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."

Comments

Re:Prior Art

[goombah99]

Just wait till Novel checks some "MS interoperability" agreement derived code back into the Linux Tree.... Or are you using a mac?

Re:Capture, milk, rinse, repeat

[Otter]

While the rest of the economy maintains some kind of pretense of "ethics", Microsoft seem to have decided that not a single rule counts.

Mining your data to generate targeted ads is how GMail works. It's how all Google online apps are ultimately going to work. And anything Google does is by definition Not Evil, so I don't see what the problem is.

If anything, you guys should be up in arms about how Google has obvious prior art on this "invention".

Re:Capture, milk, rinse, repeat

[pieterh]

Pieter's rule #1: when a Slashdot poster writes "you guys", it's a Microsoft astroturfer.
Pieter's rule #2: when a Slashdot poster says, "Google does it, how come you (guys) don't complain", it's still a Microsoft astroturfer.

Just for information, "Otter 3800", how much Microsoft dollars were spent on buying that lovely low user id?

Anyhow, to answer your question, Google is just "not evil yet". Do you think anyone really trusts Google with all that private data? Not for a second. The big difference is that Google has demonstrated several times that it is reasonably ethical. While your employer, on the other hand, demonstrates the ethics of a psychopathic puppy torturer having a bad crack day.

Otter 3800, you just made my foes list.