That's because you are most likely an intelligent person working for a company that is unlikely to pull dumb stunts and so the mere concept of the depths of the stupidity that some companies harbor in the name of "RoI" and "Risk vs Profit" is completely foreign to you. Hopefully you will be able to continue to stay unknowing, as the reality is ruddy scary.
Here is a small example: "Let's give WORSE customer service. We will make them wait for one hour on hold for very basic tech support, then anything that can't be handled in under five minutes will wait another hour. During all this time, we'll push fixing for them if they pay us. That way we monetize support of our product!" "Won't that make us lose customers like blood from a femoral artery?" "Yep! We've already gone down from seven million customers to four million!" *Six months later* "We're at two million customers, we've made a killing off 'premium' support, and we've remained profitable by massaging the books to write off the losses, and now we completely reverse it, doing everything really well." *twelve more months* "We're at eight million customers now. But instead of that being a 14% increase in customer base from 1.5 years ago, that is a 400% increase in customer base from one year ago! And because the 75% loss was within a certain frame, we didn't have to report any loss in customers. Watch the funding roll in, guys! This is what I'm talking about!"
In many cases it is more "profitable" to do something dumb, take a loss, thus being able to write off that loss on taxes and make more net as a result. Having somebody handle the forums intelligently would cost money that couldn't be written off.
The management company where I work mandates Sophos. Scans once a week and I get weekly tickets during the scan about computers running so slow that nothing can be done. When it was Sophos only, Sophos caught about 20-30 items a week and I had to reimage or repair about two computers a week from infections or Sophos-caused issues.
Now for the past year the 250 systems still use Sophos because corporate says they have to, but the site also uses Webroot. ~800k full installer for Webroot, 2-minute scans that nobody ever notices running, and not a single need to reimage or repair. Webroot catches about 90-120 items a week above what Sophos catches. CryptoLocker (and crypt-alikes) have struck about seven times IIRC and Webroot's journalling simply restored the damaged data on the local system as part of the cleanup process. Mind you, Webroot didn't detect the crypto malware immediately. There was a decent amount of encryption performed prior to Webroot catching it due to the encryption process itself.
So obviously some companies can do it right. Non-intrusive scanning, only scanning what actually needs to be scanned to protect that computer, action journalling and rollbacks, and a {censored}ing tiny application. Symantec and the others just need to do it right and people need to stop believing that "rebuilding three PCs due to virus attack" is good while I think that rebuilding zero is the only acceptable solution.
Given that Lvel3 and Verizon are currently holding PR-offs over their peering, this may be related to that. Verizon says "The peering is not symmetrical so L3 should pay us for all the data they are pushing [sic] over our network." L3's response is that Verizon is NOT a symmetrical peer and never can be because their end is full of consumers that pull more data and don't even have upload capability as fast as the download capability.
Verizon's solution? This change, then say "Look! We're symmetrical! Now pay us to push traffic!"
It's all quite useful but the real question is, is there that many deaths / accidents because of drowsiness?
The 1996 report from NHSTA says 56,000 in the US annually and more recent information indicates 110,000 incidents annually, though the injury and death rates remain the same between both claims. Both are also considered under-reported.
It's a matter of reasonable effort. How can a company determine that a given email destination is Canadian? It really can't. So Canada's laws are affecting the whole world as companies have to either give up on things that people likely actually want (security bulletins) or scramble to form opt-in databases on worldwide recipients just because of Canada.
No, it's a matter of being a decent business partner, regardless of the country you do business in, as a company with moral standing you give the options of opt-in and opt-out.
In the EU it's been that way for several years and it caused no grief to any company that does value it's customers.
