We've seen the TV commercial saying your computer is fast again. (Well,
not those words. I am not going to name the company because I don't
want a lawsuit for slander.) I've seen them, and to be blunt it makes
me angry how people are deceived. This blog is opinion, but it contains
some truths. Like registry cleaners (which I covered in an recent blog), your ignorance is being exploited. The website, The Consumerist, recently reviewed BestBuy's opimization
service. I would never pay for such a service because, well, I know
computers well. So I know nothing about except by what BestBuy states
and by what The Consumerist discovered. And according to The
Consumerist, it looks like it is a big waste of money.
Perhaps you remember the famous 1984 Apple Super Bowl commercial. It
was revolutionary, it was what made Apple seem hip, an idea that
carries over until today. I have jokingly noted that if Apple sold
iDirt for $20 a box, people would buy it. Apple makes great products.
They better with the price you pay for them. But Apple has morphed into
the very thing their 1984 commercial was talking about.
The 1984 commercial depicts someone rebelling against the
establisment because the establisment seeks conformity. Well, guess
what? If you want an app for your iPod touch or iPhone, it must conform
to Steve Jobs' standard. In order to maintain the "it just works" idea,
Apple tightly controls their computers. Want to build your own Mac?
Nope, not going to happen. In contrast, Microsoft Windows allows you to
do so much more, sometimes to a fault. The result for allowing you to
do what you want is it doesn't always work. But at least you can
do it, even if you shouldn't do it. Does this mean Microsoft is now
good and Apple evil? Not at all. I wouldn't trust either of them. My
point is that Apple is not as saintly as think they are.
To be sure, the future of comuting is very difficult to predict.
Everything can change rapidly. But computer technology does not go from
idea to production overnight. That process takes years. So what are the
computing giants planning in the future?
Some trends are developing. Low-power CPU's is going to be more important than better performing one. The computer graphics and the CPU
are poised to become one chip. A new audio/video cable standard called
DisplayPort will emerge. 64-bit computing will be the standard. And
Blu-Ray will finally become universally accepted.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started the personal computer craze
with their Apple brand computer. IBM rushed a personal computer to the
market, with has the side-effect of making Microsoft the behomoth that
it is. Apple and IBM started the home computer craze, but only Apple
used their own operating system. IBM had to use a 3rd party operating
system. Eventually, IBM computers used MS-DOS. This is the second
article in the series on how computers work. The other articles are:
Scareware is one of the most common forms of malicious software now. The whole idea is to scare you into giving up your money. It is very effective and very profitable. To date, most scareware makes you think you have a virus or spyware. It tries to annoy you to death so that you will pay a fee. If you do pay the fee, your credit card is charged once for the amount specified and then the program does absolutely nothing else. The whole idea behind these programs is to make quick easy money.
Now these scareware creators have a new tactic. The program downloads porn onto your computer and then asks you to pay a fee to clean up the porn images it found. And it then goes on to show you the porn images. The first of this new scareware tactic is called Win Spy Protect. True to the traditonal scareware, it then goes on the annoy you to death. Like a lot of scareware, it is uses something in its title to make it sound legit, in this case "Win" is used in the title.
This particular threat was actually from a hacked site, a children's website. It is important to note that most threats are designed to exploit unpatched Windows computers. An increasing number try to exploit unpatched Macs as well. If the malware or virus finds a computer which it cannot secretly get around the security of the system, it then tries to trick you into manually installing the program. If the user tells the computer to install a program, then no amount of security can protect from that. So always keep your computer up to date and never click on a banner ad which makes you think you have a virus.
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