Adware advertisers sued

Forget if this has been posted or not, but there's a class action suit against adware advertisers:

http://netrn.net/spywareblog/archive...irect-revenue/

Those in the marketing end of the life insurance industry may recognize some of the names.

[DW Simpson]

I read somewhere that some attorneys general plan on jumping on this political bandwagon soon, too.

[Salzmann]

I'm sure that all those Adware programmers in Asia and Eastern Europe are just petrified about being told by the US authorities that they can't put spyware on Web sites anymore.

My favorite spyware was something my son accidentally downloaded onto his laptop. Any site you looked at that had certain keywords in the text got linked to ads. Example: "loan" and "debt" got hyperlinked linked to a lending site. On mouseover, a bubble would appear with words such as, "Consolidate all your loans at loans.com!".

[GefilteFish144]

I don't see what lawsuits can actually do here. Sure the ads are annoying, but all you have to do is get Ad-Aware or some other anti-spyware application (can usually get it free or close to it) and run scans every few days or so. I was once hit with a particularly nasty one -- Xupiter. It was bad enough to keep me off the internet. But once I discovered Ad-Aware, it was all quarantined away.

[DW Simpson]

Originally Posted by Salzmann

My favorite spyware was something my son accidentally downloaded onto his laptop. Any site you looked at that had certain keywords in the text got linked to ads. Example: "loan" and "debt" got hyperlinked linked to a lending site. On mouseover, a bubble would appear with words such as, "Consolidate all your loans at loans.com!".

Believe it or not, Google has a product that does exactly this type of thing.