Zango Caught in Lies About MySpace? 81
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).'"
I for one... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I for one... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I for one... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I for one... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I for one... (Score:1)
--
and men who make excuses saying "I'm middle management," you could freely beat them to death.
You have a strange obsession with beating...
Re:I for one... (Score:1)
Re:I for one... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I for one... (Score:4, Funny)
Tonight? Um, I'm busy.... (Score:3, Funny)
Good thing he's not me.
Braindead marketing practices (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Re:Braindead marketing practices (Score:2)
I assumed that it had but then somebody posted an article about it on /. again.
Re:Braindead marketing practices (Score:2)
Trying this again (Score:2)
Oh. My. God. These people should be locked up somewhere, because they're completely insane.
Re:Braindead marketing practices (Score:5, Insightful)
-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?
Re:Braindead marketing practices (Score:1)
Re:Braindead marketing practices (Score:2)
Re:Braindead marketing practices (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Braindead marketing practices (Score:3, Funny)
Informative? (Score:1)
Re:Braindead marketing practices (Score:2)
Another fun
<stewie voice>Oh, my frickin sweet is it! How rather generous of you. Can I have another, hmm? Hmm?</stewie voice>
Re:Braindead marketing practices (Score:2)
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)
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)
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.
Re:Fer Shame... (Score:2)
I heard there are places in San Fansisco where people get together to do just that. And then they send each other infected emails for kicks.
It's just sick.
Correction! (Score:2)
there, fixed.
I dunno... (Score:1, Funny)
I'm out.
Zango's underhanded marketing (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Zango's underhanded marketing (Score:2)
Re:Zango's underhanded marketing (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:Zango's underhanded marketing (Score:2)
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)
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.
Re:Zango's underhanded marketing (Score:2)
Re:Zango's underhanded marketing (Score:2)
Re:Zango's underhanded marketing (Score:2)
Re:Zango's underhanded marketing (Score:1)
The last time, incidentally, was when I was searching Wikipedia. I came across this revision of a Wikipedia article on Zango Messenger, a spyware laden IM service made by Zango.
And I remeber reading something as that IM being a Miranda IM clone, with the copyrights removed.
It might be me but I haven't figured HOW does the URL tag work yet ;(
Re:Zango's underhanded marketing (Score:3, Funny)
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
Re:Zango's underhanded marketing (Score:2)
Not too surprising since recently Time Warner's site for kids has been pushing Zango spyware on them [donotreply.com].
as a myspace user (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:as a myspace user (Score:4, Funny)
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:as a myspace user (Score:2)
Insightful!?!? (Score:1)
+1 Insightful, no way
Lies: How malware and politicians relate (Score:4, Funny)
What this is all about (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:What this is all about (Score:1)
1) Zango is a company that cannot be trusted.
2) Myspace kids are dumb.
3) There is a lot of ad/spyware on the web.
Yawn. Makes a guy wonder what good old Jerry Taylor [slashdot.org] is up to these days? Or perhaps Ted Stevens [slashdot.org]? There's gotta be something else in these "tubes".
Re:What this is all about (Score:2)
so, on an unrelated note, how much $$$?
Is that NEWS for nerds? or STUFF THAT matters? (Score:2)
Cuz it doesn't look like news for nerds OR stuff that matters.
RActually (Score:2)
heh, sounds like a band name - "The New Nerds" with there new hit, "Rock the Distro".
In a related story... (Score:4, Funny)
WTF... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:WTF... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:WTF... (Score:2)
Celebrity? (Score:2)
Maybe we could ask the MPAA about that, hmmmmm...
Re:Celebrity? (Score:1)
Let's be fair (Score:5, Funny)
But does it run on linux? (Score:2)
Re:But does it run on linux? (Score:2)
Seriously... (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:Seriously... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Seriously... (Score:1)
Re:Seriously... (Score:2)
Of course, the nerds bitched and moaned about LJ too as I recall.
Re:Seriously... (Score:2)
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
Decoded summary (Score:4, Informative)
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)
Re:I RTFA yet.... (Score:2)
http://www3.ca.com/securityadvisor/pest/pest.aspx
Re: (Score:2)
Zango doesn't work on my machine (Score:1)
Please use Internet Explorer 5+ or Firefox on Windows to access this content.
flamebait? MY hate? (Score:1)
for the longest time nerds were outcasted when the net first started.
myspace is a way for the rest of the non-tech-savvy people to catch up.
when geocities.com first started in the mid-90's, every tech/geek/nerd/etc had a webpage that looked not as high quality but just and loud and annoying as the my space profiles these "teens" create.
the world has caught up, and now they are making webpages
todays myspace.com pages is like yesterdays geocities pages.....