A lawsuit filed Aug. 3 says some gambling advertisements on Google, Yahoo, and other major sites are illegal in California. The class-action suit alleges the companies sold rights to Web ads based on gambling-related search terms and use geotracking programs to target particular regions, including California; it also demands the companies stop the ads and give Californians "millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains." CNET.com said about a dozen high-profile Websites are targeted in the suits – including themselves. Internet gambling is now considered a multi-billion-dollar-a-year business.
The makers of Norton Anti-Virus are also litigation targets. San Diego-based TrekEight, the makers of Spyware Nuker, which it sells as a spyware identifier and remover, want Symantec to knock it off with identifying TrekEight software as potentially damaging adware. TrekEight says Symantec – which has identified their products as adware for several months – has cost it distributors and Google advertising. Symantec has yet to comment on the litigation, but some online analyses of Spyware Nuker suggest earlier versions of the program had trouble with bringing up false positive readings – as well as being something of a rip-off of better-known Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy – while the newest version avoids those pitfalls and does detect spyware.
Speaking of cyberspace scammers, they're even getting hip to using politics for their profession. Some said to be posing as fundraisers for Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry are trying to scam Netizens into sending them money, provoking the Kerry campaign to ask the Justice Department to look into it. A pair of mass spam campaigns have been found which ask users to contribute to the Kerry campaign but, according to Internet filter maker SurfControl, direct the money to Websites in Texas and India having no known actual connection to the Kerry campaign. SurfControl also says this kind of phishing will get more commonplace as the presidential campaign kicks higher into gear.
It isn't just adult-oriented trade shows struggling to stay alive these days. Business technology trade show CeBit America 2005 – which was set for New York in late June of next year – has been removed from Hannover Fairs USA's schedule of events because the show can't make enough revenue to support a third year. "Though regrettable, this is the correct business decision," Hannover Fairs president Joachim Schafer said in a statement. "It is really a reflection of a changing high-tech industry, as well as the overall U.S. economy."
Some of those changes include users finding value in a competitive market for Web analytics tools, according to a new study from Forrester Research. Surveying 52 users, Forrester determined 69 percent of them got good value from analytics tools bought at steep discounts (20 percent of more), and 62 percent said they'd recommend their current such vendors to colleagues.
