Seriously though, is there a business conference that happens annually now where presenters try to sell the audience on the benefits of alienating your customers by providing sub-par purchasing and product use options? Do they start the whole thing off with a keynote on how to use copyright to extort and sue your customers?
I think, in recent years, its become readily apparent that a company's true customers are it's stock holders and board members. The consumers are just raw material to be milked for money in ANY way possible.
Sorry if that went slightly off-topic, it's just frustrating to see so many product/media providers jump on this bandwagon. Whats next? Some sort of physical DRM for printed copies?
I glanced at the articles, seems both are articles mention Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia J. Snowe. I also checked the PDF files.. both are different and lengthy.
Seems like a lot of work to do for an April Fools prank but I wouldn't put it past them to leak this on April 1st... one of those "hide in plain sight" deals.
I'm curious, how difficult would it be for the these electronic voting machines to require a fingerprint at the beginning of the process and require the user to use that same finger through the entire process?
Now, before everyone starts screaming about identification, I'm not talking about comparing the fingerprints to any external databases at all.
After the ballot is cast and completed, the fingerprint data is immediately wiped.
This way, if a voter was somehow convinced that they were done and to step away from the booth before their vote was completed, the computer would automatically detect fraud/tampering if another user came up to change the ballot by comparing the fingerprints.
I'm sure there are reasons not to do this (like processing overhead), but its just something that occurred to me that could enhance security besides having a GUI designer who knows where to use a "Next" button.
Apologies, I should have worded that a lot better.
My meaning was that a badly designed UI combined with people exploiting social engineering doesn't mean there is a serious security hole in the machine software itself on the level that, say, allows someone to walk up to the machine after the votes have been completed and alter the vote.
Common sense says the GUI designer should have labelled that button "Next" or something like that if it was merely a step of the process and not the final process itself. I think such a change would drastically reduce people who walk away at this point, especially if another note is added saying "Not done yet, X number of steps to go".
So yes, it is a security issue with the GUI that leaves an opportunity open for exploitation by social engineering, but not a security issue involving the safety and accuracy of the votes after they've actually be completed and cast properly.
But the headline leads you to believe this was somehow a voting machine flaw, rather than a social engineering attack based around shitty UI design ("Vote" means vote, not, "Confirm my Choices").
In what way is that not a security flaw? If an ATM were to fail to log me out for several minutes after returning my card and money and receipt unless I know to hit a specific button, it is a problem with the ATM.
Bad analogy.
As the GP said, the button they hit wasn't the "you're finished" button, it was more like the "next screen" button. In your analogy would you really walk away from an ATM BEFORE you finished your transaction and told it "I'm done"? Probably not because, in the ATM situation, you generally don't get your card back until you're completely done and logged out of the system.
In this case, it sounds like the voters were convinced by the guilty parties that hitting the "Vote" button meant they were done, when, in reality, it was more like the standard "Next" button you see on most web forms.
Badly designed GUI + social engineering != security flaw.
Pretty much exactly what I was just thinking.. the recording industry must be ecstatic over things like this. They're learning over time that they can produce crap, in a crappy format, and people will happily buy it.
That or they've known it for quite some time and people are being trained to like it.
Could whoever is writing the Conficker++ 2.0 right now please include an auto-deactivate all important MS apps please? Thanks.
I'm really looking forward to what that would do to economies and submarines.
I think you'd see the full force of Microsoft put to squashing the vulnerability all of the sudden.
Let's say though that they didn't.. let's say the bug is not fixable in a reasonable time frame (reasonable being according to the average consumer.... probably less than a week).
I predict the following would occur, in this order: 1) The year of Linux on the Desktop would finally be realized 2) Linux gurus would become Gods among men for a day 3) The following day, "Computer Support" jobs would replace dentists as the occupation with the highest suicide rate as the flood of ex-windows end-users start calling for tech support
And yes, downloading music without paying for it is STEALING.
No, its not.
Stealing or theft is when you take something away from someone else without their consent and/or providing compensation. The original owner no longer has the thing you stole. Example: If you walk into Walmart, pick up a music CD, and then walk right back out without paying for it.
Downloading music means you're making a COPY of it, you don't go to the provider's computer/server and take the digital file from them. Copying, when the work is copyrighted, is copyright infringement.
Now, is Copyright Infringement wrong? Most people would say yes, and I'd agree with that (although I don't agree with the copyright time lengths).
