IE8 Phoning Home Called ‘Innocuous’ By Microsoft
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Catching up on Slashdot again I ran across something that’s a tad bothersome. Seems that Micro$loth is calling IE8’s habit of phoning home ‘Innocuous’.
They even went so far as to say that it’s less invasive that Google’s Chrome browser’s habits of sending a lot more data back to Google. Frankly, if you accept that then you’d probably also consider 100 grit sandpaper to be something you’d expect to find in the skin care products isle of your favorite drugstore.
It’s pretty much the same thing as a kid saying that what he did wasn’t so bad because this other kid did something worse.
Any browser, or whatever other software had better have bloody good reason for phoning home and it needs to tell me in advance and explain what information is being sent. Then I still suspect it of lying to me.
I think that programs should default to NOT phoning home and when you turn on an option that requires it, there needs to be a big bright green full-screen always-on-top popup with 48 point fire engine red block lettering that informs you “turning on this feature means I’ll have to ‘phone home’ occasionally and tell [name of company] [itemized list of data to be sent or retrieved]. Are you sure you want to do this?”
Turning said features off should be easy, turning them on should get you a big honkin warning like that, something that can’t be ignored. If programs were written that way, there would be a lot less problem with people getting surprised to find out their stuff has been calling home on them.
Technorati Tags: ie8, microsoft, suggested sites, google chrome, phone home, web browser
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
I fully agree with your comments about phone-home software but did you know that Windows Vista also calls home? The EULA that nobody reads actually tells you so and you are required to accept it as a condition of using that particular OS. Just to add an extra insult the EULA page has an accept button but no way to decline, other than powering off the machine.
Oh I’m aware of it allright. Ran into that bugger when I reinstalled Vista on my wife’s laptop. I’m also thinking that a few of the right entries in our router’s dns could redirect any of it’s attempts to phone home to 127.0.0.1.
All I need is to find a list of IP addresses / domain names that it’s trying to contact and blacklist ‘em to stop unauthorized phoning home.
If you do find or compile that list of addresses please post it so we may all benefit.
Absolutely. Microsloth does *not* need to know every time somebody boots one of their OS’s. It’s bad enough that so many of us have to do it in the first place.