Everyone Wants to 'Own' Your PC

I hope you know how to read this below and at wired news "between the lines."  It's sad too because it looks as though the computer consumer will forever be screwed.  And no one cares.  If they did care, where are they trying to help?  So far the laws protect the spammers, vendors, and large monopolies. etc.  meanwhile the consumer is ignored.

 

There's a battle raging on your computer right now -- one that pits you against worms and viruses, Trojans, spyware, automatic update features and digital rights management technologies. It's the battle to determine who owns your computer.

 

You own your computer, of course. You bought it. You paid for it. But how much control do you really have over what happens on your machine? Technically you might have bought the hardware and software, but you have less control over what it's doing behind the scenes.

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

It used to be that only malicious hackers were trying to own your computers. Whether through worms, viruses, Trojans or other means, they would try to install some kind of remote-control program onto your system. Then they'd use your computers to sniff passwords, make fraudulent bank transactions, send spam, initiate phishing attacks and so on. Estimates are that somewhere between hundreds of thousands and millions of computers are members of remotely controlled "bot" networks. Owned.

 

Everyone Wants to 'Own' Your PC