funsec mailing list archives
FW: 180 From The Inside Out
From: "Richard M. Smith" <rms () bsf-llc com>
Date: Sun, 2 Apr 2006 22:56:22 -0400
http://www.revenews.com/jimmydaniels/2006/03/180_from_the_inside_out.html I also blog about stuff on RealTechNews.com <http://www.realtechnews.com/> , the blog of former Cnet editor Alice Hill, and in one post about 180solutions called 180solutions Blows More Smoke <http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/2731> Up.. I was told by a former employee of 180solutions to Keep your attacks to the company as a whole and it's leadership and you're opinion will be respected quite a bit more by everyone, even 180 employees. So I emailed him and asked him for an interview about what it was like to work for 180solutions, here it is below. Jimmy:I am kind of curious about the atmosphere there, it must be weird, reading stuff in the press about the company you work for, do the employees talk about stuff like this, or just ignore it and go on? ex180:I don't think most people know about Google alerts so they don't know about the majority of the criticisms 180 receives. (if most people do know about Google Alerts then far fewer talk about it as a percentage than I thought). I personally had no idea how much criticism was out there until I discovered Google alerts and turned them on. It was quite an eye-opening experience. There is a company meeting every Monday morning hosted by Keith or Dan during which they talk about stuff coming up, but _normally_ they do not cover negative stories. From what I understand even the CDT recommendation to the FTC was not talked about, though they may have eventually said something that I'm not aware of. I know they didn't talk about it the first week or two. Sometimes Edelman is talked about, but it's usually in the tone of: 'they're zealots and we will never be able to change their minds, so we're not really trying', and 'a lot of these people are making money off of attacking us'. For the employees that do know about the blogs and complaints it's not discussed too much. It's interesting to see what's brought up by management and what's not, but I know in my department very little discussion took place concerning what was being said. I know that's a long winded answer to a relatively simple question, but I thought it best to separate what management says compared from water cooler talk. I will say that the people that do pay attention and do talk about it aren't overly proud of it. Occasionally a few people will get together and express real anger over the spin put on by management, but that's on the rare side. Personally, when if someone asked what 180 did after I told them who I worked for, I just said 'internet advertising'. If it was someone who already knew about 180 I felt like apologizing immediately. Not everyone is like that of course, I remember one guy that sent out a wide distribution email vehemently defending the goal of the company, (it was sent to most if not all of the company). He really believed it. Jimmy: What is the general feeling about adware? Do you all use the 180 software on your computers? ex180Well, honestly the general feeling was surprise when you found someone actually running zango in non-management positions. People looked at me like I was an idiot a couple times because I tried to be a supportive of the company and run it on both my work and home machines. I eventually had to uninstall it however, the volume of ads got a bit too high. It even boomeranged on me about two weeks after I was out of the company. The company doesn't demand that it's run, but obviously they want people to run it. There were several projects being followed that could have lead to a much higher value proposition for the software but the company's negative image seemed to kill most of them before any development really took place. It's a bummer because a lot of that negativity came from rogue distributors that 180 didn't want out there at all but can't stop until they know about them. As for adware in general, if you buy into the 'content economy' and 180's vision then adware is a good thing, and some people really feel that way but it's not a common subject of discussion. I was on the technical side and I'm pretty sure that no one in my department below management felt that way, then again, I didn't talk with many people in sales or marketing so I honestly cannot say if they really believed it or just remained silent when the execs talked about their vision. The content economy is a nice concept and some people really like the sites you can access with it, but by and large I never saw any content that was really worth having it installed except that game 'David vs. Goliath'. (for about four hours) Marketing ensured there would never be another good game however. Jimmy: You've said 180 doesn't want those rogue distributors out there, why is that? ex180In the early days the execs didn't really care. They were getting rich and that was that... this is prior to 2004. in 2004 they started 'the year of the consumer' and started paying attention to all the complaints. (they were multi-millionaires then... you can afford to listen when you're at that level.) The damage was done however and most people hated them. The effort became cleaning up the image and the primary problem with that is people like Edelman finding rogue/silent installs everywhere. 180 cannot be a truly reputable company until this stops, so big deals, really big ones, won't happen. Hence, rogue distributors and hackers are enemy number One. Once people like Edelman stop complaining the company's reputation will become better, at least to the really big companies that they want to work with. Make sense? Shutting down these rogue distributors turned out to be a lot more difficult than they expected though. When you lose them, your daily installs go down drastically and the revenue goes to hell. The layoff in September could be laid directly at the feet of this effort. (And marketing's constant pressure to upgrade clients to zango from 180SA or n-case... some people believe the deeper problem was marketing re-messaging users constantly causing them to get sick of us rather than reducing bad players.) Some really big, potentially very lucrative deals were lost due to 180's rep (or so I've heard), so it's obviously something that needs to be fixed. Other initiatives included no longer allowing distributors to write their own activeX install packages and the current S3 stuff. They are hacking around all of it of course, but 180 doesn't even get the credit for having tried. Of cutting off that really big distributor in October(?). According to the execs they were cut off specifically because they refused to police their installs and content providers. 