Hated Adware Company Raises $40 Million
from the what-were-they-thinking... dept
This article would almost be funny if it weren't so sad. It turns out that a company named 180solutions somehow raised $40 million this week, but when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer went out to find out about the company, all they seemed to hear about was just how much everyone hates the company. 180solutions, it seems, is in the same sort of sneaky hidden adware/spyware install business that made Gator and WhenU famous. The article is chock full of quotes from people accusing the company of being evil, unethical, illegal or some combination of all three. The only person they could find to give a positive quote about the company was the poor VC who was somehow convinced to invest in this company. Apparently, he didn't do very much due diligence. A simple Google search turns up how hated the company is, and has plenty of details about how they put their adware/spyware on tons of computers without the user having any idea. To then have the VC actually claim that the company is a "good actor" in the space suggests he has no idea what he just invested in.
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Lycos Sidebar by Lycos Sidebar on Apr 2nd, 2004 @ 8:59am
I got the evil Lycos Sidebar installed (without asking!) from listening to Wolf FM through WinAmp5 the other day - apparently WinAmp's HTML browser bit (which always throws up scripting errors) is where it comes from, and there doesn't seem to be a way to turn it off.
Funny thing is, you can Add/Remove Programs it, and it's still there, until Spybot S&D nukes it in the Registry and startup (then you can actually delete the progrm dir).
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Re: Lycos Sidebar by kLa on Apr 26th, 2004 @ 10:18am
The same thing happend to me....but we used Spybot and the thing is still here!! It's completely overriding all search engines I use and pops up this full screen. I have no idea how to get rid of this, how are they getting away with this?
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Re: Lycos Sidebar by E B on Aug 20th, 2005 @ 10:36pm
Same thing happened to me just by visiting their search site. We should SUE LYCOS, that will stop it!!
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