[Sussex] Wanadoo nothing

[Jon Fautley]

Tony Austin wrote:

>>I very much doubt it's anything spyware related. I think if it was,
>>there would be a major data protection issue going on - and not even the
>>French are that stupid ;)
>>
> 
> 
> I think that this may be more to the point than you imagine.  These retail
> ISPs like you to install from their official CDs or download, which will
> tailor your IE with favourites, search engines etc.  They definitely do
> not like you doing a non-CD install and bypassing, this as they most
> likely have contracts with certain people that they will promote them on
> their install disk.  Virgin for example, when you do a sign-up on-line
> says that you MUST click the Run From Current Location button on the
> Download screen; you have to be "in the know" to do Save to Disk and
> bypass this - if you then look at the .ins file you will see what I am
> talking about, there's about 4 pages of it and the only relevant bit is
> phone number, username and password.

"Filling your bookmarks folder with crap" is slightly different to 
spyware though - I know that many people pay to have their services 
distributed via ISP's install CD's, and I'm sure the contract with those 
people states that the ISP will distribute that information to any 
customers that sign up. INS files are nice and useful, as the ISP's make 
a point of the user saving them, and it contains all 
usernames/password/phone number (sometimes secret backup numbers too!) 
all in plain text :)

Jon