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Locked on 07/12/2005 8:00:14 PM PDT by Admin Moderator, reason:
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Posted on 06/01/2005 7:12:04 PM PDT by HairOfTheDog
New verse:
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Upon the hearth the fire is red, |
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Still round the corner there may wait |
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Home is behind, the world ahead, |
Sigh...ain't nobody gonna do this yard work if'n I don't.
Back later. I'm thinkin' I don't want spaghetti, so I may be here to start the chat view...
No trailering this weekend or next. We are supposed to go for some rides here at home just to keep them and us on a conditioning path, but so far, it hasn't happened... ~yawn~
Um. Well. Professionally, I have to say you're wrong. I spend many hours dealing with the results of letting people just use machines without protection. I'd love to take you into our computer lab and show you... the people who log in are all CS students, so they ought to know better. They have very limited access to the machine. And after a semester, the machines are still so goobered up all we can do is reformat and start over.
Also, virus scanners do not, usually, detect spyware. That's why one needs both. I'm glad you're lucky so far but it's really not a conspiracy on the part of the spyware cleaners. After all, the ones I use are free. So what would they be getting out of it?
Kewl, and closer to your part of theshire.
BBL
What are the spy and adware writers getting out of it? They're also free.
Um... no, they're not. They get paid based on the number of computers infected, most of the time. It's like spam. Do you honestly think spammers don't get paid for their work?
I have a better one: Microsoft takes money from the big spyware/adware producers to not report them on your hard disk when you run MS AS...
Not a fact AFAIK, just a conspiracy theory! ;)
second time today I've used "AFAIK".
OK - so how are the antispyware writers buying groceries?
MS doesn't need money from spyware producers.... Bill can't figure out how to spend the money he's got, so he pays a large staff of people to help give some of it away.
Most of them do it as a hobby. You don't know young (15 to 30s) male computer geeks like I do. In their spare time, they write 'better' compilers or train for obfuscated programming contests - or, for the recognition of their peers, write freeware. It's fueled by pride, not money, most of the time.
Plus, "I wrote Spybot S&D in my spare time" looks really, really good on a resume.
Mmmm...ginger beer...
Good work on the fence, sounds like!
Yikes! 100 in TheSunRoom (with the sgd to thehouse closed.)
Right... And these smarty geeks never have a desire to pull any pranks of their own? I don't trust freeware... It's from these same kind of little cyber geeks that we get trojans and viruses in the first place. All for the benefit of pride and recognition.
How do the spyware and adware writers make money - who pays them?
Advertisers who buy their services. They pay spyware/adware writers an amount for information collected by spyware, or for each "hit" generated by adware (usually a few cents/hit).
OK - lets seperate them...
Spyware.... What information is collected?
Adware.... Is this where popups infect the machine and display actual ads randomly or sometimes related to keywords or something on the page? I've never had this happen but I know people who have reported it.
Spyware can collect anything from a list of internet sites you visit, to password information or act as a keystroke logger.
Adware can do what you suggest. Sometimes it just popups up ads randomly when you're not even online.
There are browser hijackers that redirect your start page to theirs, or worse. 'Search toolbars' that load into your system and hijack you to their page. Our lab is infested with malware so badly, some of the machines won't allow the administrator account its priveleges.
As an example, from this article:
To cover the installation payment, the adware watches the user's Web surfing and advertises accordingly, usually with a pop-up ad. For example, when we visited the Dish Network home page with Claria installed, an advertisement for DirecTV popped up. This is politely called "contextual advertising."
The advertiser, DirecTV in this case, often has a contract directly with the adware distributer, but often indirectly through a cost-per-click network such as Overture. (Claria derived 31 percent of its revenue from Overture in 2003.) Note that Overture, in their final public filing before the Yahoo acquisition, averaged over 43 cents per click, thus covering Claria's user acquisition costs on the first click.
Thus the process starts with the file-sharing taint, but gets washed by the adware vendor and the cost-per-click vendor until it is finally clean enough for the advertiser to buy into.
I believe these things exist, I just think they have to be things that are related to, or come with stuff they are installing.... Things like Gator, which comes with Kazaa... it told me a little fib about what it was, and I said OK to install it. It was there because I let it in. Since then I am very wary of installing anything that is freeware or the like, and coincidentally, I've been clean.
In other words, I don't see how they come in without cooperation, or I'd have it too. ecurbh is more adventurous than me, and is also clean.
You don't think it's possible, that there's a correlation between spyware and freeware?
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