<h4>Information Request/Feedback Form<h4>
<form action="/cgi-bin/formmail">
<input type="hidden" name="recipient" value="name@domain.com">
<input type="hidden" name="subject" value="Response via feedback form">
<input type="text" name="realname" size="30"> Name <br>
<input type="text" name="realaddress1" size="30"> Address <I>optional</I><br>
<input type="text" name="realaddress2" size="30"> Address <I>optional</I><br>
<input type="text" name="realaddress3" size="30"> Address <I>optional</I><br>
<input type="text" name="realpostcode" size="30"> Postcode <I>optional</I><br>
<input type="text" name="realtel" size="30"> Telephone <I>optional</I><br>
<input type="text" name="realmail" size="30"> email <I>If you want a response</I><br>
<br>
<textarea name="feedback" cols="50" rows="10">Your comments here.</textarea><br>
<input type="submit" value="Submit">
<input type="reset" value="Reset">
</form>

Any suggestions gratefully accepted !!

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SCUMBAGS HIJACK YOUR WEB SITES
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quote:

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"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

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eZula is a new Pay Per Click service and they have partnered with you to drive visitors away from your web site. You don't get to choose about participating and the only reward you will get is…. well, actually you don't get diddly.

You do get something, but I can't say what in polite company.

They get to sell targeted traffic based on the content of every web page in the world without having to resort to developing any content, running a PPC search engine, or actually doing much of anything. Sounds like the Web to me.

To back up a bit before continuing to vent my anger over this issue, the story goes something like this:

There is a new file sharing system launched in the wake of the MP3 sharing/stealing war, and the new system is called KaZaa. You download it, install it and get right back to sharing bootleg music files. KaZaa claims that almost 6 million people have downloaded and installed its system.

Unfortunately when you install KaZaa you also get a virus installed on your computer. I call it a virus because by most descriptions I've seen of the term, TopText qualifies as a virus. You don't ask for it. It takes control of your browser and makes changes to everything you read on the Internet.

TopText operates with a browser to highlight words on every web page, inserting a yellow background behind keywords that have been purchased through their media sales company eZula, Inc. If a web user clicks on one of those yellow highlighted words on a web page, the user is whisked away to the site of the company paying the most that day for each click-through. If a user whose browser is infected with TopText visits your web site, they will be offered links to competitor's web sites for every keyword they find on your site for which they have a buyer.

This is not much, if any, different from the Smart Tags system that Microsoft announced for their Windows XP browser. Media and webmaster pressure and outrage caused Microsoft to cancel, for now, their release of that feature.

This new invasion of our web sites is different because the media appears to care not at all. Where is their righteous indignation now? I'll tell you… nowhere. Talking about a bunch of companies nobody has ever heard of is not glitzy enough compared to attacking Microsoft.

So, if this misuse of technology is to be beaten, you are going to have to do it.

Word has that you can send your list of sites to support@ezula.com and they will block their virus from operating on your pages. If all 300,000 of you send in your list and follow up every day until they block it, you could probably show them a little something about how webmasters feel about companies infringing on their intellectual property rights.

Respected download web sites such as Cnet Network's http://www.Download.com are actively helping this virus to spread on an unsuspecting world. I wonder why they would distribute something that would place links to competitor sites on their own web pages?

EZula claims that they have a relationship with a major ISP which should come as no surprise keeping in mind how many ISPs are starving for income.

The MP3 file sharing software allows anyone to share files for free. Free is the only model that works for that whole industry. People don't want to pay when they can get valuable content for free. So KaZaa had to find somewhere that they could generate profits without have to work at it. So they chose my web site and yours. If they can steal our traffic and sell it to our competitors, that should be profitable, right?

Sure it is. They can get (currently) about 15 cents for every click through and they don't have to share with anyone. Does anyone else see the irony in this? It shouldn't come as a great surprise that a company built on the premise that everyone should be able to get free music and cut the musicians totally out of the system would turn to another way of stealing content and do it in a way that cuts the content developers total out of the system.

Why pay too advertise on my web site when you can pay these bozos to hack into my content and send you some cheap, stolen traffic. To add insult to injury, they deface my sites with their ugly yellow background colors.

