Interview With An Adware Writer

Matt Knox, a talented Ruby instructor and coder, talks about his early days designing and writing adware for Direct Revenue. (Direct Revenue was sued by Eliot Spitzer in 2006 for allegedly surreptitiously installing adware on millions of computers.)

An excerpt of the interview:

M: Yes. I should probably first speak about how adware works. Most adware targets Internet Explorer (IE) users because obviously they're the biggest share of the market. In addition, they tend to be the less-savvy chunk of the market.If you're using IE, then either you don't care or you don't know about all the vulnerabilities that IE has.

S: In your professional opinion, how can people avoid adware?

M: Um, run UNIX.