Many of the companies scrambling already have double-opt-in to get in and very thorough opt-out options (Reply, click in any one of three places, idle detection auto-culling, etc.). So why are they scrambling? Because being a decent business partner is not good enough for the law. And again, the people it won't affect are the Canadian Pharma spammers (as an excellent example, since I'm staring at one's email in my spam box right now) who operate outside the law and know it and don't care. Decent business partners screwed. Actual spam still there. Can of worms with people affected by one country. Part of the reason there are so many US-Only sellers. They won't sell anything to the rest of the world because there are so many countries that would suddenly try to extradite the owners of the site for eyeball removal or something*.
(*Eyeball removal is not common, but a rat's nest of laws, many of which contradict each other, is out there, making the cost of allowing people from other countries much more expensive than the margin allows for.)
It's a matter of reasonable effort. How can a company determine that a given email destination is Canadian?
It's impossible without also collecting the user's physical address. A Canadian citizen living in Canada using a gmail.com should be covered by this law, while a US citizen living in the US who happens to have an e-mail provider with servers located in Canada should not be covered by the law.
Which brings the whole can of worms into things. Give your address and how do you verify it's accurate? Puts a major burden on companies and other legitimate places and doesn't discourage the actual abusers at all.
It's a matter of reasonable effort. How can a company determine that a given email destination is Canadian? It really can't. So Canada's laws are affecting the whole world as companies have to either give up on things that people likely actually want (security bulletins) or scramble to form opt-in databases on worldwide recipients just because of Canada.
Just like many of the laws in the US that people scorn, this Canadian law will only hurt the legitimate people who are trying to be respectful and operate as a good company with records and such. The spammers sending pharma spam and malware spam and such are operating from locations that don't support easy tracking for applying penalties. Thus millions of people worldwide are suddenly getting flooded with requests to keep sending mail (I opted in three years ago!) just in case they might be Canadian.
Therefore the obvious (but depressing) solution is to create borders on the internet and say "To prove you are a Canadian and protected by this Canadian law, you must have a.ca email address. Anybody who does not have a.ca email address cannot bring charges against a company sending email in violation of a Canadian law because they did not identify themselves as Canadian to be protected by the law." This is obviously not-good, but the alternative is a minefield of international laws that strangle the internet and any companies that operate on it.
Fictional but getting less farfetched example: Some Canadian posts a picture of their dog spinning in circles on a video site. The dog is not neutered and there is a flash of anatomy at 1:33 into the video (it's a long video of dog-spinning). Person gets in legal trouble in some country that: 1: Holds content posters liable for their posts. 2: Enacts a law that prohibits the depiction of any sexual anatomy online for the protection of the children/morality/whatever. Suddenly Canadian is subject to fines/imprisonment/death-for-insults-against-the-god because of this?
It seems like a ridiculous example now, but with the slippery slope we are heading down, it's becoming more and more possible.
After all the ruckus about street view accidentally peering into windows, I don't think "Home View" would be a good idea.
That being said, the technology showcase demo indicated a relatively limited range. If they can overcome that - not dramatically mind you, but the ability to scan 10-20 meters instead of just about two or three - then the ability to build things nearly instantly into 3D space can be useful. Augmented reality situations also become much more immersive as the augmentation can react to its surroundings more effectively.
Except that in this case it's more accurately "going to a pizza parlor, finding out that they have a little flag in the pepperoni pizza portion of the menu that you can stick on your lawn that says 'I like peperoni pizza', putting that flag on your lawn, and then suing the pizza company for having the lawn flag available."
Though in reality, r'ing tfa hints that it may hinge more on the fact that the inclusion of a like button on the page at all automatically shares with Facebook the fact that you were even on the page due to referrer information. The 'Like' button itself is not Hulu sharing the data with Facebook, that's the clicker sharing the data with Facebook.
I find it interesting that the summary above pushes to point out that merchants will be liable for fraud. As it stands currently, merchants are already liable for fraud. A claim results in the merchant losing the money of the transaction. The bank and user recover the money.
Reading the first linked article indicates that the "weakest link" becomes liable. If the merchant has C&P and the bank has not issued a C&P card, the BANK will be liable for the fraudulent transaction. This is a major difference from the current situation, where the bank would simply extract the money from the merchant and the merchant would take a loss.
