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more on Dell - Extortion? - Follow Up
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 14:16:06 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: Brett Glass <brett () lariat org> Date: May 31, 2005 12:29:37 PM EDT To: dave () farber net, Ip ip <ip () v2 listbox com> Cc: From: Subject: Re: [IP] Dell - Extortion? - Follow Up At 05:21 PM 5/30/2005, Art Wolinski wrote:
Personally, I feel this puts Dell right in the same category with the spyware folks we all know and love.
Perhaps most people are not aware of it, but Dell has been bundling software that is commonly considered to be "spyware" with its computers for many years. One of the earliest pieces of spyware I encountered was a program called "BackWeb," which came installed on a customer's new Dell computer. The program was sapping so much of his system's computing power that the machine's "Winmodem" (a cheap but all too common type of modem which uses the motherboard's computing power to perform functions that should be done by the modem itself, thus making it less expensive) could not get enough of the system's attention and was disconnecting. Dell also lards its systems with resource-hungry bundled software such as MusicMatch. Most of these programs sit unused in the system tray 99% of the time, but they consume system resources and slow the bootstrap process and operation of the machine itself. Dell's new support scheme is also a bandwidth hog. As an ISP, I discovered that a client with a new Dell was congesting his broadband connection by downloading nearly a gigabyte of updates and patches that should have come with the machine or have been sent to the user on a CD. Instead, his machine was busy day and night downloading them. And since the scheme is structured in such a way that the ISP's Web cache does not retain a copy of the updates, the ISP's bandwidth is needlessly wasted as well. --Brett Glass ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- more on Dell - Extortion? - Follow Up David Farber (May 31)
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