An interesting story came into my radar this week when one of my sources told me of problems some chap had when installing Yahoo Messenger with the auto-update function enabled.

Turns out, apparently, that this chap discovered immediately that all his web link associations were changed from Firefox, his default system browser, to IE7 and then a rather confusing error message was thrown up informing him of this change and offering to 'fix your settings' or 'accept changes.'

Now this is where Yahoo would appear to have got rather sneaky and dealt the low-blow. Thinking that something is interfering with your browser settings you would most likely not want to accept the changes, instead you would go for the fix problem route. Which is what chappy did, only to discover his homepage was now pointing to Yahoo by default and IE was defaulting to Yahoo for search as well.

Sort of brings a new meaning to search engine optimization huh?

This type of sneaky change is a fairly common thing. I've noticed loads of software asking me to download Yahoo! toolbar for a while now.

Google are also getting in on the act (and I believe there desktop software can impose a serious security risk); I believe they had their wrists slapped recently for bundling software with 'clean' Dell installations. Naughty!

Microsoft started this trend, Google strived to be different, and now they're all the same again. Typical.

I am typically a fan of everything and anything Google throws out, but I have to admit I have a strong dislike for their Desktop tools.

Yahoo is terrible. A friend of mine signed up for their overture advertising with a $50 credit from their web host.

First, they gave him one click, depleted the 5.00 he added to his account, and didn't give him the 50$.

Then, they tried to charge his account 5 times for the 5 dollars, until they shut off his card for fraud protection.

He sent them an email telling them its no wonder google is kicking their a$%, their advertising is a complete scam. !!!

wow...would have been great to see the look on their faces when they read that mail? not that i have something against yahoo...

I know a very big software development company removed all Gtalk clients from their systems after seeing a serious/suspicious data traffic generated by Gtalk.

I used to use Yahoo Messenger, particularly the beta version. Wow, so many bugs! I uninstalled eventually.