January 2007

Attorney General Lawrence Wasden entered into a settlement agreement with SONY BMG Music Entertainment that will allow Idaho consumers to obtain refunds of up to $175 for harm caused to their computers by SONY BMG music CDs. SONY BMG distributed more than 12 million CDs without adequately informing consumers that the CDs contained anti-copying software.

Article and links to submit a claim for reimbursement of repair expenses associated with XCP here

All Editions of Windows Vista are now available to the public, you can purchase and download Windows Vista via Windows Marketplace

Before upgrading, read Windows Vista Get Ready

Press release from the New York State Attorney General’s Office.

NEW YORK, NY (January 29, 2007)—Attorney General Andrew Cuomo today announced that New York has reached ground-breaking settlements with three major online advertisers for promoting products and services on the Internet through deceptively installed programs known as “adware.” The agreements, with Priceline.com Incorporated (“Priceline”), Travelocity.com LP (“Travelocity”) and Cingular Wireless LLC (“Cingular”) mark the first time law enforcement has held advertisers responsible for ads displayed through adware.

The settlements grew out of the Internet Bureau’s investigation of DirectRevenue. People of the State of New York v. Direct Revenue, LLC.

Priceline, Travelocity and Cingular, among others, were discovered to have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars delivering ads through Direct Revenue software. Not a surprise, many legitimate companies fund the proliferation of adware with their advertising dollars, despite anti-spyware activists.

Ben Edelman “Spyware”: Research, Testing, Legislation, and Suits

180solutions. direct revenue, zango

Patiently waiting for the release of updated drivers at Creative to support Microsoft’s Vista.

Windows Vista™ is currently available to volume licensing customers only. Creative will provide support for its products, as detailed in our Driver Availability Chart support, following its consumer release on January 30th, 2007.

Windows Vista™ - Driver Availability Chart

The last updated driver for the Audigy 2 ZS Series* is a Beta released January 12th 2007.

I downloaded and installed to use on my subscription copy of Vista; very limited functions on the Sound Blaster Audigy but better than nothing.

There are quite a few dissatisfied Creative users, as you can see here in their Discussion Forums

Creative does appear to be slow out the gate, but rather a solid release than a shoddy half baked one.

Countdown, will Creative be able to deliver……or not.

Update 01-31-07

Apprantly the answer is not. See forum posts here and here

Today, Microsoft is announcing the addition of an Extended Support phase for the Windows® XP Home Edition and Windows XP Media Center Edition operating systems, providing consumers with an additional phase of support.

With the addition of Extended Support, the support life cycle for Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Media Center Edition will include a total of five years of Mainstream Support (until April 2009) and five years of Extended Support, matching the support policy provided for Windows XP Professional.

Windows Life-Cycle Policy

MySpace is in the news again, this time accused of serving up Winfixer advertisements and attempted installs of rogue programs well known in the antispyware community. Namely WinAntiVirus Pro and DriveCleaner aka Errorsafe.

Article by The Register MySpace slams ad networks over ’scareware’

Sandi Hardmeier writes,

The MySpace articles are being sourced from Rapid Media, the same provider that CiD uses to source advertisements for the Messenger Plus! sponsor program.
Spyware Sucks

This Trojan is spreading throughout the world rapidly. Once the attached file is executed, it creates a backdoor that can be used by the malware creators to take control of a system and make it part of a botnet to launch more attacks.

F-Secure has detailed information on their Blog

If the tour schedule brings the bus near your town, it is a good opportunity to see demos of Windows Vista.

Nice site to bookmark, Sandi Hardmeier’s IE-Vista

A report from FaceTime with disturbing statistics regarding employees who undermine Corporate Security.

• Four in ten end users (39%) believe they should be allowed to “install the applications they need on their work computers,” independent of IT oversight or policy.

• Fifty-three percent of end users report they “tend to disregard” company policies that govern greynet usage, specifically IM and peer-to-peer file sharing.

FaceTime article here