Ooooh you visit a porn-site, how interesting! (Hijack Ware)

Member Name: triplecthegame

Product:	Hijack Ware
Date:	24/08/01 (1355 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None

Disadvantages: Conpanies losing Trade, The Rich get Richer, The Poor get Poorer

We all have an affection for surfing the Internet don't we?, hey I mean its one of my favourite past-times, you need to know anything all you have to do is turn on a computer, plug it into a phone-line and away you go, but we're being watched you know?, not only by people walking through the room but by a few sneaky little companies.

Oh yes, Big Brother is watching you, and Mr.Brother is selling you short, look in the description of this category, if you're even only slightly Internet literate then you're bound to have heard of at least one of those programs, heck depending on how much you use dooyoo you may have even been tempted to download one of the programs, but after reading that blurb and this opinion are you still going to be going downloading?, well lets hope not.

So imagine then, that you've got an extremely slow internet connection, you feel that when you download things you want a bit of ooomph in your speeds, so you go searching on dooyoo for a speed optimizing program, all of a sudden (just an example) you see that Go!Zilla has a good rating, and decide to give it a try, after downloading you start to have a tinker around and notice its also added a piece of software called Gator! to your hard-drive as well, next thing you know you realise you've got something you see as a handy piece of software, it remembers all the dull stuff you need to put in when logging onto and registering for sites, this is just what you needed, and you decide to keep it. Within a couple of weeks you start to notice pop-up adverts and banner adverts appearing all over the web, especially on commercial websites vying for your custom, and they often seem relevant to what you're interested in buying, sounds like fun right?, wrong.

What you're probably not realising is that the original sites you're visiting aren't getting one penny from you clicking on these adverts, because the reason they're there is Gator,
not only is it saving you time by remembering all the dull details but its also keeping an eye on every single website you visit and sending this free market-research back to the programs creators, now then, just think of what you could do with this kind of information, you know where your customers are visiting, you know what they are looking at, you know what you need to get them interested in your store, and for a small sum, Gator will allow your advertisement to pop-up on their consumers screen whenever they visit certain sites.

So now lets move onto pretending to be someone else, you're the person interested in what results are coming back, well this is where you need to get in touch with another company, this time its a company called TOPtext once again this is an application hiding behind an 'internet help' type of software - this time its KaZaa, you know the one - its being hailed as the new Napster, but this time download it and watch as you get links placed on your website that you know nothing about.

Now hows all this working?, well its one thing - Keywords, companies like KaZaa and Gator are selling off keywords - certain words that when you search for them on the internet, trigger off the adverts, one big story that had done the rounds of your major news-sites was about an american online florist - visit their site, and if your computer had a certain application installed you'd get a pop-up for the florists biggest competitors offering a 10% discount, which is great for the consumer, but terrible for the retailer.

So why is it so bad for the retailer?, well its completely free advertising on their site, its well known that Yahoo - the most popular website on the internet is still not making a profit, so think about the little guys who can't absorb this kind of hack, the fledgling e-commerce sites, all of a sudden all their business is going elsewhere, they're losing money left right and centre, lets fa
ce it, not many businesses are going to stay afloat for long with this kind of competition, yet it amazes me that there is still no laws against not only the software but the companies using this kind of software, heck its still stealing, they're not stealing products or money, but they're still stealing customers, who eventually will generate cash and that cash will bring up the requests for more products.

However look at the problems there would be trying to get these kind of companies into court - first off its the Internet, its a world-wide creation as and of course its going to be virtually impossible to police, what if an english company is using one of these US based applications to gain customers?, with the way the British judicial system is, can we really expect the companies be brought to justice straight away?, of course not. Then look at how easy it is to look into any countries legal system and find loopholes, Shawn Fanning and Napster did it, they stood up for over a year against people trying to make them a paid-for service, and in a year how many companies are going to go under?, 100s?, 1000s?, how many people are going to lose their livelihoods?, is there a quick solution to this?, alas no, but the sooner these legal proceedings get put into place then the sooner online businesses can start to become stable and the online market can start to be the world-leader we all hope it to be.

So then next time you hear of the next big download, do yourself and the online world a favour, have a look around first and see whats really going onto your hard-drive.

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