BuzzBites: FTC Spanks Adware Vendor; Ink Costs More Than Blood?

FTC Spanks Adware Vendor

Adware distributor Zango has agreed to pay $3 million to the Federal Trade Commission or unfairly and deceptively downloading software on to users' PCs, and making it difficult to find and remove the software. The FTC ruling also forbids Zango from communicating with any users' computers that downloaded Zango software before January 1, 2006.

The FTC says Zango software was downloaded more than 70 million times, often through affiliates that used unscrupulous methods, such as browser exploits, without user consent.

The settlement is partly a result of a formal complaint filed with the FTC against Zango (formerly 180Solutions) by the Center for Democracy and Technology at the beginning of this year. --Andrew Conry-Murray, [email protected]Ink Costs More Than Blood?

Blood may be thicker than water, but it appears ink is more expensive than blood. The per-milliliter cost of an HP 45 printer cartridge is 71 cents, while blood comes out to 40 cents per ml, according to a posting on Gizmodo.com.

Here's the math. A 42-ml cartridge of black ink costs $30, while a 500-ml unit of blood from the Red Cross is $200. (A quick Web search confirmed the ink price. Redcross.org doesn't have pricing info for blood, but other sites showed pricing to be within that range.)

The poster also calculated the price-per-ml of other precious fluids, including oil, bottled water and vodka. Ink tops them all. This does a lot to explain HP's $110 billion market capitalization. --Andrew Conry-Murray, [email protected]

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