I thought the same thing. SFC log file, some antivirus/malware, some .Net housekeeping...a page file...ZOMG! Sounds like pretty much everything that I would expect and would prefer to run while the machine is "idle" rather than do all the things when I'm wanting to use it and would prefer faster performance.

So your profile could look like you want hello kitty, mercedes cars and dating sites.

As oppose to having absolutely no profile information, in which case they'd just display random Hello Kitty, Mercedes cars, and dating site ads anyways. The net effect of the end user hasn't changed, but you've still managed to screw over the advertiser in a small, relatively meaningless way.

Betteridge's law of headlines. No is always the answer. :)

Of course it's worth keeping the program. It's much better to capture everything and later realize that you don't need any of it. Or better yet you don't need it for the reason that you thought you would but found another use that is equally beneficial to them. Can you imagine if the Government didn't have it AND they needed it? They might not get re-elected and they just can't have that.

It's not revenge when there is no victim. It is control by fear.

Hunger Games are merely a concentrated and purified form of the divide and conquer strategy which is the "two party" system.

actively supporting unpopular political views or oppressed ethnic groups is a felony in the US.

Don't be so sure.

It is not a non-issue in that these sorts of things could be prevented with proper regulation of drones, or at least the chances of something like this happening could be greatly reduced. No amount of rules, training, or regulation can control what the birds are going to do. Your analogy is very bad.

Slashdot's archive policy used to be much longer. I think it was at least 6 months. I'm not sure why they changed it. It may be for the sake of managing comment spam posts. It looks like they're removing them now. At least I haven't noticed posts for knockoff merchandise lately. I still read at -1, since people still downvote perfectly good comments.

Even on Facebook, we sometimes have running conversations for weeks. There, it's all in who your friends are. The ones I friend can usually keep a conversation going. Sometimes well beyond when it should just die.

Sure, you can do that. That is not how most large companies operate though. I wasn't advocating one way or the other, just reporting what I've seen over the course of a long career in IT.

Well ... I worked for a company who dealt with lots of PII (like, info on *every* person in the US). We put together a system to monitor what TOR nodes existed, and compared attacks to TOR nodes. It was significantly used as an attack vector, not only because of the anonymity, but because the attacker could change IPs frequently. Not a single legitimate user used TOR.

We decided it was worth protecting our users, and the PII of everyone in the US, to refuse any traffic from TOR.

Banks doing the same thing does seem like it's in the best interest of the customers.

If you are a legitimate user, and some 3rd party logs into your account and transfers money out, would you prefer the bank to say "Sorry, it was some random person, and we have no way to find or prosecute them. They will likely do it again." or "The intruder was found and prosecuted."

Depending on the theft, you may or may not get your funds back. If someone goes in and transfers funds as you, some banks aren't willing to refund the transaction. Transfers aren't handled like credit card transactions, which are easily refunded.

Even if your bank does give you the stolen money back, that means they've absorbed the cost. So your loss ($1 or $1M) and refund, is now added to the fees, because the bank's operating expenses are higher.

I'd prefer the "inconvenience" of not being allowed to use TOR and other anonymous relays, and not have the bank have a huge and expensive fee schedule to make up for losses that are impossible to recoup from the thieves.