And here's the link demonstrating that today, they recovered most of what they lost yesterday when the news actually broke. But not all.
They probably tumbled a bit when the news hit, and rallied when they said "We'll appeal, it's far from over" because US investors assume that companies can win any court case if they spend enough money on it. We'll see what happens if their appeal is denied.
It might just be the area I am in but finding phone techs is not easy.
What area are you in? How much are you paying? What benefits, etc. do you offer? Is work full-time? Day shift?
It may just be the area that you're in, but it can also be that a lot of phone tech positions have compensation that is not much better than a good retail job, and the work is often a lot more difficult. People are often unwilling to work a night shift on contract for $9/hour when they can work days at $8.50/hour as an assistant manager at Starbucks and get full medical at 32 hours.
Our job market is in shambles? A 5.6% unemployment rate is NOT shambles.
Keep in mind, the unemployment rate omits anyone who is "permanently" unemployed, which means out of a job for more than six months.
The average time out of work for those 5.6% is five months right now, which means a lot of people are falling out of the job-seeker pie in the reported figures.
Finally, 5.6% is about people who have *no* jobs... it doesn't count the "underemployed," or those working part time at Wal-Mart for $7 an hour because their AA in English can't get them a better job.
So a 5.6% unemployment rate can exist when the job market is strong and steady, but it isn't an indicator of very much.
But isn't Microsoft a monopoly? I thought monopolies kept the competition from the market?
Gee, wonder what people would say if it turned out Microsoft never was a monopoly...
[begin antitrust 101 lecture] A monopoly is a company that dominates a market. There are natural monopolies, and they are legal. It is not legal to leverage legally-gained monopoly power to "enforce" your monopoly on others (by keeping competition out of the market) or to gain monopoly power in other markets.
Microsoft dominates the desktop market. They are now seeing some competition entering. Since it is illegal for them to use their monopoly power to smack down the competition, they'll have to just try to provide a more attractive product. This is not something they are used to doing. It will be interesting to see what happens.
this is only for "its portfolio of business desktop and notebook PCs", the key word here being "business". This means we won't be seeing HP Linux PCs at BestBuy / CircuitCity in the near term at least.
I don't know anything about how HP markets its computers, but I do know that with Dell, the categories of "Home/Home Office/Small Business/Enterprise" are basically just suggestions. You can go to their website and order from any category. They just put together default packages that make more sense for different markets... like whether or not it comes with speakers, for example.
So it's possible you will be able to buy one of these for personal use, though maybe not at Circuit City or Best Buy. (They might have a shelf tag for it at Best Buy, but after fifteen minutes of searching, you'll find a clerk who finds a guy who actually knows anything about the inventory to tell you they're all out, sorry... would you like this thing over here that's 2x as expensive and doesn't do what you want?)
If you're worried about privacy (in a supermarket of all places) that much why would you voluntarily sign up to loyalty (otherwise known as purchase tracking and marketing) schemes?
I think the person you're quoting was simply pointing out the naive inaccuracy of the article, not claiming any personal violation of privacy.
I don't much care if my grocery store knows what I buy... maybe someday they'll figure out I don't think that Chef Boyardee is an appropriate substitute for Healthy Choice. But some people *do* care, and the assertion that it doesn't happen is flat-out wrong.
All MS are doing is giving their free software along with (hopefully not) your OS. It's like suing a computer seller for including a free keyboard of vendor X and not giving a chance to vendor Y. This, my friends, is competition. Sounds even fair for me.
All MS are doing is "giving" their "free" software along with the OS.
What's *not* free is including competing software.
This is where MS went seriously wrong... they threatened OEMs with higher licensing fees if they bundled competing media player software. That's like Antec telling Alienware "Oh, here's a free Antec keyboard with that case. If you include a Logitech keyboard, the case costs 50% more."
Yes when you install a service pack or major IE update it makes IE default again, but Netscape does the same thing on install.
Hm, not exactly.
If I install Mozilla, and then start it, it will say "Mozilla is not your default browser. Do you want to make it your default browser?" Yes|No ||Don't ask me this again.
If I update IE, and then start Mozilla (which was installed and the default browser before the update), it will say, "Mozilla is not your default browser. Do you want to make it your default browser?" Yes|No ||Don't ask me this again.
If I update IE, and then click a mailto: link, it launches OE, which *I never installed*, and doesn't ask me about Mozilla Mail until I start it again.
There's a difference between asking the user if they want to change, and just changing things.
