Interesting People mailing list archives
stupid vendor tricks
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 04:19:57 -0400
Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu Date: Mon, 10 May 2004 23:34:34 -0400 (EDT) From: "Dr. James J. O'Donnell" <provost () georgetown edu> Subject: stupid vendor tricks X-X-Sender: provost@gusun To: dave () farber net Dave, a new one on me. Just bought a new Toshiba Portege R-100 -- perfect laptop for my needs (it's the 12 inch screen superlightweight that Sony invented in the early Vaio days and now doesn't bother to make any more). So within an hour of getting my dialup configured, it started crashing -- announcing it would need to reboot in 60 seconds. This was both maddening and familiar -- and sure enough it was familiar. It was the Blaster worm, which we all got to know last summer. Got the FixBlaster tool from Symantec, disinfected, and I was fine. What's missing? Well, why is Toshiba selling me a brand new machine in May that comes with WinXP and IE that hasn't been patched yet for last summer's worm? When you call their help line, the recording begins by telling you that if you have Sasser trouble, you should go to the Microsoft website, so my guess is that they are getting plenty of folks with sexy new machines that go sour on them because they can't get them protected fast enough. I spent the evening getting 12MB of Windows Updates to download on dialup, then got my Symantec updated (the version on my machine was two months old), so I think I'm clean now. Sure is fun to get to know your nice new machine this way. Jim O'DonnellGeorgetown U.
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