C-NetMedia - deceptive... deceptive... and deceptive

FYI…

- http://www.benedelman.org/news/021408-1.html
February 14, 2008 - "Not every "anti-spyware" program is what it claims to be. Some truly have users' interests at heart - identifying and removing bona fide risks to privacy, security, stability, or performance. Others resort to a variety of tricks to confuse users about what they're getting and why they purportedly need it. This article reports the results of my examination of anti-spyware software from C-NetMedia…
* Deceptive advertising, deceptive product names, and deceptive web site designs falsely suggest affiliation with security industry leaders…
* The use of many disjoint product names prevents consumers from easily learning more about C-Net, its reputation, and its practices…
* High-pressure sales tactics, including false positives, overstate the urgency of paying for an upgraded version…
Note that C-NetMedia is unrelated to the well-known technology news site CNET Networks…"

(Screenshots available at the URL above.)

Arrgghh…

- http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/in…-continues.html
February 19, 2008 - "It was last week, on the 14th, that Ben Edelman showed that C-NetMedia (not to be confused with CNET) was using highly deceptive advertising to lure people to its sites. It’s still going on, despite press on the matter.
This morning, a search for SpyBot again shows C-NetMedia trying to trick people into thinking their site (spywarebot.com) is Spybot’s… And a search for Ad-Aware still has their ad for adwarealert.com. HIGHLY deceptive… (And we all know that many people will click on the first result, not fully understanding that it’s a sponsored link). Then, look what these crooks are doing with Microsoft Antispyware… I’m afraid it’s going to take the FTC to handle this one. Apparently the search engines aren’t self-policing on this one."

(Screenshots available at the URL above.)