So for the same business behavior, it is fair when you are small and it is unfair when you are big. I would say Microsoft is punished for being too successful, not for unfair practice.
If Windows was 30% of the market share, MS could add a media player and increase value, sure.
What they could *not* do is threaten to jack up prices on OEMs that include rival media players, because the OEMs would use one of the OSes that made up the other 70% of the market.
They didn't even get in trouble for just bundling. They got in trouble specifically for *illegally leveraging monopoly power.* This is something you cannot possibly do without a monopoly, so market share DOES matter.
So now you say it's for both sides. It wouldn't work, and does not make sense. Buffet with idle time? Just seduce a suer, and go for a fortune 500 company...the defendant pais the lawers bills!
The defendant only pays for what they initially pay above and beyond whatever established "reasonable" rate they're paying on their own case.
For example, say the regulation provides for three IP lawyers, who are billed out at $300/hour, and the number of hours is scaled for the size of the award being sought. Both sides spend that much and each pay for it out of pocket. But, when either side pays more than that, they also contribute that excess amount to the other side's defense. NEITHER side picks up the whole bill (unless that's the terms of the settlement or verdict). You only pay for the other side to the extent you're paying "extra" for your own side.
So you wind up with a waiting game, with both sides holding out to try to get the other side to pay for any extras. That lowers the escalation of expenses a great deal.
Good for the profession uh? And no, large corporation will not base a 1 billion claim trial on 1 lawer or whatever is the standard fee you are guessing, it's an important risk no matter how likely it is that they win, with juries you can never know. Also, that's not a great problem, if you have a case, you will be lawer financed.
I don't understand most of what you said there... but the guidelines would probably be written by lawyers and legislators, so they'd be somewhat generous. What they wouldn't pay for is tons of publicity, FUD, speculative investigation, etc.
The big problem with the idea is that it could never pass, but I'm afraid I really don't understand your other arguments. They don't seem to address the proposal at all.
The problem with those solutions is that the confirmation messages that a virus has been received (and consequently sent by another user) can jam up the mail server and other mail servers.
But less so than the original email. It's receiving all the email anyway, scanning it, then converting it to a harmless HTML page and sending a plain-text email to the originally designated recipient. Seems to work great.
What I really hated was those emails that would say "You appear to have sent a virus-infected email..." which were always wrong, because they pull random addresses for the from field as well.
I am pretty sure that my old Netscape client had a preview pane as well. You can turn off the preview pane in both Outlook and Outlook Express. It's oddly enough under view/layout... in express, I turned it off long ago in outlook (query help for preview pane).
Yes... but in other mail clients, the preview pane is not a security risk, because they don't have the auto-launch capability. That was the point.
I'm sure that if someone wanted to take the time and analyze the source for Thunderbird, they could easily write the same type of worm/virus.
I'm not, for several reasons:
1. Thunderbird has never thought implementing auto-launch of executables embedded in email was a good idea.
2. If you're using Thunderbird, you're probably using Firebird, and it's not as likely to try to do what the malformed HTML tells it to.
3. Even if you *do* manage to get Firebird to do it, it's not part of the operating system, and isn't likely to be able to do really nasty stuff to your computer.
Re:Well, its pretty easy actually.... and painful
on
Nasty New Virus Variants
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
MS stuff was never really designed to be hooked to the internet.
Well, sometimes, it seems like it was *too* designed to be hooked to the internet... after all, aren't a lot of these worms based on exploits in code that is designed to allow remote access to your machine?
Your average home user who has an imap or pop account from an ISP really has no good excuse not to uninstall Outlook from their machine and switch.
Ah, but then they also have to uninstall Outlook Express after they specifically told it many, many times they didn't want it to install...
Not kidding. I'm very careful about my custom installs of software. I installed Powerpoint (and ONLY powerpoint) from Office 2000 Professional because I didn't have time to work out the weird incompatibilities between my PPT files and OO Impress, and I told it "NO, I DON'T WANT OUTLOOK EXPRESS." But at some point, perhaps then, perhaps one of the times I went to Windows Update and said "NO, I DON'T WANT OUTLOOK EXPRESS," it got installed... very quietly. I found this out one day when I clicked on a mail link or something and OE tried to open up. I killed it as fast as possible, but man... that bugger is hard to squash.
The reason most (or all) viruses are written for Windows is because that's where they'll do the most damage, since most people use Windows.
If everyone switches to Linux or Mac OS then you'll start to see viruses for those operating systems.