180 cut them off to stop those installs, but all we heard from outside was something about our distributor network being so corrupt that we should just start over from scratch. (On the other hand, in a PERFECT example of the omission I mentioned, a few of us found out about a week later that the distributor in question was about to be sued, or we were threatened with lawsuit for allowing our software to be distributed by them... something like that. The story: "We simply cannot do business with them anymore; they aren't working with us"; reality: "If we don't stop working with them we're screwed". I was pretty pissed off by the spin. It supported my decision to leave.) As for people not wanting 180 on their machines... opinions vary. If you believe the actual respondents to the surveys and if you do not cast a suspicious eye, then something like 60% - 70% of people are happy with us and the number of users that don't know us or didn't know we are there is dropping consistently. Stop laughing. This is the kind of number that the BI or SI team (or whatever acronym they had that week) put out. Yeah, everyone that really thought it through said 'bullshit'. I think a couple people actually got offended that they tried pawning that off on us. It wasn't Keith, but he certainly didn't step up and say 'Guys, this sounds a bit fanciful to me'. In fairness, we did start a website that allowed people to enter search phrases directly specifically due to user requests. (back in 2003 I believe) But usually the requests are left in the form of profanity-filled voicemails and bomb threats. A couple of them I thought should have been reported to the police... one guys actually threatened to come to the office with bombs and guns and start blowing people away...most employees never hear those, however. My last thought on this... keep in mind that when you clean a friends computer and you see 'Zango', what do you tell them about it? Even if they have no idea what it is because their son installed it to see Sir Mixalot's website, you tell them 'this stuff is crap, spyware, adware, and slows you're compute down'. Of course their happy to have it gone... you just informed them that this is one step oboe a virus and is distributed by virii. And it may very well be back next week when the mom visits bettycrocker.com (Or whatever forum site she checks her recipes on). Not all, or even most, of 180's installs are rogue, most are from people who just want to access the site and they don't care about some popup that's easily dismissed with a click on 'yes' or 'accept'. You may not want to believe that, but I'm just about as suspicious of the company as I can be (while having good insider knowledge), and I know it's true.... unless there are so many, many more rogue distributors than anyone comes close to suspecting. Don't get me wrong... I still got irritated enough to wipe it off my machine every few months... I didn't want it there either. I also never visited a website that had content worth installing it to see. Jimmy: Being on the technical side of it, I would imagine you've had to uninstall 180 many times from family and friends pc's, as I have. Got any good stories there? ex180: Uninstalls? Yeah. I've taken it off my neighbors computer a couple times He has three girls and it finally got so bad that I rebuilt his laptop and installed vmware, then decreed that he was the only person in the house allowed to use the computer without starting vmware first and surfing from it. He backed it up and has been happy ever since. I remember my first embarrassing experience was my fifth day at the company... I got a call from a non-technical co-worker at my previous job to help her uninstall n-case. She knew who I went to work for and it was before the uninstallation stuff was so widely available on the web. That was humiliating... I was like, "wow... people warned me about this place before I came and here's so-and-so needing help to get this crap off her machine". Ouch. It's true that I didn't _really_ know what the company did when I went there, but I know enough to know that it wouldn't be a retirement gig unless it went public or started making me rich with pre-ipo stock. I even told my friends that before I left my last company... two - three year gig, no more. I was definitely the subject of mockery as a smut peddler (they were just joking of course, no one was serious), when I left. When I told them I was leaving I received many 'haha's. As for the normal experience of working there... normally it's really just like any other job. Had it not been for the layoff and my belief that the company will be going under in the next year, I'd still be there. _Most_ of the blogs are either filled with so much venom that it's a fanatic, or they seem to have misconstrued events because they don't have access to the inside information. I think that 180's PR department really sucks in that they don't offer complete, and I mean complete, transparency to non-fanatical bloggers. Let people like you, or others, see the very real efforts being taken to remove rogue distributors and stop drive-by installs and maybe they'd get some slack. Maybe when Sean or Keith says "We're really trying here", the criticism will be less vitriolic. Instead they take this arrogant, us-against-them stance that hasn't served anyone well at all. I think it's understandable if you view the whole situation and history with emotion, but not productive. That last PR blast was... unprofessional... in my opinion. Jimmy: If you could change 180 yourself, what would it be, how would you make it better for you all, and for everyone else, or even if you think it's possible to make it better for users. ex180: One of the questions I asked during the interview process way back when, was if they were going to stick with adware or if they planned on branching out and having non-ad related income. The answer I received was that adware (not the word they used), was it. All future projects were relating to it in some way, and there were no non-advertising products planned. I was a bit worried about that at the time because I could too easily see the day when that wouldn't work. I still went with them because I needed experience doing the job I was interviewing for, but the company itself has gone in about the direction I envisioned then, though for different reasons. If I were in charge I'd use the capital they currently have (or half as of about 12 - 18 months ago), to launch a completely different project of some sort. They were very profitable, had a crap load of developers and a very solid infrastructure, it was the absolute perfect time to say 'we have our very own RE-startup capital, so let's re-start'. A iTunes alternative perhaps for TV shows? (before Apple did it of course, or maybe just in competition with Apple) That's what I would change. Use the foundation they have, but branch out in a totally different field that's 'clean'. I can only hope that Wayne's latest post, here <http://www.revenews.com/wayneporter/archives/001646.html> is true and not an April Fool's joke.
_______________________________________________ Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts. https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.
Current thread:
- FW: 180 From The Inside Out Richard M. Smith (Apr 02)