I was shocked. Of course, I had heard of this phenomenon before, but i had never seen it so blatant. The guy even claimed pages as his own work! as far as his visitors could tell, he had done it all without help from anyone. Yet he was using other people's bandwidth, he was "stealing" their pages and he was, well, obviously without any kind of ethics.

Needless to say, I didn't give him award. I also zipped off an email to webmasters whose sites had been "borrowed" so that they could rationally decide what needed to be done.

Linking to another site is perfectly legal, completely ethical and should be done without any considerations of any kind. The web is all about linking - referencing other material at will. The best thing you can do is link, link and link some more. To any and every WEB PAGE that you find useful (never, ever link directly to graphics or other multimedia - only to web pages).

On other hand, para-siting (or framing, as it is commonly called) another person's site without permission is unethical. It confuses visitors to your site and it steals bandwidth. It's even worse to attempt to pretend web site being framed is your own.

The moral of story - stay ethical on internet.

Here's an analogy. Suppose you were a webmaster and had a product to sell. You spend your good money creating a beautiful brochure which you are going to pass out at local mall. The brochure includes some helpful content and some advertisements of your product. You are proud of it because you've put your heart and soul into it's creation and you expect to make a few sales as well.

Now as you walk around mall handing out your brochure, some sleazy guy in a trench coat is following you around. Once in a while, as you give brochure to someone, he steps in front of you, takes brochure out of your hands, pulls out a pen and makes a few changes. He crosses out a few words, writes in some new advertisements (along with some "content" to make it seem legitimate), then hands it off to person you were giving it to. Worse yet, you don't see this happening and as far as you are concerned end user received your brochure with your ads. Only it's been changed without your knowledge or permission.

You, webmaster, have no control over these links. They could be competitors. They could be links of pornographic sites (I couldn't find anything on Ezula site which excluded such sites). They could be links to sites which you disagree with for ethical, moral, religious, racial or any number of other reasons. The point is you (the webmaster) have no control over links from YOUR site. To user, these appear to be YOUR links.

In fact, they will be sites of people and companies who are unethical and scummy enough themselves to sink to this level of advertising. They will be sites of any company which is willing to shell out cash.

Want more information? Check out following site for whole story.

http://scumware.com/

If you want to help stop this special brand of evil, then you can take some steps yourself. First, don't install product on your computer systems. If you've already installed thing, then immediately uninstall it.

Second, if you do have a problem with this form of scum, then by all means file a report with better business bureau, write an article of your own, send tell your friends and spread word. You might also send an email to advertisers who purchase this "service" (if you installed product you would find out who they are) and inform them of your distaste. Be sure and point out that you will not purchase their products as long as they advertise in this method. The mighty dollar speaks volumes.

Finally, if you are a webmaster, you can add following graphic to your pages, along with a link to http://scumware.com

http://scumware.com/images/bugverysmall.gif