You're replying to a reply about the fact that this virus (like several before it, actually) can auto-launch from the preview pane. This is a "feature" specific to Outlook. If you don't use a mail program made by Microsoft, it probably won't affect you.
This is not one of those things that happens to Windows just because it's the easiest thing to pick on. This is one that specifically happens because a feature that is massively insecure was still included, just because one user in a thousand might find Outlook easier to use because of it.
I have no idea why all ISPs don't use ClamAV! Obviously they don't need to throw messages away, just in case - advanced users might prefer that messages probably containing viruses just be quarantined instead - but that would eliminate the problem for most people.
My school's mail server, after getting slammed very hard by er... one of them a couple months ago (I can no longer keep up with which virus is which), installed something that I think is called Vscan. What it does is sends you an email which informs you that you were sent a message with a virus attached, and gives you a link with a generated username (usually the "from" email address) and password to view the message... if you really want to.
I like this system, because it's soooo much easier to filter those messages as Junk than all the random stuff that might be thrown together by a virus;-) and, if for some reason you get a *real* email that happens to have a virus attached, you can still read it just fine. Remember, back in the old days, when viruses were first learning to use email, and they'd just attach themselves to whatever outgoing messages you'd send? I'll bet there's one or two of those still floating around...
I would do it the other way arround. Big Co sues small company, they have to pay say match 50% for the other party, and 2x the jury costs.
Small company sues large company? If they have a case, it will be easier to find lawers that want part of the treasure chest.
In what way is that the other way around? I'm not specifying that only one party (plaintiff or respondent) gets matched... *either* side has to match "excessive" spending on legal fees. Doesn't matter if you're suing or being sued.
You'd end up with a system where each side would try to out-wait the other... as soon as one party decides to bring out the "big guns," they pick up the tab for both sides. You'd dramatically reduce spending on legal fees all around this way.
Google's page summary is giving out misleading information about him, and they refuse to do anything about it.
Google's page summary is not giving out misleading information. Perhaps it was; I'm not sure there's any good way to find out at this point.
Currently, the google hit in question looks like this:
Disciplinary Actions List - Bi-Bz... Effective July 1, 1993. BROWN & MAUGHAN, AN ACCOUNTANCY CORPORATION (COR 2529).
MAUGHAN, MARK G. (CPA 38184) Fountain Valley/Rolling Hills Estates, CA.... www.dca.ca.gov/cba/discipline/bi-bz.htm - 47k - Cached - Similar pages
And he *is* apparently legitimately on this list for failing to renew his license in a timely manner.
Perhaps back in March of 2003, the California Board of Accountancy had their tables set up differently so that when Google's pagerank parsed it, it pulled stuff from another record. The article says that Google told him he needed to take it up with them, since they owned the site that the info was on. The issue has since been resolved, apparently... but he's suing *now*.
OK, so my plan isn't perfect. Can anyone suggest anything better?
Hm, how about something like this...
You establish a schedule of "reasonable" lawyer's fees for various services/types of law. Lawyers who agree to charge those rates will be listed in public directories (a little like the doctors who have agreed to charge certain rates being listed in that book from your HMO).
If you sue someone, each party has every right to hire whatever lawyer they want to... BUT, whatever they're paying above and beyond those "reasonable" fees, they have to *match* for the other side (unless that right is somehow waived). So, I sue BigCo Inc., I hire my standard-rate lawyer... if they want to hire fifteen big-money lawyers, that's fine, but they pay for me to do the same, too.
The only problem is, you could never get legislation like this passed in today's system;-) but it would help level the playing field, wouldn't it?
I mean, come on -- we all know that if you spend time randomly surfing the Web, you can hardly go an hour or two without randomly stumbling across some porn -- or reference to porn -- in the form of an advertisement or a pop-up or a joke site or whatever.
Uh... this doesn't happen to me very often at all. Possibly because I don't have pop-ups... but the places I surf tend to be good about marking things "NSFW" (at which point I can decide if I want to view it or not, rather than "stumbling across it").
Besides, it would be easy to set up a redirection site that "sanitized" hostnames.
We have Websense at work, and it gets huffy if I even try to view the Google cache of a site that's on its no-no list. Redirectors are totally out the window; it isn't fooled for a minute.
Now, it would be nice if it would block all the URLs that pop-up ads come from... since all I can use at work is IE:-( (And the Google toolbar causes awful hangs and slowdowns if I install it.)
