Monday, September 8, 2008

Everyone wants to "own" your PCo

There's a battle going on in your computer right now between you and viruses, worms, spyware and other junk that is bad for your computer. The battle determines who really owns your computer. Yes, you may own it because you bought it and all, but you don't have much control over what is going on behind the scenes. It used to be that only malicious hackers would try to own your computer. Now, there are a lot of different people and companies that are vying for control.
For example
-Sony put this rootkit on music CDs that installed itself when put into a computer. The point of it was to prevent people from doing illegal things with the music files. And Sony asked the antivirus software companies to not allow the antivirus program to detect the root kit.
-Hotmail aloows you to block junk mail, but there's no way to stop junk mail from Microsoft.
-Internet explorer comes shipped with half of its popup blocking turned off, to allow for ads to pop up.

If left to grow, these programs will basically turn your computer against you. They will limit your computer and make it less reliable for you to use. You can fight back by only using software that respects your boundaries and boycott services that seem untrustworthy.

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