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HOME TOPICS SEARCH ABOUT ME It’s beneath my dignity and yours. These people are moral maggots. |
technofile Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983 Scumware, Part 1: Sneaky software hits a new lowOct. 3, 2001 By Al Fasoldt Copyright © 2001, Al Fasoldt Copyright © 2001, The Post-Standard Daily newspapers survive by selling ad space to advertisers, and Commercial TV networks make nearly all of their money from advertising. So it's not surprising that advertising supports many software programs, too. They're "adware" programs. Sometimes they are offered as such, and, in such cases, we all know before we try them that they're adware. But sometimes they're not identified in any way. Adware of that sort is getting more common every week. Adware sounds innocuous. Most people think of it this way: You get a program for free or at low cost, and all you do is put up with a couple of ads on the screen when you run it. If that's what you think adware is, you're dangerously misinformed. Read this article and a companion piece next week carefully and share them with your friends. What you are about to read almost surely will shock you. Most adware is nothing like the kind of advertising you see in a newspaper or on TV. A lot of adware plays dirty tricks on you. Many adware programs spy on you. Some even change Web pages you visit so you see something the Web site designers never intended. Some do even more than that. Pardon my language, but the worst kind of adware has taken on a new name. I call it "scumware." It’s beneath my dignity and yours. Unfortunately, it’s far above the dignity of the idiots who create it. These people are moral maggots. Some of the worst scumware inserts fake hyperlinks into Web pages or covers up advertising for one product or service with ads of its own. As a Web-site designer, I consider this appalling. Pages I carefully designed, containing links I created, would show up in an scumware-infiltrated Web browser with different links. They would be links I probably never would have approved – and surely would not even have known about. And advertising that I selected for my pages would never appear on the pages I created if you were using scumware that covered by my ads with other ones. This is bad enough as it is. But it’s just the start. Those faked hyperlinks will appear to be MY hyperlinks. If one of them offends you, then I am the one you blame. Those uninvited ads that appear on my pages will appear to be MY ads. I've got enough challenges without coping with advertisers I didn't hire. Some of this might seem familiar. You may remember that Microsoft recently backed away from plans to become the world’s biggest purveyor of scumware. It yanked its own version of fake scumware hyperlinks, called Smart Tags, from the newest versions of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Microsoft said it might change its mind and use them at another time, however. Next week: Examples of scumware programs. I’ll name names and tell you what to watch out for. |