Companies that make money by distributing misleading versions of VLC

http://blog.l0cal.com/2011/07/07/these-companies-that-mislead-our-users/

by etix • 15 years ago

248 73 15 years ago

blog.l0cal.com

darklajid• 15 years ago

I wonder if there are any SEO people out there, doing pro-bono (is that even the right term?) work for open source projects like this?

It should be possible to fight back (or, as was discussed/suggested before, search engines are just broken).

ludwigvan• 15 years ago

I doubt it would be welcome, see http://jacobian.org/writing/seo-scumbags/

"Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

nbpoole• 15 years ago

The difference there is "I want a link back from your site to my site." That's the point at which the offer loses all possible shreds of credibility.

jasonlotito2• 15 years ago

That's not SEO. That's spam. SEO is about optimizing portions of your website for people using a search engine. Lumping all SEO together is akin to lumping all hackers together as criminals. I equate the techniques to those used in journalism. You want to front load the article with the most important information. The least important information should be at the end.

patio11• 15 years ago

~2 minutes of pro-bono work:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Put in name of the bad guys. Find the blogs who blogged about their sites.

http://webylife.com/design/top-10-brand-logo-mistakes/commen...

http://www.dragonblogger.com/entertainment-television/

etc, etc. Contact them, ask them to change the link to the spam site with a link to your site.

It's stupid gruntwork, you'll need lots of it, and it will be like playing whackamole -- but it will probably work at getting them off the front page.

The other alternative, rather than de-ranking their sites, is to rank more of your own, or parasite off of high authority sites. For example, notice Wikipedia ranks for VLC right now? You know who else would rank for VLC with a trivial amount of effort? Github (&etc -- just has to be on any domain other than yours). Is there an OSS industry mag that you guys like? Have they written a review of it? Get your community to link to that review, with whatever anchor text you're having trouble with.

OSS projects shouldn't have really serious SEO issues for branded keywords -- you practically swim in link equity -- and wouldn't if marketing were treated as a priority worth addressing.

jbk13• 15 years ago

Sure.

Still, adwords, adsense or bing ads get ranked over the highly ranked website.

drzaiusapelord2• 15 years ago

VLC has been linked by high profile sites for many years now. Adding yet another link from "linuxmag" isn't going to help.

The real issue is that the SEO guys are just too good and can poison the well with impunity. I feel only better competition can help this. Maybe the Bing guys can do a better job and eat Google's lunch. Quick search on Bing shows the first few links are legit but the last one isn't (and is identified as adware by our Sonicwall). Also, the ads Bing produces are fake too. Guess no one is doing a good job in this regard. I suspect shit like this is why PC users are clamoring for an "App Store." They need someone to help them properly install software.

ZoFreX• 15 years ago

In my experience it's quite difficult to offer any web assistance for free online, I guess people are too wary of unsolicited help.

omouse5• 15 years ago

They can create their own versions of those spam sites that offer the genuine product. That's what I would do, and they should have bought up some of those domain names earlier. The URL gives a lot of hints and definitely helps SEO.

jbk13• 15 years ago

This takes a huge amount of time to do, especially when people behind VLC are doing it as a volunteer work...

webylife• 15 years ago

hi guys, I am the owner of the blog, webylife.com if you have any problem with the any link just get in touch with me would be happy to help you out you can shoot me a mail at nikunj.tamboli @ gmail .com

mwill• 15 years ago

Worth noting it seems many of the sites listed at the end of the post are now offline.

jbk13• 15 years ago

It seems the OP was updated with a better list...

TeMPOraL• 15 years ago

Seeing that I am thinking more and more about creating a personal "never ever work with those people/companies" database...

jbk13• 15 years ago

Disclaimer: VLC dev and VideoLAN chairman

I think the worse part of all this mess is that Google refuses to act and stop those. This was requested quite a few time and Google told us to go away because we didn't own all the trademarks in the US (even though we still have copyright).

Moreover, the safe-browsing initiative, used in Chrome 12, is a complete joke. Reporting one of those websites make the safe-browsing re-scan the website, and find absolutely no issue with it and white-label it, which is even worse...

I contacted the Safe-Browsing initiative to report the issue and they told me "that their wasn't any issue on those websites...". Right...

Of course, running any of those executables on your Windows machine makes MSE (or other antivirus) scream...

I hope that Google fighting spam initiative will improve the situation, but seeing http://vlc-download.com/ on the first page of "VLC" search makes me wondering...

rw• 15 years ago

How likely is it that these sites serve up clean binaries to Google's spider?

jbk13• 15 years ago

Quite unlikely, tested with different user-agent, and notably the Google Spider one, but the binaries are almost empty and download other binaries, which might not work for them...

