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Congressional Anti-Spyware Bill Introduced
CRCates writes that U.S. "Senator Conrad Burns has introduced new anti-spyware legislation. The bill would make it difficult to for software to download and install itself without the user's knowledge. The bill would also require notification, consent, and procedures for easy removal."
Most spyware actually informs users somewhere in the very long license agreement, and would not be affected by this.
Completely criminal spyware - installed completely without the user's knowledge (such as that found on some discs claiming to be music CDs) is already illegal.
This is just a 'feel-good' measure which will not actually change anything; at least the intent, unlike CAN-SPAM, wasn't evil here.
(a) NOTICE, CHOICE, AND UNINSTALL PROCEDURES- It is unlawful for any person who is not the user of a protected computer to install computer software on that computer, or to authorize, permit, or cause the installation of computer software on that computer, unless--
(1) the user of the computer has received notice that satisfies the requirements of section 3;
(2) the user of the computer has granted consent that satisfies the requirements of section 3; and
(3) the computer software's uninstall procedures satisfy the requirements of section 3.
Did anyone else notice that there is no exception in here for law enforcement agencies? In other words, bye-bye big brother spyware!
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Off-topic, I admit, but there seem to be 2 more comments than are displayed here in this story. Where'd they go?
Good question. Viewing at -1 lists 18 articles, but I only see 16 of them. Might this be related to the bug that's messing up people's user pages?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
I'm more worried about the stuff I might not of found
Do what I did. Open the task manager and do a Google search for each of the processes.
You may find something that nobody's aware of (I did - and it got submitted to Spybot)
Have you tried Linux yet?
One unfortunate consequence of this talk of "user granting consent" takes us closer to the position that the act of clicking OK on a EULA can somehow be binding on the person.
As far as I'm concerned I should always be able to click anything on my own computer without thereby entering into a contract with some company such as Microsoft. Ugh.