True, but many folks in the corporate world sadly have experienced the fact that businesses these days, especially big ones, seem prone to trying to rush from one short-sighted strategy to another. One could say that it is "Innovation", since they not only are looking for something to make a quick buck, but also a growing stack of liability from their past short-sightedness. The long term strategy is to use a bunch of faulty short term ones to move at a constant roller coaster rate so there is a lot of flux in a generally-upward direction. Wait, sorry. "To innovate constantly and overcome any shortcomings to drive revenue and shareholder profits in a positive direction."
One company I know is an excellent example of this in the past. A subscription software company (likely many could find it without too much effort despite my not naming it) that ended up going to the "Pay for premium support" model to monetize tech support. Callers for support would be strongly pushed to "Pay us to fix it for you!" over an hour of hold for "basic support" which half the time had to place you back into an hour queue for "advanced support", where every thirty seconds "Get premium support for a low fee!" was announced frequently. Customer base dropped by nearly 50%. They reversed this thankfully and went to a fully-free and highly-qualified support team, but went to a change of pushing major discounts (sometimes around 75% or more discount) with the theory that people would just pay the normal subscription rate when it came up for renewal. Instead people just bought a dozen copies at deep discounts and support was only happy to combine them, so people ended up with subscriptions that exceeded the 32-bit date record. But the company did manage to recover its user base by 600%.
Cash grab now, worry about the repercussions later.
Oddly, people want Google to do something about this. Unfortunately, some forget that Google gets a percentage of in-app purchases as well, so as long as the app is on the front page of the store and highly rated and can possibly get more eyes into the app being told to "Buy! Spend!", the more likely Google is to reap benefit from it.
As the owner of enough paper books to burn down a small invading zombie army, I'm really torn between applauding their innovation and cringing at the thought that paper in hand will be going the way of scrolls.
If the book was published in 2009 and the exact event stated by DHS for denying entry occurred in 2012, how did the 2012 event get known by the DHS from a 2009 book?
Though the OP didn't state such, there is a rise of debt collection scams, eg, there is no real debt. It's just a matter of harass somebody using debt collection tactics until they give you money. It's criminal action, by the way, but doesn't garner much attention from the law enforcement because it's so difficult and costly to track. The fake collections agencies are basically using legitimate collections "tools" illegally.
Paying the fictitious debt is actually the worst thing one can do, since it simply causes you to be marked as a hitable target and thus escalates the situation.
If you disagree, you are clearly ignorant of how alcohol affects judgement.
Perhaps rather than being ignorant, it's just a bad show of judgement, which may indicate intoxication. Or may not. Sad that so much bad judgement these days is completely unassisted.
Technically: Affordable Care Act in the US (or "ObamaCare") Health Insurance Exchange, where people are able to shop for and purchase health insurance that meets federal requirements.
Officially: A TLA (Three Letter Acronym) that is US-Centric and probably half or more of the folks in the US don't even know what it means, so never mind the folks outside the US who have better things to worry about than more TLAs.
Charge folks for how much they use, but how do you determine what they asked for versus what was sent in their direction without their permission and possibly without their knowledge? Get hit by a flood of cruft while you are asleep and you could suddenly find yourself owing the ISP thousands of dollars.
"We won't count pings!"
TCP over ICMP to "cheat", anyone? Oh, and then we'll just be sure to flood with packets that "count".
The core issue though is that the network is a NETWORK. It's not like somebody opens a faucet and controls how much data flows. That data can be sent from the outside world. There is no way to accurately measure how much the user WANTED to use, versus how much gets sent anyway.
"We'll just make -everybody- work per byte, then flooding somebody to bankruptcy would cost the flooder too."
Only when credit card and identity fraud is 100% gone.
Given that it's already possible to get users of capped ISPs warned or cut off for breaking cap by sending appropriate data at a fraction of their bandwidth rate for the full month, it's not a long stretch.
