[LINK] McAfee update problem

Craig Sanders cas at taz.net.au
Sat Apr 24 22:44:20 AEST 2010


On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 07:46:54AM +1000, Jan Whitaker wrote:
> >http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2010/04/massive-manual-pc-cleanup-triggered-by-mcafee-error/1
> >
> > ... thousands of Windows PCs in large organizations around the globe 
> > were thrown into fits of rebooting yesterday after antivirus giant 
> > McAfee distributed a routine update carrying an egregious error.
> >
> > Now each one of those computers will have to be manually cleaned. 
> > Affected organizations can expect to expend a minimum of 30 minutes 
> > of manual labor per PC to get each one back into working order, says 
> > Steve Shillingford, CEO of tech forensics firm Solera Networks.

and of course, like similar incidents, this will be completely ignored
the next time Microsoft hires one of their shills like Gartner to do a
TCO comparison between Windows and free software like Linux.

hopefully this will start to wake people up.

sooner or later, even the clueless senior management and the mid-level
CMA wannabes who swallow up that kind of garbage will realise that it's
just advertorial, that Windows and MS Office and proprietary software in
general inherently costs far more - in the short term AND the long term
- than free software.

and maybe shareholders will start to wonder why management are putting 
their investments at risk by relying on such crappy software.

there have been dozens of major incidents like this where security flaws
in MS Windows or in the tools that are supposed to help "secure" it have
cause long-term outages. and both medium and minor incidents are beyond
counting - they're so common they're not even an incident, they're a
constant.

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>



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