My Mom uses juno for email. or at least she did. All she ever does on the internet is mail, so it worked for her. She called me tonight saying that Juno has institiuted a new policy…It basically says Juno can download “Computational Software” onto your PC for the benifit of a third party. It says that the software will replace your screen saver and you are not allowed to disable it. It also says that you must leave your PC on at all times, and that Juno has the right to dial into your pc over the phone line. I really thought that this was a joke someone was playing on her, until I wen’t to Juno’s web site, and found the copy of what she read to me over the phone on thier web site. Does anybody actually fall for this?
Oh, and here’s the link to their web site.
Today Mother bdgr’s pc, tomorrow the world!
That really sucks!
It’s called distributed computing and there are many projects out there, both for private and not for profit organizations. Some of us dopers run a client for the SETI@home project.
Juno has never been a charitable organization and I think this is a pretty interesting new business model. The number of failed free internet providers obviously shows that the banner ad model was not viable. I agree that the fact that they reserve the right to dial into your computer is a bit intrusive but hey, no one’s forcing you to run it.
Do you have some type of conspiricy theory about what Juno is really up to?
Yes…But I can’t tell you…You are obviously one of …THEM!..
No, I just think the idea of leaving my computer on 24/7, and letting thier program do God knows what in the background, using up processor time, all for just a free email service is kinda creepy. The dialing in thing is the worst of it. If someone wants to do this, fine, but they sent it in a new TOS agreement, kinda buried in the fine print. Luckily Mother bdgr reads the fine print and promptly uninstalled Juno. Now I have to go over and run a cat-5 line from dads cable modem for her computer. And I’m too old and fat to be crawling through the attic. Maybe I can con my nephew into it. He’s young(and short)
hey bdgr e-mail me and i can probably help her get around this problem and still have her use juno.
Talked about this back around the begining of March. Here
Personally, TANSTAFL, and you get what you ask/pay for.
A few years back there software was just an email software only. About 1.2megs. Im sure if you used that they couldn’t download software into your computer. Of course, you can’t download that from their site anymore. I must have a copy or two of it around, lucky me.
Thanks, but she’s already dumped it. I been meaning to get her hooked up to the cable modem for a while now anyway.
Its become more ominous since then. This was the new agreement that just came out 2 days ago.