The RIAA/MPAA, however, want to have their cake and eat it too. They want Copyright Infringement to be viewed, by both the general public and the courts, as stealing.
Why? Well, by making Copyright Infringement into theft, they an make it a criminal offense meaning it could end up as a felony or misdemeanor charge. Just imagine, the RIAA/MPAA could go far beyond demanding insane amounts of money per infringement, they could add jail time into their extortion methods to put the fear of The Almighty RIAA/MPAA into the infringers
I understand what you're saying, however, I don't think its really within Microsoft's power to kill Flash, even if Silverlight is wildly successful in the long term.
There will always be people who prefer Flash/Flex as a development platform, either because they feel it's a superior technology or because it's more "open-source friendly". As long as they have a market share, they'll be around.
Moonlight doesn't support Silverlight 2.0-targeted code. You're being a bit disingenious implying that Silverlight code works on Firefox. Some of it does, but a great deal of it does not. Much of it even requires a Windows client.
That is what we call 'vendor lock-in'.
Out of curiosity, have you run into any instances where a Silverlight 2 app ran on IE but didn't run on Firefox (in a Windows environment of course)? I can't recall any times that has happened to me when I was developing with it so I'm wondering what would cause the incompatibility.
Now I have noticed Chrome doesn't always handle it so well but that appears to be an issue with the browser so far and not the Silveright runtime itself. I say this because I've seen marked improvement in Chrome's handling of Silverlight since from Chrome beta until now.
I realize that most of/. is very wary of anything Microsoft to say the least, but I really hope that they follow through and continue to do so on cross-platform support for Silverlight. It's good for them, even if some of them don't see it, and it's definitely good for us as consumers (at least in regards to Adobe having some competition in the market).
Silverlight comes along offering nothing new but plenty of obstacles and lock-out of end user browsers, requiring active download of a plug-in, and yet, there are bozos out there willing to commit paying customers and their websites to an endless, costly, non-standard nightmare in exchange for nothing! You can't make shit like that up, it's real.
Unlike Adobe Flash right? Oh wait, you have to install a plug-in there too.
Granted, Silverlight 2 support isn't quite there yet with Moonlight but I believe the Mac OS version is up and running.
Argue if you will over whether technologies like Flash or Silverlight should be used for rich internet applications, or argue whether they should be used on public sites (on this note I would say that any site that expects to be most accessible should stay away from these technologies). You shouldn't, however, simply discount Silverlight as a valid development platform just because its Microsoft.
Yes, there is prior history here. Yes, its very possible they'll up and say "No more Moonlight and Mac support... ahaha GOTCHA!". And so what if they do? They'll be shooting themselves in the foot and people will just jump back over to Flash/Flex. By that time, I expect somebody will have written a C#/VB.Net to Flash/Flex converter if there isn't one already and we may be able to mostly port over a lot of the code.
I would argue that Silverlight has offered some good things, including a very nice development environment (with Blend v2 and above) and a smaller learning curve for people who already have some.Net programming under their belt. I also noticed around the time Blend with.Net support launched, Adobe announced a better development environment for Flex so I'd wager there are plenty of Flash/Flex developers out there who are happy now as well.
I think the increasing Powershell integration is interesting too. I've been reading up on 2008 R2 which is apparently the server equivalent to Windows 7 and I'm very excited about the Active Directory Powershell integration.
I can't help but wonder then, just how bad the MS situation is(security) if they're so afraid of an open view in terms of security from the outside world.
I think currently they have a fairly open view to the outside world, post-patch anyways. Releasing information regarding the vulnerability pre-fix wouldn't be a good thing. I was just commenting that they COULD hide information about the security patches to prevent would-be-hackers from learning about an exploit and targeting un-patched systems. I don't really think thats the best action to take though.
It is Microsoft's fault in the first place for writing the software and the underlying architecture in such a way that allows these types of exploits. However, if they release a fix and some people don't get them because automatic updates is turned off (for whatever reason) then that is an end-user problem. It is these systems that are under the most threat and the threat, at that point, can't be ended by Microsoft.
However, is there anyway for Microsoft to minimize the exposure of these patches?
To do this effectively I imagine they'd have to hide the fact that they've updated the system or, at least, minimize their KB articles to say "Patch KB[insert number here] fixed an exploit".
