Superfish closes shop, relaunches as JustVisual
Superfish, a California-based advertising company best known for the part it played in the Lenovo fiasco, posted an announcement on the official company homepage that its "business is closing".
The company, founded in 2006, developed an image identification and matching algorithm which it used in products such as WindowShopper to display advertisement to computer users.
Products of the company were distributed often as third-party offers in software installers. This led to user complaints who discovered later that Superfish add-ons were installed in browsers such as Internet Explorer, Chrome or Firefox.
Content producers and companies on the Internet were affected negatively as well as advertisement was added to websites automatically which not only reduced the revenue of the site itself but did paint it in a bad picture on top of that due to the added advertising elements on the site.
A study by Google came to the conclusion that Superfish was one of two major ad-sourcing companies used for injecting ads in websites.
Things started to go downhill after it became known that some Lenovo PCs shipped with Superfish preinstalled on them. What made this particularly problematic was the root certificate Superfish added to Lenovo PCs it was installed on as it made all secure connections on the computer (via https) vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
Basically, it allowed attackers to intercept https traffic, used by online banking and shopping sites for instance.
Last month, Superfish announced that it was transitioning its focus but that it would continue to offer its visual search technology to partners.
When you open the website of the company now, you get a different message stating that the company is closing its business.
Does it mean that the company is done and that its patented visual search engine won't be used anymore by ad-injectors to add and replace ads on websites?
No, that is seemingly not the case as the new company Just Visual seems to have been funded to continue Superfish's legacy.
The main company domain is protected by proxy registration which means that you cannot look up who registered it. Information on Crunchbase about JustVisual on the other hand link it to Superfish. The site's general manager and chief of product, Kevin Akira Lee, was Superfish's Chief Product Officer for instance according to Crunchbase data.
Just Visual lists two company products on its homepage. The first its visual search & image recognition APIs, the second "LikeThat Apps" for Android and iOS devices that identifies and matches styles, decor, pets or garden pictures.
While Superfish appears gone for good, JustVisual seems to provide a similar set of services. It is unclear right now whether there will be operational or product related changes apart from the switch to a new company name and domain, and the launching of applications.
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.