Stray Dog wrote:

[...]

I'll tell you another one. One of the hard drive manufacturers had,
built into some memory chip on the hard drive circuit board some code
that "phoned home" for reasons never really disclosed. The guy who found
out called the manufacturer but the rep he talked to couldn't say what
the story was.

A lot of this spyware crap came out in a lot of the computer trade
magazines back 2000 to 2005 or so (computerworld, infoweek, eweek, and
several others). Ed Foster had a "gripeline" column in one of the
magazines and spent a lot of time on what I call the
tricky-cheaty-sneaky crap (everything from spyware to shrinkwrap
intimidations). He even had a website. His magazine laid him off (maybe
the advertizers were intimidated and threatened to pull their ad
contracts) so he set up his own website where he continued to be a forum
for user gripes about all manner of things.

[...]



Thanks for the extensive information! I find that using the Noscript
addon with Firefox blocks a _lot_ of unwanted and unnecessary and
malicious garbage on the Web.


With all good wishes,


Kevin, WB4AIO.