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 keith2468Premium,MVM
join:2001-02-03
Winnipeg, MB | You guys down south try to keep US software honest This sort of thing makes the whole of the USA, its IT industry, its law enforcement industry, and its journalists look bad to foreigners.
Compare the company with other software vendors.
Compare the problems with problems other software has.
The root problem is people who are neither programmers nor engineers getting involved in creating and evaluating software.
Does any of us have any complex software on our computer that is at verision 1.0?
No. It was all shipped with bugs.
And this is true for complex shareware Linux, MS products, Sun products, IBM products, Kaspersky products, Ad-aware, etc.
And look at the size of Symantec's (Norton's) bug data base.
And this is true even for new releases of products that have existed for decades, let alone years.
Unqualified managers push products into production release without realizing that adequate testing has not been successfully completed.
Of course, normally by the time software is noticed by ordinary folks it has been through a few iterations already, and most of the serious bugs are out. (When "professional computer journalists" evaluate products, they usually make one or two remarks about there still being serious bugs in the product, but then, rightly or wrongly, they move on.) But most serious bugs are not all serious bugs, and that still leaves more serious bugs to be fixed.
Yes company mangers and directors should make sure the products work fairly well before they ship. But most of these managers aren't programmers, so they don't realize what is required to do that.
Same goes with independant product evaluators.
And the average quality of programmers turned out by schools today is typically not that terrific any more either. Through no fault of their own, they need additional training, and on-going training, on the programming tools and environment they are required bytheir employers or prime contractor, to use to do the work.
So many product evaluators have no experience in programming in a work environment.
They don't realize that the problems they are making a big deal out of with product A, are so similar to problems they see or hear about everyday with other products, and that they normally overlook.
They don't understand what goes on behind the scenes. Because they don't understand how programs are developed and how they work, they don't have a feel for what went wrong, when it went wrong, and what the motivation for it going wrong were.
Oh there is a bug, oh it is inefficient, oh it must be malicious malware, must tell the entire world before the nasty vendor finds out.
There is no malice in such cases. It is incomptetence.
There are other cases of malice. Vendors attacking each other and playing dirty tricks are nothing new in the IT industry.
So one should carefully consider the source of reports on software, and try to determine if it might be a rival vendor.
This all said, I feel the consumer's best bet for computer security is stronger laws and law enforcement against cracking and hacking, and the same sort of minimum standards for Internet connected software that we have for cars and trucks.
So far as I know, there is no single product you can buy that will provide foolproof protection for your PC no matter what OS you run.
So if someone touts another product as actually adequate for providing overall computer security, a warning flag should immediately go up in your head.
And if you think someone is actually breaking the law by spreading malware, especially viruses and remote access trojans, you have a duty as a citizen to report it to law enforcement. Then their experts can conduct preliminary investigation to see if your beliefs are worthy of a more indepth investigation.
US law enforcement will take action on these things if approached by reasonably credible people:
»Operation Web Snare
If you are in the country of origin on the particular product you can do this and actually have it investigated. Your fellow netizens who live in other countries cannot easily get foreign rogue products officially investigated.
You guys down south try to keep US software honest, and I'll try to keep Canadian software honest.
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(Virus&Hijacking FAQ + Submit suspected malware + Backups FAQ + Security FAQ TOC) | |
| Re: You guys down south try to keep US software ho I appreciate your concern, but "honesty" in software is hardly a national problem. As you said, even share and freeware has its problems. Lavasoft, one of my favorite internet companies, is European. Making good software is difficult, and it is the productive comments of those in the community like yourself that makes subsequent versions an improvement upon the original.
That being said, Ashley, the purveyor of the product in question, was not a haphazard vendor. He was a (British) con artist. Apparently, he bought a flawed database of a questionable spyware remover, PAL, and either added spyware to it, or never bothered to QC it due to his disregard for end-users. Read the links to the thread above for more info.
We need to keep all software "honest" everywhere, and Americans are doing as much as anyone else. | |
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