Maybe TopText is both a virus and a hacker at the same time. Hackers find ways to change the content of your web pages. TopText does it by infecting Net user's computers.

Hacus? VirCker? Scumbag?

Further reading:

EZula Marketing site: http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g117ezula

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Slashdot: Don't eat yellow links http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g117slash

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San Francisco Chronicle article http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g117sfg

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Kazza web site http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g117kaza

[This message has been edited by Jim (edited 08-10-2001).]

[This message has been edited by Jim (edited 08-24-2001).]

"The only entities that should receive revenue from a site are the site's owners and those with whom they have agreements. Further, altering a webpage without permission violates its copyright. I believe that there is a strong legal basis should website owners choose to bring suit against you. You would be well advised to find an alternative use for your technology."

Are they speaking in Klingon?
I don't think I have a cgi/pl file, and where do I set the paths to perl and sendmail?

Sorry if I'm being excessively dumb.

I suppose those are both better because the user chose to install them but suppose a user specifically goes and installs this TopText client for some strange reason?

Don't get me wrong it completely pisses me off that someone will take people away from my site and they get paid - not me. If ever there was a company that deserved to be the target of a DoS attack it's these jokers. I'd love to be a judge when some website owner goes into their offices and picks up a couple laptops that look nice.

Still, aside from the scummy way they distributed their software what are they doing that's worse than the other examples. Perhaps the answer is nothing and we should be rallying against all of the above.

Yeah it sucks when someone's business plan is to make money from someone else's work but in some ways we all do it don't we. I run my site on a Linux based machine and use MySQL neither of which I paid for. ISP's would go out of business if all the websites went away and yet they pay me nothing. It's all a matter of degrees.

"/cgi-bin/formmail"

A script in your cgi-bin should be formmail.cgi or formmail.pl (you don't have the extension, so you may have made a simple error on the form).

If there is no such script in your cgi-bin, you will probably have to install one (try http://www.hotscripts.com )

The path to perl and path to sendmail are variables you would need to configure in the mail script. However, your paths are the most common ones, and many scripts will work "out of the box" without you needing to make changes.

The permissions is what allows a cgi script to run. After you upload it to your cgi-bin, use your FTP program to CHMOD the file. With WSFTP, left click the file name to select it, then right click it. Select chmod (UNIX). Owner should be "read write execute", group and other should both be "read execute". Click OK and your file is now executable.

Follow the instructions for whatever formmail script you've chosen to create a new form for your web page.

If you have trouble getting it to work, post a message in the CGI forum below and I'm sure someone will try to help get it going.

Given the huge amount of work that most of us have put into our sites, and particulary given the current economic situation we face, this is a serious issue.

As for MySQL & Linux, those were given to the public, rather than stolen from the developers. That's the key difference.

Anything's a matter of degrees. But that doesn't mean that clear conclusions can't be drawn here.

When I am visiting web pages it pops up every now and then offering me an alternate place I might want to go based on the content it sees on the current page I am visiting. I don't don't really mind it because it manages all of my user names and passwords when I have to log in anywhere. It probably helps me out 100 times a day. For that, I'll watch some pop-up ads.

I can also tell it to never show me a specific ad again.

Were it to go into the pages I'm trying to read and fiddle with the look and contents of the page, that would be a different story.

Nobody has the right to change the contents of any page on the web except the owner of that page.

All of the programs that strip out the advertising from pages, replace ads on pages with ads that do not benefit the owner of the page, or attempt to bleed traffic off from a legitimate page in order to earn money by corrupting the actual contents of the page, those are what gets my dander up.

Apparently there are no limits to what we will allow people to do in their efforts to defraud us.

In order to make these types of scams go away it will be necessary to show any company sleezey enough to buy clicks from them that they might as well start sending out spam as well because they are trashing their online reputation.

If you would like to contract for links from my content that is something that is easily negotiated.

You may not corrupt the contents of my property without my permission and if the situation continues I will explore legal remedies.

My sites are as follows:
http://jimworld.com http://virtualpromote.com
.... the rest of my domain names ....

