Calling the practice “extortion,” the US Federal Trade commission has taken action against D. Squared Solutions and its principals Anish Dhingra and Jeffrey Davis, who allegedly spammed 135,000 Internet addresses every hour with pop-up advertisements advertising software that would block the same pop-ups!
An article by Dennis Callaghan on the eWeek website does a nice job exploring the issue, including the fact that these kinds of pop-ups were made possible because Microsoft added the poorly-thought-out Windows messenger server to Windows 2000. It’s still there in XP, although now the default is to have the service turned off, rather than turned on.
You’ll find more details at this article on the FTC’s website
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