Slashdot Mirror
And here's the link demonstrating that today, they recovered most of what they lost yesterday when the news actually broke. But not all.
They probably tumbled a bit when the news hit, and rallied when they said "We'll appeal, it's far from over" because US investors assume that companies can win any court case if they spend enough money on it. We'll see what happens if their appeal is denied.
It might just be the area I am in but finding phone techs is not easy.
What area are you in? How much are you paying? What benefits, etc. do you offer? Is work full-time? Day shift?
It may just be the area that you're in, but it can also be that a lot of phone tech positions have compensation that is not much better than a good retail job, and the work is often a lot more difficult. People are often unwilling to work a night shift on contract for $9/hour when they can work days at $8.50/hour as an assistant manager at Starbucks and get full medical at 32 hours.
Our job market is in shambles? A 5.6% unemployment rate is NOT shambles.
Keep in mind, the unemployment rate omits anyone who is "permanently" unemployed, which means out of a job for more than six months.
The average time out of work for those 5.6% is five months right now, which means a lot of people are falling out of the job-seeker pie in the reported figures.
Finally, 5.6% is about people who have *no* jobs... it doesn't count the "underemployed," or those working part time at Wal-Mart for $7 an hour because their AA in English can't get them a better job.
So a 5.6% unemployment rate can exist when the job market is strong and steady, but it isn't an indicator of very much.
But isn't Microsoft a monopoly? I thought monopolies kept the competition from the market?
Gee, wonder what people would say if it turned out Microsoft never was a monopoly...
[begin antitrust 101 lecture]
A monopoly is a company that dominates a market. There are natural monopolies, and they are legal. It is not legal to leverage legally-gained monopoly power to "enforce" your monopoly on others (by keeping competition out of the market) or to gain monopoly power in other markets.
Microsoft dominates the desktop market. They are now seeing some competition entering. Since it is illegal for them to use their monopoly power to smack down the competition, they'll have to just try to provide a more attractive product. This is not something they are used to doing. It will be interesting to see what happens.
this is only for "its portfolio of business desktop and notebook PCs", the key word here being "business". This means we won't be seeing HP Linux PCs at BestBuy / CircuitCity in the near term at least.
I don't know anything about how HP markets its computers, but I do know that with Dell, the categories of "Home/Home Office/Small Business/Enterprise" are basically just suggestions. You can go to their website and order from any category. They just put together default packages that make more sense for different markets... like whether or not it comes with speakers, for example.
So it's possible you will be able to buy one of these for personal use, though maybe not at Circuit City or Best Buy. (They might have a shelf tag for it at Best Buy, but after fifteen minutes of searching, you'll find a clerk who finds a guy who actually knows anything about the inventory to tell you they're all out, sorry... would you like this thing over here that's 2x as expensive and doesn't do what you want?)
If you're worried about privacy (in a supermarket of all places) that much why would you voluntarily sign up to loyalty (otherwise known as purchase tracking and marketing) schemes?
I think the person you're quoting was simply pointing out the naive inaccuracy of the article, not claiming any personal violation of privacy.
I don't much care if my grocery store knows what I buy... maybe someday they'll figure out I don't think that Chef Boyardee is an appropriate substitute for Healthy Choice. But some people *do* care, and the assertion that it doesn't happen is flat-out wrong.
All MS are doing is giving their free software along with (hopefully not) your OS.
It's like suing a computer seller for including a free keyboard of vendor X and not giving a chance to vendor Y.
This, my friends, is competition.
Sounds even fair for me.
All MS are doing is "giving" their "free" software along with the OS.
What's *not* free is including competing software.
This is where MS went seriously wrong... they threatened OEMs with higher licensing fees if they bundled competing media player software. That's like Antec telling Alienware "Oh, here's a free Antec keyboard with that case. If you include a Logitech keyboard, the case costs 50% more."
Yes when you install a service pack or major IE update it makes IE default again, but Netscape does the same thing on install.
Hm, not exactly.
If I install Mozilla, and then start it, it will say "Mozilla is not your default browser. Do you want to make it your default browser?" Yes|No ||Don't ask me this again.
If I update IE, and then start Mozilla (which was installed and the default browser before the update), it will say, "Mozilla is not your default browser. Do you want to make it your default browser?" Yes|No ||Don't ask me this again.
If I update IE, and then click a mailto: link, it launches OE, which *I never installed*, and doesn't ask me about Mozilla Mail until I start it again.
There's a difference between asking the user if they want to change, and just changing things.
