eburger68
Premium,MVM
join:2001-04-28
| reply to edbott
Re: WMP Adware: A Case Study in Deception
Ed:
You wrote:
said by edbott  :My original post was skeptical about both of these reports, which were posted on very high traffic Web sites (Boing Boing is insanely popular, with more than 200,000 unique visitors a day and countless RSS subscribers). It turns out my skepticism was justified. Fair enough. The Techdirt and Boing-Boing stories were not the best. Indeed, that's the kind of careless/clueless reportage that would have gone on no matter what PC World had written. The real story here is rather involved and difficult to understand, and Techdirt and Boing-Boing predictably made a hash of it. I see that all the time with spyware/adware issues, which are inherently confusing.
The PC World story, on the other hand, was well done for the most part. I just re-read it, and for the complexity of the issues covered, it does a respectable job of conveying the essentials. Here and there I might prefer a slightly different choice of words, but it's pretty close to what we understand now. Certainly nothing in there is outright false.
Just for the record, PC World was the first out with the word on this story. I wrote about it here at DSLR in the other discussion thread on this topic. DSLR/BBR news then picked it up, pointing both to the PC World story and the Security forum discussion thread. Techdirt got it from BBR/DSLR news, and Boing-Boing from Techdirt. In retrospect, it all looks like a high-tech game of "telephone."
Eric L. Howes |
edbott
join:2005-01-02
Scottsdale, AZ
| >> In retrospect, it all looks like a high-tech game of "telephone." Exactly, and that was my point in my original post. I certainly wasn't trying to "throw cold water" on the story, and please note that as soon as I heard that a sample file existed I contacted you to get a copy so I could do my own tests.
I do wish the larger sites would pick up on the real story, which is important and which people like you and Ben and Andrew and Suzi and me have dug out the hard way. But I guess that isn't sexy enough. |
