Spyware VS. Federal Trade Commission
Published: Monday, October 10, 2005 Online-Casinos.com
PRESSURE ON SPYWARE BY FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION
FTC seeks Court ruling against spyware installer
The fight against spyware continued in the U.S. this week when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asked a U.S. District Court judge to put a stop to the operations of a company that installs spyware on the PC's of consumers after attracting them by touting free peer-to-peer file-sharing software.
In an interesting report in Information Week, it was revealed that the FTC complaint was against Odysseus Marketing CEO Walter Rines, who advertises software branded Kazanon with claims such as "Download music without fear" and "Don't let the record companies win".
But when consumers download the software, they get an extra, uninvited and probably unwanted 'bonus' spyware called Clientman that secretly downloads dozens of other adware programs.
The FTC said the Clientman software, among other things, replaces or reformats search-engine results, creating bogus search pages or putting clients' Web sites at the top of legitimate search results. The unwanted software programs also generate pop-up ads and transmit information from consumers' PCs to servers controlled by Odysseus.
Exacerbating the problem software is the fact that it is "...difficult to detect and impossible to remove using standard software utilities," and while Odysseus does advise consumers about the spyware, the warning is hidden "...in the middle of a two-page end-user licensing agreement buried in the 'Terms and Conditions' section of their Web site."
The final irony: The surreptitious peer-to-peer file-sharing software doesn't work!
