Slashdot Mirror
Hiding Your Choices And Saying You Made Them
An anonymous reader writes "Lawmeme's Paul Szynol describes how during installation RealPlayer hides checkboxes that elect that the user receives spam, making it look like the user chose to make the selections when in fact he probably just didn't see the options. "This is essentially a cheap and dirty marketing tactic which creates an illusion of informed acceptance by the user where no such acceptance really exists." Other people have posted similar examples from other applications. Is this illegal, or just annoying?"
BTW, isn't it ironic that the acronym for I Am Not A Lawyer is I Anal??
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
Getting spam is almost as bad as... using RealPlayer. At least they are consistant.
activestudios web design
Thanks you insensitive clod. My email address is a@b.com, and I have always wondered why I get all this junk mail from Real!
This is just another reason why I don't use RealPlayer -- I decode my streams by hand. I have the help of fourteen trained cats, and as the stream is "played' accross a readerboard in front of us we all translate it into .au format.
A central server compares all the files in realtime and averages them to compensate for any typing errors/drunkennes.
It's a surprisingly efficient system. Right now I'm listening to the White House's response to the leopard inspectors in Iraq who just found a forbidden stash of Gucci pants in an Iraqi bunker.
I'm eager to upgrade to a 28-cat system, thus effectively doubling my sample rate and allowing me to listen to stereo feeds and possibly even allow video by... er.... damn, I gotta get a life...
RealPlayer accepts a fake address, and you're not missing anything by diverting those helpful marketing messages.
A lot of people will put foo@test.com in. Don't do that. The test.com mail admin will hate you. Use something @example.com instead. example.com is never going to be a live domain.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Software firewalls are great for managing misbehaving software installations like Realplayer. I've never had a better security tool.
There's a rapid-response high-security button on most computers with a little symbol that looks like a capital Q rotated 135 degrees counter-clockwise. You'd be surpised how much more effective it is for managing your misbehaving software installations. Sometimes the mangufacturer is even nice enough to label it "power", as in, it gives you the power of the computer.
Unfortunately, the evil empire figured that button had too much power over their misbehaving software a few years ago, so a standard called "ATX" was introduced that gave their misbehaving software some control over it. They haven't beaten us yet though. It's still possible to make a hardware mod with just a little soldering that restores the power to you, the user.
I feel really sorry for me@me.com - if you're reading slashdot, I'm sorry! :-p
It's also fun to put a real.com e-mail address in...
give a fake adress that will bounce AND check the five upper boxes, to maximize the amount of spam that wil bounce to them.
Alternatively, you can give support@real.com as an address, so support becomes unmanageable.