Everyone Wants Your PC

There was a song by Tears for Fears called “Everybody wants to Rule the World” ( you can have a listen over at lastfm)

But Wired News has an article Bruce Schneier called Everyone Wants to ‘Own’ Your PC which tries to document the battle raging on your computer right now. The one that pits you against worms and viruses, Trojans, spyware, automatic update features and digital rights management technologies.

Basically it’s about determining who owns your computer.

Dont get me wrong, I know you went out and paid your hard earned cash for your PC and you own it. But (there always has to be a but doesn’t there?) how much control do you really have over what happens on your machine? Lets face it you might have bought the hardware and software, but you have very little control over what it’s doing behind the scenes. Virus upgrades just happen, your mail just arrives, the Microsoft upgrades just keep rolling along and you would be hard pressed to tell me when the last one happened.

Using the hacker sense of the term, your computer is “owned” by other people.

Read the article. There is also a copy at http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/05/who_owns_your_c.html

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