The use of Adblock and similar to help reduce (not remove) blanket tracking combined with this means that it becomes opt in and as a "product", the user is still valuable and thus still "fed" free stuff.
I think one of the more interesting considerations is that if this takes off and more militant anti-blanket-tracking occurs, perhaps we can have more control over what the advertisers try to decide about us. For example, a ferret owner researching baby food for a sick ferret is highly unlikely to want to get flooded with a massive number of "your new baby!" ads and coupons for diapers and cribs and wipes. (True story, mind you. Owned ferrets. Researched three baby food items from Google. Within a month, I could have saved thousands from all the discounts and coupons I was offered for baby stuff. Gah.)
Webroot SecureAnywhere. The old stuff was junk, but SecureAnywhere is pretty much Prevx 4. The total install file for the AV-Only version is under a mebibyte, the working memory stays under 5 meg while idle (usually under three), under 30 meg generally while scanning, and scans take a few minutes at most on most machines, even old old ones. I do enough computer work that I take people who were told that something else is fast/light (usually ESET or Vipre), remove malware for them a few times in a few months, then swap them to Webroot SecureAnywhere. Then I never have to remove malware from their systems again (year and a half and going strong on a few hundred systems) and several asked if I upgraded their hardware for them all sneakily.
So no, it's not free, but you can get the enterprise version if you really want to manage things and have completely internet-based management, and honestly the darn thing has saved me thousands of dollars in work and given me hundreds of happy customers. So I'll advocate it anytime.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because you are most likely an intelligent person working for a company that is unlikely to pull dumb stunts and so the mere concept of the depths of the stupidity that some companies harbor in the name of "RoI" and "Risk vs Profit" is completely foreign to you. Hopefully you will be able to continue to stay unknowing, as the reality is ruddy scary.
Here is a small example: "Let's give WORSE customer service. We will make them wait for one hour on hold for very basic tech support, then anything that can't be handled in under five minutes will wait another hour. During all this time, we'll push fixing for them if they pay us. That way we monetize support of our product!" "Won't that make us lose customers like blood from a femoral artery?" "Yep! We've already gone down from seven million customers to four million!" *Six months later* "We're at two million customers, we've made a killing off 'premium' support, and we've remained profitable by massaging the books to write off the losses, and now we completely reverse it, doing everything really well." *twelve more months* "We're at eight million customers now. But instead of that being a 14% increase in customer base from 1.5 years ago, that is a 400% increase in customer base from one year ago! And because the 75% loss was within a certain frame, we didn't have to report any loss in customers. Watch the funding roll in, guys! This is what I'm talking about!"
Sad. But true. Which makes it even more sad.
Sadly I do. I just simplified things for folks. Not going to bother to type out details for you though. Go to school if you want to learn those.
In many cases it is more "profitable" to do something dumb, take a loss, thus being able to write off that loss on taxes and make more net as a result. Having somebody handle the forums intelligently would cost money that couldn't be written off.
The management company where I work mandates Sophos. Scans once a week and I get weekly tickets during the scan about computers running so slow that nothing can be done. When it was Sophos only, Sophos caught about 20-30 items a week and I had to reimage or repair about two computers a week from infections or Sophos-caused issues.
Now for the past year the 250 systems still use Sophos because corporate says they have to, but the site also uses Webroot. ~800k full installer for Webroot, 2-minute scans that nobody ever notices running, and not a single need to reimage or repair. Webroot catches about 90-120 items a week above what Sophos catches. CryptoLocker (and crypt-alikes) have struck about seven times IIRC and Webroot's journalling simply restored the damaged data on the local system as part of the cleanup process. Mind you, Webroot didn't detect the crypto malware immediately. There was a decent amount of encryption performed prior to Webroot catching it due to the encryption process itself.
