>There's also the appearance of impropriety: if you undercut the business
>of major vendors like Symantec by bundling in a competing (and competition
>killing) product there may be legal consequences and repercussions (plus
>shouts of joy from virus writers across the galaxy who just know Redmond
>will screw it all up somehow and create yet another smoothly paved onramp
>to the OS).
>\
that's the biggest problem, imnsho.
i can't see an end in sight for malware or spam. today's malware is about surreptitiously installing a remote access trojan and using the machine to relay spam/scams and/or create an army of zombie machines that launch Distributed Denial of Service attacks on, er, Microsoft or SCO. All without the blissfully unaware user ever knowing about it.
I"ve seen people with 100s of spyware apps on their machine. Things ran a little slow for one guy but he was so used to crap from 'doze that he just figured it needed a reboot. (Which is funny. Who said something about crashing? I haven't seen this machine crash, ever. It runs and runs and runs -- and I beat the hell out of it with resource hog products from Adobe and Macromedia.
I bring this up b/c my partner was getting peeved about the whole thing and said: "People don't drive on the streets without a license, people should have to have a license to drive the internet."
I used to laugh at that on libertarian principles. Now, I take it seriously but it wouldn't work. With a car, you could suffer the consequences: dismemberment, death, lifelong injury, out lots of money, etc. But what happens when you screw up and drive the wrong way down the Internet? Nothing. Older types of malware made the end user suffer. Today, malware writers just want to slide in and take advantage of all the (hardly ever used by most users) horse power and the DSL/cable connection -- all without being noticed.
Heck, I know a guy who's gotten zapped five times this year alone. He can't help himself. He sits around for two hours everyone night in the amateur titty chat rooms. Another person sends him a zip file--of titty pics, probably--and he opens it. Every mother lovin' time! He has to repair the machine, often has to reformat and reinstall. Every mother lovin' time. And he still downloads the files.
The beau won't even forward Mike security bulletins I send. It's a waste of time. Our friend, Mike, is like a habitually reckless driver who's been in repeat accidents. There are a lot of Mikes out there.
Although I recently violated the edict (I was so ashamed, I had to spank myself with this ), look how many people refuse to shut HTML off, even after you give them instructions. You tell them HTML will leave their system open to malware, often malware that doesn't have to be executed... and they STILL freakin' use it.
The only people with an interest in attacking malware/spyware are the ISPs -- but they aren't really doing well, last I heard. I suspect the only thing they could do is offer the monthly fee and then force users to buy and install firewalls, AV, and anti-spyware. But there's the rub: it's needs to be easy to run, it needs to be maintained (patched), etc. etc. The ISPs aren't going to invest in the support and training staff.
K
"We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."
--Bruce Sterling