Imagine though the lashback from this... we already know from recent articles how much people despise Microsoft for adding sneaky patches that install addons for Firefox. Sneaking in security updates without documentation and/or some sort of notice would further solidify some people's ideas of Microsoft's sheer level of evil and their obvious plot to take control of all of our PCs away from us.
If you think about it that way, this whole situation is pretty much a win/win for MS haters.
Interesting strategy here... distract Microsoft with your left hand with a "we don't want to be bundled" sign and hit them hard with your right fist with those good old anti-trust brass knuckles.
I guess maybe what they're going for is to not have ANY browser installed during OS installation, however if they went that route I hope they would put in an extremely user-friendly GUI to grab browser install packages from online. Yes, I realize most people on this site have FTP addresses and mirrors memorized for the Firefox install but I'd really rather not have to explain the process to everyone in my family the next time they move up to another version of Windows. Not to mention half my friends... then there is all the people at work...
Valid point. Does/. have a filter option? Would be interesting if you could select which news you want to see on the front page and maybe have another page you can visit to browse the articles that got filtered out of your main view.
On the other hand, I think a lot of the Windows 7 links have definitely been relevant and news-worthy. Not all of them have been from Microsoft either (well, that we know of). The benchmark comparisons between Ubuntu, Windows 7, and Vista for example was interesting and I'm glad they posted the news about the UAC exploit as well as the fact that they're fixing it now (this article). I guess I could sign up for some Windows 7 RSS feeds from other sites but the beauty of/. is you get articles showing different perspectives as well as a range of issues and products.
First it was tagged "whocares" which I thought was somewhat silly considering the related article ended up with 379 comments, many of which were condemning said UAC security hole. Obviously, a lot of people, even those who don't even use Windows, did care or at least found it interesting.
Of course thats all in the past since the tag seems to have been replaced by "astroturfing", which would be correct since the article was about a positive change. After all, we wouldn't want anyone to come under the false belief that anything positive from Microsoft is anything other than a PR scam to make you forget that they're evil.
Come to think of it, this article clearly needs the "itsatrap" tag!
It's just that the vast majority of computer users never get's the chance to select an OS, you must have heard all the stories of people that wanted their money back when installing Linux?
The vast majority of licences sold by MS are OEM, it's the computer brand that decides what price point they want to sell their machine at.
True. Really though I was thinking mainly about the prices for the OS itself when sold at somewhere like Walmart or Staples. It's easy to forget sometimes that most people buy computers with a pre-installed OS.
Obviously not or else I wouldn't have posted that would I?
I haven't researched this because, up until now, there wasn't a point. I've used Vista at home for a while but I honestly couldn't remember the install experience in this regard. We don't use it on campus because the majority of our computers wouldn't perform well with even Business installed... we've essentially decided to skip Vista.
Now, since Windows 7 released to beta, I am researching and learning as much about it as I can so that I can make an informed decision when it releases. Thank you for the informative post.
Even so, why can't they just make one version, sell it at the cost that they'd sell Ultimate, and have an interface during install that shows the different "versions" and a quick explanation of the features included, the intended platforms, etc.
Beyond that, there should be a method to "upgrade" your install to one of the higher versions if you decide you need the added features and that your hardware can support it. Since you've already payed the price for a full Ultimate copy, there would be no need for extra costs to do this.
Granted, it would be nice just to have one version, plain and simple, but as a IT employee at a university, I'm going to want some sort of either version options or feature options so I can only install what I need on campus machines and not eat up disk space with things the students won't ever use.
Has anyone noticed a performance hit to Firefox or anything? Any critical need to remove it?
Not that I'm happy that it was put on my system and that it can't be removed through the accepted addon system with Firefox, but I'm wondering if its really worth the trouble and for what reasons other than the standard "MS is evilllll", "They're spying on us", or what is sure to become a new spin on a popular internet meme "Microsoft raped my web browser".
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up... that had me cracking up
Seriously though, is there a business conference that happens annually now where presenters try to sell the audience on the benefits of alienating your customers by providing sub-par purchasing and product use options? Do they start the whole thing off with a keynote on how to use copyright to extort and sue your customers?
I think, in recent years, its become readily apparent that a company's true customers are it's stock holders and board members. The consumers are just raw material to be milked for money in ANY way possible.
