Labels blur and change with time. It's behaviour that's
important, and not the common label for it. That makes legal
approaches to stopping harmful actions difficult. If your
definition of an act that could be made illegal is imprecise, the
behaviour continues, and law-abiding citizens are restricted from
activities that are beneficial to consumers and the economy.
For software, the labels have changed quickly. Good labels have
become bad words. Marketing methods that worked well in the 1990s
have been taken over by con artists in these opening years of the
new century.
I've been watching the industry from the inside for years now.
I've been publishing software since 1984, writing about computers
and software since 1988, marketing shareware since 1991, and have
been helping local clients keep their computers working for the
past decade. For the past two years, that has meant sudden
increases every few months in virus removal, adware removal,
spyware removal, and removal of phone-home components from boxed
software and hardware products that slow computers down to the
point of being doorstops.
Since personal computers became available in the late 1970's,
software has evolved from very expensive to inexpensive, and
sometimes free. Back then, small programs developed by an
independent programmer were frequently given away. A few innovative
programmers started to ask for contributions to help finance
additional development of larger programs such as PCWrite and
PC-File , and shareware marketing of software began.
There were other such software labels in those days, including
postcardware, begware, bannerware, freeware, and dozens of others.
In 1987, the Association of Shareware Professionals was founded in
order to promote the creation of try-before-you-buy software, or
shareware.
Now, shareware is commercial software, sold mostly online,
marketed with downloads of try-before-you-buy editions of the
product. It's the same approach as the free sample of a product in
a grocery store, and while there are many variations on how the
shareware edition sells a full commercial software product, the
successful authors all have this in common: the shareware
experience has to get a customer interested in the product and
happy with the free trial so that money will be spent on the full
version software. Shareware authors cannot anger customers with
autostart changes and other surprises and still expect payment.
Most other approaches to making money with software aren't that
easy to categorize.
Definitions of these other types of software are far more
difficult. Adware is a good example. Adware was a good thing, at
one time. In 1992, adware was software given away for free that
included an advertisement for other products sold by the same
author. There was no connection to the internet to get ads – this
was before the WWW explosion, and the advertisements were just a
handful of graphics or a few paragraphs of text that were included
with the software.
By 1998, adware's definition had changed. It became a free
product that downloaded advertisements through an internet
connection from a third-party ad agency, displayed the ads in the
same window as the program, paid the author on the basis of how
many ads were displayed, and the ads never appeared by themselves.
Most authors found that adware, as it existed then, didn't pay well
enough to support additional program development.
2000 was when things changed. Venture capital entered adware, in
a big way. Within the shareware industry, authors saw big money
devoted to drawing products and authors away from the free download
of a try-before-you-buy product, attempting to convince authors
that being paid a few cents for every download of a product with
advertising sponsors was more profitable as a marketing model than
being paid $30 for a product license.
At the industry convention that year, authors were told by one
start-up exhibitor that they could earn a $17,500 bonus for
incorporating a new component into their products and offering them
for free download. That component would add a text-only
advertisement in the title bar of Internet Explorer, running
anytime that Internet Explorer was running, whether the free
product was running or not. That was the turning point, when the
advertisements were no longer linked to the free software. That
particular experiment didn't do much; a good time was had by all at
the party and casino night, but only a handful of authors signed
up, and the venture company had disappeared by the following
Summer.
Since then, adware has become a bad word, linked to spyware and
privacy violations by everyone except the publishers of the
products. Now, adware shows up as free software that will put a
convenient tool in your taskbar to do a task for you, possibly
storing passwords, putting smiley faces in e-mail, or weather
reports on the desktop, or as a free screen-saver of the month.
Adware and spyware are particularly prevalent in software
products that are themselves illegal or potentially so, in
particular software for file sharing and copying music and movies.
The majority of adware is installed on the basis of stealth, hiding
what it does in a license agreement on a web site, subject to
change at any time, without notice, stating that the software item
"collects and stores information about the pages you view" and "may
use that information to provide targeted ads." But most don't
mention that they work full-time, and that installation of more
than one of these software gadgets in combination can turn a fast
computer into a blithering slowpoke.
Worse, much spyware/adware is installed on the basis of a pop-up
message, along the lines of "Would you like to not continue
installing (gadget name), and give up (feature)?" Many computer
users automatically think they've read the message that a program
wants to install a graphics viewer add-in, and immediately click
'No.' Wrong answer–that meant 'install.' This is deception at best,
and in many cases, fraud.
So, why was adware a good thing ten or fifteen years ago, and
bad now? Well, compare it to television commercials. Some
commercials are annoying, some are funny, some are just too loud,
but all of them go away when you change channels or decide you'll
play a movie from DVD instead. That was adware in the early days –
it paid for the program it came with, it said so up-front with no
trickery, and if you didn't use the program, or uninstalled it, the
ads went away.
