Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Zango Caught in Lies About MySpace?

Posted by Zonk on Fri Jul 28, 2006 05:47 PM
from the bad-ango-thingie dept.
Security The Internet
An anonymous reader writes to mention that Zango's still under suspicion for problems on MySpace. ZDNet has the story, discussing rumours of multiple accounts, paid Zango hawkers, and mass emailings. From the article: "Boyd posted some choice snippets from the email, like this: 'Zango is fairly new with myspace sites and it took me some time to see what works and what doesn't ... more profitably, *go to a bunch of your friends* who have popular profiles and pay them (it's up to you so much. One of my partners said 5$..maybe offer to split the money with them?) to put a zango video into their profile through your site. This will give you hundreds of extra installs a day (this probably works even better than having them on your actual site).'"
+ -
story

Related Stories

[+] Adware Spreads Through Myspace 209 comments
Sandbagger writes "Here's an interesting problem for MySpace — groups of websites that entice MySpace users into placing videos onto their profile pages (under the guise of 'free content'), without disclosing a key piece of information that might make them think twice. When someone visits one of these profiles carrying the video, a DRM acquisition box pops up and attempts to install Zango adware. In all likelihood, the profile owners don't even know these videos are doing this to their visitors. The end result is an Adware affiliate effectively removing himself from the distribution chain and letting kids promote these videos instead, in a strange example of viral marketing gone wrong."
[+] Zango Under Fire From Adult Webmasters 93 comments
An anonymous reader writes, "Over the past few days, adult webmasters have been accusing adware maker Zango of 'stealing sales' by means of the following method: Computer users with Zango's adware on board will pop open a window containing the affiliate merchant's site they happen to be on at the time, except with Zango's own affiliate code in the window. By doing this, Zango claims credit for the sale and the original, rule-following merchant, the one who referred the user there, loses out. Despite this practice having been around since at least 2004, it seems the adult webmasters are only just realizing this takes place — surprising, considering how deeply connected the worlds of adware and porn are. It seems pornographers pushing adware is acceptable only as long as they aren't the ones getting burnt. Part of me doesn't care, and part of me hopes they carry the financial clout to force Zango to change their current practices."
[+] FTC Fines Zango $3 Million 77 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Wired is reporting that government regulators have fined rogue adware distributor Zango (formerly 180Solutions) $3 million. This is 'following charges that the company deceived internet users into installing its pop-up software and tried to prevent them from uninstalling it.' ZDNet mentions that 'Zango's executives pointed a finger elsewhere, claiming that the federal violations were due to third-party distributors rather than the software manufacturer itself.' Security researchers are still happily finding examples of Zango software being popped open in rogue distributions such as IM worms. Ben Edelman is claiming to have more evidence of their dubious business practices, casting into question their claims of newfound affiliate responsibility."
[+] Will Zango Ever Clean Up Their Affiliates?
An anonymous reader writes "Since the FTC fined Zango $3 Million dollars for deceptive installs, security researchers have made a seemingly endless amount of finds with regards dubious Zango affiliates and business practices. Hot on the heels of the fake Youtube videos discovered by Websense earlier in the week comes another foray into Myspace for Zango, via a program of (extremely) limited functionality being spammed across Myspace profiles with the overall aim of people downloading Zango Adware. The program's EULA is also highly suspect, giving the company behind the program the right to spam messages to whoever they want, whenever they want, install Adware whenever they choose and lay the blame of these spam messages entirely at the feet of the end user should the service being used to spam complain about it. In the face of mounting evidence, when will Zango actually hold their hands up and admit their affiliate program is actually still as poor as it ever was?"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Zango Caught in Lies About MySpace? 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • I for one... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Neil Blender (555885) <neilblender@gmail.com> on Friday July 28 2006, @05:51PM (#15802759)
    ...am glad I have absolutely no idea what that summary means.

  • Tonight? Um, I'm busy.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Itninja (937614) on Friday July 28 2006, @05:57PM (#15802795) Homepage
    One of the lines from the 'full text' of the original email:
    If I were you I'd do them tonight
    Good thing he's not me.

