I just want to gripe about this article. Seemayer can't use his computer because it's infected with spyware, so he's cancelling his broadband Internet connection. That's a fine and logical solution to his problem. No, my complaint is with the writer of the article, Joseph Menn. He doesn't seem to know very much on the subject he's reporting on, and he hasn't done the research on what he doesn't know to make sure what he's reporting makes sense. As a journalist, it's his responsibility to ensure that he stays as close to the truth as possible, since many people who read this article are going to assume it's mostly true, and believe what he writes.

The first thing that bugs me is the line "Seemayer is once again on the cutting edge: Sick of spam clogging his in-box and spyware and viruses crashing his system, Seemayer yanked out his high-speed connection." While I can't prove this to be right or wrong, using the term "cutting edge" implies that this is where the future is going, and if you don't yank out your high speed connection too, you're a loser who's behind on the times and out of date. Does Menn seriously believe that in the future, no one will be using the Internet anymore?

Later on, Menn quotes Ted Schadler of Forrester Research, a technology analyst, saying "People are getting really angry. They're angry at Dell and Microsoft and their cable providers, and that's appropriate. They should be." I don't know whether Schadler's an idiot, or if he's being misquoted (or both), but I can't believe someone this stupid got a job as a "technology analyst". Getting mad at Dell or Microsoft for spyware is like getting mad at Egyptians for inventing paper, just because I don't like this article. Obviously, you're not supposed to get mad at the people who provided the technology (Dell/the Egyptians), but rather at the people who wrote whatever it is that you didn't like (Spyware writers/Joseph Menn).

"No one is immune," Menn writes. "Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates discovered spyware on his personal machine not long ago." Oooh, if Bill Gates, the God of computers, can get infected, then what hope do we mere mortals have? First of all, this fails to note that Bill Gates is a famous guy, and has a few zealots who hate him. I bet, he's one of the most frequent targets of hacking attempts, right up there with NASA, Amazon, Yahoo, Google and the Pentagon, meaning he's far more at risk of having malicious programs installed onto his computer than any of us. But even assuming that Bill Gates was never the target of any attacks, his argument is still flawed. As far as I know spyware for Linux, Macintosh or BSD is unheard of, and certainly people I know who use those OSes have never gotten infected. Then there's the lesser known operating systems for which I don't personally know the person using it (and so I haven't had conversations with them about whether or not they've had that OS infected), but it would very much surprise me to find out that the spyware people have targeted such a market (AmigaOS, BeOS, AIS, VMS, OS/2, AIX, MS-DOS, WindowsCE, Solaris, Java Desktop System, NeXTSTEP, QNX, Rhapsody, System V, Minix, UNIX, Plan 9, Amoeba, GNU Hurd, Mach, FreeDOS, NetWare, Syllable, PalmOS, etc.)

But even amongst the window user, most people I know are relatively free of spyware. I got infected once, and so I ran my antispyware tool, and it removed the infection from me. Note that I said I got infected once, not that I got infected multiple times most of which were blocked by my antispyware tool except for once where I really got infected and so needed to seek out help to get rid of that last bugger. No, I got infected once, about two months ago. Had I not ran any antispyware tool at all, I wouldn't have got infected until two months ago, having ran Windows for at least nine years with Internet access now, and probably closer to twelve years. My mom: I didn't teacher her anything about spyware. She read about it online, I assume, and got tools to protect herself. My brother got infected badly once, learned his lesson, and now runs tools. While I won't go so far as to reverse Menn's statement with "everyone is immune to spyware", I think the vast majority of people are immune to the kind of spyware that makes you shout "OMG, quit Internet forever!"

"Once a weakness in Windows is discovered by hackers, a virus can wreak havoc on millions of computers before Microsoft can offer a patch ? which typical users may not take the initiative to download," writes Menn. The solution is right there. Tell the users to download the patch! If they refuse out of apathy or laziness, it's like whining "I hate needles, so I don't want any form of vaccinations, but I blame the medical industry every time I get sick."

"Stark read five years' worth of computer magazines just to keep up with how to defend himself." This sentence is probably to imply that it takes a gargantuan effort to protect oneself. So show of hands, who here has not read five years' worth of computer magazines? Now, of those who raised their hands, who has had so much trouble with spyware that they decided to quit the Internet? This is a bit of an unfair test, since I know you (or a friend) had to be online to gain access to this blog entry anyway.