I hope this small fine hurts someones business model
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?storyID=2006-11-03T204731Z_01_N03360083_RTRUKOC_0_US-ZANGO-FTC.xml&rpc=81 An Internet advertising firm called Zango Inc. has agreed to pay $3 million to the U.S. government to settle allegations that its pop-up ad software was secretly installed on millions of personal computers, federal regulators said on Friday.
As part of the settlement, Zango must give consumers a way to remove disruptive adware and is barred from future downloads of its adware without consumers' consent, the Federal Trade Commission said.
"Consumers' computers belong to them, and they shouldn't have to accept any content they don't want," FTC consumer protection chief Lydia Parnes said in a statement.
The FTC said the Zango's adware was distributed by affiliates who often offered consumers free content and software, such as screensavers, peer-to-peer file sharing software, games, and utilities, without disclosing that downloading them would result in installation of the adware.
In other cases, Zango's distributors exploited security vulnerabilities in Web browsers to install the adware, the FTC said.
The FTC said Bellevue, Wash.-based Zango deliberately made the adware hard to find and remove, and even installed code on consumers' computers enabling the adware to be secretly reinstalled.
Zango, formerly named 180solutions Inc., accepted some blame for the problems in a statement. It did not admit any legal violations, but said it had relied too heavily on third-party affiliates.
"Unfortunately, this allowed deceptive third parties to exploit our system to the detriment of consumers, our advertisers and our publishing partners," Zango said.
While I,m all for taking down the spyware vendors is this not just a scam on the public who wont see a cent of that fine, insead it will no doubt end up in some officials pocket instead of going to pay out those who have been systematically abused by this company, when will justice be done rather than fines used to feathers a bunch of lawyers nests ?
