Weatherbug - What do you think about it?

[...] Spyware Blog - Remove Spyware wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptWeatherbug - What do you think about it? 0 Add a Comment Thursday, May 29th, 2008 by a0369 Weatherbug is a program that displays weather information on your desktop. Once install, it puts an icon in the system tray that shows the temperature and to open the full display you click on the icon. The program gives you radar, satellite, the forecast, and tells you about severe weather by alerting you. The question is do you consider Weatherbug as spyware? Or do you consider it as [...]

I have used it before, but decided to switch to Weather Watcher Live Beta. This is similar to weather bug, but I feel it works faster and gives more updated weather information and details, it also gives you the option to change your desktop wallpaper into one minute live updates on weather in your area. You can have it show the temperature, severe weather alert information, rain, snow, even moisture rates. This program also alerts you when you have severe weather in your area.

I believe it got itself a bad name before some legit sponsors came along, like my local TV station. I haven’t noticed any problems on the networks I manage when the users have installed this one.

I personally love WeatherBug. I have the yahoo widget installed on my XP desktop and it’s twin brother running in the sidebar on my Vista PC. I think they both do a great job of telling the weather and considering it was free I wouldn’t mind a little ad here and there, plus there’s no actual pop-ups so that makes it even better.

Cheers

I’ve tried the various desktop weather programs, but wasn’t satisfied with any of them… including weatherbug. I settled in with a Firefox extension called “ForecastFox Enhanced.” You can set the number of days forecast, the frequency of updates, and the location in your browser (status bar, bookmarks bar, etc) among other things. It’s been working great for me. All the others I’ve tried have had one problem or another.

If you prefer to have something in your e-mail client, I’ve tried a Thunderbird extension called “World Weather+” that does a pretty good job… not quite as nice as ForecastFox Enhanced, but still a good extension. Either one works far better (for me) than any of the stand-alones I’ve tried.

In it’s earliest incarnations Weather Bug was indeed a tracking cookie info harvester and showed up in the scanners as such. As more netizens became aware of this type of behavior and the possible privacy issues, Weather Bug fell so far from favor it all but disappeared. I can remember looking for it out of curiosity a few years back and finding only 2 or 3 places to get it. Obviously, that has changed. The current incarnation appears relatively harmless, being only one more advertisement driven widget.

Personally, my preference is wunderground.com, the weather underground. Individuals with sophisticated weather stations provide online feed of real-time weather conditions. You can type in your zip and find the station nearest you to bookmark, or browse the world. Includes Nexrad radar feed and forecasts. I live rural yet get 3 second updates from a station less than a quarter mile from me. Much more accurate than feeds from the nearest tv station 50 miles away relayed by a 3rd party. Ad-driven, but easily tamed with Ad Blocker Plus.

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