KQED is the largest public broadcaster in northern
California. It operates TV Channel 9, an FM station, various
repeaters for both in different areas, and now, having
purchased one of those ubiquitous Christian FM stations,
radio to Sacramento despite the fact that there was already
a public station there.

I discovered degraded system performance when I was on their
web site, and with effort, traced the problem to
transmissions from my machine to imrworldwide. When i
emailed them, KQED acknowledged their use of this tool. They
said that they had selected RedSheriff because it was the
least likely to cause consternation among their site users.
I logged a separate transmission to imrworldwide with every
mouse click while I was on the KQED web site.

I noticed that on their site, imrworldwide proclaims the
superiority of their product at evading firewalls; sure
enough, that's where I found it logged as it merrily
subverted my protection. I believe that the way that this
operation works is to comandeer some of our computer memory
to efferctively establish a server in our machines:
effectively creating a "computer within the computer." Quite
a theft of processing power.

Our 900-pound Public Broadcaster is blindly devoted to
obtaining stats regardless of how odious the practice or
method is (and how questionable it is to devote scarce
resources to this techno-fluff). I registered an objection.
Instead of stopping this odious (and costly!) practice,
KQED's response to my objection was to post a statement
about their use of RedSheriff on their policy page.

Perhaps if we all refuse to contribute to any public
broadcaster invading our systems and privacy this way, and
let them know how we feel and the impact on their bottom
lines, they'll get the message loud and clear.

Richard