Please advise when you have disabled your software and it no longer has the ability to make unauthorized changes to my property.

Jim Wilson
jim@jimworld.com

i can't believe what these dirtbags are proposing to do with other people's advertising dollars.

a company can spend mountains of money for print ads advertising their web site, big bucks for goto clicks, and go through months of expensive search engine optimizations and then microsoft or this other scumbag ezula company can come along and steal your hard earned web audience and redirect them to one of their paid link whores.

i mean, you go through all the trouble of months of seo changes to get that perfect ranking, only to have your hard earned traffic given for free to these greedy, filthy, disgusting, and unholy link animals.

i am shocked that microsoft could even think about putting this out, i hope that they have permanently canceled that idea because that is scary (with microsoft's huge market share they would own 78% of web site traffic from every web site on the net).

but don't get me wrong, i also believe that this other ezula company is just as despicable, immoral, unholy, unrighteous, and uncouth as their larger counterpart. i hope they get a big up-yours card from the webmaster community.

i am not as worried with this other company since they are smaller than a giant like microsoft, but does anybody know just how much of a threat these smaller companies really are in terms of market share?

by the way, i never even thought about that nbci thingy that does the same thing, i saw it advertised but i didn't think twice about how it could damage things. after careful consideration, i think they are dirtbags too.

this technology should be regulated like UCE, it should be "opt in" by webmasters only and not 'opt out'.

i just wanted to express how upset i am at these people. next week i am going to hire a voodoo expert to cast a spell on ezula.

[This message has been edited by Black Hole (edited 08-10-2001).]

I just installed kazaa yesterday and love it - I found a whole bunch of old videos I've been looking for.

When I made my daily visit to gethighforums, I saw these yellow links. At first I thought it was an ingenious spammer putting in their referal link and slipping by the moderators

now I found out the truth - what a true pain - when is the class action lawsuit happening?

Either way though, I can simply close the ezula program (alt ctrl del once and its gone) and I'm surfing free.

From an end user standpoint (not a business one) its worth it simply for the fact that the amount of items on kazaa is mind boggling

From a business standpoint, they are stealing away visitors I worked hard for. They are illegally advertising on a site.

Its the same thing as being a solicitor in a no soliciting zone - except there's no friendly clerk to tell them to get out

I remember once in my Judo and Kickboxing class, a solicitor walked in and my instructor just turned around and was like get out or be hurt

Too bad I can't send a kick or choke over the internet pipelines

... or is that the next generation internet invention? nahh

quote:

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Dear Mr. Fox,

It has come to my attention that C/Net is actively distributing a software program which directly alters website content without permission or authorization from its owner. The program known as "KaZaa Media Desktop" is currently being distributed from the C/Net site at this url: http://download.cnet.com/downloads/1,10150,0-10001-103-0-1-7,00.html?tag=srch&qt=kazaa&cn=&ca=10001 . This program includes a section of code and feature called "Top Text". Top text is used to directly alter the browser and the content that a surfer will view by inserting a yellow background behind keywords that have been purchased through their media sales company eZula, Inc. I'm sure that you are aware of the latest controversy over the new Microsoft Operating System which included a similar feature called "Smart Tags" and the resulting problems both ethically and legally. The eventual cancellation of "Smart Tags" due to building pressure from media & website owners should have been the end of copyright infrigement features in operating systems and programs. Instead, with your help (any many other sites), Ezula Inc. is accomplishing what microsoft could not achieve in the media spotlight. I would like to ask that you carefully review the "KaZaa Media Desktop" and its implications, especially regarding copyright infringement.

Sincerely,

Melissa D. Martin

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Can you post the email address for Fox?

Maybe some other webmasters would like to drop him a friendly note as well.

The email address for Steve Fox, Editor of CNET Online is sfox@cnet.com

A list of other editors responsible for the content of the C/NET site can also be found here:
http://www.cnet.com/aboutcnet/0-13615-7-309474.html

sales@dialtoneinternet.com

Press Contact: tracoobian@thorpco.com

Anyone know if you can just install top text from any where.

[This message has been edited by jkcity (edited 08-11-2001).]