3721 (Yahoo Assistant)

» see 3721.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the internet cafe machines i grew up on were full of toolbars nobody chose. you would sit down, open internet explorer, and there would be search bars stacked under the address field, none of them yours, all of them slowing the thing to a crawl. mine were the turkish and global kind. 3721 was the same disease in a language i could not read, and it was bigger than anything we ever caught, the biggest of its whole species.

zhou hongyi started 3721 in beijing in 1998. the pitch was smart and it fit the country. the web in the late nineties assumed you could type a latin-alphabet domain name, which is a strange thing to ask of a billion people who do not write in latin letters at all. so 3721 let you type a chinese word straight into the internet explorer address bar and get taken where you wanted, its little plug-in translating the keyword into a real destination. companies paid 3721 to own their brand name as a keyword. at its height something like eighty million people had it installed and six hundred thousand businesses were paying.

and then it would not leave. the same plug-in that made navigation easy made itself nearly impossible to remove, riding in on other downloads and hiding its uninstaller, respawning if you managed to kill it. microsoft's anti-spyware tool flagged it, and a beijing media group put it at the very top of its 2005 list of the country's malware. yahoo bought the whole company in november 2003 for 120 million dollars, renamed the thing yahoo assistant, and inherited every bit of the loathing along with it.

~ the case file ~

~ the funny part ~

here is the part that is almost too neat. zhou hongyi, the man who built the most hated piece of software in china, left after the yahoo deal and started a company called qihoo. its product was 360 safeguard, a free antivirus whose whole reason to exist was hunting down and deleting exactly the kind of clingy adware he had gotten rich making. it worked. 360 became one of the most installed programs in the country by promising to protect you from things that behaved like 3721. the arsonist came back as the fire brigade, and got much richer the second time.

~ what carried over ~

3721 is where china learned a habit it never lost, that a plug-in is a thing you have to fight. the whole later era of chinese desktop software, the security suites and download managers that nagged and bundled themselves onto every machine, grew in the soil 3721 poisoned. it also gave the country zhou hongyi, who is still building things people argue about. outside china almost nobody remembers the name. inside it, 3721 is a small four-digit number that still means the exact feeling of a computer that has stopped being yours.

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