  • Braindead marketing practices (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2006, @05:58PM (#15802797)

    The email contains the following fun snippet:

    2) MOVING GIFS. This really gets peoples attention and vistors love this shit. Heres an example of a perfect site: www.free-extras.com

    Look at the karate guy doing flips: its awesome. Click on it: it links to a gallery of a 100 zango videos. THIS IS WHAT YOU SHOULD DO. Its simple, cool, and WAYYYY more profitable. Find a moving gif online and put it on your site. Make it link to a gallery.

    Ok, what fucking planet do they live on, and more importantly, WHY HASN'T IT BEEN DESTROYED YET?

    • WHY HASN'T IT BEEN DESTROYED YET?

      I assumed that it had but then somebody posted an article about it on /. again.

    • 2) MOVING GIFS. This really gets peoples attention and vistors love this shit. Heres an example of a perfect site: www.free-extras.comOh. My. God. These people should be locked up somewhere, because they're completely insane.
      • I guess I didn't close my blockquote tag. (Note to self: the preview button is your friend.) Here's what I meant to say:

        2) MOVING GIFS. This really gets peoples attention and vistors love this shit. Heres an example of a perfect site: www.free-extras.com
        Oh. My. God. These people should be locked up somewhere, because they're completely insane.

    • Re:Braindead marketing practices (Score:5, Insightful)

      by xXBondsXx (895786) on Friday July 28 2006, @06:10PM (#15802848)
      I know these marketing execs seem stupid, but think about it. They wanted people to install their adware, and the ideal audience is one who is:

      -a frequent web user
      -not exactly computer savy
      -able to live with pop-up ads and flashing colors 24/7
      -unaware of the consequences of clicking yes to a dialog

      sounds a lot like the typical myspace user doesn't it?
    • WHY HASN'T IT BEEN DESTROYED YET?
      Because the damn terrorists keep destroying my Death Stars!
    • Nuke the site from orbit......... it's the only way to be sure.

      Another fun .gif from the site- Peter from Family guy with 'your frickin sweet' on it.

      <stewie voice>Oh, my frickin sweet is it! How rather generous of you. Can I have another, hmm? Hmm?</stewie voice>

    • WHY HASN'T IT BEEN DESTROYED YET?

      Really makes you wish for the good ole days. I remember when all you had to do was say "press f10 for secret hax" and all the newbies would magically disappear.

      Now you have to figure out some way of making all their pictures blurry or keeping those pesky rebels away from your auxiliary exhaust port.

  • Fer Shame... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ackthpt (218170) * on Friday July 28 2006, @06:04PM (#15802817) Homepage Journal

    Caught in a web of their own lies, like common politicians.

    Seems to me it's up to MySpace to either condone this sort of thing or ban users for it, never mind what the weasels at Zango do or say.

    • Re:Fer Shame... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Kesch (943326) on Friday July 28 2006, @06:07PM (#15802829)
      Profiles named Zango were found on MySpace and Zango later admitted an employee created the profiles and said it was a "mistake".

      See... it was all just an honest mistake. You know we have all accidently tried to force feed people adware at one time or another, it's a natural human thing to do.
    • Caught in a web 2.0 of their own lies, like common politicians.

      there, fixed.

  • Zango's underhanded marketing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 9x320 (987156) on Friday July 28 2006, @06:11PM (#15802852)
    This isn't the first time I've seen them engage in this. I first encountered Zango when its predecessor company, 180 Solutions, told me to install Install026.exe, which had 180 Search Solutions infect my computer with its spyware. I had been installing a video game at the time, while browsing the webcomic hosting site Keenspot, so I thought it was part of the installation process and clicked the button. My computer fell to the spyware and I had to end up doing a system restore. Since then 180 Solutions has merged with another spyware company to become Zango.

    Keenspot suffered massive outrage, and coldly responded that they outsource their advertising to the Burstnet company, which used iFrames to distribute their ads, so they had no control over it, and that everyone is evil and stealing when they use Firefox's AdBlock.

    The next time I encountered them was when I went to the website Newgrounds, which apparently had become infested with spyware since the last time I visited, and said I needed to install Zango to access portions of the site. This spyware problem was in the Wikipedia entry for a few months, but now it appears to have been removed?

    The last time, incidentally, was when I was searching Wikipedia. I came across this revision [wikipedia.org] of a Wikipedia article on Zango Messenger, a spyware laden IM service made by Zango. Look how glowing its review is. Wikipedia records the IP addresses of every user that edits when they aren't logged in, and when you look at the IP address that made the edit, you will see that the address traces back to a company by the name of "180 SOLUTIONS HOOKED-2", with 180 Solutions being the company's old name!