Sorry if that went slightly off-topic, it's just frustrating to see so many product/media providers jump on this bandwagon. Whats next? Some sort of physical DRM for printed copies?
Compare to the story ran on April 1st:
New Legislation Would Federalize Cybersecurity
I glanced at the articles, seems both are articles mention Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia J. Snowe. I also checked the PDF files.. both are different and lengthy.
Seems like a lot of work to do for an April Fools prank but I wouldn't put it past them to leak this on April 1st... one of those "hide in plain sight" deals.
I'm curious, how difficult would it be for the these electronic voting machines to require a fingerprint at the beginning of the process and require the user to use that same finger through the entire process?
Now, before everyone starts screaming about identification, I'm not talking about comparing the fingerprints to any external databases at all.
After the ballot is cast and completed, the fingerprint data is immediately wiped.
This way, if a voter was somehow convinced that they were done and to step away from the booth before their vote was completed, the computer would automatically detect fraud/tampering if another user came up to change the ballot by comparing the fingerprints.
I'm sure there are reasons not to do this (like processing overhead), but its just something that occurred to me that could enhance security besides having a GUI designer who knows where to use a "Next" button.
Apologies, I should have worded that a lot better.
My meaning was that a badly designed UI combined with people exploiting social engineering doesn't mean there is a serious security hole in the machine software itself on the level that, say, allows someone to walk up to the machine after the votes have been completed and alter the vote.
Common sense says the GUI designer should have labelled that button "Next" or something like that if it was merely a step of the process and not the final process itself. I think such a change would drastically reduce people who walk away at this point, especially if another note is added saying "Not done yet, X number of steps to go".
So yes, it is a security issue with the GUI that leaves an opportunity open for exploitation by social engineering, but not a security issue involving the safety and accuracy of the votes after they've actually be completed and cast properly.
But the headline leads you to believe this was somehow a voting machine flaw, rather than a social engineering attack based around shitty UI design ("Vote" means vote, not, "Confirm my Choices").
In what way is that not a security flaw? If an ATM were to fail to log me out for several minutes after returning my card and money and receipt unless I know to hit a specific button, it is a problem with the ATM.
Bad analogy.
As the GP said, the button they hit wasn't the "you're finished" button, it was more like the "next screen" button. In your analogy would you really walk away from an ATM BEFORE you finished your transaction and told it "I'm done"? Probably not because, in the ATM situation, you generally don't get your card back until you're completely done and logged out of the system.
In this case, it sounds like the voters were convinced by the guilty parties that hitting the "Vote" button meant they were done, when, in reality, it was more like the standard "Next" button you see on most web forms.
Badly designed GUI + social engineering != security flaw.
Pretty much exactly what I was just thinking.. the recording industry must be ecstatic over things like this. They're learning over time that they can produce crap, in a crappy format, and people will happily buy it.
That or they've known it for quite some time and people are being trained to like it.
Could whoever is writing the Conficker++ 2.0 right now please include an auto-deactivate all important MS apps please? Thanks. I'm really looking forward to what that would do to economies and submarines.
I think you'd see the full force of Microsoft put to squashing the vulnerability all of the sudden.
Let's say though that they didn't.. let's say the bug is not fixable in a reasonable time frame (reasonable being according to the average consumer.... probably less than a week).
I predict the following would occur, in this order:
1) The year of Linux on the Desktop would finally be realized
2) Linux gurus would become Gods among men for a day
3) The following day, "Computer Support" jobs would replace dentists as the occupation with the highest suicide rate as the flood of ex-windows end-users start calling for tech support
And yes, downloading music without paying for it is STEALING.
No, its not.
Stealing or theft is when you take something away from someone else without their consent and/or providing compensation. The original owner no longer has the thing you stole. Example: If you walk into Walmart, pick up a music CD, and then walk right back out without paying for it.
Downloading music means you're making a COPY of it, you don't go to the provider's computer/server and take the digital file from them. Copying, when the work is copyrighted, is copyright infringement.
Now, is Copyright Infringement wrong? Most people would say yes, and I'd agree with that (although I don't agree with the copyright time lengths).
The RIAA/MPAA, however, want to have their cake and eat it too. They want Copyright Infringement to be viewed, by both the general public and the courts, as stealing.
