Monday, February 12, 2007

More disgraceful Vista support

More outlets are picking up on the disgraceful state of Vista support.

Smarthouse discover Logitech have no intention of supporting their equipment. They also mention Abode, Creative and nVidia. A good point is how empty this talk of "convergence" with home hi-fi is when the stuff doesn't work.

Over at Eastwood Hi-Fi, they've found that not only Yamaha have problems, but the Panasonic website won't even work for Vista users. I find Steve Niell's naivete about the professionalism and planning of the IT and electronic industries rather touching. He should try dealing with ISPs.

Australian Personal Computer
has a rundown on ISPs and their hardware vendors. Taking the cake are the country's two biggest Telcos: Bigpond won't connect Vista users while Optus take the cake with the comment they "already supported six operating systems but "only recently learned that Vista brings with it some elements that require us to change our systems."

Truly breathtaking. You'd think Vista suddenly appeared out of the ether and onto computers. The contempt vendors and ISPs have for their customers is disgraceful.

Mark Curban doesn't understand spam

As a subscriber to Crikey's newsletter I enjoy their daily links to blogs that have caught their reader's attention so I visited Mark Curban's comment on Donald Trump sending him spam.

Ummm Mark, that spam is as likely to have come from your granny as it was from Donald Trump. See my previous post on compromised computers.

Home PCs attack the Internet

Last week's attack on the Internet root servers is being blamed on botnets of zombie computers. And why not, the number of computers being compromised by spyware is horrendous. We see a half a dozen each week.

Convergence is a buzz word in the IT industry. The worrying thing about the malware epidemic is how the bad guys are converging: Spammers, phishers , spyware, phishers and virus writers are all coming together and sharing tactics and compromised machines.

The spam epidemic is a good example. One of the best protections from spam were the black lists of compromised servers and open relays. The problem now is that we have hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of compromised home PCs.

Unsecured wireless networks are also to blame. One client of ours was getting regularly disconnected for abusing their service. It turned out their wireless router (not setup by us) had no security and someone was using it to send spam.

The lesson, as the EETimes article linked above says, is that all computer users have a responsibility to secure their computers. If they don't, they may be responsible for spam, phishing scams and attacks on the Internet DNS servers.