Which does not prevent them from dumping extension garbage silently in Firefox. I forget if they do the same with Silverlight and .Net.
It seems they calmed down since 2010, but I still have or see it in some old systems, which we all know are going to stick around forever given Windows XP + Firefox's tag team.

Losing potential search hits due to Bing search redirects is probably why Chrome 25 introduced blocking of these silent extensions.

I love how even the weather-news app (Gingerbread and up) redirects all stories via google news, so they track that redirect. That they do it overtly makes it even more unnerving, since they might just hide this
Google desktop searches are the same way. NSA or not, (ha!) I can't help but fear that my Address book app should remain completely blank, especially knowing that google backs up this stuff to their cloud in the name of convenience.

Even with Winamp for Android I needed a private Shoutcast server just to connect to my music library over wifi. One giant con is you can't see or alter the playlist from the phone. Cannot even pause or skip a song without walking down the hall.

From my laptop with any playlist capable audio player, this SMB network share integration is elementary and expected, so why does nothing on Android support SMB music play? oh, right, it's not sexy, profitable and interceptable like cloud services.

Until we want to double-click on our music from everyone else's machine: funny that Windows Media Player and iTunes, the clunky video players for Windows and MacOS, do just that for everyone by default. The exceptions are geeks, and fancy OEMs who love bundling other [rather clunky] video players.

Number searches have gotten crappy, like I said in my other comment.
Name searches are meant to be newbie-friendly. Random non-geek trying out Ubuntu X doesn't know how to pull up the version number, but can memorize the funny name and find forum support on google

For those of us who are affixed to Linux year after year the names can become a pain if we've skipped a few versions. And seeing how much hoarding we do with machines we've re-purposed, keeping track of it all is a pain.

It's still horrible for Android troubleshooting, because only geeks know the names, or the version numbers. It's kind of a black box. I like that iOS is fond of a number that reliably goes up yearly, but that's about all.

Agreed. This is a problem with firefox version searches too. I preferred version numbers back 6 years ago when google didn't ignore your search queries and quotes.

Up until recently, if you looked for something like firefox 28 and get something like 3.5.28. What on earth? It seems to be better, as I can't replicate. Yahoo is still affected

Put yourself in their shoes by replacing "drugs" with Operating System and problem with "Viruses." Do slashdot pros know *all* the choices for something as "common" as an OS choice?
Just like slashdot pros can choose to be offering/installing their favorite OS (Windows, Linux favors or Macs), in the end, the doctor is doing what they know. That's better than EXPERIMENTING on your child as step 1. If step 1 fails, then they begin unpacking the lesser known alternatives and outliers. Or you can get a second opinion if they're adamant.

And regarding the evidence for promotial packages, it's only logical that the doctor would have something around the office for the product they know, and you can't bet that this was the work of advertisement, rather than a well-formed medical school standard or defacto choice of the field.
Wouldn't you find in your own shop some evidence of what you're familiar with? what would YOU have in your environment that betrays your allegiance, and why? Wouldn't a few penguins plush dolls on people's desks, or anti-windows wallpapers, or for the Windows choosers, you'd perhaps find surplus job training paraphernalia or trial CD's because keeping it is "free". Even the Intel inside, or Windows 7 stickers count.

It's not the OS or hardware that matters. It is traffic, because visitors are targets ripe for advertising.

Mobile numbers will eventually be half of traffic on some sites. They're already 25 to 30% in some (FB, for instance). Marketers are the same guys known to benefit from abysmally small fractions for their thousands of ad impressions. They must be pretty sensitive to small percentages and fractions of a percent. So again, 25 or 30%? When your ads CANNOT spew flash at one in four or five visitors, you have to go back to the drawing board and wonder if investments and ad delivery policies needs to be rethought.

They have to decide if your shovelware is more effective delivered to you via bundling agreements with Dell (where some uninstall or decrapifier script is an easy fix), or if it's a safer ROI to buy a few unremovable app slots on Samsung phones. Here is the kicker: this paragraph is a bit more impactful when you realize how many NEW PCs you buy every year in a home this day and age, per capita... versus how many cellphones it is COOL to buy YEAR after YEAR, sometimes at twice the price of a new PC ($300 decent desktop PCs vs $700 list price for a new Galaxy S 4)

Replying to myself:
We need to coin a new Godwin's type of law
How quickly can we bring up NSA-like involvement in some random online thread?
I dub thee "Snowden's Law"

You really think it's their fault? Common sense has never been too strong when compared to status quo and people follow by lead. Thankfully, that helped us win some battles, in the past. After all, people now know about firefox and Ubuntu without being geeks themselves. Because they followed a geek trend that eventually became mainstream.

But trends are exactly what all big and small companies are following now. You can't sign up to Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail without being asked for a cellphone number. Since that is so normal, Facebook, Whatsapp and probably many others I haven't been asked to help with, are already making it a norm. My mother is mad that her FB App autofills her number on the login screen.

Since it has become the norm to be asked, people sooner or later give in. Or didn't most of us realize that RealName started out just like this, and yet few non-geeks ever obfuscate it on their Facebook and G+ profiles?
Ultimately, the wise man is he who follows common sense despite trends, percentages and friendly pressures. But online nobody is truly wise with the NSA listening in.

Funny thought: Phone numbers are nothing --they're in the phonebook after all...
a really bad day for the web is the day some Dark Snowden comes to release some exploit with even a percent of the treasure trove of data that governments themselves have at their disposal.

