The rise of user-hostile software
Agreed on all points.<p>Interesting to see this:<p>> <i>You can argue that all of this has existed for a very long time, back from the days of all kinds of toolbars and extensions that created multiple levels of address bar nesting in your web browser and taskbar.</i><p>What I find ironic about the whole situation is, back then it was universally known that those toolbars and extensions are distributed by assholes. The whole software category was called by various pejorative names - "adware", "spyware", "malware". There was a whole ecosystem of tools and tricks to get rid of them, as well as preventing them from being installed in the first place.<p>Something weird happened over the past decade. We find ourselves in times where most mainstream software from renowned companies should be, by the standards of the toolbar era, classified as malware.