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Microsoft Patents the Mother of All Adware
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Jul 17, 2007 01:03 PM
from the clippy-has-a-couple-cheap-watches-to-offer dept.
from the clippy-has-a-couple-cheap-watches-to-offer dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica has an article on the mother of all adware patents filed by Microsoft: 'It's such a tremendously bad idea that it's almost bound to succeed. Microsoft has filed another patent, this one for an "advertising framework" that uses "context data" from your hard drive to show you advertisements and "apportion and credit advertising revenue" to ad suppliers in real time.' Ars discusses this disturbing concept, which was originally unearthed by Information Week and we first discussed last week."
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theodp writes "The kernel meets The Colonel in a just-published Microsoft patent application for an Advertising Services Architecture, which delivers targeted advertising as 'part of the OS.' Microsoft, who once teamed with law enforcement to protect consumers from unwanted advertising, goes on to boast that the invention can 'take steps to verify ad consumption,' be used to block ads from competitors, and even sneak a peek at 'user document files, user e-mail files, user music files, downloaded podcasts, computer settings, [and] computer status messages' to deliver more tightly targeted ads."
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"Context data" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:"Context data" (Score:5, Informative)
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indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Prior Art (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Prior Art (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Prior Art (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Prior Art (Score:5, Interesting)
Specifically Google has an exchange that reads: We'll give you software applications, remote disk space, and e-mail. In exchange anything you use our services for we will parse for key[words|phrases] and serve you an ad or two. This is how you agree to pay for using our services.
Now... if Microsoft were to come out with an OS that was free as in beer in exchange for taking a percentage of your screen for ads then it would fall under the same overall principle, aside from the disk space portion. If the ads were as inoffencive as Google's text ads, I may even consider it. My gut feeling, however, says otherwise, and if I have to pay for an OS then looking at my files as anything other than blocks of bits to store on a disk and optimize for space will happen over my dead computer.
-nB
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Re:Prior Art (Score:5, Funny)
Well, you only paid for a license to use our software based upon our terms.
We're changing the terms of the license. Pray we don't alter the terms any further.
[/microsoft_speaking]
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Who says you will get a choice in the matter? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nice sentiment but take a moment to consider what the actual offer will be:
Option #1, the Dell M-Box, brought to you by Pepsi (this month, next month another sponsor....).
Plays mainstream media. Meaning everything on sale at Best Buy/Walmart in the movie, music and games depts. Cable TV will be delivered through it. Allowed to connect to the Internet and perform E-Commerce, required for E-Voting, filing your taxes and renewing your driver's license. Can run Microsoft Office, required to interchange documents via Microsoft Hotmail, the only approved mail service since they merged with the Postal Service. The only way to transfer content to your iPod. (Even in a total distopia I can't see the Zune beating the iPod at this point.)
Not allowed to run any unsigned binaries.
Option #2,
Buy a PC on the grey market and install Ubuntu. You can run anything you like but you won't connect to the Internet with it, at least legally. There will be hacks to allow basic IP access but no major website will allow you to connect because your browser won't bear the mark of the beast. Generate too much traffic out on the dark net and you will get noticed so P2P will be right out. Warez will of course not cease, just return to face to face exchange of really high capacity media, Linux will of course be part of that warez scene since after the Patent Wars any useful program will be in violation of at least one and therefore illegal to traffic in and also comply with the GPL.
Now, how many people will actually pick Option #2? They won't even have to police the gray market too hard, no more than they pretend to fight the War on Some Drugs. Just the social stigma of being outlaw will keep it safely contained to a ghetto.
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Trusted Network Connect (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Prior Art (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Hypocrisy isn't defined as using something you criticize. Or do you only use, consume, purchase, support, etc, things which you have absolutely *no* criticisms or reservations about?
2. Even if one were to decide to boycott Novell over this, why must that extend to open source projects that are freely obtained from parties who have no affiliation with Novell whatsoever?
3. goombah88 heavily implied he doesn't use Linux. So even if what you claim as hypocrisy *is* hypocrisy (it isn't), he wouldn't be guilty of it anyway!
I applaud Ubuntu (Canonical), RedHat, and all the others who had the integrity and good sense to decline MS's offer. I similarly am highly disappointed that Novell did not do the same. But I don't hold that mark against them as sufficient cause to refuse to do business with them, let alone the even more ludicrous response of boycotting everything, even open source projects, which Novell has contributed to in any way.
Maybe you should take your own advice:
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Re:indeed (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you guys are all getting the wrong idea. Microsoft isn't likely to be so much as implementing, as much as being in the patent license business. IOW, the plan is to sue adware producers for patent infringement, driving them away from producing the adware that plagues their operating system products. They might license it to a select few companies who do adware that doesn't screw up someone's entire OS, but I think the general goal is to get rid of adware through brute force rather than fixing the technological problems that allow it to proliferate.
