QuickTimeCheck Scriptable Object

Within the past few days, I've noticed that while browsing a variety of websites, from my Blog, to StatCounter.com, to Scott Hanselman's blog, that an Information Bar was popping up in IE7 stating the following:

This website wants to run the following add-on: 'QuickTimeCheck Scriptable Object' from 'Apple Computer, Inc. (unverified publisher)'. If you trust the website and the add-on and want to allow it to run, click here...

Now, I'm kind of against installing anything that has "Apple" and "Quicktime" in the same sentence, especially since Quicktime has almost become viral in nature (try installing iTunes by itself), so I just have been ignoring the Infobar. 

At first, I thought that maybe StatCounter was at fault.  There's a script that tries to collect capabilities about the clients that access my blog, etc (things like what screen resolution they use, what operating system, what processor, whether JavaScript is supported, etc) and I thought that this was just one more of the data points being examined.

As it turns out, it's the "Don't Be Evil" folks [Google] that are trying to install this ActiveX component as part of the AdSense advertisements that I (and the other sites) have displayed on our sites.

tags: AdSense, QuickTime, QuickTimeCheck