In a perfect world where piracy is zero, all people who will not pay for Photoshop are forced to use GIMP and other alternatives, or just stay out of the race. The problem in our world is few people see piracy as a problem and make statements such as this as if Adobe's boxes were all marked "MSRP: $0" instead of $600 or $1000 for the non-student versions. Just skip this post if you advocate otherwise. I don't want your reasons.

If you basically have no barriers to acquiring Photoshop, then sadly there's no reason to "invest" on the less developed product, even if it is ALSO free.

Adobe and Microsoft both know that piracy tends to drive adoption out of increased eyeballs on the de-facto tools. This hurts the number of developers who would otherwise improve Gimp out of sheer need. We have Linux today because someone in the nineties wanted a free alternative. Someone like that living in today's pirate friendly world would have few reasons to bother working with others, when he can just shut up and torrent multi-thousand dollar software.

Does all that free work up on deviantart get made with paid copies of Photoshop, especially for broke amateurs contributing from humble third-world countries? nobody there buys personal software.

If you're one of us who won't pirate, you'll find the problem. Just by the power of numbers, intentional or unknowing free-loaders *dictate* practices for everyone. It's free for them to send you their work in PSD format, or ppt and docx for Windows office work, so they'll do it and assume you have the reader for free on your machine.

Not so much a problem for geeks who know of Openoffice, Gimp or the free converters online, but things get to the point where you have random computer illiterate friends expecting you to have those installed on your mother's machine to read some random forward, and think YOU are the one with the problem for not having pirated. But most of them are clueless that their PC is "fine" because someone else skirted paying hundreds of dollars for Office and other software. They just assume all PC's can read all files and that yours is broken. They're driving up the pressure for others to pay for Office and Photoshop. More realistically, it's just more pressure to pirate!

And there are a few hardware-assisted breakthroughs thanks to a freshly designed Android mentality. We probably never stopped to think 10 years ago how much shareware, paid or even free software suffered due to the *fragmentation* presented by wintel PC *diversity*

I just realized this: un-needed smartphone peripherals starting with the iPhone and Android era gave birth to a multimedia 2.0... different from the nineties' version in that there are no more drivers, sound cards, CD roms, modems, cameras and microphones to install.

Also, simplified file management and transfers to others (no need for CD burning or shady Windows shares if you have Wifi, certain apps or just bluetooth. For better or worse. It is saddening the knowledge contrast in proficient users who only can upload photos from phone GUIs, but get teary-eyed when you show remind them the 5000+ picture archive on the Windows PC won't attach itself to their emails or flat to Facebook. People do NOT want to have to deal with file sizes, folder locations AND the concept of Windowed desktops when they have an emergency to share with the world.

Back on point, devs gave us unexpected products that PCs and laptops equipped with similar hardware still have no binaries for. Things like personal barcode scanning, radio song identification, GPS and compass-assisted augmented reality that lets you
* avoid paying 100+ USD minimum for dying GPS devices
* find where you parked
* track down miles walked for personal exercise efforts
* overlay star and planet information over the night sky as you point the camera
* translate some signs on the fly

Hybrid machines would mean some hardware changes that might spur a new age of desktop based software that you can distribute for Windows Stores.

I used to find comfort in that same thought, but the techdirt link in the GP post has a comment that ups our healthy paranoia. Even with the "battery" off we should recall there's a secondary battery not maintained by the user, which may or may not power nefarious means (clock tick battery and settings, but why not a cell tower ping? GPS is expensive, but 1 and 2G can be pretty cheap power-wise)

Consider that a recent /. article said wireless chips are getting even smaller, so air-gapping "legal" interfaces that we know doesn't mean we're safe from an untrusted device. And they are ALL untrusted nowadays. I heard here that the very first Amazon-branded e-reader had a little-known always-on internet connection. Supposedly it was a low speed blackbox paid for by Amazon where you could do simple things like read wikipedia articles. That's scary because people didn't talk about it, and because if Amazon does it publicly, who's to forbid American phones from connecting to government-controlled blackbox spectrum at random intervals and chat away?

You can never be too paranoid. I caved in and looked up what the Russian "facebook" alternative is some hours ago (yeah, local ISP spying and whatever is still a problem, but at least there's no worry about US ad companies running the show and piping every single post without court orders.) No need to mention the name, because it lost the game quickly: There was a signup box, and a "sign-in with Facebook" button. So our tendrils are all over the place. If they have FB code on their site even being a competitor, then what else do they exchange with the "enemy"?

Tell that to geocities content. Not only does it live on in japan [since they shut down their english presence] but I've seen clones that still hold the space I made more than ten years ago. Look up "oocities".

Ages: 99, 91 and 90-something from your own sample.
No disrespect meant: I'm starting to notice a generational pattern here ; )

It is a shame that today's middle aged and youths regard the horoscope sections more highly for entertainment. Sudoku itself isn't my thing, but I recall it WAS brainy and extremely popular. They don't require actual culture or dictionary lookups to solve (just math skills). From what I recall back in 2007 - late 2009, I'd see lots on solvers on the way to work.

They were all gone at some point between 2010 and late 2011 while I was out of the workforce. Mobile happened!
You'd think we'd be seeing a transfer from paper to Sudoku apps, but when people aren't passively reading, it's all Bejeweled, Angry birds and other games, Facebook, email and texts. I doubt these will be pushing back Alzheimer's.