So obviously some companies can do it right. Non-intrusive scanning, only scanning what actually needs to be scanned to protect that computer, action journalling and rollbacks, and a {censored}ing tiny application. Symantec and the others just need to do it right and people need to stop believing that "rebuilding three PCs due to virus attack" is good while I think that rebuilding zero is the only acceptable solution.
Title got my attention and worried me a little bit.
So do you need to smoke the mother before or after she's given birth to alter her childrens' DNA?
Given that Lvel3 and Verizon are currently holding PR-offs over their peering, this may be related to that. Verizon says "The peering is not symmetrical so L3 should pay us for all the data they are pushing [sic] over our network." L3's response is that Verizon is NOT a symmetrical peer and never can be because their end is full of consumers that pull more data and don't even have upload capability as fast as the download capability.
Verizon's solution? This change, then say "Look! We're symmetrical! Now pay us to push traffic!"
It's all quite useful but the real question is, is there that many deaths / accidents because of drowsiness?
The 1996 report from NHSTA says 56,000 in the US annually and more recent information indicates 110,000 incidents annually, though the injury and death rates remain the same between both claims. Both are also considered under-reported.
It's a matter of reasonable effort. How can a company determine that a given email destination is Canadian? It really can't. So Canada's laws are affecting the whole world as companies have to either give up on things that people likely actually want (security bulletins) or scramble to form opt-in databases on worldwide recipients just because of Canada.
No, it's a matter of being a decent business partner, regardless of the country you do business in, as a company with moral standing you give the options of opt-in and opt-out.
In the EU it's been that way for several years and it caused no grief to any company that does value it's customers.
Many of the companies scrambling already have double-opt-in to get in and very thorough opt-out options (Reply, click in any one of three places, idle detection auto-culling, etc.). So why are they scrambling? Because being a decent business partner is not good enough for the law. And again, the people it won't affect are the Canadian Pharma spammers (as an excellent example, since I'm staring at one's email in my spam box right now) who operate outside the law and know it and don't care. Decent business partners screwed. Actual spam still there. Can of worms with people affected by one country. Part of the reason there are so many US-Only sellers. They won't sell anything to the rest of the world because there are so many countries that would suddenly try to extradite the owners of the site for eyeball removal or something*.
(*Eyeball removal is not common, but a rat's nest of laws, many of which contradict each other, is out there, making the cost of allowing people from other countries much more expensive than the margin allows for.)
It's a matter of reasonable effort. How can a company determine that a given email destination is Canadian?
It's impossible without also collecting the user's physical address. A Canadian citizen living in Canada using a gmail.com should be covered by this law, while a US citizen living in the US who happens to have an e-mail provider with servers located in Canada should not be covered by the law.
Which brings the whole can of worms into things. Give your address and how do you verify it's accurate? Puts a major burden on companies and other legitimate places and doesn't discourage the actual abusers at all.
It's a matter of reasonable effort. How can a company determine that a given email destination is Canadian? It really can't. So Canada's laws are affecting the whole world as companies have to either give up on things that people likely actually want (security bulletins) or scramble to form opt-in databases on worldwide recipients just because of Canada.
Just like many of the laws in the US that people scorn, this Canadian law will only hurt the legitimate people who are trying to be respectful and operate as a good company with records and such. The spammers sending pharma spam and malware spam and such are operating from locations that don't support easy tracking for applying penalties. Thus millions of people worldwide are suddenly getting flooded with requests to keep sending mail (I opted in three years ago!) just in case they might be Canadian.
Therefore the obvious (but depressing) solution is to create borders on the internet and say "To prove you are a Canadian and protected by this Canadian law, you must have a .ca email address. Anybody who does not have a .ca email address cannot bring charges against a company sending email in violation of a Canadian law because they did not identify themselves as Canadian to be protected by the law." This is obviously not-good, but the alternative is a minefield of international laws that strangle the internet and any companies that operate on it.
