Bastard sons of scum sucking weasels (desktopdollars.com)

Member Name: cjkace

Product:	desktopdollars.com
Date:	01/07/01 (298 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None

Disadvantages: HotText hijacking advertising

Bit of an over the top title? Read on and then you tell me.
** Please note the use of the word 'bastard' in the title is not as a profanity. It refers to them being fatherless sons of... **

Desktop dollars for the uninformed is one of the few remaining 'get paid to surf' programs, most of the others having withdrawn from the race due to lack of advertising revenue. Basically you download a small program, that when installed creates a bar on your screen that flashes adverts at you. You are supposed to be paid a set amount for every hour that the bar is running, and you are surfing the net.

I used it when it first launched but after earning only 50 cents for over thirty hours surfing, I ditched it. My friend who introduced me, however, did not.

He has consistently used it and has yet to receive the minimum payout limit, earning around two dollars a month for having their advert bar on his screen for around forty hours a month.

Recently, however, he has noticed some strange things happening on web pages that he views. This seemed to start when he installed the latest version of their viewbar.

Certain words on webpages that my friend visited were underlined and flashed yellow, even if the word was not a hyper-link. Clicking on these words opened a little pop-up box that invited him to visit sites (shopping pointed to Ebay). I must stress that this was coming from his own PC as viewing the source of the web-pages revealed no link!

A little digging on his machine uncovered a little program call EZULA, that seemingly installed, without permission!, when he installed the new desktop dollars bar. A quick search on Google shows that Ezula is a advertising site that is selling this technology to other companies.

So how does it work?

Well Ezula is pioneering something called HotText, which seems to be very much like the smart-tags feature that Microsoft are busy removing from Wi
ndows XP. Companies pay for their websites to be associated with certain words which are stored in the Ezula program. Then whenever the browser goes to a site that has the word on the page it will highlight and create a link.

Hey that sounds ok you are thinking?

Well consider a site like DooYoo. By using certain words (shopping, opinions, community, music etc) in the Ezula HotText program it would be possible to hijack the advertising revenue from DooYoo. DooYoo has a link to Blackstar. Well imagine if I bought the right to have DVD and Video built into my own version of Ezula HotText. Then if I could convince people to install my own version, whenever they visted DooYoo, and the words DVD or Video were present on the page, they would be highlighted and offer you the chance to visit "CJKAce's Movie Emporium". DooYoo would receive no money for this, and Blackstar wouldn't receive many visitors from the DooYoo site.

As you have probably guessed, Desktop Dollars have indeed signed up their own version of HotText, and predictably offer it as a way for you to earn more money. As they don't seem to pay out anyway (or it takes so long to make it unviable) it's a bit of a moot point.

The problem is that this software hi-jacks other sites advertising revenue, which means that many sites whose business relies on targetted advertising, like DooYoo, Ciao, IPoints etc, will start to lose their advertisers, which means they close down and ulimately WE lose.

So yes, Ezula and Desktop Dollars are in my opinion the

"Bastard sons of scum sucking weasels"

(My apologies to any weasels that may be reading this, but I refer only to your scum-sucking brethren)

** Read more about Ezula at www.ezula.com **

Summary: