Sick of the telemarketers?

Not sure if anyone is aware of this or not but a new site was introduced to take you off telemarketers lists. Bush has made a new law for telemerketers not to call your home if you request it. The site is http://www.donotcall.gov I think this law is definetely necassary and should have been implemented years ago. I hate is when I'm in the middle of something and I get a call about what someone wants to sell me.

Now if they would just outlaw banner and popup ads I'd be even happier. Knowing that won't happen for a while, so sign up for it and get your name off those annoying cold call lists. Be nice on the net ads if they were showing me something I was genuinely interested in.

The donotcall.gov site is generating on average 108 registers per minute so allow the site some time before going there.

HEHE HA! for all you that say Bush hasn't done anything great!!!

This has to be the greatest thing a President has ever done.


You know what I hate about popup ads, most of them have downloaded something onto your computer...

I find this highly illegal, i mean there are issues of privacy, trespass and tons of other things. Noone should be allowed to alter anything on my compter, this includes downloading or placing files on, without my permission. I personally think most of these Popup Companies should be tried criminally.


you know one of the main pop-ups i get is? Buy our service to stop Pop-Ups! Hmm so they use a pop up to sell there service to stop pop ups.

ok thats my rant of the day.

JV!

Arrr, please don't spread misinformation like that. With the exception of ones which open a dialog to install the wonderful world of GATOR or such, the only thing they 'download' to your computer is a cookie. If you allow them to do this, it's your own doing, as since IE.. 5.5? or so they've included a myraid of cookie privacy features, which you merely need to slide a bar to enable.

None of them 'alter' anything on your computer without you making the mistake of saying "YES, DO THIS". If you dislike the fact that cookies are placed on your harddrive, disable them, as it's actually your browser which you are in control of which performs this act. They are not some super magical bits of alien software which sneak into your computer and start making it do things.

WERE they to do anything which you have not implicitly allowed, they would be in violation of several laws, as this would categorize them as a virus, worm, or trojan.

Want to stop it? Take the initiative and learn how they work, and you'll realize you CAN disable every single one of those features.

BTW, I hate pop ups too.

As for telemarketers, this is how it usually goes:

me: 'Hello?'
telemarketer: 'Hello my name is so and so with this and that comapny, how are you doing today?'
me: 'Well I was great untill you called' *hang up*

lol

As for pop ups.. Right on Jonathan! I am very sick of having to use adware, pestpatrol, and spybot to search and destroy that spyware those friggin pop ups put on my puter!


Theres my rant for the day.

lynn

Ohhhh I so love this thread....

I agree with every opinion here, some more then others.

But as I have studied and dedicated the past 6 to 10 years of my hobby, and private contracting life to computer and network security, you both are right to some aspect on "cookies" "spyware" etc....

si Almost all your posts I tend to agree with but, this one is true, but there is validity to some degree to Jonathan's post.

Gator, Common name, Alexis, etc... the list goes on all are spyware tagged files/(insert appropriate name here) etc..

But some are designed to alter your files on your hard drive.
Common name is BAD for this. Try to remove common name without messing up your network connection, without a 3rd party remover that knows what its doing. It messes with many files most importantly winsock files. (network)

But the other thing is most "spyware" is not designed to be malicious in nature, but the hacker/crackers destine it to be.

The code can be broke into and used for malicious purposes.
Spyware can be exploited in ways like subseven trojans and backoraface. I have seen systems brought to their knees just by visiting well known "safe" sites that use spyware cookies, programs, etc....

Just because of someone useing a inhome coded scanner program looking for pc's that fit the match to the spyware signature they can plug into.

Gator does install more than just a cookie btw. but the cookie is not just a normal cookie. If I knew refferences off the top of my head that I could point everyone to on this I would.

An uninformed public on the net is more dangerous than any single hacker. Remeber when the net was severly crippled a bit ago? this was done by a single or group that used uninformed regular everyday users' systems as their "drones"
all pluged in with back doors, so that anyone with the controller of the backdoor could do as they pleased.

Not to mention most of your annoying internet spam comes from everyday users' systems being used as email spam bots. But that is a whole nother issue.


