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The following is a compensated review of a site which gives a walkthrough of how to remove spylocked, a common and annoying piece of spyware masquerading as a helpful application:

If you’re here looking to remove the annoying piece of spyware known as ’spylocked’ from your system, you can click on through to the walkthrough itself, which will help you get rid of the software. However, the purpose of this post is to review the walkthrough, which I think has some very strong, as well as some very weak, points.

Overall, the solution to removing spylocked is well-detailed and thorough. The site takes you step-by-step through the process, linking you to tools that you’ll need, such as smitrem.exe. However, here’s where some of the negatives come in.

The site is undeniably peppered with ads, some of which I believe (though I am not that company, and especially not their legal counsel, so this is my opinion only) constitute a violation of the advertising company’s Terms of Service. Even those which don’t are clearly designed to funnel you into clicking on them. This starts on the first page, which asks you to ‘click below’ and then shows you a bunch of ads, with a tiny link bar directly over them (what you’re ’supposed’ to click on).

While it took me about 2 minutes to find the actual links (after walking away in disgust the night before, having not seen it then), I guess that technically, this isn’t encouraging anyone to click the ads, just being pretty sleazy about link placement and size. The following screenshot, though, is definitely just nasty:

That’s right, this site wants you to install the Google Pack to ‘prevent’ SpyLocked from ‘continually reinfecting’ your computer, and they’re not afraid to put an ad link in there for you to click on to get it. Now that, my friends, is pretty weak, if you ask me. If you’re a blogger, you know what kind of revenue that particular ad brings, and telling people that they pretty much need it to keep SpyLocked off their computer is just cheap. Cheap cheap cheap. Also, you can’t see it, but the words ‘CRITICAL FINAL STEP…’ are in the BLINK tag. That’s right, they used the blink tag. So, overall, if you need to get rid of spylocked, the info’s there, but be careful not to fall into any of the obviously placed ad traps that are just plain lame. Maybe if the authors took some steps to clean up the ads and remove the terribly obvious link to the Google Pack (or just tone it down), this would be a worthwhile service, and satisfied browsers who learned something from the page would be interested in ads displayed and click on them without being tricked into it.

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