Barbarians at the Digital Gate (2004)

The way those ad company executives spoke about how consumers "valued targeted advertising" is truly disgusting. I would like to see the statistics of how many users had installed their adware directly from the company website. If the software is valuable, the consumer will seek it our, correct? The reality is most of the people buying products from adware are hostages with Stockholm syndrom.

A view of the evils and perils of advertising in computing contexts from a decade and a half ago.

My last Windows machine was twenty years ago. Keeping ads and assorted malware at bay was no great challenge then, nor has it been on Linux since then - before there were decent Firefox extensions, there was Privoxy.

I have rarely ever seen an unwanted ad on the internet. Whenever I have to deal with other people's computers, I'm taken aback by the amount of unneccessary crap everyone seems willing to put up with.

This causes me to reflect on history, like when I got chewed out by one of my bosses for running a prank program on his computer that "was erasing his hard drive!"

Also on how I used to respond to misdirected emails to let them know they missed their intended address. Yes, there was a time before spam, although that now seems far-fetched.

Sigh.

It is humbling to realize how naive I was (sometimes still am?).

Yeah those evil ads that follow you around on the internet and slow your browser down. Lucky that we got rid of those.