Dundee Experiment
What happens when the scummers get scummed?

Background: Scummers and Scumware
"Scumware" is a term which refers to a nasty type of software that is sometimes installed on peoples' computers without their asking. Scumware is typically written by marketing companies trying to make a fast buck. What it does is make unauthorized changes to Web sites as they are being rendered by the user's Web browser: the program runs in the background, waiting for the user to access any old Web site. When he does, the scumware program intercepts the incoming data, replaces or inserts content (usually adding its own, unauthorsized advertising, or redirecting the user to paying competitors' sites), then passes it along to the browser where it is displayed. While this seems a clear violation of the scummed Web sites' copyrights, Scumware authors defend this as a perfectly legitimate and legal practice.

The Experiment
"Dundee" is a fictional program we made up to see what would happen when scumware vendors (Gator, eZula, etc.) thought a competing product was inserting foul language and vile racist propaganda on their own sites. We rounded up a handful of regulars from GRC's spyware and privacy newsgroups to be the "actors", contacting scumware companies and feining righteous indignation after they've seen all the racist viewpoints the company expresses on its Web site. Naturally, the company might want to investigate these claims, especially coming from multiple sources in the course of a few days. To that end, the "actors" were equipped with bait in the form of (forged) screenshots depicting the racial slurs appearing on the Web sites, a dummy executable named "dundee.exe", and bogus config files for dundee.exe.

To complete the baiting, the .ini file made reference to the "Dundee home page" and pointed to the "proof of concept" document below, and contained various data instructing the program on how to add racial slurs, where to send bugreports, etc. When the dummy executable was run, it would complain of missing files and then die with an enigmatic error-message.
The Beginning...
 
As this says, the goal of the experiment is to see if any Scummers take the bait, demanding removal of "Dundee" and/or threatening lawsuits, etc....

Results
Our actors were very convincing. However, only a few minor nibbles from sumware companies, and NO lawsuit threats! (Come on, scummers...and you call yourselves Americans... :-)

Denial, and "very concerned" (Various)
"We will investigate" (Gator)

Some Extra Fun
Just for fun, we contacted the marketing departments of a few scummers and related companies, with a mock salespitch for this revolutionary new software. No takers.

Owning your customers.
 
The original "Proof of concept" bait
The "Proof of concept" file appears below.


"Dundee.exe" proof of concept

Dundee is a client-side application that adds racial slurs to selected commercial Web sites.

Abstract
Dundee is a client-side application that adds highly offensive anti-racial sentiments to selected commercial Web pages. According to US law, it is entirely legal to do so, as the algorithmically-modified content is not stored or transmitted, and the user consented to installing the application. Currently, the application targets the makers of products that "hijack" third-party Web pages using similar (advertising-centric) tools.

Racial slurs were chosen because they are highly and *universally* offensive to most everybody, and easy to add to Web pages (unlike, say, porno images). Also, racial slurs appearing on a company Web site could bring massive lawsuits, investigations and loss of business, more effectively than just about any other modification a client-side program could make to Web pages. To many Webmasters whose sites are currently defaced by the applications Dundee is modelled after, defacing their site and goodwill with banners, popups and paylinks is no different than defacing it with racial epithets and nasty language.

Dundee uses a single configuration file, config.ini, to store all its local configuration data. This configuration contains lists of Web pages Dundee is to act upon, and additional data containing racial slurs to include into the target Web Page. These slur words are separated by noun, verb, etc., for reasons that will become obvious later. More general slur constructs are embedded in the ddlexan.dll file.

Installation
There is no stand-alone Dundee. However, it comes bundled with a number of free and low-cost software products, including two major MP3 sharing clients, and there are plans to bundle it with more applications as time goes on. It has an auto-update feature, which periodically checks the Web site and installs updates. Advertising and resource-sharing capabilities will be included in a future release, and bundlers supplied a portion of the revenues. The ultimate goal is to use the Dundee algorithm to seamlessly insert other things, for a reasonable fee, into specific Web sites at the behest of a client. These are intended to match the tone and context of the page well enough that the average user cannot differentiate original content from Dundee-enhanced content on the page.

Dundee is offered as an option during installation: "Dundee: Free Web Browser Enhancement". The idea is that "sheeple" will install this good-sounding application without understanding what it does. The user can opt in or out of installation. An uninstall reference is placed in Add/Remove Programs.

Operation
Dundee acts as a proxy between the Internet and the Web browser. Upon visiting a Web site matching the URL rules specified in the .ini file, Dundee springs into action, using its quick-and-dirty lexical analyser to seamlessly(?) insert racial slurs and rude epithets into the target Web page. These are created by random selection of the words specified in the .ini file and in the .dll. While the specific algorithm is proprietary to CEXX Labs and subject to much revision, the basic idea is as follows:

The density of changes made to the target Web page are dependent on the apparent SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio) of the target document, also determined by the Dundee application. The SNR is a measure of the ratio between apparent "signal" (informational text content) and "noise" (ad text, text containing marketing terms or constructs, ad images, etc.) present on the page. In general, text modifications are preferred to graphic by Dundee, as the image-module is somewhat flaky, and cannot yet create images dynamically (proportionally-sized text is instead inserted). Many extremely low-SNR sites consist of nearly all images--in this case, there is no other choice but to replace some. The first few non-animated images are skipped in the hope of preserving the company's logo on the page with the racial slurs.

In general, the lexical analyser detects:

Since the replacement is done on the HTML-stripped text and re-inserted within the same tags, the attributes (font, colour, etc.) of the replacement text will seamlessly match the original.

Bugs
While it has been tuned to perform well on the homepages of currently-known highjackers, the insertion of text is prone to fail in some circumstances, particularly on other random Web sites. As mentioned earlier, Dundee's lexical analyser is a quick-n-dirty hack, nothing more. While it does well at fitting text appropriately into a sentence, it does not "understand" language and so will be foiled by odd usage of language, misspelling, structures it does not recognise, and where its key phrases are used in ways I have not anticipated. Hopefully, by the time more hijackers appear or Dundee nears completion, this will be significantly improved.

The TITLE tag contents are currently excluded from analysis, to prevent munging of a company's identifying tagline (we want these racially-intolerant companies to be easily recognised, no?) In the future, the TITLE may be included in analysis by default or as an option.

The image engine also leaves much to be desired. Using images to display Web page text appears to be a common practice among the current crop of hijackers, but the replacement algorithm is very primitive. It may zap the company's logo, it may mess up the page formatting, it may place something completely out of context, it may replace a hidden image, or completely butcher the size/dimensions of an image whose size is not declared in the IMG SRC tag. It is a necessary evil, whose operation will be tuned greatly as Dundee approaches non-beta release.
 
No provision is currently made for other "enhancements" co-existing on the system. It's entirely possible for another "enhancement" to modify Dundee content before it gets to the browser, or for Dundee to act upon already-modified content. Future releases will include code to detect and remove competing plug-ins (GATOR, eZula, etc.) on initialisation. This also solves the problem of Dundee paid content being "watered down" by other paid content, or other plugins breaking the original context of the page.

Demo
Screenshots from three major hijacker Web sites. Note the fluent insertion of slur text in most cases.