    It's hosted by Time Warner Telecom, by the way. That's another reason not to use AOL.
    • As an extension to my previous post, I should add that, with this MySpace incident, there is obviously no "accident" undergoing at Zango. Obviously there should be some provision of law floating about making them vulnerable to some sort of law suit for these marketing tactics. Someone should find it and sue, perhaps?

      • Re:Zango's underhanded marketing (Score:5, Interesting)

        by 9x320 (987156) on Friday July 28 2006, @06:29PM (#15802931)
        Oh, my, I'm sorry if it looks like I'm karma whoring, but this post is much more urgent. The last post about Zango mentioned that they had created a Zango Messenger article in Wikipedia in 2005, which has since been fixed by Wikipedia administrators.

        It turns out that was not an isolated incident. If you look at this article revision from April 2006 [wikipedia.org], you will see that they have been at it much more recently. I suspect that Zango is doing a full-out campaign on any "Web 2.0" website, any website that anyone can edit or contribute to. I would not be surprised if they had also been marketing on Digg---I think I have even seen them there, in fact!

        The evidence for a lawsuit against their company for their destructive marketing practices is mounting...
        • Wow, "Zango is adware, but it has been said that it is a rootkit" to "Zango is a product designed to do for the Internet what commercial TV stations like NBC, CBS and ABC have done for TV, which is keep it free."

          That's somewhat of a shift. Glad to see a company come around and drop their spyware so quickly. ;-)

        • Re:Zango's underhanded marketing (Score:5, Interesting)

          by 9x320 (987156) on Friday July 28 2006, @07:18PM (#15803117)
          More developments:

          Less than thirty minutes ago at the time of writing, Zango once again edited the Wikipedia article on Zango messenger. See this edit [wikipedia.org], which has been reverted by other users. They wrote in the edit summary, what Wikipedia asks its editors to write to justify edits and explain changes, "Fact checking and bias redirection."

          The same IP address wrote on the article's discussion page, "29 June 2006, reworked the corporate advertising copy for accuracy. I hope you don't mind me having a little fun with these shills. If you object to my copy, please exchange it for your own, so long as it is not advertising and/or misinformation in Zango's favour. Thank you and good night. [Anonymous]"

          They have just admitted to manipulating Wikipedia for corporate advertising. They think they are "anonymous," but this adware company knows not even the concept of IP addresses. I am opening a discussion with Wikipedia administrators at this URL [wikipedia.org] with the intention of getting all Zango IP addresses permanently blocked from Wikipedia. Please observe and provide input if you feel you have something useful to say.
          • Er... read that comment a bit more closely. It was left by someone not from the company who added some sarcasm to the advertisement text left by the company. How could you honestly confuse that?
            • I had left the comment. The person that wrote it had reverted a perfectly good article back to the Zango-written version just to add some comment to the bottom. It's still harmful, and got the person that did it blocked for three hours, but I'm pretty sure that the person at the computer won't even notice it.
              • Here's the edit, with non-Zango additions bolded:

                Zango Messenger is a straightforward universal instant messaging (IM) application that lets you communicate with anyone using AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger - from one simple interface, but has the added side-effect of installing insidious spyware clients that clog up systems and keep you from actually enjoying your PC. However, this can be counteracted by using such programs as Spybot Search & Destroy and Lavasoft's AdAware.

                Zango Mess


    • It's hosted by Time Warner Telecom, by the way. That's another reason not to use AOL.

      Not too surprising since recently Time Warner's site for kids has been pushing Zango spyware on them [donotreply.com].
      • Like this: slashdot.org [slashdot.org]

        What I typed looks like <URL:slashdot.org>

        Is that what you were wanting to know? As far as how slashcode actually handles the url tag, I have no idea, other than the input and the end result. It could very well have a hammer that hits a monkey on the head everytime you use a URL tag, and then the monkey writes out the URL on the back of a receipt, and mails it to Mars, where the top secret Chinese Mars base receives it, translates it into a string of digits in base 3 repr
  • Lies, lies, and more lies. They've turned the internet into a US presidential election.