Fictional but getting less farfetched example: Some Canadian posts a picture of their dog spinning in circles on a video site. The dog is not neutered and there is a flash of anatomy at 1:33 into the video (it's a long video of dog-spinning). Person gets in legal trouble in some country that: 1: Holds content posters liable for their posts. 2: Enacts a law that prohibits the depiction of any sexual anatomy online for the protection of the children/morality/whatever. Suddenly Canadian is subject to fines/imprisonment/death-for-insults-against-the-god because of this?
It seems like a ridiculous example now, but with the slippery slope we are heading down, it's becoming more and more possible.
After all the ruckus about street view accidentally peering into windows, I don't think "Home View" would be a good idea.
That being said, the technology showcase demo indicated a relatively limited range. If they can overcome that - not dramatically mind you, but the ability to scan 10-20 meters instead of just about two or three - then the ability to build things nearly instantly into 3D space can be useful. Augmented reality situations also become much more immersive as the augmentation can react to its surroundings more effectively.
Except that in this case it's more accurately "going to a pizza parlor, finding out that they have a little flag in the pepperoni pizza portion of the menu that you can stick on your lawn that says 'I like peperoni pizza', putting that flag on your lawn, and then suing the pizza company for having the lawn flag available."
Though in reality, r'ing tfa hints that it may hinge more on the fact that the inclusion of a like button on the page at all automatically shares with Facebook the fact that you were even on the page due to referrer information. The 'Like' button itself is not Hulu sharing the data with Facebook, that's the clicker sharing the data with Facebook.
Almost-normal-looking maybe?
(The ski goggles hide it somewhat decently... but anybody in ski goggles at a pub is... yeah...)
I find it interesting that the summary above pushes to point out that merchants will be liable for fraud. As it stands currently, merchants are already liable for fraud. A claim results in the merchant losing the money of the transaction. The bank and user recover the money.
Reading the first linked article indicates that the "weakest link" becomes liable. If the merchant has C&P and the bank has not issued a C&P card, the BANK will be liable for the fraudulent transaction. This is a major difference from the current situation, where the bank would simply extract the money from the merchant and the merchant would take a loss.
True, but many folks in the corporate world sadly have experienced the fact that businesses these days, especially big ones, seem prone to trying to rush from one short-sighted strategy to another. One could say that it is "Innovation", since they not only are looking for something to make a quick buck, but also a growing stack of liability from their past short-sightedness. The long term strategy is to use a bunch of faulty short term ones to move at a constant roller coaster rate so there is a lot of flux in a generally-upward direction. Wait, sorry. "To innovate constantly and overcome any shortcomings to drive revenue and shareholder profits in a positive direction."
One company I know is an excellent example of this in the past. A subscription software company (likely many could find it without too much effort despite my not naming it) that ended up going to the "Pay for premium support" model to monetize tech support. Callers for support would be strongly pushed to "Pay us to fix it for you!" over an hour of hold for "basic support" which half the time had to place you back into an hour queue for "advanced support", where every thirty seconds "Get premium support for a low fee!" was announced frequently. Customer base dropped by nearly 50%. They reversed this thankfully and went to a fully-free and highly-qualified support team, but went to a change of pushing major discounts (sometimes around 75% or more discount) with the theory that people would just pay the normal subscription rate when it came up for renewal. Instead people just bought a dozen copies at deep discounts and support was only happy to combine them, so people ended up with subscriptions that exceeded the 32-bit date record. But the company did manage to recover its user base by 600%.
Cash grab now, worry about the repercussions later.
Oddly, people want Google to do something about this. Unfortunately, some forget that Google gets a percentage of in-app purchases as well, so as long as the app is on the front page of the store and highly rated and can possibly get more eyes into the app being told to "Buy! Spend!", the more likely Google is to reap benefit from it.
As the owner of enough paper books to burn down a small invading zombie army, I'm really torn between applauding their innovation and cringing at the thought that paper in hand will be going the way of scrolls.
