[IP] more on Dell - Extortion? - Follow Up

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>
Date: May 31, 2005 12:29:37 PM EDT
To: dave@farber.net, Ip ip <ip@v2.listbox.com>
Cc: From:
Subject: Re: [IP] Dell - Extortion? - Follow Up


At 05:21 PM 5/30/2005, Art Wolinski wrote:


> Personally, I feel this puts Dell right in the same category with the
> spyware folks we all know and love.

Perhaps most people are not aware of it, but Dell has been bundling
software that is commonly considered to be "spyware" with its computers
for many years. One of the earliest pieces of spyware I encountered was
a program called "BackWeb," which came installed on a customer's new
Dell computer. The program was sapping so much of his system's computing
power that the machine's "Winmodem" (a cheap but all too common type of
modem which uses the motherboard's computing power to perform functions
that should be done by the modem itself, thus making it less expensive)
could not get enough of the system's attention and was disconnecting.

Dell also lards its systems with resource-hungry bundled software such
as MusicMatch. Most of these programs sit unused in the system tray 99%
of the time, but they consume system resources and slow the bootstrap
process and operation of the machine itself.

Dell's new support scheme is also a bandwidth hog. As an ISP, I
discovered that a client with a new Dell was congesting his broadband
connection by downloading nearly a gigabyte of updates and patches that
should have come with the machine or have been sent to the user on a CD.
Instead, his machine was busy day and night downloading them. And since
the scheme is structured in such a way that the ISP's Web cache does
not retain a copy of the updates, the ISP's bandwidth is needlessly
wasted as well.

--Brett Glass



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