Belkin router - Now with ads!

This is pretty unreal:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/69/33858.html

ReplayTV is kinda doing this too. They have ads on their pause screens. Not every time you pause, but maybe 10% of them or something. Sometimes they just advertise new features or whatever. I don't know if they're actually selling advertising on them or just using it to promote their own stuff, but it's still annoying, especially when I've got family pictures set up to be my pause screen, and would much rather see those than ads, however innocuous they may be.

What next ads built into contact lenses

That's some pretty shabby tactics.
As pointed out in nanae newsgroup it rewrites the IP address of legitimate packets, so your data goes to Belkin.

Also noted: a) for an internal LAN it is unknown exactly what happens when the request fails, b) and it may cause serious failures on unattended systems and c) it happens "every 8 hours" which could be quite often on a lightly loaded router.

Gareth

What I really want to know is just _how_ marketing departments end up with so much power to be able to do shit like this? You can bet that the engineers didn't do that willingly.

Damn. And I really liked my two Belkin AP's that I've already got. Netgear will get an even larger percentage of my business from now on.

Matthew

Netgear will get an even larger percentage of my business from now on.

I don't know who will get my business, but I'm positive it won't be Belkin.

OH - I work for Bausch & Lomb...I am going right now to check and make sure they are not working this down in the lab ;-)

The most perplexing thing about all this is that the decision-makers at these companies can't get the picture that whenever things like this happen, the public relations backlash has to cause much more damage to them than they could ever recoup with whatever advertising they're trying to sell. There are countless other examples where companies tried to do things like this (using either ads or some kind of spyware) and when they were exposed, realized they stand to lose a lot more than they gain if they continue to do naughty things. Don't these bozos monitor the rest of the industry?

I mean fair enough if it brings up a popup advert when you use the router setup but just redirecting people is over the top. Belkin really didn't think about how much damage their reputation has now taken because of this. As it's actually rewriting the HTTP request then your application will think it's succeeded but in reality it's just talked to the Belkin servers.

Their logic is that you can turn it off and it's "only" once every 8 hours so it's harmless. Will a Mercedes every 30 days go onto auto pilot and drive you over to the dealership so you can look at new cars?

Ssshhh, people! You're giving them more ideas....