Enough to make you angry?

[Aliquis76]

Perhaps some of you knew about this - perhaps some of you didn't. Something tells me that I am not really enlightening all the smart people here - but I figured I would post this to the forum anyway. I had read articles about this way before the release of XP - and basically, it was one of the reasons I decided to protest against it - silently, by not installing it. But since I believe in freedom, consumer privacy and all the other great things that America stands for - I feel like everyone has a right to know what's going on.

Posted on Fark today - a link to this article:

http://www.nandotimes.com/technology/story/262326p-2436274c.html

I'm sure that there is a way to disable this little feature...but that's a bit scary. It's like M$ has little dossiers on every PC user in America - how much is yours worth? Something to ponder...

[Vic 970]

it came up as part of topic 'have you seen this one' in after hours club (reply by yoda)

to repeat my answer.

interesting, but not surprising. there seems to be a lot of 'spyware' progs about, some intentional and others 'accidental' in that the program produced, does it as part of another function.
Fact remains though that info is being collected & stored, and available for future retrieval, irrespective of prior intent.



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for every question there's an answer. Then a load more questions.
Definition of Upgrade "A means of introducing new bugs to a program to replace the ones that you have eventually found fixes for"

Regards..,
Vic.

[Gallaeglagh]

It doesn't really surprise me that MS would collect information, most other companies try to do it as well. And there's plenty of alternatives to WMP for most files that are better anyway, with the possible exception of streaming video [which isn't even all that special with hi speed dsl].

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"Mr President we must not allow a mineshaft gap!" - Dr Strangelove

[YODA74]

No nothing is surprising from Bill,look in your start-up see if you have a "WORKS fud" that is a microsoft marketing file ,uncheck it,or loadqm which is for MSN messenger do the same?
If you think M$ is the only one check out Power supply problems http://www.pcdiag.com.au/power.htm
there not collecting info but deliberatly selling bad power supply's
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Death has come to our windows.

-- Jeremiah 9:21
(undoubtedly a Biblical reference to a Microsoft product!)

YODA74@carolina.rr.com

[This message has been edited by YODA74 (edited 02-21-2002).]

[tgmoon]

When I became aware of this 'problem' with WMP several weeks ago, I uninstalled WMP, and downloaded and installed Ultra Player, which has all the features of WMP, plus a nicer interface.

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A wise man once said, "huh?" - tgmoon

[hiredgoonz]

I never really understood the appeal of Media Player...that thing is a pig, plain and simple...its use of resources is ridiculous, its visualizations are mostly just less attractive copies of other people's work (check out Geiss for Winamp) and personally, I don't need M$ cramming "content" down my throat every time I open the program...

Just try a little test some time: play a dvd using Media Player and check the cpu usage. Then use a program like powerdvd, the ATI dvd player, windvd, or just about any 3rd party program and check the cpu usage, guarantee it will be half of what MP used...

Using MP to play back Divx? (highly compressed video format) Unless you have a FAST system, you're gonna get skipping...try BS player, again, half the resource use and it doesn't run to Bill and tell him what you're watching...

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When all else fails, read the instructions.

Microsoft Knowledge Base (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;rid;kbinfo)

Google (http://www.google.com)

[psabi]

I have no desire to install XP - as much as I think it has merits, I think it also gets me more tied to M$. I'm content with win2k as my primary with 98se as a backup for legacy software and my scanner. Ideally i want to be less dependent on Microsoft. Maybe when the opera browser is less than $40, I can leave the IE world. Among other reasons, netscape lost the browser war by charging when IE was free. I know opera has an ad sponsered version but I need more ads on my pc like a hole in the head.... but I digress...

X Teq has tweaking software that has an option to disable the ID in windows media player. I can't even blame M$; Real Player has several different points that it either monitors, checks for updates, etc. You litterally have to go through every preference screen to disable anything that might affect your privacy and/or your bandwidth. What's the lesser of two evils?

[JazzBassJukin]

Very interesting stuff. Big brother is watching us more than we know.
The power supply info was interesting as well. I'm having a problem with a PC that I thought was faulty power supply. After a new supply, I'm still having troubles- but that's for another forum.

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If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have partied twice as hard.