Keep Your Grubby Mitts Off My Hard Drive

What's more, the whole philosophy here -- from the program's spyware-like behavior to its requiring you to login to uninstall software -- is totally wrong. Get this straight content providers: Our computers belong to us. If we're in the mood, we might let you sell us some stuff to run on them. But they don't belong to you, and we're not likely to surrender control over our own bought-and-paid-for hardware, which we often rely on to do our jobs and run our lives, simply in exchange for letting you sell us something. (Honestly, most of what you're selling isn't all that good anyway, and you're lucky that people buy it at all. So don't get greedy. And while click-through license agreements may make it legal, they won't make you any more popular.)

Consumers grumble a bit. People that work in IT talk about such things on obscure message boards when they're not photoshopping images of Lindsay Lohan into their high school photo with them. But the world is changing, and it matters a great deal when you monkey around with customer loyalty, and men that buy ascii text by the metric tonne get a hold of you.

Read the whole slapping around here.