  • What this is all about (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kesch (943326) on Friday July 28 2006, @06:16PM (#15802872)
    So apparently Zango makes some crappy adware toolbars. Then they get video's to link back to the Zango website and bring up installers when they try to play. Webmasters can sign up and push Zango crapware in return for $$$s per install.

    This is where that mangled piece of English in the summary comes in. That piece is from an email where Zango reveals there evil scheme to the Zango pushing legions. In the email, Zango tells its associates to target kids and make it easy to embed Zango vids in their MySpace profiles. Then all their friends come, have the installer pop up, and let it through so they can see the cool new video.

    There, just in case you were confused after trying to read only the summary like I was.

  • Cuz it doesn't look like news for nerds OR stuff that matters.

    • it is stuff that matters to the new nerds.

      heh, sounds like a band name - "The New Nerds" with there new hit, "Rock the Distro".

  • In a related story... (Score:4, Funny)

    by HAKdragon (193605) <hakdragon AT gmail DOT com> on Friday July 28 2006, @06:19PM (#15802886)
    MySpace told Live Journal to tell Zango that they are no longer invited to their party and that Zango doesn't have a boyfriend because she's a heffer.

  • WTF... (Score:5, Funny)

    by shawnce (146129) on Friday July 28 2006, @06:20PM (#15802889) Homepage
    Anyone have a decoder ring that works for this submission? I think mine is busted.
  • Hmmm, I notice that they have a 'family guy' banner amongst a few others. Were they granted the rights to use that character, or are they perhaps in violation?

    Maybe we could ask the MPAA about that, hmmmmm...

  • Let's be fair (Score:5, Funny)

    by Joebert (946227) on Friday July 28 2006, @06:41PM (#15802981) Homepage
    I think it's only fair that since they give you a place on their systems & let you call it "myspace", that they get to take some space on your system & call it their space.
  • Just another normal day in the windows landscape....feel the pain

  • Decoded summary (Score:4, Informative)

    by Frenchy_2001 (659163) on Friday July 28 2006, @07:01PM (#15803058)
    A spyware company called Zango (formerly 180 solution) has been caught trying to infect user's PCs through an automatic download triggered by a video. Their latest scheme is to post and encourage to post those videos on myspace pages.

    As the user base of myspace is not that tech savvy, they click "yes" to the pop up that ask if they want the software installed (presented as required to see the video, or even automatic when the video try to load, i'm not sure) and they find themselves infected by the spyware.

    It seems some emails proving that scheme have been found.

  • I RTFA yet.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ShawnDoc (572959) on Friday July 28 2006, @07:40PM (#15803208) Homepage
    I still have no idea what the heck Zango is.
  • explaining what this is al about, because I have no clue what the summery means.

    • Re:as a myspace user (Score:4, Funny)

      by identity0 (77976) on Friday July 28 2006, @06:48PM (#15803005) Journal
      Like, ohmygod, you haven't heard about ZONGO yet? Lol, it's, um, this really strange, uh, THING on MYSPACE!!1!! I TOTALLY had a huuuuuge problem with it the other day!!! :) It went like, this...

      I was blogging on myspace on the PC. And it was all, like, beep beep beep beep, and MySpace was, like, gone.

      And I was, like.... "Uunh?" (O_O)

      Zongo DEVOURED MySpace.

      It was a really good myspace. :-(

      And then I had to do it again, and I had to do it fast, so it wasn't as good (;_;)

      It's kind of... a bummer.

      My name is Ellen Feiss, and I MySpace...

    • Re:Seriously... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Miniluv (165290) on Friday July 28 2006, @07:39PM (#15803204) Homepage
      Sadly no. MySpace seems to have achieved critical mass, and I know a disturbing number of otherwise reasonable adults who've become hooked. It combines everything they want: a profile, pictures, messaging, hooking up with people they haven't seen in years, and horny teenage girls.
    • Who the fuck cares about MySpace? (Aside from teenagers, obviously... but they're dumb.)

      Advertisers care. Teenagers dominate Western culture. They have throwaway income and they're easily manipulated. MySpace is basically a huge marketing list-- complete with interests and links to their friends-- of a good percentage of the teens in the U.S. and the world. You wonder why it's worth so much to Murdoch?

      This doesn't have much to do with you, or me really, but MySpace is hardly irrelevant. Right now it's

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.