The folks over at the daily wtf have an amusing story about trying to determine if a sales pitch was worth it.

Since there’s really only one thing that could cause such a dialog to pop-up so fast, I checked the source code…

if (form.id.value=="buyers") {
if (form.pass.value=="gov1996") {
location="http://officers.federalsuppliers.com/agents.html" }

Even if you don’t understand Javascript, you can probably appreciate how terrible this implementation is…

This is great. We covered Microsoft OneCare when it was first announced and again when Vista was nearing release. Now comes news from SecurityFocus that Microsoft OneCare deleted Outlook e-mails…

Recent reports suggest Microsoft’s OneCare anti-virus offering suffered a bug that could have caused it to delete or quarantine all e-mail in a user’s Outlook inbox, in certain cases when it finds a virus.

Well isn’t that nice. You have a spam/virus email in your PST, so to get rid of it, we’ll just delete the entire PST file. Yikes. Glad they didn’t include it in Vista as Anil had suggested.

Taking profiteering to a new level:

I got hacked by my own host. No, it wasn’t a mistake. No, the server didn’t just go down. They hacked it so that they could upsell me on some $2000 security audit and package!

“They” seems to be the malicious action of one individual who part-timed on support for the hosting provider and worked at a security consulting firm. Interesting (but illegal) way of drumming up business…

Every software developer has done this at one point in time… You fix a bug but in the process, introduce a new one.

Well, it sucks when the bug you are fixing is actually a cumulative patch for eight security vulnerabilities, and the bug you introduce is a security vulnerability that is as severe as worst of the eight you fixed.

Oh well, here’s hoping they get this one worked out before exploits show up in the wild.

Microsoft recently made some major changes to the Vista code to increase stability and create a more secure operating system.

This is the “new” Microsoft. More secure, stable, and able to do anything that (*cough*) Mac OS X can. To be honest, I like this shift and borrowing (to use the term lightly) provides the seeds for innovation.

To help improve security, MS is going to provide users with a product called Windows Live OneCare. It is a anti-virus/spyware scanner with some extra bells and whistles. (Windows already has a defragmenter, do I need repackaged it in this product??)

Here’s the catch. It’s $49.95 per year. Now don’t get me wrong, you have to pay for Symantec’s anti-virus too. But Symantec doesn’t write the OS code, they exist because MS can’t do it securely.

My point is why not just include OneCare with Vista? Users are paying (alot) of money already. Not only that, but home users will not pay for OneCare, because they don’t care. How many people do you know that just use whatever anti-virus that Dell preloaded on there, only to ignore expired definition update warnings after the free 6 months?

Then your friends call and ask you to fix their computer.

If OneCare is automated to update and scan automatically, then home users are covered. Less security problems gives you a better rep, and helps in dealing with the corporate market. I’d say, “just write better code,” but that isn’t going to happen.

Don’t play their game MS. Look from at other OSes you are already taking ideas from. How much money do you think Symantec makes from its OS X anti-virus scanner?

How much money do you think you’ll make from offering a product no one will pay for? How much more “secure” will that make Vista? The only way users will pay is with crashed hard drives, stolen data, and all sorts of headaches.

Here is an opportunity where MS goals meet consumer ones. MS wants to provide a more secure OS, “borrow” ideas, stifle competition (what company doesn’t deep down)…and ultimately generate more revenue. Let’s face it, the past few years haven’t been great for MS.

Incorporating OneCare meets these goals.

Users and businesses, want a secure OS too. A secure OS that takes care of itself, and doesn’t require mom and pop and the IT guy on the third floor to constantly be dealing with a varient of the Sober worm, and it would be nice that people wouldn’t be required to buy other anti-virus products to patch an expensive OS (hmm…lawsuit?)

Incorporating OneCare meets these goals too.

Microsoft has recently announced pricing and licensing details for their OneCare Live service. Question: will users really pay the company that gave them an operating system susceptible to viruses, spyware, and malware an additional $50/year?

This is what one of the Microsoft salespeople at the AMD – Microsoft Server Build Event told the people in attendance—mostly system builders and value-added resellers—about the Microsoft Security Solutions competency. I’m paraphrasing here because I didn’t have a pen and paper handy…

Folks are real concerned with security these days, and with training in Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2004, you can build additional services revenue by creating firewalling rules for your customers. The Microsoft Security Solutions competency can be a great revenue builder.

This is why information security—and Microsoft—gets a bad name. Giving people whose job is putting together computer components the idea that they should be making money off security. Meanwhile, those of us that focus 100% of our effort on security can’t help, because their system builder “took care of” the security. Yikes.