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Microsoft Patents the Mother of All Adware
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica has an article on the mother of all adware patents filed by Microsoft: 'It's such a tremendously bad idea that it's almost bound to succeed. Microsoft has filed another patent, this one for an "advertising framework" that uses "context data" from your hard drive to show you advertisements and "apportion and credit advertising revenue" to ad suppliers in real time.' Ars discusses this disturbing concept, which was originally unearthed by Information Week and we first discussed last week."
to use linux. Don't we have enough already?
"*Bip* See Natalie Portman naked!"
"*Bip* Hot nude women!"
"*Bip* All amateur action!"
"*Bip* Hot midget-on-'67 Red Sox pitcher action!"
"*Bip* Come on, quit pretending. We know you have 137GB of meticulously sorted porn, we're just pointing you where you would go anyway!"
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Generally I have very few nice things to say about MS, but I doubt they're stupid enough to shoot themselves in the foot in such a way. The biggest advantage of Windows vs Linux ATM is that Windows still has an edge usability-wise. Enough crap like that, and people will start moving despite various inconveniences.
But, what if MS simply got sick of various crap that infests Windows and decided to patent things they might do, so that they can sue the makers without needing an anti-spyware law? An anti-spyware law would probably be seriously hard to create and enforce, and would be open to a lot of interpretation, while patent infringement is probably much more straightfoward.
Google does this with their g-mail service. I often find sidebar ads that relate to the e-mail I currently have open. I think a lot of this goes around with little knowledge on the users part.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.