Messing With My Computer (continued)
I took a couple potshots at Yahoo! last week for messing with my computer by taking control of my media files when I installed Yahoo! Music Engine.
I got the following comment from Ian at Yahoo!:
We didn’t do anything intentionally evil with the grabbing of types.
We’ll look into it and see if there’s a bug of some sort we need to
address, or if we just need to make this easier.
He then sent me a private email and copied the product manager and they said that Yahoo! Music Engine does ask permission to take over the media files during the install. That is a distinct possibility because to be honest I don’t remember the install process that well.
Ian went on to say in one of the emails:
I agree this shit is annoying. I remember in 1999 when I was at Nullsoft and we
first started having to play this game. Real was playing dirty and unless we
wanted to be pushed out we had to get in the mix.
I totally agree with Ian – "this shit is annoying". I would like all of the companies that develop software to play media files of one type or another to sign a "non proliferation treaty" that says they won’t try to override each other and will not try to change a user’s preferences on install.