Another explanation is that Google doesn't consider those adware and toolbar as malware... I truly don't know.

mnutt• 15 years ago

When I used to work at LimeWire, Google would do the same thing to us. Not only did they sell adwords to the malware sites, they refused to allow us to buy adwords.

gaius5• 15 years ago

Well, this is about misalignment of incentives. If you are a search user, you are not Google's customer. You are their product. They sell you to people who buy adwords - whoever they may be.

rryan2• 15 years ago

OK, this line of reasoning is all over the place. All it does is expose that you know close to nothing about how Google works. There are in fact, many hundreds of engineers whose sole incentive (e.g. promotions and salary adjustments) and purpose in their job is to make sure that your search results are good.

These engineers are /not/ the engineers that are in charge of designing or running the systems that sell ads. In fact, those are two completely different divisions of the company. (If you would like to learn more about how Google works from the inside, I suggest reading Steven Levy's book "In the Plex")

Just because you do not pay for something does not mean it is not a product. If search was not good, people would go to a competitor. This is how Google got to where it is today, and bing.com is just a click away. This thread is about the quality of Google search results, and your argument is that Google does not care about the quality of your search results because they allow you to use it free of charge by inserting labeled advertisements.

To me, this is not a logical argument -- your emotions and sense of being wronged have taken over.

billpg2• 15 years ago

So distributing copy of VLC with lots of malware added but still conforming with the GPL is okay?

jbk13• 15 years ago

Yes, this is ok, as long as VLC copyright is concerned.

However:

- Claiming that you are the original Author is not OK, because of copyright laws.

- Adding restrictions on the usage of the software is not OK, because of the GPL.

- As the VLC installer is GPL, the modified installers must be GPL'd too.

- Shipping VLC commercially means shipping all the source code of all external libraries, which they usually don't. (Still GPL)

- VLC, VideoLAN, x264 and VLC media player Trademarks are registered. (depends on the countries)

- Scraping the website and the images is not ok. (copyright)

- Wrongly impersonating a person or an organisation is not ok either.

billpg2• 15 years ago

I think the trademark would stop my hypothetical evil plans more than anything else. If I had to call it "Bill's video player that isn't evil, honest." no-one would download it.

(To say nothing of why someone who distributes malware would be at all concerned with copyright and trademark law.)

omouse5• 15 years ago

Which of those would be okay in a copyright-less world? Which ones are morally/ethically bad (without copyright law)?

zenspunk6• 15 years ago

Should Google somehow run background checks on every advertiser to see if they're breaking some US law? (or other countries' laws?) What broken laws should justify removal?

Should this be before or after they allow them to advertise? If before, this would inconvenience the majority of advertisers who are legitimate. If after, should Google investigate every incoming report of illegitimate advertising? Or, how many reports should warrant an investigation by Google?

Regardless, can Google remove these Adword listings without legal issues (i.e. without risking being sued)?

Getting these scammers off the front page of search would be relatively easy - it can be solved algorithmically. They're probably working on it now, with their anti-linkspam initiative.

But I don't see how Google could get them off Adwords without employing hundreds or thousands of people to review advertisers, but this would create more problems of greater magnitude than it would solve.

They could crowdsource it to narrow the (retrospective) review process, but this would create a secondary market of advertising, which I doubt Google wants, nor users would want to deal with.

I can't think of a way for Google to solve this problem without creating larger ones.

It's the responsibility of governments -- not internet advertising platforms -- to police copyright law.

jbk13• 15 years ago

No, but at least Google should take down those advertisers when they are reported to them.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738238 as a comment, for example.

zenspunk6• 15 years ago

Edit: parent made a retrospective edit to add the link after I had made this post.

So again, I ask:

- is Google meant to run a background check on each and every report?

- does this not put Google at risk of being sued by the removed advertiser?

- or, if Google wrongfully removes a legitimate advertiser, does this not put them at risk of being sued?

- which broken laws - of which country - should justify removal?

- how should they solve the potential problem of scammers flooding the report system?

Again, I don't think Google can solve this problem without creating larger ones. I don't think it's their job to police copyright.

numbsafari2• 15 years ago

Google wants to be a useful search engine that returns relevant results. If they are returning links to malware/spyware/adware in exchange for money rather than linking to legitimate results, don't you think that is not only unethical but borderline illegal?

If Google's product is US then they are effectively selling US to the malware/spyware/adware fiends.