Adware as it exists now, to continue the television comparison,
would be something like this: "In exchange for watching the program
(name here) you agree that your television will show ads of our
choice, which may be adult or deceptive in nature, at all times
that the television is turned on, and may interrupt other
programming to do so at our convenience, and may tie up your phone
line to get more ads and send home information about your viewing
habits." Well, it's my computer, and my television. If a company
wants to give me a free television or a free computer, I'll take it
for whatever value it provides, and keep it and tolerate the
advertising as a cost of having it available, or choose not to take
it. But that's not adware as it exists now. It's my computer, not
theirs.
The lines for adware are even being blended into virus and
Trojan territory. Clearly, much spyware is a Trojan – it's the gift
horse with the phone-home software inside. But some virus-writer's
techniques are finding their way into adware, and denial-of-service
attacks have come to mean both a virus that floods a web site with
data to prevent its use, and a spyware program that slows down a
single computer while it phones home for more ads, and to act as a
server for advertising on other computers.
As I've removed these little monsters and thieves of personal
data, I've found that many are self-repairing, just like the newer
viruses and other malware. Remove one autoplay entry for some of
these products, restart the computer, and it will come right back.
There are multiple starting points, all checking for and repairing
each other, so that professional cleanup tools are needed to root
out all the infected parts of the software at once. Cleanup of
adware or spyware isn't much different from cleanup of a virus or
worm.
So, is boxed software or the software that accompanies hardware
any better? Usually, but not always. Some boxed software, or
shelfware, connects to a server back at the publisher for a variety
of purposes. Some do it for a valid reason, such as product
updates. Some will phone home for license validation, and while
that's a touchy subject for some consumers, as long as the
publishers announce what they're doing, and why, before purchase of
the product, and don't send private information home without
permission, it's a valid choice for how to compete, make a profit,
and use that profit to continue supporting and developing the
product.
Some boxed software, however, doesn't play fair. For example, a
major manufacturer of colour photo printers installs, along with
their drivers for printing, a series of four extra programs that
automatically run when Windows starts. Surprisingly, at least to
most owners of the printers, disabling all four of those programs
does not result in any loss of printing functionality whatsoever.
What those programs do isn't documented, but judging from
filenames, apparently at least one is intended to assist users in
publishing photographs onto a web site for an additional fee. It's
a stealth install; no permission is asked, but it's there, and it
slows some computers down markedly, and reduces stability, and
costs productivity.
Labels don't seem to matter much. Adware and spyware are
imprecise descriptions of what these programs are doing. We can't
prohibit anything on the basis of labels; publishers will just say
that they're something else, and make a small adjustment in their
products to match the new definition. It's behaviour that must be
banned.
What behaviour cannot be allowed, then? First, all unannounced
installation of a software component that will autostart when a
computer is turned on should be prevented by legal prohibition, and
by intervention from the operating system. If the operating system
could pop up a warning of "An installation program is attempting to
add a program to the autostart list. Allow yes/no?", much of the
adware would simply go away.
Next, all unannounced use of an internet connection should be
prevented, again both legally and by intervention by software. The
software part is possible now, using software firewalls.
Finally, stealth installations have to be both banned and
prevented by software. Clicking on a program to "view weather"
should not do anything other than "view weather."
While law and technology attempt to catch up with the adware
publishers and the virus writers they've hired, what can consumers
do? Unfortunately, the answer is to watch what they're clicking on
carefully, backup their computers, and run scans for adware just as
they run scans for viruses and other malware.
Further, when software is offered for free, consumers have to
ask two questions: First, why is it free? If the answer is that "It
was a project I created in a day for our own use, and I'll donate
its use to the public (no support calls, please) for their own
use," and if you trust that statement to be true, great. And there
is a lot of such free software out there, especially in the open
source community, including applications for Linux. Or if the
answer is "I no longer support this product, but it's available for
those who still need it" OK, then as a user of free software, you
know what you're getting, and that's the key.
The second question to ask of free software is "What's paying
for this? What's the revenue model? Is there any visible way that
the free software is providing income to this software publisher?"
A free try-before-you-buy download of a shareware program is
advertising for purchasing the program itself, and that's OK. Or
built-in advertising can pay for free software, and you'll want to
know that before installing the program.
Some products don't need revenue, if they're small programs that
don't need support or updates, or written by a community of
authors. But if the publisher is putting major advertising efforts
into getting you to download free software with no visible means of
support, there's something wrong, and being a careful and
suspicious consumer is just as important for a downloader of
software as it is for someone selecting any other consumer
product.
© Jerry Stern 2004
This article was reproduced with the kind permission of the
author.
Jerry Stern is the editor of ASPects, the monthly newsletter of
the Association of Shareware Professionals, and is the author of
Graphcat and FileTiger, runs Science Translations Software, and is
on-line at www.filetiger.com.