If the book was published in 2009 and the exact event stated by DHS for denying entry occurred in 2012, how did the 2012 event get known by the DHS from a 2009 book?
Though the OP didn't state such, there is a rise of debt collection scams, eg, there is no real debt. It's just a matter of harass somebody using debt collection tactics until they give you money. It's criminal action, by the way, but doesn't garner much attention from the law enforcement because it's so difficult and costly to track. The fake collections agencies are basically using legitimate collections "tools" illegally.
Paying the fictitious debt is actually the worst thing one can do, since it simply causes you to be marked as a hitable target and thus escalates the situation.
If you disagree, you are clearly ignorant of how alcohol affects judgement.
Perhaps rather than being ignorant, it's just a bad show of judgement, which may indicate intoxication. Or may not. Sad that so much bad judgement these days is completely unassisted.
Technically: Affordable Care Act in the US (or "ObamaCare") Health Insurance Exchange, where people are able to shop for and purchase health insurance that meets federal requirements.
Officially: A TLA (Three Letter Acronym) that is US-Centric and probably half or more of the folks in the US don't even know what it means, so never mind the folks outside the US who have better things to worry about than more TLAs.
Charge folks for how much they use, but how do you determine what they asked for versus what was sent in their direction without their permission and possibly without their knowledge? Get hit by a flood of cruft while you are asleep and you could suddenly find yourself owing the ISP thousands of dollars.
"We won't count pings!"
TCP over ICMP to "cheat", anyone? Oh, and then we'll just be sure to flood with packets that "count".
The core issue though is that the network is a NETWORK. It's not like somebody opens a faucet and controls how much data flows. That data can be sent from the outside world. There is no way to accurately measure how much the user WANTED to use, versus how much gets sent anyway.
"We'll just make -everybody- work per byte, then flooding somebody to bankruptcy would cost the flooder too."
Only when credit card and identity fraud is 100% gone.
Given that it's already possible to get users of capped ISPs warned or cut off for breaking cap by sending appropriate data at a fraction of their bandwidth rate for the full month, it's not a long stretch.
The use of Adblock and similar to help reduce (not remove) blanket tracking combined with this means that it becomes opt in and as a "product", the user is still valuable and thus still "fed" free stuff.
I think one of the more interesting considerations is that if this takes off and more militant anti-blanket-tracking occurs, perhaps we can have more control over what the advertisers try to decide about us. For example, a ferret owner researching baby food for a sick ferret is highly unlikely to want to get flooded with a massive number of "your new baby!" ads and coupons for diapers and cribs and wipes. (True story, mind you. Owned ferrets. Researched three baby food items from Google. Within a month, I could have saved thousands from all the discounts and coupons I was offered for baby stuff. Gah.)
Quite sure it won't stop advertisers from knowing when somebody is pregnant based on them buying blue rugs and lotion though.
Medical science has been saying for YEARS that frying Scented Candles is bad for your health.
Which is worse though, frying them or eating them fried? Obviously more healthy poached.
Wait...
Don't tease the participle just because it dangles. It can get some blue pills for that and then you'll be sorry!
Gonna chime in here as well.
Webroot SecureAnywhere. The old stuff was junk, but SecureAnywhere is pretty much Prevx 4. The total install file for the AV-Only version is under a mebibyte, the working memory stays under 5 meg while idle (usually under three), under 30 meg generally while scanning, and scans take a few minutes at most on most machines, even old old ones. I do enough computer work that I take people who were told that something else is fast/light (usually ESET or Vipre), remove malware for them a few times in a few months, then swap them to Webroot SecureAnywhere. Then I never have to remove malware from their systems again (year and a half and going strong on a few hundred systems) and several asked if I upgraded their hardware for them all sneakily.
So no, it's not free, but you can get the enterprise version if you really want to manage things and have completely internet-based management, and honestly the darn thing has saved me thousands of dollars in work and given me hundreds of happy customers. So I'll advocate it anytime.