What the fuck is it?

Hehehe... That's Gator. They changed their name to GAIN, in order to improve their image.

Here is the faq.

Then, it's even worse than I expected! To explain this: When I was working on a computer at university today, an unidentifyable (concerning its identification as in 'belonging to a program I had running') window suddenly popped up, showing some cheesy 'before and after' advertisement about slimming down. The title said "GAIN Adserver". I guess some idiot installed it there. How annoying can anything get?

Either that, or some idiot had the MSIE settings set to low, and all ActiveX components got automatically installed. Remember - Gator or GAIN or how they are going to call themselves tomorrow is spyware that installs on a computer without the user knowing about it.

(Disclaimer: saying this may get me sued; Gator/GAIM was sending cease-and-desist letters to anybody who claimed they were spyware.)

Well, I know what I'll tell the system administrator tomorrow. Can't work with such badly configured and secured systems

Edit: After reading a bit on their site, I can assure you it certainly is not spyware. After all, they only log the following:
* Some of the Web pages viewed
* The amount of time spent at some Web sites
* Response to GAIN Ads
* Standard web log information (excluding IP Addresses) and system settings
* What software is on the personal computer
* First name, country, city, and five digit ZIP code
* Non-personally identifiable information on Web pages and forms
* Software usage characteristics and preferences

Perfectly acceptable!

Edited by Mr Creosote at 20:21 on November, 17th 2003

* Response to GAIN Ads
So they must have gigabytes of logs saying "fuck you" over and over again?


GAIN is usually installed with some kind of adware, so the most likely origin of the problem is some freeware prog that someone installed.

More likely they'll have gigabytes of logs containing banner clicks of people who showed actual interest in their crap. That's the most shocking part

In England, 'GAIN' means "Gone Away Information Network"... a credit database of people who get credit and dont pay it back hence getting blacklisted.

Is that what Gator do...blacklist people??




I fucking wish I could blacklist them....intrusive bastards. Arrrrggghhh..... annoying little &%"!&*^.