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Thread: Roar.com assessed as a threat

  1. #21
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    Hello Bill,

    let me tell you some reasons why Spybot will not remove roar.com.

    http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/roar.com
    roar.com
    When we tested this site we found links to winantivirus.com, which our analysis found to be deceptive or fraudulent.
    http://www.pageseeker.com/results.ht...imageField.y=0
    Many of our users complained about such search results.

    hotsearch.com#|roar.com
    Is blocked in IESPYADS:

    http://forums.spybot.info/showpost.p...46&postcount=3
    Protecting Your Privacy & Security on a Home PC. Eric Howes
    Bookmark it.
    http://www.spywarewarrior.com/uiuc/

    We have to protect our users and will not remove roar.com from detection.
    "The advantage of wisdom is that you can always act the fool. The opposite is quite tough."

    K. Tucholsky

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  2. #22
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    We checked the website roar.com and decided to not remove it from our detection because we found roar.com on most of the host-lists. In addition to that we checked the privacy of roar.com and found several vague statements:

    "Roar.com does not normally link IP addresses to any personal information, which means that a Visitor's session will be logged, but the Visitor otherwise remains anonymous."

    What means normally? Are the Ip addresses stored or not? In the next passage they say:

    "Roar.com can and will use IP addresses to identify a Visitor when it is necessary to enforce compliance with our terms of service or to protect the integrity of our services and websites, as well as to protect our interests and those of our Customers."

    Hm, how is it possible to identify visitors when IP adresses normally not get stored or linked to personal informations?


    In one of the next parts it is said:

    "there may be times when Roar.com may be required to disclose personal information of a Customer or Visitor without their consent. This may occur where we have reason to believe that disclosing the information is:

    necessary to identify, contact or bring legal action against the Customer, Visitor or another person who may be causing injury to or interference with (either intentionally or unintentionally) the rights or property of Roar.com or its subsidiaries, other Customers or anyone else that could be harmed by such activities; or
    required by law."

    In what case it could be necessary to contact customers or visitors without their consent????? And how you will do it without storing personal information?

    In addition to this reasons we recognized that the search results of the website are often malicious and dangerous and many of our customers complained about your search results. So we think we have to protect our customers and will not remove roar.com from our detections

    Best regards,

    MisterW
    Team-Spybot

  3. #23
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    Hello Spybot team,

    Thank you for your response.

    http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/roar.com
    Quote:
    roar.com
    When we tested this site we found links to winantivirus.com, which our analysis found to be deceptive or fraudulent.
    Roar.com is a commercial advertising network. While we screen our advertisers when they apply to be part of our network, we cannot take responsibility for actions that are out of our control. We can however remove them from our network should we have sufficient proof that they have breached our terms and conditions. We are investigating the winantivirus software concerns that you have raised, but so far have only found speculation rather than proof that this package contains spyware. As I am sure you can appreciate, any breach of a contractual obligation must be proven, rather than speculated against on a forum. While we will continue to investigate, any information you can provide to help us bring light to this case would be appreciated.

    http://www.pageseeker.com/results.ht...imageField.y=0
    Many of our users complained about such search results.
    When you say “complain”, could you please explain exactly what you mean? As an advertising network, customers can bid on keyterms to have results displayed. For example, PCTools.com advertises on the keyterm “Spybot” at both Lycos (http://search.lycos.com/?src=sf&loc=sem&query=spybot) and Google (http://www.google.com/search?q=spybot). It should also be noted that our 24 hour customer care department is available to review any complaints from any visitor to our sites.

    hotsearch.com#|roar.com
    Is blocked in IESPYADS:

    (http://www.spywarewarrior.com/uiuc/resource.htm)

    These block lists are based in part on info from:
    discussions in the SpywareInfo Forums, Spyware Warrior, CastleCops,
    and other forums that specialize in crapware removal
    After looking in those forums, the only references to roar.com I could find were to sites that were removed from the roar.com network long ago. It should also be noted that there have been no discussions about roar.com in Castlecops or the Spybot forums, other than this thread.

    In response to MisterW’s questions:

    "Roar.com does not normally link IP addresses to any personal information, which means that a Visitor's session will be logged, but the Visitor otherwise remains anonymous."

    What means normally? Are the Ip addresses stored or not?
    There are two different types of people that visit our sites, Surfers (anonymous visitors) and Advertisers that wish to promote their site through Roar.com. For surfers, IP addresses are stored, but without any personally identifiable information. This is for fraud detection purposes. To protect our advertisers, we proactively monitor the streams of traffic to search terms to ensure the traffic is of a high standard. We monitor such things as duplicate requests to advertisers. A way to identify duplicate clicks for example would be to use the request and the IP address of its origin. This protects our advertisers and ensures they are not paying for false clicks or poor traffic. This is common in the pay-per-click industry. For advertisers, we store personally identifiable information because they have a financial relationship with us. We may need to link IP addresses and personal information to ensure the security of the account has been maintained, for example, logging in from two geographically disperse places at the same time.

