D Squared To Stop Sending Pop-Ups

bizpile writes "D Squared Solutions, the company created by college students Anish Dhingra and Jeffrey Davis, has agreed to stop bombarding computer users with Internet pop-up ads to advertise its ad-blocking software, avoiding a court battle with the Federal Trade Commission. They were sending pop-up ads using the Messenger function enabled on many Windows operating systems. Their attorneys claimed the pair were not trying to extort consumers with their ads and only intended to send one a day to computer users. Lawyer Anthony J. Dain has said the ads are 'annoyances you have to deal with in a free society.'" (The San Diego Union-Tribune also has a story.)

Square D

[suso]

You know, when I first read that headline, I was thinking of the Square D company [squared.com] that makes circuit breaker boxes and other electrical supplies. And I was thinking "What the hell?"

White Hat Spammer!

[Ryan Stortz]

Has anyone thought of sending out messages telling people how to turn off Windows Messenger?

Re:Annoyances

[ergo98]

The problem is that, thanks in part due to the mere existence of such intrusive socialist agencies as the FTC, the US is now no longer anything approaching a free society.

So in a truly free society, they could send their messenger popup, and in return I could send a platoon of machine gun equipped commandos to liquidate their offices? Is that freedom with intrusive socialist agencies like justice departments or police?

This is a prime example of Microsoft failure

[0x0d0a]

This proves that software developers in general were caught flat-footed by the internet, and that they failed us as customers by claiming that their computers were now "internet ready" and only meant by that that they gave us integrated no-choice branded browsers and instant messengers to save their market share, they didn't even think about us, just themselves.

No, it proves that Microsoft had zero regard for the Internet and for their customers. The Mac OS had no problems like this. Linux had no problems like this. BSD had no problems like this. The only developers that seemed to think that allowing authentication-less control over the local environment was acceptable (and then tried to promote the view that "no desktop machines should ever exist on the Internet without being firewalled") were the developers at Microsoft. Unfortunately, for them, all their competitors did not completely ignore security when designing software, and as a result, the Microsofties came out looking rather pathetic, especially when they tried to shunt blame off onto sysadmins for not trying to patch over *their* poor design with a firewall.

Its a shame XP SP2 disables this by defualt

[aardwolf204]

Its truly sad that Windows XP Service Pack 2 sets the messenger service to disabled by default. It was always nice to know that no matter if you friend on a lan was on AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, etc, you could send them a message. Its a shame marketing agencies abused this. I for one leave write on in *nix and messenger on in windows because I'm behind a NAT and dont get these annoyances, and sure every once in a while at a LAN party someone will annoy you with it when your playing a full screen game, but none the less its a shame that this functionality is going away by default, it was truly a cool feature in windows.

Oh, yeah, this is slashdot, um, in Soviet Russis you annoy popups

OT: Mozilla needs a regexp module

[Anonymous Coward]

So we can strip the annoying slashdot theme prefix and maybe do other neat stuff, like convert news links into regfree google links :)

Green slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Color harmony [slashdot.org]

"Annoyances"?

[penginkun]

So if I come 'round and kick them in the groin once a day and then leave, is that another of those 'annoyances (sic) you have to deal with in a free society'?

Seems like assault and battery, but really, it's not! And those ads they're sending, they only SEEM like an invasion of privacy, but trust me, they're not!

RFC 822

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he's trying to ignore the much more pervasive RFC-822 design flaw, which is that anyone in the world has append rights on my mailbox.

There's some hypocrisy here: when we talk about viruses, we blame the system vendor (Microsoft) for producing a vulnerable system. But when we talk about spam, we lay all the blame on the abusers of the vulnerable system, not the DESIGNERS of the vulnerable e-mail system or the USERS who insist on continuing to use a vulnerable system.

they spamed the wrong person

[E8086]

this was slashdot-ed back in Nov03 [slashdot.org] according to MSNBC [msn.com]

"Part of the reason Windows Messenger pop-ups caught the attention of the FTC is that one of the agency's commissioners received one of the advertisements at home"

Around a year ago(or more) one of my housemates, whose only firewall was the WinXP "it's almost a firewall," was getting several dozen a day. I told him to use a real firewall, think it was the free ZoneAlarm. Even after that he was still getting enough to have to tell me he was still getting them, possibly during windows startup before Zone Alarm could start or when he disabled it to run Kazaa. Even with the little extra cash I got installing free firewalls it wasn't worth the number of complaints I was getting.

Funny how you can net send spam millions of the world's computers and get away with it, but spam one gov't agent and you'll be promptly(after months of legal stuff) shutdown. Because of the inconvenience of not being able ignore them like traditional email spam I'm going to side with the FTC on this one.

oh yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

click here if you dont want any more popups!
are you also annoyed by ads? here you can get rid of!

yeah great, an ad against ad's.
bombing for peace, anyone?