Black Raven Dragoons

[Tirian]

Take a gander at this article, it's pretty interesting: http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/1 ... ards-scam/

[Snobal]

Woah, that's impressive. Thanks for sharing Tirian.

[Zancarius]

Wow... that was certainly an interesting read. I'm not even sure where to start!

I think the author is most certainly right that smaller user communities (like OS X) tend to have sites better suited for human interaction and less inclined to be ranked with AdWords/AdSense. To an extend, I think this holds true for the F/OSS community with the exception that, since everything is submitted with the full-source viewable, it's a little bit more difficult to avoid scrutiny. After all, the F/OSS model depends on the end users being able to submit bug fixes! (Although, not all open source projects are willing to accept bug reports, and of the few fixes I have bothered to submit to some PHP-based projects, every single one was rejected on the grounds that the fix "wasn't necessary" because the bug only occurred under very unlikely conditions.)

Shareware, on the other hand, is one of those things that sort of floats halfway between legitimacy and illegality. It most certainly never used to be that way, either. I think that as malware has become more prolific, the inherent trust of software has been in steady decline. If there's something I want to try, I'm reluctant to do so (under Windows, anyway) unless I can find numerous sources recommending that particular piece of software or stating that it does what it says and is clean! Then again, as F/OSS has infiltrated the world of Windows, this is becoming less of a problem, since many popular software packages are available on that platform (Pidgin, formerly Gaim; Audacity, a free audio editor; and Gimp, just to name a few).

But hey, it's a "download at your own risk" world these days. I think your article is further proof that we should all exercise caution! Thanks, Tirian!

[Tirian]

No prob. Personally, I'm overly wary of downloading anything on my laptop anymore. Scariest thing -- I found a trojan on an mp3 CD I've had for two years; never detected it on my previous computer. And that was software purchased on disk (ok, admittedly, in the Third World, but still...).

[Snobal]

LOL

[Zancarius]

No prob. Personally, I'm overly wary of downloading anything on my laptop anymore. Scariest thing -- I found a trojan on an mp3 CD I've had for two years; never detected it on my previous computer. And that was software purchased on disk (ok, admittedly, in the Third World, but still...).

Whoa, that's kind of spooky, unless it was a false-positive. I had one of those crop up on an old disk when it couldn't have possible been what was detected (the virus was about 5 years newer than the disc it was on).

[Tirian]

That's what I'm hoping -- I had updated Symantic AV on the previous computer, and I would think that if I had any keylogging software I would've been screwed by now since that was well over 6 months ago that i switched computers.

[Zancarius]

True, and it would've had to be launched from autorun to do any damage.

[Sonikku]

Freeware often has spyware in it as well. Freeware is rarely free...

Remember kiddies, if it ain't got the Sonikku seal it ain't worth jack.

[Highgrade]

Sonniku it is good to see that you are as odd here as you were in Eternal Glory =)
By the way like the new avatar.

[Snobal]

Remember kiddies, if it ain't got the Sonikku seal it ain't worth jack.

Thank you mistress, for your valued wisdom.

/bow

[Zancarius]

Freeware often has spyware in it as well. Freeware is rarely free...

Remember kiddies, if it ain't got the Sonikku seal it ain't worth jack.

Unless it's open source