an excuse when the cops come, right?
Time to fire up a program called the EULA Analyzer – it digs through all the text in the EULA, checks for anything suspicious and lets you know if there’s more chance of reaching the end of War & Peace than the text in the popup box. With that in mind, let’s see the scores on the doors:
Scoring Metrics
Number of characters: 2701
Number of words: 540
Number of sentences: 9
Average words per sentence: 60
60 words per sentence? When the average sentence length is supposed to be around 14 to 20 words, you might have a bit of a readability issue there. Worse are the Flesch scores:
Flesch Score: 2.74
Flesch Grade: 28 : Beyond Twelfth Grade reading level
Automated Readability Index: 32 : Beyond Twelfth Grade reading level
Coleman-Liau Index: 14 : Beyond Twelfth Grade reading level
Gunning-Fog Index: 73 : Beyond Twelfth Grade reading level
Here is the Wikipedia page for Flesch scores and grades. In a nutshell, the lower the Flesch score, the harder the content is to read.
90.0–100.0 easily understandable by an average 11-year-old student
60.0–70.0 easily understandable by 13- to 15-year-old students
0.0–30.0 best understood by university graduates
The score for the text generated by this program is 2.74. Exactly like a typical Adware EULA, then!
As for the Grade, the higher the number the more years of education is required to make sense of the text. Anything higher than 12 is (of course) “beyond twelfth grade level”; the score here is 28.
Additionally, the EULA Analyzer flagged 9 sentences that might strike the end-user as suspicious including one “Reference to removal restrictions or removal rules by third party tools” and three counts of “Advertising: reference to online promotions”.
I give it an A for effort but a D for execution.
Christopher Boyd