Aaaaanyway. So that's why we just can't block all the adware sites. There's just too many of them, far too many. The companies advertising on these kinds of services are idiots. There's no properly-thought-out targeting. Most of them are so annoying i'd like to lock their creators in a bare room with an infinitely-looping recording of a 5-year-old asking "why?" playing from unreachable loud speakers and a blunt spoon as their only means of committing suicide. And any claims they don't affect internet connection speed/PC performance are, quite frankly, utter bollocks. This is more a knock-on effect of the blunderbuss-style targeting approach of these adware programs, but they are more than capable of rendering one of our many windows 98 machines unusable. And we really could do with not losing the use of any of our machines, even for half a day, just because some bigshot thinks popping your ad up to random users is a good advertising strategy. I object to this approach because it's a true invasion of privacy with no good reason - it's nothing to do with national security, it's just some company thinking I'll be stupid enough to buy something because some random Internet Explorer window appears telling me it's great. Or with a fake DOS window supposedly showing some (non-existent) scan program telling me I have lots of viruses and/or adware (ok that last bit is right, but they already know that cos it's their adware!)

I find the sneaky adware particularly objectionable, because it's so blatant.
You want an example? I thought you'd never ask...

Virtual Bouncer. If you see this advertised on a web site, run a mile. It's a wormy little bastard. It's adware masquerading as anti-adware (clever huh?). Most tellingly of all, there are a number of files associated with it with names including the words "silentinstall". basically, once it gets on, it tries its darnedest to stay on WITHOUT you being able to remove it.

There's more out there. Loads more. I'll be posting mroe info shortly on some bits I've found that I didn't find online.

You might also be interested to know of some "legitimate" companies that are involved in adware:
Google
Lycos
Dennis Publishing

(this last one surprised me, but just last week no a number of windows 200 machines around school, an extra folder appeared in the All Users/Favorites folder, called Dennis Publishing, with links to sites for many of their publications. They must really be in dire straits to sink so low)
There are more, so I shall add to this list as and when I can.

First posted on my blog