Adware and Under-Wear - The Definitive Guide

A major driving force behind adware technology has been the cyberporn industry. Porn meisters (who account for up to a fifth of American Web revenues) may market wares that are objectionable and offensive to the majority of Web surfers, but their ad techniques work quite well within their market, and their technology tends to be more sophisticated and "cutting-edge" than more mainstream advertisers.

The Web tracking firm Cyveillance has found that they're routinely accepting technology and tactics once limited to porn vendors. These include the now-ubiquitous "pop-up" ads (appearing on 30% of the world's Web sites as of November 2001), the newer "pop-unders," and the more annoying "mouse-trapping" tactics, which prevent users from exiting a page(showing up on over 5% of Websites). Vertical "skyscraper" banner ads split time with ads that spawn new browser boxes when a Website is downloaded. Other, more intrusive types of ads zoom across Web pages or fill computer screens while a Web page is being downloaded. These techniques were birthed on the porn sites, and as the mainstream advertisers learned just how effective they were proving to be, they adopted them for their own purposes.

According to a Cyveillance spokesman, "the most aggressive [advertising] sites continue to be the pornography sites, followed closely by the gambling sites. But you're also finding more aggressive behavior on totally mainstream sites." Other techniques are also being employed, particularly using Flash and JavaScript technology to give the surfer a "richer experience" in the ads he or she peruses. Of course, one surfer's "rich experience" results in another surfer lunging for the close button... if they can find one in the ad. "It's a fine line between getting a client's message out there and making people irritated," says one marketing firm.

InternetFuel's advertising techniques include a blizzard of pop-ups as you leave a site, while Search-Explorer.com uses a mouseover script that automatically downloads advertising software to your hard drive. InternetAlert uses ads designed to look like Windows' own system warnings to scare consumers into buying their product. A particularly onerous Web marketer, John Zuccarini, registered about 5500 Internet domains that were misspelled versions of popular, legitimate domains, including 41 misspellings of "Britney Spears." Surfers who misspelled the singer's name in their Web searches often wound up at one of Zuccarini's sites, where they were inundated with pop-up ads, including ads for porn sites and for the infamous "psychic" Miss Cleo.

Little, if any, of this is illegal as yet, mostly because the law hasn't caught up with the latest online marketing strategies (Zuccarini was ordered by the courts to pay back $1.8 million in "ill-gotten gains," but disappeared without paying; he is still being sought by American authorities). Annoying? Aggravating? You betcha. One irate user goes so far as to label it all "cyberterrorism." But with spending on Internet advertising in 2002 topping $9 billion, you can bet it won't be going away any time soon.

What Does It All Mean?

The various terms used for these programs sometimes overlap in meaning, but let's try to break the programs down into groups, each labeled, however arbitrarily, with one of the terms currently in use. Naturally there's a good bit of overlap.

Adware is the least offensive of the bunch, though still quite intrusive, annoying, and sometimes disruptive. These programs do anything from send dozens of unwanted ads to your browser -- pop-ups, pop-unders, Flash animations that temporarily hijack your screen, you name it -- to more direct assaults on your machine, including:

• resetting your home page,
• adding links in your Favorites, and
• yanking your browser to their sites while you're trying to go elsewhere.

Some adware is perfectly above board, telling you up front that the software will direct ads to your display. Opera, the browser, and Eudora, the email client, offer no-cost, ad-supported versions of their programs, and require you to pay if you want to be ad-free; many other shareware developers offer similar versions of their wares. The more insidious ones install ad-channeling or tracking software without your knowledge. Often the data collected is used to "target" ads to the surfer, sending him advertisements tailored to his surfing habits. For example, if you visit several sites to peruse and download MP3s, this information will be sent back to the marketing company, resulting in them displaying MP3-related advertisements when you use the software.

Spyware is defined by Wikipedia as "technology that gathers information about a person and/or their computer, and transmits it to someone else: advertisers, law enforcement officials, hackers, etc." It sends information on you and/or your machine back to its home servers, including IP addresses, email addresses, system configurations, and in some instances, credit card and personal information.

The excellent spyware removal program Ad-aware discusses spyware in its documentation:

Malware (short for MALicious softWARE) actively alters and/or damages your system, including the aforementioned browser resettings, rewrites of your configuration, entries into your Registry, system crashes, and more. Sometimes the line between malware and viruses is pretty blurred. The term is often used to cover the entire range of "hostile" software, including viruses, trojan horses, and worms. The author of Malware.org states that "the issue [of] whether a program is "malware" or not is in the mind of the person executing the code."