It should be possible to rate individual products as startupware. Not just good or evil–that’s not it. What’s needed is a measure of how invasive they are, and how hard to remove.
Remember that this stuff isn’t all spyware; it includes antivirus software, overly-ambitious print drivers, and it’s not all evil, although most of it is [...]
Adware is spyware with permission to snoop.
Spyware is adware without the license agreement.
OK, so defining two words as a variation of each other is circular reasoning, but it’s still vastly less convoluted than the definitions that the companies creating this stuff would have the government enact. Those definitions are a mess.
It would be better to [...]
stärt’-up-wãre, noun, any software that configures portions of itself to automatically start with the operating system of a computer, or to start with other previously-installed software.
All these definitions for what is loosely being called ‘spyware’ are a problem.
Earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission decided that a working definition was good enough, without a formal definition based on new legislation. They can deal with the problem based on existing regulations.
Various industry groups have attempted definitions. Some of these groups [...]
Just finished building a new box for a client. Took the opportunity to grab the task list. The list below is what Windows Task Manager reported as running processes immediately after installation, after hardware detection, but before any drivers were installed. No patches, no antivirus, no software installs of any kind, no exposure to the [...]