Why? Well, by making Copyright Infringement into theft, they an make it a criminal offense meaning it could end up as a felony or misdemeanor charge. Just imagine, the RIAA/MPAA could go far beyond demanding insane amounts of money per infringement, they could add jail time into their extortion methods to put the fear of The Almighty RIAA/MPAA into the infringers
I understand what you're saying, however, I don't think its really within Microsoft's power to kill Flash, even if Silverlight is wildly successful in the long term.
There will always be people who prefer Flash/Flex as a development platform, either because they feel it's a superior technology or because it's more "open-source friendly". As long as they have a market share, they'll be around.
Moonlight doesn't support Silverlight 2.0-targeted code. You're being a bit disingenious implying that Silverlight code works on Firefox. Some of it does, but a great deal of it does not. Much of it even requires a Windows client.
That is what we call 'vendor lock-in'.
Out of curiosity, have you run into any instances where a Silverlight 2 app ran on IE but didn't run on Firefox (in a Windows environment of course)? I can't recall any times that has happened to me when I was developing with it so I'm wondering what would cause the incompatibility.
Now I have noticed Chrome doesn't always handle it so well but that appears to be an issue with the browser so far and not the Silveright runtime itself. I say this because I've seen marked improvement in Chrome's handling of Silverlight since from Chrome beta until now.
I realize that most of /. is very wary of anything Microsoft to say the least, but I really hope that they follow through and continue to do so on cross-platform support for Silverlight. It's good for them, even if some of them don't see it, and it's definitely good for us as consumers (at least in regards to Adobe having some competition in the market).
Silverlight comes along offering nothing new but plenty of obstacles and lock-out of end user browsers, requiring active download of a plug-in, and yet, there are bozos out there willing to commit paying customers and their websites to an endless, costly, non-standard nightmare in exchange for nothing! You can't make shit like that up, it's real.
Unlike Adobe Flash right? Oh wait, you have to install a plug-in there too.
Granted, Silverlight 2 support isn't quite there yet with Moonlight but I believe the Mac OS version is up and running.
Argue if you will over whether technologies like Flash or Silverlight should be used for rich internet applications, or argue whether they should be used on public sites (on this note I would say that any site that expects to be most accessible should stay away from these technologies). You shouldn't, however, simply discount Silverlight as a valid development platform just because its Microsoft.
Yes, there is prior history here. Yes, its very possible they'll up and say "No more Moonlight and Mac support... ahaha GOTCHA!". And so what if they do? They'll be shooting themselves in the foot and people will just jump back over to Flash/Flex. By that time, I expect somebody will have written a C#/VB.Net to Flash/Flex converter if there isn't one already and we may be able to mostly port over a lot of the code.
I would argue that Silverlight has offered some good things, including a very nice development environment (with Blend v2 and above) and a smaller learning curve for people who already have some .Net programming under their belt. I also noticed around the time Blend with .Net support launched, Adobe announced a better development environment for Flex so I'd wager there are plenty of Flash/Flex developers out there who are happy now as well.
Competition is good, even for Adobe.
I think the increasing Powershell integration is interesting too. I've been reading up on 2008 R2 which is apparently the server equivalent to Windows 7 and I'm very excited about the Active Directory Powershell integration.
I can't help but wonder then, just how bad the MS situation is(security) if they're so afraid of an open view in terms of security from the outside world.
I think currently they have a fairly open view to the outside world, post-patch anyways. Releasing information regarding the vulnerability pre-fix wouldn't be a good thing. I was just commenting that they COULD hide information about the security patches to prevent would-be-hackers from learning about an exploit and targeting un-patched systems. I don't really think thats the best action to take though.
It is Microsoft's fault in the first place for writing the software and the underlying architecture in such a way that allows these types of exploits. However, if they release a fix and some people don't get them because automatic updates is turned off (for whatever reason) then that is an end-user problem. It is these systems that are under the most threat and the threat, at that point, can't be ended by Microsoft.
However, is there anyway for Microsoft to minimize the exposure of these patches?
To do this effectively I imagine they'd have to hide the fact that they've updated the system or, at least, minimize their KB articles to say "Patch KB[insert number here] fixed an exploit".
Imagine though the lashback from this... we already know from recent articles how much people despise Microsoft for adding sneaky patches that install addons for Firefox. Sneaking in security updates without documentation and/or some sort of notice would further solidify some people's ideas of Microsoft's sheer level of evil and their obvious plot to take control of all of our PCs away from us.