Google absolutely has the responsibility to return relevant, meaningful and SAFE results to its users. They already try and do that in a lot of cases. It's just that, in this case, they are getting paid not to.

zenspunk6• 15 years ago

Did you not read my post? I said they could easily (relatively) solve the issue of these guys turning up in search results.

The problem they can't solve, I argue, is to ensure that people violating copyright law (of some arbitrary country) can't advertise with Adwords.

Edit: Look, I can do retrospective edits too!

msy• 15 years ago

Fake anti-virus software, counterfeit pharmacies, counterfeit products in general, malware of all sorts. Google have been taking their money for years. They have the resources not to. That's pretty shitty behaviour that endangers their users in my book.

zenspunk6• 15 years ago

>They have the resources not to.

This point is crucial. Could you elaborate?

JoeAltmaier• 15 years ago

Not taking people's money doesn't get you sued. Amazon's scam-bots cancel legitimate vendors all the time because they 'smell funny'.

And nobody asked Google to background check - the offenders were reported, and Google whitewashed the report. That raises suspicious eyebrows because Google is making money off of the offenders.

omouse5• 15 years ago

How can you say "intellectual" property and GPL in the same sentence? That's fucked up, seriously. The whole point of the GPL is to help erode the copyright system and make it unnecessary.

Of course this situation is not specific to VLC, other open source products are affected by this scourge and there’s not much we can do about it. They have the money to buy adwords, we don’t. Sadly, as a non-profit organization we don’t have the money to sue them.

Really? You would sue them? That's kinda dumb don't you think? Kinda gives legitimacy to the shitty copyright system...

Anyway, my solution would be to ask for money so that you can afford to take some action.

The other half of this solution is to setup a few spammy/malware-looking websites that offer the genuine product. Out-spam the spammers! There must be a reason people are falling for the spammers' marketing after all.

And judging by the domain names, you failed to pick up on that marketing. They have some key domain names; downloadvlcplayer.net, vlcdownload.org, vlc-media-player-blog.com. Those domain names should have been bought up a while ago. Create a new domain, something like free-vlc-download.com.

jbk13• 15 years ago

> How can you say "intellectual" property and GPL in the same sentence? That's fucked up, seriously.

You understand very little about GPL. GPL is very strongly linked to source code copyright and source code modification. It isn't BSD or MIT.

> I don't think it's tAnd judging by the domain names, you failed to pick up on that marketing. They have some key domain names; downloadvlcplayer.net, vlcdownload.org, vlc-media-player-blog.com. Those domain names should have been bought up a while ago.

With what money?

troymc• 15 years ago

Last week, I changed my default search in Chrome to DuckDuckGo. Today when I do a search for VLC Media Player I get the "VLC media player" Wikipedia article in the red box at top, and http://www.videolan.org/vlc as the top search result, with a nice little "Official site" label beside it.

I'm increasingly delighted by DuckDuckGo.

MetaMan• 15 years ago

I think the real issue is that there is a misalignment of "business models".

On the one hand you have an open Source project with little funding relying on a small group of volunteers acting mostly out of a sense of social responsibility and on the other hand you have dishonest rip-off artists able to make money for free with little or no practical sanction applied.

Its not really google's job to police the web (Note I'm not condoning Google's behaviour). The extent to which they do this depends on how well that policing activity aligns with their business interests.

The root problem is profit Vs non-profit in an environment with dis-interested / conflicted and or toothless regulatory bodies.

IMHO Money is metaphor for power and as long as VLC/VideoLAN is a 'not-for-profit' organisation they will have problems.

arihant• 15 years ago

To me it appears that most have not changed the name and they are hosting the download files for free. Not all darkness here.

Zeus-TheTrueGod• 15 years ago

sudo apt-get install vlc. Really easy, so may be google is not the best way to download and install software ?

rwmj2• 15 years ago

Obviously this is the best way to get it.

But when I send some video to my friends/relatives and they can't play it, I have to say "use VLC". If I forget to send the URL, there's a danger they'll fall into some spam site.

rwmj2• 15 years ago

One problem with VLC is the genuine site's URL is not obvious. It is:

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

but it's competing against (spammy) sites like "vlcdownload.org".

If they had vlc.com or changed their name to videolan, then it'd be better IMHO.

shadowflit• 15 years ago

So of course I agree that spam results are the heart of evil. But I'm confused. After reading the DDG comment, I plugged both "VLC" and "VLC Media Player" into both google and DDG, expecting to see bad results at google. Instead, the top 4 results (ignoring ads, of course) all point to videolan.org. Is this a case of my results being pre-filtered or something? I don't recall hitting the "this is stupid, make it go away" button too often on Google.

Companies that make money by distributing misleading versions of VLC

Related Stories