Honeynets and honeypots are sooooo fun to manage. I find alot of how these work by my having operated one.


edited for my usual typos

Well things I've said weren't nice but so what, they are calling my home, using my time to sell something. Usually my calls are like this. Hello, Hello, Hello, me saying this 3 times because a computer is dialing my home. Finally I get some person asking for such and such, I say no they aren't here. Then before they even ask whens a good time to call I start with some obscenities, and they end up getting mad, then I ask why are you mad? You are the one bothering me, and now I'm the one that's mad. Then they always say you don't need to talk that way. I say well maybe I don't but you also don't need to call here. Then I say I only talk to people I know and you aren;t one of them, don't call here anymore, in a mean loud tone and then hang up.


This usually makes them stop calling but if that doesen't work I file a complaint with www.ftc.gov Almost certain once they get a call from the FTC they stop calling. Use that site if you sign up at donotcall.gov and the calls continue. Thinking of starting a group against telemarketers not in Sl of course.

As for the Internet popups I think that may be what's next on the agenda, but I think the ISP's that everyone uses needs to deal with that. Love to see an ad free Internet like back around 1995 when the internet was brand new practically. I miss those times. No ads hardly ever popped up, and back then it was banners.

interesting. Have any of you guys gotten hit with in world spammers? I have. Flyin around minding youre own beezwax and get smacked with an ad notecard.

If you are a writer of one of these scripts OR use one let me tell you... as a potential consumer thats a huge turnoff and I'll never shop somewhere that spams me inflight. Actually I then try to avoid the area.

hehe misinformation huh?

I have had plenty of icons, programs and a multitude of other stuff downloaded without me saying yes to anything, i always say no when they ask....

Get Adaware and run a scan on your computer, I always find at least 100 items, folders, processes, from popup add companies that i quarantine and delete, yet i never give permission.

JV

Actually, Gator has nothing to do with a cookie, it uses an ActiveX control to install actual software. Which, if you refer back to my original post, you must explicity allow (this is not even enabled by default, as some cookies are).

It's simply not possible outside of trojans, viruses, worms etc which are exploiting vulnerabilities to do things that you do not allow on your system, and these actions are highly illegal, and are not performed by the ad companies. They are smarter than that, it's much easier for them to do things things you allow them to, and avoid legal problems entirely.

Also, nothing 'modifies' actual DLLs in the system, this would also be a signifigant legal risk. Instead, they attach other DLLs which hook into your system DLLs. While they do at times use deceptive names, they are again stuck in the legal battle where they have to keep themselves on the "legal" side, so the names aren't all that hard to determine with a small amount of investigation.

Long story short, there's a lot of places where spyware and other ad systems can dump stuff onto your computer for use by them at later dates, but your software is what's implicity allowing them to do this. I advise all people to actually learn what the privacy and security settings in Internet Explorer and Netscape actually mean.

I have ad-aware on every system I use, which I scan with on a weekly basis after updating ref files. The most I ever have are 4 cookies, all from sites which I have allowed to send them to me. Even sitting here staring at Secondlife's website I see the big eye with a red circle through it, saying it denied secondlife.com's cookies for the forums.

si interesting that you sound like your takeing offence to what I said. But first you say:




hehe now you say they don't? um ok...

But as I said I have much study on this and Yes they can get through without a dialog...really they can...yes some can be stopped by the settings on ie but some bypass that altogether. The ones that can be stopped follow the rules of course, but since when does ALL coorporate america or er um any country for that matter as the net is world wide follow all the rules?

But anyway I run 5 different spyscanners and 3 of them are realtime scanners (catch on the fly).

Each one can detect stuff that the others can't, There is no set standard on spyware like there is in the market of virus scanning. So each company has its own thing.

If all you use is Ad-Aware and you think you are free and clear? I'm sorry but......It's just a matter of time. PLZ read up. I would not spread lies about this. I have learned from 1st hand experience.

But anyway no need to drag this on, I had a disscussion with a boss of mine on this and he thought I was wrong/paranoid, lol well 1 week later every system (15 of them) he had were dead all needed special attn. and low and behold all spyware, that opened the doors for other things like planting viruses and other Trojans. Which btw go to www.GRC.com and read up on spyware. That is just one example where spyware is by many considered to be no better than a trojan...

