October 4th, 2006
AOL OpenRide - what you might not know
With all the posts regarding AOL's announcement of a new browser/e-mail/media player application today, I find it pretty interesting that no one apparently has tried to actually install this thing on their system. How else might you explain the fact that not one post I've read so far has mentioned that you must also agree to install AOL Desktop Search when you install OpenRide? Do you think that might have been at least mentioned on the AOL beta page for the product? Or the official download page? Or in the very slick multimedia demo?
No thanks. There are plenty of good desktop search tools out there already. Ones that don't hide like a Trojan in other application's installers. OpenRide might be cool but I am not at all interested in providing even the possibility of a back door into my system to a company that has yet to prove to me that they have corrected the environment that led to a massive disclosure of private information just a short time ago. And that buries the fact that it will install an agent that indexes the contents of your local drive until you are one click away from actually committing to that action. where most people, fatigued from clicking OK in a number of dialogs probably aren't even reading what they're clicking on.
Note to Jason Calacanis: time to have that transparency talk with the troops again.
Marc Orchant has been building, testing, and sometimes breaking hardware and software for 25 years. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
