AOL 9.0 is accused of 'badware behavior'

security.itworld.com ^ | 28 August 2006 | Robert McMillan, IDG News Service, San Francisco Bureau

[Sloth]

...since I'm not even sure "engineer" was a word until the last century. I think all those words stemmed from the application of "engine" to locomotives, then transferred to the train's captain.

'Engineer' has been used to describe a military role for centuries.

[CedarDave]

Friends don't let friends install RealPlayer. If you need to play RealMedia streams, I suggest RealAlternative

A hearty SECOND to that statement!

[Revelation 911]

Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then

gee thanks

fwiw - blind pigs dont retire at 43

[Revelation 911]

Try canceling your service with them.

oh please - after one little wav file makes it to the net, it makes sense to indict the whole company (sarcasm)

[PogySailor]

No surprise to me. I work in a company that will FINALLY turn off the last IBM 3745 Front End Processor and SNI link we have later this year.

[PogySailor]

I still have devices using YMODEM for EDI transfers.

[Old Professer]

ping

[Recovering Hermit]

As for Adobe reader, you can choose not to install the google toolbar during installation.

Yeah, but the text is small, and the box is conveniently checked so that the majority of morons will end up the toolbar anyway.

Another thing that Adobe does is screw around with Windows registry settings so that every time somebody updates their Reader, the registry settings get changed, which basically affects Outlook in a negative way.

If you ever hear about someone going off on a murderous rampage while screaming something about "load behavior", that would probably be me.

[KoRn]

" Another thing that Adobe does is screw around with Windows registry settings so that every time somebody updates their Reader, the registry settings get changed, which basically affects Outlook in a negative way."

The Adobe updater is very annoying too. If your on XP you can msconfig it and disable it. It doesn't show up as a service you can disable.

[TChris]

RealPlayer is especially offensive because it basically hijacks your computer for anything multimedia...

RealPlayer is a weed.

[Still Thinking]

"When there are large programs, some of which stay around after you've thought you've uninstalled them, they need to be disclosed to the user."

Disclosure is not good enough. Uninstall should mean uninstall, disclosure or no. A user has the moral right and therefore should be assisted by his software vendor to completely remove any vestage of a certain software package from hardware he purchased with his own money, period. An ISV doesn't have the right to decide that what they want is more important than what the hardware owner wants, except that they have the right to protect their intellectual property from theft.

[backhoe]

Ah, the days of XMODEM, YMODEM, ZMODEM and Kermit. Mustang and Wildcat BBS could run on my 286/16 with a whopping 512k of RAM and a 30MB HD. Now I have digital photo RAW files larger than that first hard drive.

Somewhere, I still have the printed out Zmodem manual... I bought my wife a 512 megabite SD card for her camera a few days ago, and couldn't help remembering "the biggest DOS hard drive" we ever put in the old 30 megahertz, 386 machine-- 65 megs. Barely fit a 5 1/4 drive bay... you had to do some weird jumper setting to get 65 megs, it was nominally 32, a Mitsubishi, I think.

It's just amazing how the technology accelerates so much.