Again thats:

www.GRC.com (for those who skim read)

no hard feelins si I've always felt you were a good poster on this forum for the threads I read. But we all have our own opinions, we get them from experience (good or bad). and from knowledge, Knowledge is power...power to defend yourself and others.

Nono, reread what I said



with the exception of, being the key part of it.

No offense taken or intended at all, but a lot of misinformation on the subject abounds, and it creates a lot of work and headaches for some of us out in the system engineering world. Ad-aware is not all I use, but it is the only automated tool I use.

Honestly, if you *ever* encounter one of these which installs itself with proper security settings on your system, you need to contact your local law enforcement immediately. It would mean jail term sentences for the company involved, as it is highly illegal, more so on corporately owned systems than personal owned systems.

Thanks for the reminder about this. I just signed up ... still haven't got the confirming email. Too bad it will be October before it takes effect. I can hardly wait!!!

As far as pop-ups:

Mozilla has pop-up blocking built in. There is a list of automated activies that you can allow or disallow and one of them takes care of 99 percent of the pop-ups. Somehow, Live365 is able to still pop-up and ad every hour or so, but thats fine with me, since I'm getting free music from it. I get no pop-ups out of the blue from other sites though. And no viruses...but that may have more to do with Linux than Mozilla.

Even if I were still using Windows regularly, I think I'd do most of my browsing with Mozilla and only go into IE for things that would not work correctly in Mozilla *cough*certain SL pages*cough*.

It is, and always will be free: http://mozilla.org

(stick with the stable release, unless you just want to help them debug the next one)

If I recall correctly, past the actual start date, all companies have 6months from the time someone adds to the list to update. Ie they only have to update their do not call lists from the main one once every 6 months, and nothing forces them to do it as soon as the list goes active. :/

Its still all good, and I'm already signed up, just saying don't expect all your solicitations to stop immediatly when the list goes active.

Actually, Missouri has had this for a while now, i'm guessing it's the same thing we have here anyhow. Used to get 15-20 calls a day, we didn't even use the phone line or phone ringers anymore. Signed up, haven't had one in ages. We did get one once, and reported it, got a nice mail back from our state whatever saying they sent a nice little fine to whatever company it was.

High hopes for you all!

I was thinking of going that route myself, getting a cell phone with just local calling plan. Everyone of my family that's far away owns a computer so as for long distance we usually go to something like Netmeeting or other chat programs that allow the use of a mic, it's wayy cheaper this way, I don't buy into all these 1010920 malarky plans. They always sound really good but they always have some kind of catch. The catch is, they track your phone number of you using the service to sell you more pointless crap. As for the cell phone deal, most of my friends went that route already, and alot of people also have caller ID. Turn the ringers low and then monitor all the calls coming in. As you know well most places anyways have a call block feature. I hope they crack down big on this, and start making fines fly, big time. It's about time Americans got their choice to pick their phones to talk to their friends and family without having to monitor every single call.

Mac, if you signed up using a yahoo account, your confirmation email was prolly marked as spam and blocked.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59427,00.html

Nope, didn't use yahoo (but I sometimes use it for sign-ups, so that was an interesting goof on their part).

After my last post I went to the do-not-call website again thinking that I might have made a typo on my address or something. Went through the process again and about an hour later got the confirmation. I figured I must have been really tired when I signed up the first time.

But then a couple hours ago (almost a full day later) I got a SECOND confirmation.... which means that they are really lagged. Either that or there is something wrong with my e-mail provider. Anyway I'm on the list twice now. Hopefully their computer programs can deal with that.

I used Yhaoo too actually, and it was just fine, I hit the site just at the right time I guess cause I never noticed any lag or loading probs.

I don't mind telemarketers. Or banner ads. Or billboards or television advertisements or whatever.

I registered two days ago and I JUST got the three emails for the numbers I regsitered. I registered my home phone, my other home line, and my cell. yay

Congratulations to all who got the chance to register for this wonderful much needed service. Glad to see something good is coming out of it. The telemarketing industry is planning on fighting this battle in the courts. It's really funny, noone ever wins a court case against the federal government, it'd be interesting to see what transpires.