Sneaky Add-On Annotates Ads To Your Web Surfing Experience
from the sneaky-bastards dept
Well, it's about time for the next big controversy to spring up, so here's a candidate. One of the popular new music sharing programs is KaZaa. KaZaa has a deal with EZula to automatically install a program called TOPText which adds random "advertisment" hyperlinks on any webpage you surf. It's very similar to Microsoft's SmartTags idea, or ThirdVoice's defunct annotation program - except that most people don't realize they've installed it. They think their surfing experience has been hijacked and they might be right. The article gives a number of examples where a site has the added "advertisement hyperlinks" to a competing site. Can't wait for people to get angry about this one.
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Kazaa Hi-Jacking
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will the s**t hit the fan?
I still think this is a sleazy and insidious way to advertise, with many questionable ethical uses (ie: the fact that those tags can be used to highjack traffic from a competitor's site).
I'm hoping this will raise as much of a stink for this company as it did for Microsoft...
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