SiteAdvisor blog

Five Examples Of Smiley Sites That Make Us :(

Over the last few months, we’ve heard from a lot of parents who ask us how spyware and adware end up on their family computer. A typical lament: “I just go to Amazon and Citibank, so why am I seeing pop-ups for Adult Friend Finder?” Parents, we have an answer – your teenager.

One of the benefits of testing so much of the Web is that we’ve developed a good sense of where the bad guys concentrate. And smiley sites are one of those dark alleys. For those of you who don’t know, smileys (aka emoticons) are graphic punctuation marks that people use to add emotion to their text communications, whether IM (Instant Messaging), SMS (mobile phone texting) or plain old e-mail. Now, who does the most IM’ing in your house? Yup, it’s your teen. What follows are five smiley sites that will leave you and your computer frowning. But first, a little background.

ComScore Networks estimates that a whopping 69 million Americans use instant messenger software. AOL, Yahoo! and MSN are the most common providers.

(Source: http://elouai.com/icq-smiley.php)

Unfortunately, many smiley packs, often accessible as a free download, contain unrelated programs that harm users’ computers. SiteAdvisor tests show that spammers and adware distributors often find new users by offering “free” smileys. Fortunately, there’s still reason to smile. Free smiley downloads are available without Web safety threats. More on those later.

Navigating the Spyware Minefield

How do your kids get smileys in the first place? The major IM providers include a default set, but these get old fast. You can imagine the exchange: Jane IM's John: “Cool smiley. Where did you get it?” John IM's back. “Don’t remember. It was free on Google.” Jane searches Google for “free smiley.” The next thing you know, Jane’s installing a piece of adware with the pack of emoticons. Just how risky is that search?

Of the 20 links on this result page, eight (40%) point to sites that SiteAdvisor rates yellow or red. If Jane picks a random site from this list, she faces a 40% risk of infection. Do two such searches and the risk increases to 64%. Three times, 78%. So for useres making a series of unsafe searches, it's not unusual to find the family computer hosed.

Too Hot to Handle

The word “free” occurs six times in the ad page above. But Hotbar is hardly free. By default, Hotbar “enable[s] keyword search in Internet Explorer['s] address bar,” changes the IE search assistant to something called “ResultsMaster,” installs ShopperReports (a “FREE and easy-to-use comparison shopping tool” that shows auto-opening sidebar advertisements), and adds a weather bug from the Weather Channel.

The three license agreements (Hotbar, ShopperReports, & The Weather Channel) presented during the Hotbar install total 9,514 words - more than twice the length of the U.S. Constitution. And that’s not all. Along with garden variety pop-up ads, our Hotbar installation showed us sexually-explicit ads as we browsed family-friendly content – including ads from from SexSearch.com and Passion.com while we browsed sites like MSN.com.

Frozen Smiles

Popular screensaver and emoticon provider Freeze.com delivers an installation with a dizzying array of add-ons and signups. Clicking on one of their search engine ads re-directed us to a page that required our e-mail address and presented us with 13 unrelated commercial offers including deals from Cheapflights, Walmart, and Colgate.

Freeze’s chill runs even deeper. Its install sequence made Freeze.com our home page and installed WhenU’s SaveNow, Newdotnet with Quick! Search Assistant, Desktop Weather by The Weather Channel and the Yahoo! Toolbar.

And what about that e-mail registration? When we signed up at Freeze.com, we received 94 very spammy e-mails per week. What kinds of e-mail are your kids signing up for? Here are some headlines from our Freeze.com inbox:

Yikes.

The 'Must Accept Nonobligatory' Installation

Sherv tells its users that they 'must accept the EULA before installing' the smileys. At the same time, users are also told that installation is “nonobligatory.” We suspect nine out of 10 teenagers are unable to parse this Orwellian locution. Frankly, we still don’t understand what it means. When we tried to decline, we received this image:

Emotional Wreck

The first thing we saw when downloading EmoInstaller was a poorly explained dialogue:

Later in to the process, 180Solutions (Zango’s maker) was somewhat more forthright (“…because it’s paid for by advertising”). Unfortunately, 180 pre-checked the box for “I am 18 or older.” We don’t imagine there are a lot of teenagers who would ever say, “Oh well. Guess I’m not old enough to have smileys.”

Exit Stage Left?

Claria, provider of the GAIN adware client, recently announced it was exiting the adware business entirely. Claria’s GotSmiley site didn’t come up as a paid result when we searched for ‘smiley’ or ‘emoticon,’ but the homepage still exists as of the time of this writing and still bundles the GAIN client. SiteAdvisor will continue to track practices at Claria and GotSmiley.

Can't Smile Without You

As with so many categories where we find a lot of red rated sites, there are plenty of safe places to get smilies. Here are some options categorized by IM application.

• Yahoo! Messenger – SmileyUtility is free of charge and unrelated software.
• MSN Messenger - Emoticons Plus 3.1 is free to try for 30 days, but costs $20 to buy.
• AOL Instant Messenger – The AIMFace Web site offers 500 free emoticons. Our e-mail registration did result in six e-mail newsletters per week.
• AOL Instant Messenger -- RunABot offers 1,000 free smilies and doesn’t require an e-mail registration.
• IRC – Try out IRC Ice Chat for some cool smiley graphics.
• Trillian - Free instant messenger software that handles screen names from some of the most popular IM software providers.
• GetSmile – GetSmile’s download is free forever, as long as you don’t mind the word “demo” in the upper corner of each emoticon graphic. Getting rid of that costs $20.