You might not know it, but they're in your PC and on your network, and they're altering your applications. Hell-bent hackers? Viruses? Nope. The digital critters to which we're referring are the increasingly ubiquitous phone-home applets embedded in many applications by some of the biggest and best-known commercial software companies in the world.
Used by Microsoft, Symantec, Intuit, and many other software vendors, phone-home applets verify that users have the latest patches and fixes released by a software vendor. Convenient and simple, these specialised applets, often called update agents (or, more menacingly, spyware), allow unrestricted access to a user's PC. These automated updates can be a great convenience, sparing software users from having to manually seek software fixes and updates.
But at what cost to the consumer? While these vendors are doing their updates, they may be stealing data from your PC.
Great, now how about telling us what we can do to block the invaders out of our PC's??
It seems to me that you are full on about warning us in a sensational manner then leaving us hanging!!