
Barbarians at the Digital Gate (2004) - dredmorbius
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/featured_articles/20040920monday.html
======
adingus
The way those ad company executives spoke about how consumers "valued targeted
advertising" is truly disgusting. I would like to see the statistics of how
many users had installed their adware directly from the company website. If
the software is valuable, the consumer will seek it our, correct? The reality
is most of the people buying products from adware are hostages with Stockholm
syndrom.

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dredmorbius
A view of the evils and perils of advertising in computing contexts from a
decade and a half ago.

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interfixus
My last Windows machine was twenty years ago. Keeping ads and assorted malware
at bay was no great challenge then, nor has it been on Linux since then -
before there were decent Firefox extensions, there was Privoxy.

I have rarely ever seen an unwanted ad on the internet. Whenever I have to
deal with other people's computers, I'm taken aback by the amount of
unneccessary crap everyone seems willing to put up with.

~~~
dredmorbius
That may have been your experience.

Others weren't so fortunate:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20060613002852/http://australian...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060613002852/http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,19345228%5E15865%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html)

Fairly widely commented on at the time:

[https://slashdot.org/story/06/06/06/1256221/ballmer-
beaten-b...](https://slashdot.org/story/06/06/06/1256221/ballmer-beaten-by-
spyware)

[http://www.thorschrock.com/2006/06/08/microsofts-steve-
ballm...](http://www.thorschrock.com/2006/06/08/microsofts-steve-ballmer-
confounded-by-spyware/)

[http://macdailynews.com/2006/06/05/microsoft_ceo_ballmer_spe...](http://macdailynews.com/2006/06/05/microsoft_ceo_ballmer_spends_two_days_unsuccessfully_trying_to_clean_win/)

~~~
interfixus
Fortune would appear to have little to do with it. As stated, by 2006 I had
long since had the good sense to move off the Microsoft roach motel.

I guess I'm just a whole lot smarter than Ballmer and his friends :-/

------
raintrees
This causes me to reflect on history, like when I got chewed out by one of my
bosses for running a prank program on his computer that "was erasing his hard
drive!"

Also on how I used to respond to misdirected emails to let them know they
missed their intended address. Yes, there was a time before spam, although
that now seems far-fetched.

Sigh.

It is humbling to realize how naive I was (sometimes still am?).

------
runn1ng
Yeah those evil ads that follow you around on the internet and slow your
browser down. Lucky that we got rid of those.