So for the same business behavior, it is fair when you are small and it is unfair when you are big. I would say Microsoft is punished for being too successful, not for unfair practice.
If Windows was 30% of the market share, MS could add a media player and increase value, sure.
What they could *not* do is threaten to jack up prices on OEMs that include rival media players, because the OEMs would use one of the OSes that made up the other 70% of the market.
They didn't even get in trouble for just bundling. They got in trouble specifically for *illegally leveraging monopoly power.* This is something you cannot possibly do without a monopoly, so market share DOES matter.
> So it's more expensive then?
Well, somewhat... because "a few" politicians in Europe is about five times the number here... yay parlimentary systems!
There is a reason you set your maximum spend budget in the adwords settings before you go live.
Yes, and then that budget is busted after a few minutes, and no one actually *sees* your ad.
So now you say it's for both sides. It wouldn't work, and does not make sense. Buffet with idle time? Just seduce a suer, and go for a fortune 500 company...the defendant pais the lawers bills!
The defendant only pays for what they initially pay above and beyond whatever established "reasonable" rate they're paying on their own case.
For example, say the regulation provides for three IP lawyers, who are billed out at $300/hour, and the number of hours is scaled for the size of the award being sought. Both sides spend that much and each pay for it out of pocket. But, when either side pays more than that, they also contribute that excess amount to the other side's defense. NEITHER side picks up the whole bill (unless that's the terms of the settlement or verdict). You only pay for the other side to the extent you're paying "extra" for your own side.
So you wind up with a waiting game, with both sides holding out to try to get the other side to pay for any extras. That lowers the escalation of expenses a great deal.
Good for the profession uh? And no, large corporation will not base a 1 billion claim trial on 1 lawer or whatever is the standard fee you are guessing, it's an important risk no matter how likely it is that they win, with juries you can never know. Also, that's not a great problem, if you have a case, you will be lawer financed.
I don't understand most of what you said there... but the guidelines would probably be written by lawyers and legislators, so they'd be somewhat generous. What they wouldn't pay for is tons of publicity, FUD, speculative investigation, etc.
The big problem with the idea is that it could never pass, but I'm afraid I really don't understand your other arguments. They don't seem to address the proposal at all.
The problem with those solutions is that the confirmation messages that a virus has been received (and consequently sent by another user) can jam up the mail server and other mail servers.
But less so than the original email. It's receiving all the email anyway, scanning it, then converting it to a harmless HTML page and sending a plain-text email to the originally designated recipient. Seems to work great.
What I really hated was those emails that would say "You appear to have sent a virus-infected email..." which were always wrong, because they pull random addresses for the from field as well.
I am pretty sure that my old Netscape client had a preview pane as well. You can turn off the preview pane in both Outlook and Outlook Express. It's oddly enough under view/layout... in express, I turned it off long ago in outlook (query help for preview pane).
Yes... but in other mail clients, the preview pane is not a security risk, because they don't have the auto-launch capability. That was the point.
I'm sure that if someone wanted to take the time and analyze the source for Thunderbird, they could easily write the same type of worm/virus.
I'm not, for several reasons:
1. Thunderbird has never thought implementing auto-launch of executables embedded in email was a good idea.
2. If you're using Thunderbird, you're probably using Firebird, and it's not as likely to try to do what the malformed HTML tells it to.
3. Even if you *do* manage to get Firebird to do it, it's not part of the operating system, and isn't likely to be able to do really nasty stuff to your computer.
MS stuff was never really designed to be hooked to the internet.
Well, sometimes, it seems like it was *too* designed to be hooked to the internet... after all, aren't a lot of these worms based on exploits in code that is designed to allow remote access to your machine?
Your average home user who has an imap or pop account from an ISP really has no good excuse not to uninstall Outlook from their machine and switch.
Ah, but then they also have to uninstall Outlook Express after they specifically told it many, many times they didn't want it to install...
Not kidding. I'm very careful about my custom installs of software. I installed Powerpoint (and ONLY powerpoint) from Office 2000 Professional because I didn't have time to work out the weird incompatibilities between my PPT files and OO Impress, and I told it "NO, I DON'T WANT OUTLOOK EXPRESS." But at some point, perhaps then, perhaps one of the times I went to Windows Update and said "NO, I DON'T WANT OUTLOOK EXPRESS," it got installed... very quietly. I found this out one day when I clicked on a mail link or something and OE tried to open up. I killed it as fast as possible, but man... that bugger is hard to squash.
