I am aware of some of the tricks used to persuade people install malicious software. It is rare that I get caught but at times I can be gullible too.
It was my turn this morning, and it took a couple of hours to recover from my lack of vigilance. I don’t suppose facemoods will want to cover that cost though (consider the many hours of productivity lost worldwide down to scams like these).
Fortunately not many organisations take the nasty bullyware approach to business like facemoods. What they hope to gain from such tactics mystified me until I read a complaint by someone called Yang from facemoods in response to complaints flooding in to the Firefox add-on reviews page. He said “We have millions of users worldwide“. A cynic would say they have managed to bully millions of users into installing their conware.
He goes on to say the addon is offered 100% free but he’s not telling the truth. His software replaces adsense publishers codes with his own. That’s right, he’s hijacking content owners reason for publishing.
Not only have they replaced search engines with a poor quality copy affiliate page (and thus benefiting from the affiliate income any ad clicks they produce) they replace many affiliate links with their own thus hijacking the income from bloggers and other organisations that have worked hard to produce a reputation and good rankings.
Wait a minute – say that again – what do you mean facemoods hijacks income?
Yes, its important to understand this. If you own a blog and earn an income from affiliate revenue, facemoods is hijacking your income. How does this happen? Its so easy it’s embarrassing but let’s give you a real world example:
Let’s say you are a famous blogger, and your subject is dog training. You love dogs, take photos every day, create video and podcasts, and help people with all aspects of dog training, grooming, behaviour therapy, and you are accepted as a leading authority. To cover the cost of your work and the expenses you have you make book and DVD recommendations and gain a small commission through Amazon for each purchase people make.
I buy a lot of books and I love the idea that I reward the blogger who has taken the time to review the book by purchasing from the link on their page.
This has become the de facto standard method for rewarding bloggers and content providers for their efforts and facemoods thinks it ok to steal it.
So if Mr Yang’s boast of “millions of users” is true then he is making an absolute killing through deceit and dishonest practices. Hardly 100% free.
Is this really happening?
Those of you familiar with Adsense are going to ask “Surely Google know about this and stop it?” I don’t know but what’s the incentive for Google to do that? They proved they do not care much for their adsense publishers when they cut 90% of the commission income, and it hasn’t stopped Mr Yang from trying.
In the mean time other applications fighting for memory are robbed of this resource. If you are not a heavy user of the reader then the overall effect is to slow your productivity.
A raft of software, drivers and functions load each time the cam attempts to do it’s thing, and this causes numerous problems in other software such as Skype and Microsoft’s own Windows Live Movie Maker, here are a few examples:
<rant>
