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Tech: Microsoft making (more) spyware?
Thu, 07 Jul 2005

For purposes of this post, lets gloss over the fact that Windows Updater passes details about your machine hardware and installed software up to Microsoft (you can debate until the end of time if they will abuse it or not, noting that the EULA permits them to silently uninstall anything they like..) and cut to todays chase. Relatively recently, Microsoft started working on buying Claria, a 'direct internet marketing company' -- a company you likely know better by the name of Gator (recently renamed) who makes pop-up ads and software to track which websites you go to. Gator have been a pretty disreputable bunch, with such wonderful tactics as tricking Internet Explorer (a very wide open browser.. try Firefox instead!) into silently downloading and installing software that does all sorts of terrible things, and is pretty hard to remove (generally needing commercial anti-spyware software to remove it.)

The Tribune Media Services (a security news portal) famously said:

"Gator tracks the sites that users visit and forwards that data back to the company's servers. Gator sells the use of this information to advertisers who can purchase the opportunity to make ads pop up at certain moments, such as when specific words appear on a screen. It also lets companies launch a pop-up ad when users visit a competitor's Web site"

OKay, so well and good, Microsoft is buying a spyware company. Also of note is Microsoft bought an anti-spyware company awhile back, and recently started hoisting its anti-spyware software into peoples computers for free. Really, that was pretty cool -- buying a pretty well liked anti-spyware tool and giving it away free to millions of people. Nice.

Naturally, the pundits immediately pounced on these facts -- buying an anti-spyware company, and then later buying a spyware company just screams that their anti-spyware credibility is now shot unless they shut down the latter. Well, it appears the pundits were right -- the anti-spyware tool's automatic updater just downgraded the Gator threat to negledgable, so that it no-longer reports and removes Gator -- despite it being flagged as spyware by all anti-spyware companies (including Microsoft) for a long long time.

This of course makes MS's anti-spyware worse than useless, since it can nolonger be trusted. Maybe this will be reversed, since we all know our corporations won't take kindly to anti-spyware that doesn't do its job, but really it ratchets MS another notch down the already long sleeze-ruler. But does this make Microsoft a spyware company? Or just a friend-to-spyware-when-$$$-are-in-the-mix?

Of course, we're all free to wonder which products McAffee and Symantec's anti-spyware tools choose to ignore :)

This sort of behaviour is asinine.. more evidenc our society is going slowly to heck, with people thinking with their wallets instead of their brains and hearts..

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