Blog for hpHosts, and whatever else I feel like writing about ....

Sunday 19 May 2013

Misleading marketing: Uniblue + pcguide.com - but everyone's doing it!

Doing a quick search for something earlier, I stumbled upon pcguide.com, and whilst I'm now used to (but still hate) seeing security sites and support etc forums plastering ads all over the place (some even in the first and then every other, post), I still get irked when I see this kind of thing.

What makes this worse, is that it's not being delivered via an ad network this time - the "advert", if you can call it that, is housed on pcguide.com itself.

hxxp://www.pcguide.com/uniblue.jpg

For an alleged security forum to use blatantly misleading adverts just to push their affiliate link, is simply abhorrent.



Since they didn't want to, I've added a little red box around the offending advert, for those wondering which one I'm referring to.

As for Uniblue, well we already know they're no stranger to the use of misleading marketing, given they've been caught doing such countless times, and ignoring cases where their affiliates (such as this case) use them.

Needless to say, pcguide.com has been added to the hpHosts blacklist (classification: MMT), Uniblue.com was re-added back in Feb for exactly the same thing.

URLs involved;

hxxp://www.liutilities.com/affcb/?id=DSgen&aff=3165&xat=gen
-> hxxp://www.uniblue.com/cm/general/driverscanner/dslitrafficdp/download/

No direct download (as has been the case with a few others), which is about the only good thing about this, but for those wondering, the download you're led to is;

hxxp://download.uniblue.com/cm/general/driverscanner/dslitrafficdp/setup/driverscanner.exe

2 comments:

BoaterDave said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
BoaterDave said...

Hi :-)

I well remember that when I was first enquiring about 'malware' - posting on the Annexcafe User2User newsgroup back in 2006 - one of the companies I was concerned about was 'Lilutilities' which morphed into 'Uniblue'.

The then moderator of the group, RoyC, chastised me and insisted that there was absolutely nothing wrong with Uniblue!

So, imagine my interest when I read your message this morning!

http://hphosts.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/misleading-marketing-uniblue-pcguidecom.html

I have drawn attention to your Blog findings in Usenet - see Message-ID:

I wonder if anyone will find anything badly amiss at Uniblue!

We shall see!

Have a great day! :-)

Dave