There was some noise on the web today about a bug in msn messenger that allows any websites to look up your contact list. Complete detail is here. I guess this site was giving a demo of the bug. I could not see the demo as the site was down the whole day(I suspect microsoft may have something to do with this), but anyway that was no major threat, as long as it's not your credit card number or password or something like that involved. But then, look what mircosoft has got to say: they openly claim it is a feature! And they are blaming that some 'malicious' sites are mis-using it!! This statement was posted on their support status page today morning, they have removed it now!
What they say is some thing like - 'It is a wonderful feature that allows msn or microsoft to get user information without user's consent, but if any other site makes use of this, let's call them malicious!'. Scott Adams would love this. Incidences of companies mis-using their softwares to break privacy of users seems to be increasing every day. Read about Audiogalaxy's satellite being used as a spyware. Thanks to Ashok for the link.
Talking about irresponsible calims of software companies, it reminds me of the famous Sklyarov case where Adobe filed a case against this Russian programmer for having found a security hole in Adobe's software! Then, Adobe had to face the wrath of programming community and eventually dropped the case.
