Hey, Google, Alexa Where are my Firefox toolbars? Yahoo can do it, why not you? Why should the 25 million odd Firefox users be shut out from spyware, proprietary protocols and the ability to mess with the page and add links to your commercial properties?

Oh, well, I guess we'll have to do it ourselves.

As for the storm in a teacup currently running about the evil Google Toolbar, get over it folks. This seems to me to be a classic argument between the geeks and the non-geek writers. Publish on the web and
- You have no privacy
- People will screw with your content
If you don't like it, then don't post on the web, publish on paper, or use some nasty locked down protocol like Adobe Acrobat with everything disabled so I can't even cut and paste. Because if you post in HTML, or XML, somebody somewhere is going to hack some nice little utility that converts all your proper nouns to WikiPedia links, all your ISBNs to Amazon links, removes your ads, kills your popups, turns all your text to yellow on red and changes the layout, copies and plagiarises your words, corrects your spelling, links all your Zips to a map site, turns your phone numbers into Skype links. And generally screws you over. And no amount of bleating about the first amendment and the sanctity of the publisher words or publisher opt out or opt in is going to prevent it.

The moment you publish, All Your Text Are Belong To Us!


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[ 27-Feb-05 10:20am ] [ , , , ]