Perhaps one or some of the tech press that read HN will pick this story up and give you all some more link juice? Or, perhaps some of those anonymous vigilantes will be happy to have new targets to go after.

I realize this is somewhat off-topic, but thanks for VLC and all that you all do. It's one of my favorite projects, and it's one of the first things I install on friends' machines.

My knowledge is probably ~ 7 years out of date here, but back in the day when I worked in AV, labelling and removing spyware was a task fraught with legal issues.

AV companies could recognize and trivially remove such a thing - but chose not to, so they didn't get sued by well-monied corporations who got very upset at their "User Metric Software Toolbar blah blah blah" being marked as malware.

I wonder if that's the case here.

Although I believe google is in the wrong here, I do also believe that adware/malware prevention should be the responsibility of the end user's machine. What google does is at best sticking its fingers into the dam. We can't expect them to do everything, not to mention business and IP laws in the US are incredibly generous to corporations. The case may be that its legally difficult for Google to attack some of these companies.