September 10, 2001– Newsletter #147

Greetings, Weekend Silicon Warriors,

My wife was at Sam’s Club and, out of the kindness of
her heart, bought a DVD player.
Oh…bad idea. I bought “Hannibal” and have now
watched the same four scenes upwards of 100 times.
Hey, I can jump right to them. Why not? I’ve begun
doing imitations of the movie at dinner. Furthermore,
I’ve been living my life renting the DVDs of all my older
favorite movies. I never actually watch the movies
themselves. I’m far more interested in all of the extra
stuff like the director’s comments and the outtakes. The
original Rocky has like an hour with Sylvester Stallone.
Very cool! On my running list of technology I like and
technology I don’t – the DVD goes way up at the top of
the “Like” column.

Did you hear…

Windows XP won’t be on sale for another couple of
months but already its claims of being anti-piracy
software are in question. First off, there are numerous
pirated versions rolling around the Web. Better yet,
bulletin boards are filling up with reports of cracks that
hackers are finding before the product even hits the
market. Wow.

A bulletin board at the Huazhong University of Science
and Technology in Central China has been shut down
because students began posting topics that dealt with the
1989 Tiananmen Square incident.

The World Wide Web Consortium (WC3) has given a
thumbs-up, in the form of a protocol recommendation, to
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.0. The image format
is said to allow Web pages to recreate the same glossy-
type photos like you’ll find in magazines. Furthermore,
the format is said to be much better moving from
platform to platform and devise to devise than current
formats.

SONY’s AIBO robotic puppy must have gotten out of the
kennel. SONY has unveiled two new “puppies”. They’re
named Latte and Macaron.

Now on to today’s topic…

So, have you been surfing around lately noticing more
and more green or yellow highlighted links these days?
Right there on an otherwise well-designed page is a series
of strange links that really don’t seem to carry any rhyme
or reason. Have you seen that?

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, well done.
You’ve kept yourself clean of scumware. I’ve also seen
the term “theftware” used, but “scumware” has so much
more of a ring to it.

Scumware, as I saw it named by Allan Gardyne of
Associateprograms.com, is the latest in a long line of
methods to steal visitors away from your site and send
them to paying customers.

Here’s the general idea. Scumware can be installed in
and of itself, but usually it’s placed on a computer as an
add-on piece of software that installs right along with
something else the user downloaded. The user installs
the software and unwittingly places this scumware right into the mix.

Currently, the most popular program for delineating
scumware is named KaZaA. It’s a NAPSTER-style file-
sharing program. A few other culprits include:

eZula (http://www.eZula.com)
Gator (http://www.gator.com)
Surf+ (http://www.filemix.net/)

(The Surf+ Website claims to have turned off the
scumware component.)

In each case, the programs claim to do one thing like help
you fill out forms (Gator) or help you stop pop up ads
(Surf+). Granted the software does do what it promises,
but that function is only the carrot to make you bite. The
real deal is to get a program called TopText, or equal,
onto your system.

Once TopText is on yours system, ads can be delivered
from any site through the text presented.

For the sake of argument, let’s say I am a bad guy and I
decide to take advantage of scumware and sign up to be
an advertiser. I buy words. When a page loads, the
program looks for my words in the text of the page. If
the words appear, the TopText program lays a hypertext
link, through a layer or equal style of programming, over the text.

If I buy the text “HTML” I can make it so that anyone
who has TopText installed on their system will get a link
to HTMLGoodies.com when the letters “HTML” occur
on a page. Think about how successful I could be if I did
that. Anyone with TopText could go to an HTML help
site and anytime the text “HTML” appears, it becomes a
link to my site. Furthermore, if the site already has
HTML set to be a link, my link overrides theirs. Click
and you come to me.

McDonalds could use this and buy the word “burger”.
That means that someone running TopText could go to
the Burger King Web site and every instance of the word
“burger” would be a link to Mickey-Ds.

Gosh.

I hate that this is happening, but you have to hand it to the
people who came up with this. It really is impressive that
anyone would think to do this, set it up to be a covert
operation, and succeed.

By this point, you may be interested in what exactly these
links will look like. Well, here are a few screen shots
from sites around the Web:

Screen Shots here.

More shots.

Right off the bat, we can talk about the laws that, if they
are not being broken, are at least being bent. This
includes vandalism of Web sites, copyright infringement,
and fraud just to get us started. But that’s not what bugs
me.

When I hear of a new virus being delivered via an
attachment I shake my head. When I hear that it is
flourishing because people just keep clicking even though
the last ten viruses came the exact same way, I tend to
think, “fool me twice, shame on me.” This is different.
Most everyone that has this on his or her system was
tricked into installing the program.

Now, the sites offering the program may claim that they
warned consumers through the statements noted above
but that certainly wasn’t enough. That gerrymandering
format of text would never warn away someone from
downloading the Gator program.

Plus, and this is what gets me, I look like the jerk!
Someone rolls into HTMLGoodies.com running that
TopText deal and the next thing you know, every time
my page uses the text “Goodies” someone clicks and goes
to a porn site.

Will that person blame Gator?

Heck no. They’ll blame me. They’ll write me. They’ll
call my mother names and I’ll have no idea what in the
heck they’re talking about…

…because I didn’t post the link!

But all that aside, what really blows me away is that this
form of advertising is successful. It works. Advertisers
pay for the service because it works. It brings people to
their site. Most surfers don’t even realize that they’ve
been duped so they’re not angry. They click, look
around, see five or six banner ads, wonder what in the
world happened, and hopefully come back.

…and again I’m a jerk for sending them there.

Ugh.

If you’d like to read more about Scumware, head to
this page.
and read all about it. There are links galore.
I really commend the author for
the work.

I wrote this piece in response to numerous angry emails
from people that wanted me to
Get the word out so we could, “crush this right now”. I
agree that the idea needs to be thwarted, but signing
petitions and writing emails to this person or that person
really isn’t the answer.

Take away the advertising venue. That’s the answer.

The thing is, the tide is already turning. The word is out
and people are learning about what those little yellow and
green boxes mean and who is actually placing them. This
newsletter alone will reach a quarter million people. If
they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on,
maybe a million people will understand they’ve been
duped and will pull that silly program off of their
computer. (Instructions below)

As I said earlier, Surf+ has already shut down its
TopText. Others will follow. Once enough people take
action by recognizing the links for what they are and
begin to pull the software off of their computers, the
advertising venue will most likely tumble like a house of
cards.

You can write letters to the advertisers and those who
produce the software all day long. I’m sorry, but they
won’t care. You won’t change them through angry
emails. Those who distribute these programs will only
understand one thing. No users will mean no advertising
venue will mean no advertisers. The end.

Get rid of it. Get it off of your computer. That’s the
strongest move you can make. The next strongest would
be getting it off of someone else’s computer.

Here are the steps to eliminating the program:

There. That’s done.

The next advertising “wolf in sheep’s clothing” should be
showing up in, say, two months.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

That’s that. Thanks for your time and attention.

Joe Burns, Ph.D.

And Remember: The loudest sound created when you
snap your fingers is not from your middle finger striking
your thumb’s pad, it’s the air the middle finger pushes
away actually striking the palm. Really. Try to make the
same noise by simply slapping your fingers against your
palm or thumb’s pad. The sound it further amplified by
the ring and small finger lying across the palm, the
“sounding board.” Again, try to make the same snapping
sound while only slightly lifting those two fingers off of
the palm. Listen to the pitch when you raise those two
fingers. It’ll be higher.