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The increasing costs of spyware and music |
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Friday, 07 May 2004 |
According to Wired, 12% of support calls to Dell and 50% of system crashed reported to Microsoft are caused by spyware. A recent study by Earthlink found an average of 28 peices of spyware per computer.
Even if their numbers are off by a lot, the message is clear - spyware is costing real money. This fits with my own experience working in IT. At work we manage about 600 client computers, about 500 laptops and 100 desktops. Spyware and worms are contending for the top spot when it comes to support issues. In fact, we just added spybot to the disk image for our laptops. Most of the spyware seems to come as a hitchiker with another program, like Kazaa, or be installed by a website. Many sites use vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer to download and install software without the user even knowing it. And because the preview pane in Outlook is really just IE, you can get infected just by reading SPAM. Another good reason to use my favorite browser, firefox.
In unrelated news, it looks like the record labels are forcing Apple to raise some prices on iTunes. As if suing your customers wasn't a bad enough business strategy, they now think it's a good idea to make legitimate legal alternatives to downloading music free less attractive by raising prices. The article also notes that some labels, namely Sony, are trying to launch their own competing services. This could be an early move to push prices up and send customers to the new sites run by the labels themselves. Can you say "anti-competitive"? Wal-mart is still offering songs for $0.88. It would be interesting to see the labels try to renegotiate prices with wal-mart.
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