    "Roar.com can and will use IP addresses to identify a Visitor when it is necessary to enforce compliance with our terms of service or to protect the integrity of our services and websites, as well as to protect our interests and those of our Customers."

    Hm, how is it possible to identify visitors when IP adresses normally not get stored or linked to personal informations?
    As mentioned previously, we can only identify advertisers, not surfers. We do this for reasons explained above.

    "there may be times when Roar.com may be required to disclose personal information of a Customer or Visitor without their consent. This may occur where we have reason to believe that disclosing the information is:

    necessary to identify, contact or bring legal action against the Customer, Visitor or another person who may be causing injury to or interference with (either intentionally or unintentionally) the rights or property of Roar.com or its subsidiaries, other Customers or anyone else that could be harmed by such activities; or required by law."

    In what case it could be necessary to contact customers or visitors without their consent????? And how you will do it without storing personal information?
    If a client or host performed a DoS attack, or some other form of malicious activity, and the investigation was able to identify the culprit based on personal information that they had submitted previously (ie, when they signed up for an advertiser account), then there may be a requirement to report their personal information to the relevant authorities for prosecution.

    It should be noted that the “personal information” that is referred to in the terms and conditions is that of our customers who have signed up to advertise with roar.com.

    I appreciate your response, however we are, and have done all that you have asked in the past. We have been pro-active in amending our terms and conditions based on your recommendations, and our policies are very similar to others in the industry. We will continue to work with you regarding the winantivirus.com case. We are a search engine with many of the terms and conditions no different to other major search engines in the industry. My concern is that every time we have done what you ask, we have simply been provided with another reason why we cannot be removed from your lists. Our original placement in your lists was based on terms and conditions that were taken out of context. This was explained in a private message to your reviews department. We then took your suggestions and revised our privacy policy taking your recommendations into consideration.

    We will continue to work with you on being removed from your lists, however I would like to hear some sort of assurance that what we are doing is being recognized as a positive step toward the removal from your block lists.

    Thank you

    Bill

  4. #24
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    Could someone at Spybot please respond? It's been nearly a month since my last post.

    Thanks

    Bill

  5. #25
    Junior Member Ya Disgruntled Neighbour's Avatar
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    Hi Bill,

    I just registered but found this thread to be quite interesting. Anyway, I feel the reason that the spybot team are reluctant to remove roar.com off their website threat database is because roar.com has had past bad links related to spyware. As the contents of websites can change at any time it may be a bad idea to remove websites which were threats in the past.

    I can see how hard you've been trying, and by the looks of things you've been very patient. But the fact of the matter is Spybot is to protect users, the last thing people would want to know is that websites are being removed from the block list because they are no-longer a threat. The thing is, people at Spybot can't check the website in the future to check that it is clean, so the safest course of action is to leave it blocked due to its malicious past.

    It is a matter of trust, but who on the internet can you trust these days?

    YDN.

  6. #26
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    Interesting topic indeed. So let me get this straight, if you have links to a known malware site on your site, that's cause for being blacklisted?

    What about Google, Yahoo, or any of the main search engines? They link to malware sites. Not just in search results, but also in paid listings. I can see why you might want to block certain domains that have CWS or other devious malware. But I can't see that the Roar.com site itself can be held responsible for the conduct of advertisers any more than any other paid listing source.

    I don't know Roar.com or how their site actually operates other than from what I have witnessed as a user in the last couple of minutes (it appears to be a directory of sponsored listings from what I can tell), but the logic of the Spybot argument is flawed.

    Ok, let's flip the coin now. I notice on Roar.com that the sites listed are for "Best Sites for: ------ Category". I'm definitely seeing links from Azoogle redirects in the results listing so they are paid listings... but no where do you disclose that they are paid listings. If I'm not mistaken, it looks like you're passing off paid listings as an edited directory of sites. Can you tell me whether relevance is dictated by an editor, or a keyword bid amount? That is certainly cause for concern.

    WinAntiVirus Pro is certainly a known "rogue" and I'd recommend kicking them off your network. And for what it's worth, I searched the site and couldn't find any reference to them anymore.

    tC

  7. #27
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    Hello. I just installed Spybot on this work PC as one of the many things I am trying in order to stop Roar.com for apparently hijacking access to our homepage @ Austco.com. Whenever I attempt to view our site I instead have a classified ads page displayed. Upon viewing the page source I see this right at the top;

    <BASE href="http://www.austco.com/common/roar/landing/rpos/">

    I do not want this occuring as I require access to our site for various reasons.

  8. #28
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    Oi!
    Mr Roar.com sycophant, I am still dealing with this problem thanks to your company, now it's another site I need to get at and can't.
    F you very much.

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