For the past 12 months or so, I've felt that about.com has become a devious website distributing malicious code while disguised as a valuable information resource.

One day probably 12 months ago, like turning on a light switch, about.com suddenly appeared at the top of my Google search results for nearly every common topic I requested. And why not, the pages had tons of information.

But surrounding the information were tons of banner ads, popups, and even software install attempts (in Internet Explorer). During typical "my computer is slow" support calls at work, I began seeing spyware which referenced about.com. And just today, a co-worker was greeted with Symantec anti-virus quarantining the notorius winupd.exe during a visit to about.com.

It seems like such a perfect "grayware" setup: Create a seemingly vastly legitimate resource, find and implement THE secret to appearing on top of every Google search (mass self subdomain linking?), then sell your high-traffic banner space to spyware authors and malicious coders, who are paid by ill-intentioned market research firms, quack product sellers, phoney mortgage lenders, identity thiefs, credit card harvesters, botnet pwnz0rds, and spam senders.

Has my internet paranoia reached new heights? Or, is the saying still true that: "The Internet ****s up EVERYTHING!"

Moments later, the user reported that their Windows Media Player was hijacked (in not so few words). Stupid typical replacement of the media player .exe. The time stamp on the compromised file matched when a "free wallpaper" site was being viewed, not about.com. So, maybe the winupdt.exe bug did not come from about.com.

But who cares, I told the user to check out en.wikipedia.org (thanks Bitt). No banner ads or popups there. Have to try and support the honest trustworthy sites...... until they take over every dimension of the digital world like Google has/is. ::sigh:: /me goes to check his 9 GMail accounts

about.com were bought by the New York Times recently so they can't be that suspicious regarding spyware. You'd probably have to fill out a 10 page form and then login to even view the site soon anyway

Thanks for the info. Now is that nytimes.com or nytimes.com.com? No, that's CNet who loves to share your cookies with all of its affiliate sites within the com.com domain (ZDNet, techrepublic, etc.).