Imagine where the words "credit information" might occur, sometimes, perhaps, in contexts unrelated to financial credit (maybe something about credits for a movie, let's say). Nonetheless, that particular sequence of words leads to consumerinfo.com. "Small business" will take you to the same place.

You may ask, who would go to trouble to obtain and install such a thing? Well, have you perchance downloaded the sharing utility KaZaa? If you did, you picked up ContextPro along with it, whether you know it or not. [1] The manufacturer of ContextPro claims to have many ways to quietly and surreptitiously insert this product into your system--my adjectives, not theirs, but perfectly appropriate none the less--probably, as in the case with KaZaa, bundling it with some other attractive item.

This has quite some resemblance to Microsoft's so-called Smart Tags. Whether there's any connection, I have no idea.

Symantec informs me that they are aware of this and are both asking eZula to block their site from TopText and bringing the matter to the attention of their legal department, so these effects may not continue for long in this particular case. Nevertheless, if you're interested in checking this out for yourself, you can find any HTML page that includes those particular words, or whip one up yourself; it doesn't matter. It can be a simple local file on your machine; it need not pass through a web server to demonstrate this behaviour.

The following were derived from screen captures showing the sequence of events that occurs if you attempt to click on the "Virus Protection" link on the Symantec product information page at www.symantec.com/product while using Microsoft Internet Explorer with ContextPro installed. (Please note that the mouse pointer itself does not appear in the screen captures; so it's not visible here.)

I, for one, am becoming intensely annoyed by the increasing intrusiveness, underhandedness and coerciveness of some parts of the software industry.

Ray Simard