Spyware Companies And Their Evil Money

Business Week has a story about Direct Revenue, a spyware company from New York that has installed its malicious software on more than 100 million computers. The spyware software produced by Direct Revenue is bundled in free software like screensavers, smilies, file sharing tools. Once installed, the program monitors users' internet usage and delivers targeted pop-ups.

"Spyware rakes in an estimated $2 billion a year in revenue, or about 11 percent of all Internet ad business, says the research firm IT-Harvest. Direct Revenue's direct customers have included such giants as Delta Air Lines and Cingular Wireless. It has sold millions of dollars of advertising passed along by Yahoo." Other customers: Travelocity, Priceline.com, Vonage.

The spyware produced by the company is very difficult to uninstall and can sometimes disable other companies' spyware. It's funny to see that even Direct Revenue's investors fell prey to their software. "Disaster ensued, as Aurora paralyzed thousands of computers. Branko Krmpotic, the managing director of Technology Investment Capital Corp. (TICC), which had invested $6.7 million in Direct Revenue, also caught the Aurora bug and couldn't kill it, according to e-mails. Eventually, Direct Revenue had to send its customer support director to fix Krmpotic's machine. After receiving complaints about Aurora, Insight Venture, another major investor, told the company to remove Insight's name from the Direct Revenue Web site."

While the company stopped delivering lethal software like Aurora, it continues to infect many computers of non-tech-savvy users and receive threatening mails like this: "If I ever meet anyone from your company, I will kill you."

{ Via Slashdot. }

New In Gmail: Apply Filters To Old Emails

Until now, Gmail allowed users to set filters only for the future emails. Now when you create a filter or update one, Gmail allows you to apply it to old emails (see Also apply filter to 160 conversations below in the screenshot). That's a very useful feature. How could you use it?

1. You change your mail account and you want to send all your emails from the Gmail account to your new one. Set a filter without any restriction and forward all the emails. That might also be useful to backup your emails.

2. Forward more emails at once to a friend. Create a temporary label, set the label to the emails you want to forward, create a temporary filter that forwards the emails to your friend. And that's it. Don't forget to delete the filter after that.

3. You want to archive all your emails.

4. Delete all the emails from your ex-girlfriend.

5. Set the label "jobs" to all the emails that contain job in the subject.

6. Merge two labels (A, B). Set the label B to all the emails that have label A. Just type "label:A" in the "Has the words" input box and choose "apply the label B".

7. Filter your sent emails. Include "label:sent" in the "Has the words" input box.

You can think of many other nifty applications for this new feature.

Like the Delete All Spam link, this feature is not yet available to all the Gmail users.

More Gmail:
5 fast ways to check your Gmail account
Check multiple Gmail accounts