attention visitors from subeltblog - please read this

i'm getting an influx of traffic from sunbeltblog readers over the adware comment thread to end all adware comment threads that i wrote about earlier...

i would like to ask you all, before you send me hate-mail for being an 'adware apologist' (which i'm not), please take some courses in abstract reasoning and critical analysis - because once you actually have a handle on those skills you will probably understand what i was talking about in that comment thread...

the synopsis goes like so:

an anti-spyware website criticized an anti-spyware application (labelled it rogue, actually) in part because it was bundled with adware...

the question is, does installing program B make program A bad? the answer is yes if:

1. program A (an anti-spyware app) was supposed to stop program B (an adware client)

or

2. program B can be shown to be bad itself

while many adware clients are also spyware of one form or another, the anti-spyware website in question never established that the adware in question was also spyware so number 1 above is out... that just leaves us with number 2, but again the anti-spyware website in question failed to show that program B was bad, opting instead to simply indicate who created it...

being created by bad people (in this case very bad people) doesn't make software bad (john mcafee became a pariah in the av industry for his practices, but his software was still good)... furthermore, just because most of the software made by those bad people is bad doesn't mean this one in particular is bad... you can't prove they've never made good software (because you can't prove a negative), but you can prove that this one was bad if it really was - either indicate how the program was bad or indicate that it matches a program that was previously analyzed and determined to be bad...

does just being adware make it bad? no it does not.. not all adware installs in secret (and in this case the adware's presence was fully disclosed), not all adware has pop-ups, not all adware is also spyware... none of those really bad things most people associate with adware are actually inherent to adware, they're simply present in the vast majority of cases...

was this particular instance of adware bad? probably... most (possibly all) instances of adware produced by it's creators were spyware and those creators are now paying the price for it...

was the anti-spyware app it was bundled with really rogue? definitely... aside from bundling probable spyware with an anti-spyware app, it used deceptive practices to get users to install it and there is serious question as to whether it actually detects and/or removes any spyware...

unfortunately for me, i use a functional definition for adware that is unencumbered by emotional baggage related to it's association with other types of malware and so i create contraversy and get hate-mail... but using an adware defintion that is abstracted from other forms of malware doesn't make me an adware apologist, it makes me a computer scientist and anyone who doesn't like it can stick it where the sun don't shine...