D Squared Software thought it had the ultimate scam. The San Diego based software company used Windows Messenger Service pop-ups to sell a software product that blocked, you guessed it, Messenger Service pop-ups. The company thought that this was a legitimate sales tool.

The FTC thought that it was extortion and a Federal Court judge agreed.

Messenger Service (not to be confused with Windows Messenger Instant Messaging program) is a little used feature in Windows. Designed to allow Network Administrators to communicate to people on their network, it serves no purpose for the home PC user. It is pretty easy to disable, assuming a user knows how. (For anyone who needs instructions, please visit http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;330904.) Many users don't know how and bought software from D Squared, at a cost of $25 to $30, that basically did the same thing that you could accomplish with a few clicks of your mouse.

D Squared was exploiting this Windows vulnerability to generate what appeared to users as Windows Error messages telling them to buy software to stop the problem that D Squared had created. The FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection director, Howard Beales, called D Squared's tactics high-tech extortion.

"The defendants created the problem that they proposed to solve -- for a fee. Their pop-up spam wasted computer users' time and caused them needless frustration," Beales said. "'I'll beat you, and I'll stop beating you if you pay.' We call that extortion, and it's no different in the high-tech world."

To make matters worse, D Squared is also accused of selling or licensing their pop-up-sending software to other companies, allowing them to engage in the same conduct. The defendant's Web site allegedly offered software that would allow buyers to send pop-ups to 135,000 Internet addresses per hour, along with a database of more than 2 billion unique addresses.

It has not been a good year for Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative. Microsoft was chastised for being slow to react to this problem. Last month, America On Line automatically disabled this feature. If most PC users don't use this feature, and any competent Network Administrator would know how to enable it if their organization did use, why was it ever on by default?