Adbuster

Harvard student's hobby keeps adware vendors on the ropes.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. - Symantec this month is suing so it can continue to call Hotbar.com's software "adware" without running the risk of being sued itself.

The legal complaint relies in part on an analysis of Hotbar.com software written by Ben Edelman, a 25-year-old Harvard University economics Ph.D. student. He already has graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School and runs the most respected independent adware site on the Internet.

The site, benedelman.org , regularly analyzes adware and exposes companies that sneak the stuff onto PCs without giving users sufficient warning. In his most recent post, Edelman contends that Google maintains relationships with adware vendors despite Google's policy against doing business with companies that fail to adequately seek consent before their software installs itself.

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CAMBRIDGE, MASS. - Symantec this month is suing so it can continue to call Hotbar.com's software "adware" without running the risk of being sued itself.

Click to see: Ben Edelman

The site, benedelman.org , regularly analyzes adware and exposes companies that sneak the stuff onto PCs without giving users sufficient warning. In his most recent post, Edelman contends that Google maintains relationships with adware vendors despite Google's policy against doing business with companies that fail to adequately seek consent before their software installs itself.

His work "is just totally invaluable," says Richard Stiennon, head of threat research for Webroot Software, a spyware-cleaning company. " It pulls the cloak off people's eyes. All you hear is claims from some of these vendors that they're good guys and don't do bad things and he turns around and says, 'What about this site where you're installed by a drive-by download?'"

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Based in part on Edelman's research, some adware companies have changed their policies, Stiennon says, and "that's a great thing if you can say that in any walk of life."

Edelman spends 15 to 20 hours a week researching and writing, time carved out of days otherwise occupied studying for the bar exam, working on his Ph.D. thesis, running 8 miles, taking road trips to present papers, sitting on expert panels and riding the world's best rollercoasters. "The job is right in here," he says gesturing to a room in his street-level apartment in Cambridge, "so the commute is short. I enjoy it. It's like a hobby rather than a job."

But it is a job in that he gets paid consulting fees, something that he relied on to pay his way through undergraduate and law school. He's consulted with companies that have been threatened by spyware makers to document the bad practices of the spyware vendors. "There are lots of threats from spyware companies to those who detect, remove, write about, criticize and otherwise threaten their business. Gator sued PC Pitstop for calling them spyware," he says.

He says he's had job offers from anti-spyware companies but turned them down. "I value my independence, my ability to write what I want," he says.

He would seem to be a target of litigation, too, but nobody has come after him. "I get some letters, legal papers, but never lawsuits. No one has ever sued me," he says.

He's been a consultant since junior high school, when he set up PCs for friends in his hometown of Washington, D.C.

"It used to be quite a scene," he says. "You'd order your new Gateway, and the cables would get shaken loose in shipping because they weren't that firmly connected in the first place. You'd get your new computer, turn it on and it wouldn't boot."