MovieLand Girl Scumware

betrayware rant and questions

[chewy]

There's a new scourge - the Movieland Girl popup. If you know about this, maybe you can help me. First, who does one trust? There seem to be a number of anti-scumware products advertised to remove this which -- guess what -- may be scumware themselves.

I guess they're calling this "betrayware". So, it seems that this Movieland / mediapipe thingy is removable with about 2 hours worth of effort - or, according to Gooooogle, you can get some kind of free application that will remove it. Further Googling indicates this application is, or once, was betrayware.

OK, so now Gooooogle (AdWords) allow advertisers to advertise stuff that doesn't work?

Question #1:

do I do the safe thing and not trust the stuff advertised on AdWords?

Question #2:

do I begin to distrust Adwords - is there a "reporting" mechanism? After all Google says "don't be evil" and this stuff seems right on the edge.

Question #3:

this scourge arrived on my parent's computer. They're in their late 70's. Did they get it from playing bridge or NetFlx - how do I find out where they got it so I can tell them to stop doing whatever they were doing?

TOS prevents me from mentioning the freebie app but you can find it if you google "movieland" - and there apparently are legal issues floating around about flames relating to this...

[D_Blackwell]

do I do the safe thing and not trust the stuff advertised on AdWords?

I think that the sensible thing is to be judicious and diligent. Like anything else in the world, a few are horrible, some are bad, most are so-so, some are good, and a few are awesome.

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do I begin to distrust Adwords - is there a "reporting" mechanism? After all Google says "don't be evil" and this stuff seems right on the edge.

See answer #1. This is not so different than any other form of advertising. Believe nothing, check out everything. In the end, take your chances, or not.

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this scourge arrived on my parent's computer. They're in their late 70's. Did they get it from playing bridge or NetFlx - how do I find out where they got it so I can tell them to stop doing whatever they were doing?

You might be able to track down the source, but danger lies everywhere. I diligently run three separate anti spyware/malware programs, keep up with a good anti-virus, maintain as stiff a firewall as I know how, and still can't say that I feel safe, so I backup very regularly. I don't know how the average Joe survives.