I'd put it this way. My first inkling that something was wrong was when Norton Anti-Virus shifted to a subscription model and charged me full retail for a renewal back around 2006. What does disabling virus updates for ordinary users with the explicit intent of leaving them vulnerable says about a company's attitude in regard to long term trust?
I left Norton for Kaspersky and paid it protection money for a few years. It seemed refreshing at first. One day, a few years later, I learned how to look at my LAN traffic and saw how often I was sending data to its servers. It was more often than seemed reasonable. That's about the time Microsoft started providing its own free anti-virus and I started switching machines...the Windows XP Professional x64 box stayed on Kaspersky despite my misgivings until I upgraded it to Windows 7 because Microsoft did not port its anti-virus to that platform.
Spyware is often the basis for free software. Adobe Reader and Google Chrome and the Ask toolbar that shipped with Java are pretty obvious examples.
They'll even set their own search engine as your default homepage.
It would be great if an unrelated leak were to happen, though.
To be completely honest, I don't remember. It was 2 years ago and I sit on lots of these pitches. I remember pushing back on them about the methodology, hearing how the sausage was made, and noping right out.
I want my team to be able to spend marketing dollars efficiently but I would never compromise my ethics to do so. Luckily I work somewhere that I can give a justified 'no' and keep my job.
That is lucky! Where do you work?
Currently - head of data engineering at Minted
> That is lucky! Where do you work?
DNS can't log your activity on a website, can it? All DNS does is resolve hosts, right?
DNS service can log that you resolved a host, but doesn't know what you did with the IP address it returned.
Is that technically correct?
It stands to reason the average internet user probably then made a visited that IP.
There is a huge segment of the semi-tech literate crowd that feel wise for using it. I think it's because it's the only time they get to type in an IP address and it makes them feel l33t.
It is probably better to use OpenDNS, but they used to do the same spammy redirect on NXDOMAINs that ISPs do (I think I heard they stopped that). To be honest, the real reason I don't use them much anymore is that their IPs are harder to remember. It's easier to do 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4.