Bright Ideas Computing

Apparently, word has it that McAfee has decided to compensate home PC users for expenses they paid to repair their computers as a result of last week’s bad McAfee antivirus update. Click below for full article…

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-20003399-83.html

If this news holds true, it will go a long way to repair consumer confidence in their product. They sure need a boost in consumer confidence at this time.

On Wednesday, April 21, 2010, McAfee released an update called DAT 5958 that crippled tens of thousands of PCs around the world. Affected PCs appear to be limited to Windows XP with Service Pack 3. McAfee has responded by trying to make the damages appear less significant than they already are. Check this…

http://siblog.mcafee.com/support/mcafee-response-on-current-false-positive-issue/

While there are thousands of complaints pouring in, what most of them don’t realize is that McAfee will disclaim any liability whatsoever. In other words, they will repair their software but they are not liable for financial damages suffered to the end users. Don’t believe me? It’s right there in the End User License Agreement (EULA) nobody bothers to read when they install their copy of McAfee Antivirus.

“7. NO LIABILITY. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES AND UNDER NO LEGAL THEORY, WHETHER IN

TORT, CONTRACT, OR OTHERWISE, WILL MCAFEE OR ITS SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR

ANY DAMAGES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER SUCH DAMAGES ARE CATEGORIZED AS DIRECT,

INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT

LIMITATION, DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF PROFITS OR GOODWILL, WORK STOPPAGE, COMPUTER

FAILURE OR MALFUNCTION, OR FOR ANY OTHER DAMAGE OR LOSS.”

Furthermore it was reported today at CNN that “the University of Michigan’s medical school reported that 8,000 of its 25,000 computers crashed. Police in Lexington, Ky., resorted to hand-writing reports and turned off their patrol car terminals as a precaution. Some jails canceled visitation, and Rhode Island hospitals turned away non-trauma patients at emergency rooms and postponed some elective surgeries.” Click here to read full article.

This is serious stuff. It’s amazing no deaths have yet been reported as a result of McAfee’s ‘mistake’.

Comments?

Mozilla was quick to respond to the discovery of a critical security hole in their browser. The breach was discovered on March 22 and a patch was announced today.

You can find the Mozilla Firefox release notes here.

Users of Firefox should click on menu ‘Help -> Check for updates’ or they can wait for this update to be automatically downloaded. But if it were my system, I’d choose the former option.

We officially kick-off this new WordPress-based website today. Until all the content is migrated, the old site will remain active at http://www.bictx.com. Hope you enjoy the new look!

Happy Computing!

Tomas