Microsoft And The Fight Against "Scareware"
Ewigen Zyniker, Oct 01, 2008 0815 hrs IST
"Critical Errors" all hooey, they say
"Your PC is vulnerable to attack!"
"300 critical errors found! Click here to clean!"
If you've never seen these messages before, you've either never tried security shareware or you don't run Windows. What normally happens when a program shows you such (admittedly daunting) messages is that it tells you something like "This version only shows you the errors. Please buy the full version to clean," or something to that effect. If you scoff at the thought of purchasing software, you probably waste a lot of time searching for a cracked version. If you go the legal way, you could end up spending around $50 (Rs. 2,400) to secure your PC. In either case, however, you lose--most of these programs are spewing absolute tosh, and may even be trojans in disguise.
Dubbed "scareware" (for obvious reasons), such software has become a menace, and for all practical purposes, is right up there with the best of scams. Its hapless victims, however, needn't fret any more--they find a new rescuer in good ol' Microsoft. The software giant is suing the pants off Texas-based Branch Software and its owner, James McCreary. The company is the developer of Registry Cleaner XP (note how useful that sounds), which tells you that your PC is seriously corrupted, and you must cough up $39.95 to rescue it. Once you buy and run the software, it tells you that 43 critical errors have been fixed. Sounds legit so far, yes? Turns out that these "43 errors" are on every Windows machine, whether your install is an hour or a year old.
Normally, when we see the Big M pulling a philanthropic move, we are wont to probe further and see if there's a catch somewhere. However, when we couple this with Steve Ballmer cursing pre-installed crapware for slowing down Windows, we decide not to look this gift-horse in the mouth. If Microsoft wants to rid the world of crapware and scareware, more power to them.
Source: PC World
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