Free Republic

Media giant CNN caused more than a few raised eyebrows in the tech community when it was revealed recently that it installs an application that lets CNN use subscribers’ computers to distribute its live streaming content the first time viewers sign in to view streaming content.It’s not a drive-by download or some insidious secret hack — more of a social engineering scam, actually. Millions of users who signed up for the live streaming feed of U.S. President Barach Obama’s inauguration last month were told they couldn’t get hooked in unless they first installed something called ‘the Octoshape Grid Delivery enhancement’...

"...In other words, after you've blithely downloaded a plug-in that shares your computer's Internet connection and processing power with other, unknown computers, Octoshape might choose to alter just what it's doing, how it's doing it, or the extent to which it is using your computer, remotely updating the software on your machine to change it, and /they're not going to tell you/. Oh, they'll make a revision to the license agreement available on their website, sure – but when was the last time you actually read all of the details of any software agreement, much less reviewed revisions to the...