Isn't the protection racket illegal? You know, where thugs go into a business and tell the owner that for a percentage of his income they'll "protect" his business. If he doesn't pay them, bad things seem to happen. That's extortion and that is illegal.
Why isn't the computer protection racket illegal?
You've seen it, the little box that pops up and says "Your computer is infected with spyware."
Yeah. You put it there you farking asshole.
Then, the program offers you the opportunity to remove the spyware or adware that it installed if you buy their product. This should be illegal. It should be illegal for anyone to install stuff on your computer that you haven't requested.
It's always gotta be a few people who screw things up for the rest of us. It's times like these that I wish I weren't an atheist and that there were a hell. There would be a special place just for telemarketeers, spammers, comment spammers, virus writers, adware writers and popup writers. They're all scum!
What I would like to see is some young hero coders take on some of these buttwipes. Write some code that would attack the servers of the companies that write adware programs. Give these bastards a taste of their own medicine.
Extortion is illegal and computer extortion should be illegal also.
Posted by denny at April 20, 2005 08:01 PM
Real life cyber-cops have the ability to fry your hard drive, start fires, and then some if you don't unplug. Kiddie porn & terrorists are their araa of expertise and it's supposed to be a big secret... oop's.
Posted by: charlie on April 20, 2005 11:14 PMAt the risk of sounding like a broken record..
Mozilla. Firefox.
And yeah, those fuckers piss me off, too, but you know, if IE wasn't such a shit browser, they wouldn't even be in business.
Posted by: EatShiz on April 21, 2005 01:53 AMI use Sun Belt Software's "I hate Spam, I Hate Pop Up's and Pest Patrol" also Ad Aware SE Personal. Simply put it works for me great. Don't know if it would work for you John
Posted by: John on April 21, 2005 07:00 AMAnti-virus software: extortion. Bastards.
Posted by: Stephen J Whiteley on April 21, 2005 08:16 AMWrite and call your congress man and senators about cyber-extorsion. Get others to do the same. Hold seminars about it with friends and neighbors or anyone else who'll listen. Get them writing and calling. Paper letters have far more influence on legislators than does email. Get your local board of supervisors to hold hearings on whether they should pass a resolution to petition your congressional deligation about the issue. That's how you change the law.
Posted by: Ric on April 21, 2005 12:24 PMMore laws won't solve the problem, IE sucks as a browser. What is needed is a direct approach. Once I lived near a CB'er that ran illegally, bleeding all over the TV, radio and home entertainment systems in the neighborhood, repeated requests to tone it down were ignored. FCC didn't respond either, neither did local police, the gentleman in question insisted he had the right to operate as he pleased and for us busybodies to stay out of his affairs. It culminated one night when someone anonymously placed a length of cable around his antenna and drove off into the night with it and a portion of his house, with the understanding that more would follow the problem was solved.
Posted by: Jack on April 21, 2005 01:17 PMIf you can physically locate these extorsionist's and open a can of whoopass on 'em, more power to ya. Had your neighbor been caught he would have been in far more trouble than the HAM operator. Tearing out a section of wall is wreckless endangerment which is a felony in most places. Virginia passed an anti-spamming law and just two weeks ago sentenced the country's biggest spammer to nine years in the pen. If anyone feels sorry for him I'm sure he'll appreciate a couple of tubes of KY jelly from time to time. Big Elmo is already making wedding plans.
Posted by: Ric on April 21, 2005 04:05 PMDamn! Your server is slow as shit!
Posted by: reality on April 21, 2005 05:39 PMJust driving a nail thru his coax feed would have done the job. As soon as he keys his transmitter the amp will fry itself......
Posted by: Rick T on April 21, 2005 10:39 PMJack - All they would have really had to do was paint his antenna. I had a HAM friend who did that to a CB'er.
Reality - Hosting Matters put another site on the server I use and evidently it gets a lot of traffic which causes slowdowns. I still wish I knew who your father was.
Posted by: Denny on April 21, 2005 11:07 PM