Symantec Lets Users Down. Collusion With Sony? Another reason to own a Mac.
I'm sure you've all heard about Sony's rootkit CD protection scheme that silently loaded itself onto every PC on which one of its CDs was played and how it recently backfired quite literally. It's been all over the news, and is, I might add, another reason you shouldn't be using a Windows based PC. However, this rant isn't about Windows. It's about your anti-virus software. In Wired magazine (http://tinyurl.com/ag6oy), Bruce Schneier says that the real story behind Sony's rootkit problem is the lack of response from major security firms like Symantec and McAffee.
Bruce says "The story to pay attention to here is the collusion between big media companies who try to control what we do on our computers and computer-security companies who are supposed to be protecting us.... What do you think of your anti-virus company, the one that didn't notice Sony's rootkit as it infected half a million computers? .... Because it spread through infected CDs, not through internet connections, they didn't notice? This is exactly the kind of thing we're paying those companies to detect -- especially because the rootkit was phoning home."
[Italics and emphasis mine]
Labels: Computers, Symantec, Technology
posted by Rev. CMOT TMPV @ 11/21/2005 06:21:00 PM (permalink)
Stumble It!
4 Comments:
Just in case you think Macs are safe (this really affects Macs only from the "if everyone switches to Mac, then all the dumb people will be using Macs and nothing will change" school of thought):
"Each installation of Sony's rootkit not only hides itself and rewrites systems drivers, it also communicates back to Sony and the creators of the software, British company First4Internet and Phoenix-based SunnComm Technologies, who handled the Mac side for Sony."
Obviously, of concern to you is the SunnComm "Mac side". The full article is here: http://tinyurl.com/bzrkd [wired.com]
Saw this after reading the Yale link you posted in my LJ and immediately thought of you, in that whole "poor Eric won't be able to follow his lifelong secret dream now...": http://tinyurl.com/8j6x4 [nytimes.com]
Right, but on the Mac before the software installs you get a message saying something is being installed and to type your admin password to allow it to be installed. It's IMPOSSIBLE for this software to install without the user knowing it and allowing it. That's a HUGE difference.
The same idiots who write spyware, malware, viruses, adware, etc can write the same software for a Mac. Nobody in their right mind would remotely dispute that. It's a question of getting it on the user's machine.
Oh, I completely agree that you have to be a complete idiot to get the thing installed on the Mac. Thus the "if everyone switches to Mac, then all the dumb people will be using Macs and nothing will change" school of thought.
In other words, if everyone uses Macs, every kid or stupid adult who wants to hear their music without hassle will learn to enter their password without thinking, much in the same way as we click through EULAs without reading them...
This is part of the problem with Windows: it may be badly engineered, but no engineer can compensate for gullibility or stupidity, and if you have the lion's share of the computer users of the world, it logically follows that you have the lion's share of idiots, too.
Well, that does prove my theory that all idiots are using PCs (that doesn't mean all PC users are idiots from a logical standpoint, though I tend to figure one follows the other....)
If a message pops up and tells you an unauthorized program is attempting to install itself somewhere it doesn't belong and you go ahead and click 'ok' and then type your root password, you deserve what you get, don't you?
On the PC it just happens and you don't even get a choice. Worse the virus companies aren't stopping it. What does that say about PC users?
Windows began with a flawed design, Microsoft releases flawed software and then they charge people to fix what wasn't broken to begin with. That's why all the EULA agreements have an "AS-IS" clause. Except on a Mac the "as-is" software works better and generally more securely than a "PC" -- "As-is" on a PC pretty much means "hope it doesn't crash"
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