If you think about it that way, this whole situation is pretty much a win/win for MS haters.
Running Linux will.
Apparently not if you're using KDE or GNOME.
Ack, naturally I missed the part where its actually Opera doing the anti-trust case. Dang misleading article summary!
What if the consumer had both IE, Firefox, and Opera on their desktop? Why isn't this possible?
Well Firefox execs have just recently been saying bundling on Windows would be bad.
Interesting strategy here... distract Microsoft with your left hand with a "we don't want to be bundled" sign and hit them hard with your right fist with those good old anti-trust brass knuckles.
I guess maybe what they're going for is to not have ANY browser installed during OS installation, however if they went that route I hope they would put in an extremely user-friendly GUI to grab browser install packages from online. Yes, I realize most people on this site have FTP addresses and mirrors memorized for the Firefox install but I'd really rather not have to explain the process to everyone in my family the next time they move up to another version of Windows. Not to mention half my friends... then there is all the people at work...
We already paid $200 billion for a nation wide fiber optics network that never delivered. When is anyone going to ask what happened to all that money?
Telco Companies: "What money? What, you're not satisfied with your '8mb' *snicker* connections?"
Valid point. Does /. have a filter option? Would be interesting if you could select which news you want to see on the front page and maybe have another page you can visit to browse the articles that got filtered out of your main view.
On the other hand, I think a lot of the Windows 7 links have definitely been relevant and news-worthy. Not all of them have been from Microsoft either (well, that we know of). The benchmark comparisons between Ubuntu, Windows 7, and Vista for example was interesting and I'm glad they posted the news about the UAC exploit as well as the fact that they're fixing it now (this article). I guess I could sign up for some Windows 7 RSS feeds from other sites but the beauty of /. is you get articles showing different perspectives as well as a range of issues and products.
These Microsoft article responses are funny.
First it was tagged "whocares" which I thought was somewhat silly considering the related article ended up with 379 comments, many of which were condemning said UAC security hole. Obviously, a lot of people, even those who don't even use Windows, did care or at least found it interesting.
Of course thats all in the past since the tag seems to have been replaced by "astroturfing", which would be correct since the article was about a positive change. After all, we wouldn't want anyone to come under the false belief that anything positive from Microsoft is anything other than a PR scam to make you forget that they're evil.
Come to think of it, this article clearly needs the "itsatrap" tag!
It's just that the vast majority of computer users never get's the chance to select an OS, you must have heard all the stories of people that wanted their money back when installing Linux?
The vast majority of licences sold by MS are OEM, it's the computer brand that decides what price point they want to sell their machine at.
True. Really though I was thinking mainly about the prices for the OS itself when sold at somewhere like Walmart or Staples. It's easy to forget sometimes that most people buy computers with a pre-installed OS.
do you have a clue about this?
have you ever even investigated this?
Obviously not or else I wouldn't have posted that would I?
I haven't researched this because, up until now, there wasn't a point. I've used Vista at home for a while but I honestly couldn't remember the install experience in this regard. We don't use it on campus because the majority of our computers wouldn't perform well with even Business installed... we've essentially decided to skip Vista.
Now, since Windows 7 released to beta, I am researching and learning as much about it as I can so that I can make an informed decision when it releases. Thank you for the informative post.
Even so, why can't they just make one version, sell it at the cost that they'd sell Ultimate, and have an interface during install that shows the different "versions" and a quick explanation of the features included, the intended platforms, etc.
Beyond that, there should be a method to "upgrade" your install to one of the higher versions if you decide you need the added features and that your hardware can support it. Since you've already payed the price for a full Ultimate copy, there would be no need for extra costs to do this.
Granted, it would be nice just to have one version, plain and simple, but as a IT employee at a university, I'm going to want some sort of either version options or feature options so I can only install what I need on campus machines and not eat up disk space with things the students won't ever use.
'If you believed that your patent had been infringed, wouldn't you be tempted to do the same thing?
Because two wrongs ALWAYS make a right!
Has anyone noticed a performance hit to Firefox or anything? Any critical need to remove it?
Not that I'm happy that it was put on my system and that it can't be removed through the accepted addon system with Firefox, but I'm wondering if its really worth the trouble and for what reasons other than the standard "MS is evilllll", "They're spying on us", or what is sure to become a new spin on a popular internet meme "Microsoft raped my web browser".