today, i won my own
Already : Hatachi Archives
today, i won my own Wednesday February 27
today, i won my own little battle against the internet. but before i discuss that, i'll mention that i've been web browsing since 1996. this is not particularly amazing, but i still have full capability to say that i was "around" before the web cost anything and well before the dot.com boom; you could do cool things like get free email addresses and forwarders without getting your name sold on a list that seven different companies buy for the purpose of "targeted" email applications. so, when i watched the 2000 super bowl's advertising cornucopia of dot.com ads, i was initially disgusted.
even though market analysts continually said, "the economic bubble is going to pop soon.." and so on so forth, all of us that had grown up with the internet and the modem and everything in between *knew* this was all bullshit. we knew from day one that the internet was not just another marketplace, and you can't control it like you can the airwaves or the television. it's too decentralized for this, and we knew you couldn't take our medium from us. the sneakier ones of our kind had created slick storyboards and power point presentations and used their social engineering skills from the phreaking days to sell venture capitalists, who, due to 10 years of economic boom, had plenty of cashflow. we knew that beneath it all, it was a sham. but that's ok. the vc's lost, and even the least-successful ceo still got to have fun doing an ipo and maybe they even got to keep the palm pilot they bought with company funds. clearly, the vc's were of a different generation, and they knew nothing about what we knew everything about. and we sucked 'em dry. no longer am i disgusted, i feel that it was an appropriate punishment for anyone who throws their money into people and ideas that they really don't understand. true, some were clearly inspired to succeed (half.com, etc), but fuckedcompany.com will now give you play-by-play demises of these wastes of domain namespace. no longer am i disgusted, now i laugh.
however, some companies are clinging by advertising. if you have an interesting site, you'll get visitors. if those visitors click on your banner ads, you get money, the advertiser gets exposure, et al. wow. it's like television. i get free e-mail from yahoo, and in return they cloud my inbox window with ads. here's where the subversion that i don't appreciate enters the picture. i deal with banner ads well enough; no one is forcing me to click on them, and no one is holding up the amount of time it takes to find the information i'm seeking. however, pop-up windows have got to go.
just this month, pop-ups started showing up on my machine. the same ones. but not when i was at public sites. when i was editing my own new web redesign. "i've been infiltrated by dirty code," i thought. "someone will pay dearly for this mistake." i eventually was able to obtain the ip address of the pop-up window before it routed the html to an image of the ad. i tracerouted said ip and determined that vx2 was my nemesis all this time. who the hell are they? i don't really know, or at least, i didn't know until know. kind of makes you wonder how their software got into my internet explorer. let me cut-and-paste from their site:
"vx2, inc. is a software development company. we have developed a series of ad targeting applications such as vx2.dll that help advertisers deliver targeted ads. in addition to our..." and it goes on. further quote of interest: "third party companies license and distribute our software, typically as part of their sponsorship of free software or free content. as part of any licensing of our software, vx2 contractually requires all distributors to give notice concerning the presence of our software and to provide consumers access to a vx2 supplied privacy policy."
now, i don't know what rogue program i installed -- but i've never heard of vx2, and i damn well would have never said yes to this option. luckily, vx2's website allows users to uninstall the software. to do so, you need to delete vx2.dll from c:\$winroot$. easier said than done. the file is always in use because it attaches itself to internet explorer, which is inherently windows explorer. i had to open a command window and taskmanager, kill explorer.exe as a process, then alt-tab to the command line, manually delete the file, then use task manager to re-start explorer.exe.
i ask you: what average user like my dad is going to know how to do that? and these little things, as i see it, are the ugly spoils of the internet boom.
