Why Isn't This Illegal?

This sort of thing drives me nuts... frankly, I wish someone would just round up these "internet washer" freaks and haul them all off to jail. Slap 'em with some giant fines while you're at it... I just can't believe this sort of thing isn't illegal... there's nothing quite like trying to capitalize on the irrational fear and huge vaccuum of knowledge of the average consumer. Who needs a viable product and business model? All you need to do these days to make money is find a bunch of suckers and drill their wallets for all they've got...

[/fuming]

I surf using Mozilla/Phoenix. Occassionally I have to fire up IE to view certain sites. When I do, it's amazing all the crap that starts popping up that I never see when using Mozilla products. I had the one you posted pop up on me yesterday along with a bunch of other junk.

Using IE as little as possible doesn't completely make the problem go away but it sure helps.

Yep, put that along with the flashing banner ads that look like error messages....

since i use a mac at home and linux at work, these ads just bounce off me. my question is: if their software is so hot, why can't they come up with an ad campaign that id's yr os before trying to mimic it?

I use moz all the time too and I just don't allow ANY pops on a site unless otherwise stated. At work, however, I have no such option. I started typing 'exit' because I just glanced at it while minimizing IE and thought I had left a console open after working with it. After a second it dawned on me that there was a button in the console - so it tweren't no console!

I think we should go on a huge ad campaign to educate people about how useless their silly little "product" really is. I'd love to put scumbags like this out of business and on the streets.

Just for kicks, I tried something similar to their product once on a bunch of files (in fact, one that was supposedly better than this one according to at least one "leading industry expert", but a guy I know that comes from the OOOOOOLD school DOS world still managed to recover most of the "shredded" files' peices and put them back together just by walking through the directory tables and re-linking things with a REALLY old tool from Norton.

Besides.. if you weren't downloading chicken porn from KaZaA, you wouldn't have anything to shred, and if you still had something that secretive to shred, odds are you'll have the company / agency budget to buy a real heavyweight utility from the pros rather than these numbskulls.

lol @ chicken porn

Yeah, a client of mine keeps falling for those. I think it isn't/will-never-be illegal as long as people accept things like SPAM (which I class in the same category). The problem is that people in general simply 'put-up' with it as something that is normal for their experience of the Internet.

The problem with getting laws passed to prevent this kind of thing is that it all takes too long. Who wants to spend time writing to their local government represenative (member of parliment, congress etc.,) when you know that they're busy doing things that are important to their own agenda.

LOL at the button on the console! When I first saw that one, I though, wow - you can do that? Then I hovered my mouse over the console window and mister hand/glove came up... oh, it's an image.

Sure, it would be easy. If they are dumb enough to click, they are dumb enough to accept an executable d/l. Put in a virus to crash their internet connection/computer. Presto, no longer "broadcasting", just as advertised.

LoL

I hate gator... One night, when I was too stoned to know what I was doing, I accidentally installed gator network on my computer. Next day, I removed it but guess what... it kept coming back to my desktop.

Had to do a full re-install in the end... that was back in the days of Win98.

I've seen some pretty horrible stuff on client's computers - Free XXX Dialer that won't 'delete' from the desktop (safe mode command prompt and deltree solved that problem...)

Hey you know what is really cool.

Go to someones machine in IE, troll around and find a Gator popup, install and make sure you click the Always trust from Gator box. Do that with a few others too.

Ewww thats just flat out mean!

lol, you've gotta really dislike someone to do such as that.

But they are all such helpful programs! I have said it before, i think it would be a great project to convert some of the major ones to XUL so that they can be ran cross-platform under Mozilla. Don't want Mozilla users missing out on these handy programs

LOL!



wow... it's amazing how one simple action can lead to so much clean-up work. Personally, I prefer doing things like opening their box and chaning some random jumper setting, or more than one if I'm really peeved off... The best is if you get your personal CD-player and whack on Rage Against The Machine while you relocate the jumpers so it look's like you're initials when they open the machine up... any track really, although... "f*ck you I won't do what you tell me" is a personal favorite.

Still, write down the changes in case you have a change of heart!

By the way, messing around with a computer other than the one(s) you own, is illegal. (re. Why Isn't This Illegal?)