Spyware vs. Spyware: No Honor Among Thieves

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Slashdot reports on malware uninstalling malware from a competing company. Of course, the company on the short end of the stick is suing the other company. Ain’t America grand?

I can’t work up rancor over this, hence MPSIMS instead of The Pit. I hope the malware companies sue each other into oblivion and write programs more concerned with uninstalling the competition than popping up ads. It could solve the whole problem in a uniquely just way.

Of course, evolution will kick in and the malware will become even harder to uninstall. But to some extent that’s happening now, as a response to AdAware and Spybot Search&Destroy. But the other prong of this development, the lawsuits, will probably have a more lasting effect of squeezing the smaller players out of the crapware game. Not that the bigger companies will be any more responsible or nice to the computers of the unwary, but there promises to be fewer kinds of crap in the wild, which makes AdAware’s job that much easier.

2

I wonder if this case might create some sort of a precedent for suing any company that produces malware. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

3

That would, indeed, be wonderful. :slight_smile: It’s about time the makers of deliberately sneaky and destructive software got smacked but good.

4

ArsTechnica has a more detailed article on this very thing.

This sentence in the attacking spyware’s EULA is interesting:

We’re all used to EULAs demanding our firstborn and complete control over everything we’ll ever sea, hear, smell, and feel, but this is the first one I’ve heard of that mentions removing adware programs.

On the one hand, if this EULA is upheld, the next piece of adware will have language that legally allows it to remove AdAware and anything else the adware maker doesn’t like. On the other hand, if the EULA is struck down, the same legal decision could be used to make AdAware and programs like it illegal.

This could get very interesting.