Minor irritation

My current laptop is Microsoft flavoured, with the browser being Edge and the search engine being Bing, which is all fine. Especially the picture of the day that you get from Bing - although today's is not one of their best.

Now when you fire the thing up, or open a new tab, by default, you get a rather busy page, a bit like the front of the Sun newspaper.

A row of header stuff, the weather for Epsom (where we live) and then a whole lot of what appear to be news items in rectangular boxes, visually the equivalent of the display format small ads in local newspapers like the Epsom Guardian. This morning, one of these items announced the forthcoming demise of landlines in Epsom, in words to that effect, rather than the vaguer words in the corresponding item in the screen shot included here; the computer had clearly taken where I live into account when putting the first item together. Which item caught my eye and so I clicked to find that what had appeared to be a news item was actually an advertisement for voice over IP telephone services.

Or rather, not exactly an advertisement, rather a puff for the services in general, but including click here to take you to providers in your area.

Initially I was really irritated that an advertisement was masquerading as a news item, rather in the way of the stuff you get in women's magazines. Irritation which was only slightly dissipated by reading the small print under the item which said sponsored.

And now, about an hour later, I am thinking that maybe I ought to know about this sort of thing, that maybe I am too much of a pushover for BT. But I think I would rather read about it in the Guardian at my leisure, than having some trade sponsored advertisement distracting me first thing in the morning.

To be fair to Microsoft, Google makes (even more) money out of advertisements in the same sort of way - but somehow manages to be less intrusive about it.

Reference 1: http://www.talktechdaily.com/new-phone-system/uk/.