Well, the big-wigs at Microsoft are at it again. As if tracking cookies weren’t bad enough, Microsoft has recently filed a patent that would ” look at what’s on your hard drive and serve you targeted advertisements based on that data.” The patent application notes that the software in question could be a part of Windows or a stand-alone app:
An advertising framework may reside on a user computer, whether it’s a part of the OS, an application or integrated within applications. Applications, tools, or utilities may use an application program interface to report context data tags such as key words or other information that may be used to target advertisements.
Gives me all the more motivation to start using Linux/Ubuntu full time now. I can’t believe the government would allows this, oh wait how I could I be so naive…this is the same government who created the Patriot (wire-tap) Act. Ironic that I come across this today too as I am helping a friend via e-mail clean her computer. From what she is describing it sounds as if is badly infected with Adware.
Come join the discussion on the Firefox Extension Guru’s Forum: Microsoft’s Ad(ware) Patent
News Source: Wired Blog
i read in a blog that purports that they are an intern or something in microsoft corp. and that they are trying to patient adware so they can sue spammers they go after like they’ve been in the news for patent infringement and get them even harder. hard to know if that’s true or not. seems like the more mac gets towards being used on the mainstream sometimes i wonder if microsoft isn’t self destructing at the thought of having competition in the OS game and knowing they can’t drive them into the ground because the fact is they are skating so close to the government breaking the entire company into pieces.
I’m using http://www.bitdeffender.com/ which is an antivirus and firewall and http://www.adalert.co.uk which is an adware remover. Bit Deffender consumes some more memory, indeed, but i never had problems with viruses. Ad Alert has speed up my computer a lot after I have installed.