The reason most (or all) viruses are written for Windows is because that's where they'll do the most damage, since most people use Windows.
If everyone switches to Linux or Mac OS then you'll start to see viruses for those operating systems.
You're replying to a reply about the fact that this virus (like several before it, actually) can auto-launch from the preview pane. This is a "feature" specific to Outlook. If you don't use a mail program made by Microsoft, it probably won't affect you.
This is not one of those things that happens to Windows just because it's the easiest thing to pick on. This is one that specifically happens because a feature that is massively insecure was still included, just because one user in a thousand might find Outlook easier to use because of it.
I have no idea why all ISPs don't use ClamAV! Obviously they don't need to throw messages away, just in case - advanced users might prefer that messages probably containing viruses just be quarantined instead - but that would eliminate the problem for most people.
;-) and, if for some reason you get a *real* email that happens to have a virus attached, you can still read it just fine. Remember, back in the old days, when viruses were first learning to use email, and they'd just attach themselves to whatever outgoing messages you'd send? I'll bet there's one or two of those still floating around...
My school's mail server, after getting slammed very hard by er... one of them a couple months ago (I can no longer keep up with which virus is which), installed something that I think is called Vscan. What it does is sends you an email which informs you that you were sent a message with a virus attached, and gives you a link with a generated username (usually the "from" email address) and password to view the message... if you really want to.
I like this system, because it's soooo much easier to filter those messages as Junk than all the random stuff that might be thrown together by a virus
I would do it the other way arround. Big Co sues small company, they have to pay say match 50% for the other party, and 2x the jury costs.
Small company sues large company? If they have a case, it will be easier to find lawers that want part of the treasure chest.
In what way is that the other way around? I'm not specifying that only one party (plaintiff or respondent) gets matched... *either* side has to match "excessive" spending on legal fees. Doesn't matter if you're suing or being sued.
You'd end up with a system where each side would try to out-wait the other... as soon as one party decides to bring out the "big guns," they pick up the tab for both sides. You'd dramatically reduce spending on legal fees all around this way.
Google's page summary is not giving out misleading information. Perhaps it was; I'm not sure there's any good way to find out at this point.
Currently, the google hit in question looks like this:And he *is* apparently legitimately on this list for failing to renew his license in a timely manner.
Perhaps back in March of 2003, the California Board of Accountancy had their tables set up differently so that when Google's pagerank parsed it, it pulled stuff from another record. The article says that Google told him he needed to take it up with them, since they owned the site that the info was on. The issue has since been resolved, apparently... but he's suing *now*.
OK, so my plan isn't perfect. Can anyone suggest anything better?
;-) but it would help level the playing field, wouldn't it?
Hm, how about something like this...
You establish a schedule of "reasonable" lawyer's fees for various services/types of law. Lawyers who agree to charge those rates will be listed in public directories (a little like the doctors who have agreed to charge certain rates being listed in that book from your HMO).
If you sue someone, each party has every right to hire whatever lawyer they want to... BUT, whatever they're paying above and beyond those "reasonable" fees, they have to *match* for the other side (unless that right is somehow waived). So, I sue BigCo Inc., I hire my standard-rate lawyer... if they want to hire fifteen big-money lawyers, that's fine, but they pay for me to do the same, too.
The only problem is, you could never get legislation like this passed in today's system
I mean, come on -- we all know that if you spend time randomly surfing the Web, you can hardly go an hour or two without randomly stumbling across some porn -- or reference to porn -- in the form of an advertisement or a pop-up or a joke site or whatever.
;-)
Uh... this doesn't happen to me very often at all. Possibly because I don't have pop-ups... but the places I surf tend to be good about marking things "NSFW" (at which point I can decide if I want to view it or not, rather than "stumbling across it").
Perhaps we just browse on different internets
Besides, it would be easy to set up a redirection site that "sanitized" hostnames.
:-( (And the Google toolbar causes awful hangs and slowdowns if I install it.)
We have Websense at work, and it gets huffy if I even try to view the Google cache of a site that's on its no-no list. Redirectors are totally out the window; it isn't fooled for a minute.
Now, it would be nice if it would block all the URLs that pop-up ads come from... since all I can use at work is IE
leaked video footage starring Mr. Gates or Mr. Ballmer.
And no, I did not suggest the video would feature both of them together, thank you very much!
Scary that you did have to put in that disclaimer... I seriously saw "and" instead of "or" the first read-through.