Scumware: How TopText Works

"Imagine how powerful it could be to widen the effectiveness of search engine keyword advertising to the entire Web. This will enable you to reach millions of qualified users from every web page that contextually matches your campaign objective and your product or service keywords, anywhere on the Web." - eZula.com

Ezula's TopText is a virus-like collection of programs that gets installed onto your computer hen you download and install several desirable programs such as the new KaZa a system which has replaced the popular Napster program which allows people to download pirated copies of MP3 music files. C/NET's Download.com shows that KaZaa has been downloaded over 7 million times just from their site. If you read the user reviews for KaZaa you will see that most users are very upset about the programs installed that do not relate to file sharing. They don't like the programs that spy on you while you are online and send the data back to the media companies wanting to sell your private information with advertisers.

Obviously, KaZaa is being paid substantial amounts of money to act as a Trojan Horse and install all of this SpyWare on our systems. That makes sense as no Net user would voluntarily download and install something this evil. And since KaZaa is a company set up to get around the court's decisions regarding copyrights in the music industry and has no vehicle to actually generate an income, they must align themselves with other unethical companies in order to make a buck or two. Selling their T-shirts is probably not going to make them rich.

Following is an example showing how TopText works on a user's computer from ToolsForThe.Net which is our directory of webmaster resources. Because the list of active keywords that are underlined in yellow varies according to which bad guys are spending money to steal traffic, I am posting screen captures made in early August, 2001.

When you visit the first page you see that a yellow line has been added under link to the category of the directory dedicated to accepting credit cards. My intent is for visitors to click to drill down into the data I have assembled for their benefit.

My screen capture doesn't show the cursor in the capture, but the next image shows how it looks if you put your mouse over my link to the credit card category. The little pop-up box is not describing my content but rather the product being pimped on my page by TopText.

When you click on the link you are offered a one line option to stay on my site plus a 3 line sales pitch to leave my site now and visit the site paying to hack into my site and my traffic.

What a wonderful way to show that the Net allows anyone to survive as long as they will do anything for a buck.

When we first started educating people about the TopText threat, there were dozens of yellow keywords active on any given day. That means that there were many companies paying eZula (the company that sells the traffic stolen by TopText) each day. Now they are down to one or two advertisers each day willing to fly in the face of Net user's anger by paying for the traffic stolen from us. Fewer advertisers is a very good thing.

When we first started educating people about the TopText threat, the KaZaa installer had a very well hidden check-box that users could uncheck to avoid having TopText installed. It was set to a default that caused TopText to be installed automatically. the version now on Download.com does not install TopText unless you request it. That is progress. Not as good as if C/NET would do the right thing and stop offering this Scumware, but at least it is progress.