Cnet.com has been a poor excuse of a tech website for many years but it has been on a steady downhill road since it was purchased by CBS. The website became front page news recently when they awarded The Hopper as Best of Show at CES. Actually, they intended to award it best of show but the lawyers of CBS took exception. Because CBS is suing to prevent the ad-skipping built-in to the Hopper, they deemed it ineligible for any awards at CES. You can find details of this story here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2414276,00.asp

But this is not the end of Cnet’s degradation. The company purchased Download.com back in the infancy of the internet and has been a top place to go for free software as well as trial versions of software. For many years, Cnet was content with using page button confusion to boost their bottom line. If you were to search, for instance, for a good disk defragger, you might select Auslogic’s Defrag but accidentally click on on alternate programs because the download buttons for alternatives are large and vaguely worded to sound like they are the requested target. Cnet has now taken it step further and will not link directly to the target download. Instead, it provides a “Download Manager” that will download the file for you. The current version of the download manager has six steps to it. The first five steps were actual downloads of software one does not want on a pc. Steps 1-4 were blatant about what was being offered with a chance to skip, step 5 offered only a standard install or advanced install, with no word on the actual program. By clicking on advanced, a list appeared where it was possible to opt-out of installing “SearchYa”, a toolbar and search engine that is widely noted as malware. Then there’s step 6 which was the actual installation of the requested software.

Were you tagged in a photo stored at shoppybag.com? I doubt it. If you should receive an email purporting to be from a friend and it notifies you that your friend has tagged you in a photo at shoppybag.com, you are being set up. Clicking on the link takes to their site where you must create an account in order to see the photo. But there is no photo. There is only the opportunity to turn over your email contacts to shoppybag so they can send out more such nonsense.

Savanna elephant "Loxodonta africana" in Kruger National Park, South Africa. Photo: Felix Andrews, courtesy Creative Commons

Sport Killing

GoDaddy’s CEO thinks killing an elephant is great sport. The company that built its business on sleaze has gone from bad to worse. If you have domain names with the company, transfer them to something more reputable, such as Dotster.

According to eWeek, Samsung laptops come pre-loaded with keylogger software that records your every keystroke — including logon id and passwords– and emails the data back for analysis. SEE eWeek: Keylogger found on Samsung

A follow-up report by ars technica disputes the claim, stating that Vipre antivirus is showing a false positive. Simply creating a directory named SL in the windows directory is enough to trigger the false positive. SEE arstechnica

Somehow confusing net neutrality with “government takeover”, Boehner would like to bar the FCC from creating any regulation guaranteeing net neutrality. As he sees it, corporate control of the information sent across the wires is a good thing.

Quotes from his speech at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention:

“The last thing we need, in my view, is the FCC serving as Internet traffic controller, and potentially running roughshod over local broadcasters who have been serving their communities with free content for decades.

At the end of the last Congress, some members of Congress sought a compromise on net neutrality that would give Washington temporary control of the Internet while we sort this all out.

As far as I’m concerned, there is no compromise or middle ground when it comes to protecting our most basic freedoms.

So our new majority in the House is committed to using every tool at our disposal to fight a government takeover of the Internet…

We’re also going to do what we can to see that no taxpayer dollars are used to fund these net neutrality rules. “

There are many reasons for signing up with Clear for broadband service but you should be aware of a major pitfall. They reserve the right to peddle your ass to anyone out there who pays them a fee. You won’t find this out until you’ve purchased the device and installed it on your machine. When you first logon to the internet, Clear directs you to their terms of service which includes specific language that is highly disagreeable:

“. Consent to Business Relationship. When you sign up for the Service, and as part of your business relationship with Clearwire, you will be asked to provide a telephone number. Regardless of whether this is a wired or wireless number or whether this number is listed on the Do-Not-Call Registry, you consent to being contacted by Clearwire (and/or its designated agents) at this number, for any purpose (including sales, marketing and promotional offers) and by any means (including autodialed or prerecorded voice calls and text messages). In this regard, you specifically acknowledge and understand that you may incur, and will bear sole responsibility for, charges related to these incoming calls or messages. ”

You cannot use the service unless you agree to these terms.

From an article published here: http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2011/01/19/sony_sues_researchers

Sony appears to be sending a warning volley across the bows of all security researchers.