Some of you may have already read about C.O.A.S.T., a consortium of anti-spyware developers and vendors, and have asked why we are not part of it. There are a few reasons for this:

• Before COAST was founded, we were asked to join, and have been promised to be kept up-to-date. The next thing we heard was that it already had been founded, and we would be welcome afterwards (though that only after a bit of pressure from the press) - without having the possibity of working on the principles.
• You may have already heard about Lavasoft leaving COAST. Why can only agree with their reasons.
• But the most important point is their so-called Code of Ethics. Let me quote from that:
  1. Compete honestly and fairly on the open market with their competitors and refrain from any intentional misrepresentation of a competitor▓s products and/or services to gain marketing or competitive advantage.
  Which sounds very nice until you see that EnigmaSoftwareGroup is part of this. EnigmaSoftwareGroup are tolerating affiliates that are using domains like 1spybot.com or spybotsearchdestroy.com, even advertising those at Google AdWords. We receive dozens of complains every week from users who've such been tricked to think they would have downloaded (and paid for) Spybot-S&D while actually they only got SpyHunter. COASTs reply is that I should wait a few more weeks and this should surely work out. Meanwhile, COAST didn't answer within their own time frame, and EnigmaSoftwareGroup does not even acknowledge that using domains like spybotsearchdestroy.com or doing advertisement through headlines like "Download Spybot" or "Free Spybot" could confuse people.