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Re:indeed (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be a great thing if this is true and really, I want to believe it. No one loses more than Microsoft every time someone else screws up something that happens to run on their OS. On an irregular basis Turbine's Dungeons and Dragons Online client crashes my PC's sound system drivers so badly that my machine blue screens. MOST Slashdot people would reflexively blame Microsoft for that, but neither the client nor the drivers were written by Microsoft. Do I or anyone else blame Red Hat when I have trouble getting third party screen savers to build and work right on the newest iteration of Fedora Core? No.
If anything, using the IP-infringement cudgel against the miscreants would be priceless. It's like designing bioweapons before your enemy gets them done so you can get a headstart on the process of designing blocking agents and cures for them, negating them before they can be deployed, but (mostly) without the messy prospect of them being deployed by your side. That being said, Microsoft might use this to their advantage with IP-mismanagement vis a vis multimedia and the ongoing war over fair use, but then again, Microsoft WROTE Windows so if they wanted to root kit their own OS, they could do it a dozen times over on multiple levels to the point that the OS was one large trojan dedicated to monitoring everything you did and really, would they get far with that given that if a third party fouls up their bugtesting, no one blames that third party and instead just whines that Microsoft sucks?
If anything, the paranoia towards Microsoft works towards making this patent and sue the miscreants thing a big win for us and Microsoft as we get the biggest dog on the PC block throwing its legal weight against the schmucks who write malware and we get to see Microsoft taking these threats seriously and instead of being reactionary and patching, actually being proactive and offensive, taking out the people who write these things. Sure, it could go wrong, but then, it always could.
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Re:indeed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Best news all day (Score:5, Funny)
If We're Going To Patent Software... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. This patent will prevent other people from doing the same thing, and
2. If MS actually does this, more people will leave Windows behind.
Less of an interruption??? (Score:5, Interesting)
For me, ads that look more like the content that I actually want to read are more of an interruption because it takes me longer to differentiate between the important content and the crap.
free oS in the offing? (Score:4, Interesting)
this might be the mother of all adware, but MS might get to say "who's your daddy?"
Might Not Be Evil (Score:5, Insightful)
For starters they may be patenting this 'technology' (it's kinda obvious) defensively to prevent other people from implementing it (even as an 3rd party addition to windows). Alternatively they may be planning to offer special free computers to people who agree to be subject to this sort of invasive advertising. I don't like the idea myself but if other people are fairly informed and want to get their free computer anyway why should I tell them they shouldn't?
I've grown to despise advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
The other day I went into best buy and bought a $30 bluetooth adapter. The cashier asked if I wanted a $10 2-year warranty on the thing. I firmly declined and as she went on explaining the benefits of this program I felt less and less happy to be shopping in a brick & mortar store. The cashier was just doing her job but I still wanted to strangle whatever marketting exec makes them do that. I find generally all advertising really off-putting anymore. I know what the hell I want to buy, I don't get sold things. I'll take a psych test to prove it. I know it works well on lots of sheeple, but let me opt out damn you.
My point is, I'm getting pretty hostile to marketting, and as far as I can help it I won't have any more business with MS if they engage seriously in this strategy. There's enough spam out there, it really doesn't belong anywhere in a fundamental part of an OS.
Isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
So Microsoft is trying to get a defensive patent to prevent Google from leveraging the OS as an ad-serving mechanism. The proximate motive for this is, I believe, probably to use as ammo against Google in the current dispute, and certainly in the inevitable near- and mid-term disputes.
Which is not to say that MS itself won't implement a tech like this in some fashion at some point, but I'm in agreement with some other posters that it will be a free/cheap version of Windows. They're just not short-sighted enough to try and shovel this into the enterprise; it would be the end of Windows upgrades for business if they did.
No (Score:4, Informative)
"The software would also free advertising from its traditional browser yoke. "A word processor may display a banner ad along the top of a window, similar to a toolbar, while a graphical ad may be displayed in a frame associated with the application. A digital editor for photos or movies may support video-based advertisements," the patent application says.
So no, Adblock in its current form wouldn't do squat.
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Re:Let me get this straight (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Let me get this straight (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, that'll fly.
*in the nebulous future*
Me: Well, in order to get the latest security update, we have to install the service that scans our hard drives in order to provide targeted advertising.
CIO: What? Repeat that.
Me: Ummm. Well, Microsoft's latest service pack installs a service that gathers information from the files on your hard disks in order to provide more targeted ads an-
CIO: Like FUCK it does. I don't fucking care how you do it, block that fucker from running. You go do that now - I'm calling our Microsoft rep to have a little chat...
As far as I can see, this will die on the vine.
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Re:More reasons (Score:5, Funny)
/Sarcasm
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