Dear Cecil,
I visit www.whatever.com and I am blessed with popups that Goodgle doesn’t catch. Assuming I am not the victim of spyware, who puts the popup javascript into my incoming data stream? Is the owner of www.whatever.com responsible If not, who? – CR
Who put the pop in the popup bop shebop?
Who put the spy in the spy-o-eye-o-ware-ware?
I think it’s usually the case that the owners of www.whatever.com have sold some ad space to creepazoid.adshovers.com; the code on www.whatever.com’s pages includes a reference link which gets filled with content over which www.whatever.com has no control. The folks at creepazoid.adshovers.com are most likely the culprits, although I suppose it’s possible that they accept ad content from one of their clients, sleezy.redirect.com, and include it in their rotating ad content, and that the spyware stuff gets incorporated into the mix through the design submitted by sleezy.redirect.com. That assumes that creepazoid.adshovers.com doesn’t spend much effort or time examining what is provided to them by their clients, and that the clients provide their own ad code rather than paying creepazoid.adshovers.com to design it for them.
The folks at www.whatever.com are still culpable for having sold ad space to an org that puts up spyware (and it is their responsibility as sellers of ad space to do some detective work in that regard, IMHO), and creepazoid.adshovers.com is similarly responsible for whatever client-supplied ad copy they include in their rotation if they do in fact accept and receive ad code from their clients.