Serving ads isn't the objectionable part, adds on the net are a fact of life google has made billions from adds.
Serving an 'ad' that installs malware/adware onto your system instead of the product its advertising (spam blocker in this case) is very very bad. Infact its not much of a stretch to call it criminal.
Thats the point of Alex's post.
good comment old bean
right on the money 
Ah, I see that there may be some confusion. My anonymous commenter seem to think that we install adware INSTEAD OF the content we're advertising. Zango doesn't work like that. Instead, Zango uses desktop advertising to help keep the content we DO install FREE. In other words, if you install our SpamBlockerUtility, you really do get an anti-spam engine that you would otherwise have to pay money for. And yes, while you have it installed, we will show you some targeted ads, a trade-off that we describe no less than three separate times during the install process. But you really (honestly, truly) do get the anti-spam software that the ad referred to. You may not like the trade-off, you may prefer a different engine, and that's fine: but it's a real utility and it works pretty well. Go over to http://www.spamblockerutility.com/ and see.
Just wanting to make sure that we've all got our facts straight before we start arguing 
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Your last line made me laugh; it's like the stormtroppers in Star Wars, "Move along, move along!"
Zango also replaces URLs you visit with other sites you did not intend to visit. They sell this service on a cosp per clik basis to the highest bidder.
Ah, another anonymous commenter! Gotta love folks who take responsibility for their opinions .
I do appreciate the straw man, though (the above comment is, quite literally, nobody's opinion), so let me just emphasize that the claim that Zango "replaces URLs you visit with other sites you did not intend to visit" isn't true. The implication of the comment is that if you type in, say, www.countrywide.com, Zango will magically replace that URL and navigate you (in a sneaky fashion) to www.mortgage.com instead. That's simply not true: we don't do that.
Now, Zango *does* do these two things: (1) Like most other toolbars, if you type in a URL that doesn't resolve to a genuine domain (say, www.contrywide.com), Zango's toolbar will try to be helpful and take you to a page that lists some options you might be interested in; and (2) Zango will periodically launch a NEW browser instance with a well-labeled ad that is hopefully contextually relevant to the page to which you had navigated. We do this because, well, we show ads; those ads drive our business and fuel the Content Economy; and we explain repeatedly and insistently throughout our install process that we show ads, the acceptance of which is the stated quid pro quo for mountains of free, [ad supported] content.
To be clear, though: Zango does NOT replace valid URLs.
Replacing typo URLs with some of Zango's clients that it thinks I might be interested in? Forcing pop-up windows on users who only skimmed the install small-print? Come on. There's a line to be drawn somewhere.
Who do you think your fooling?? Zango is nothing but adware/malware crap and you know it. Try your jedi mind triks on some weaker form of life. We aren't buying it.
Commenting by HaloScan
