Mark's Notebook


	When a man's ways please the LORD, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him. - Proverbs 16:7

No More Internet for Them

Los Angeles Times

Friday 14 January 2005, 11:05 pm
Keywords: Computer Topics , News Articles

By Joseph Menn

A small but growing number of frustrated computer owners are giving up or cutting back their use of the Internet, especially at home, where no corporate tech support team will ride to their rescue.

Instead of making life easier — the essential promise of technologies since the steam engine — the home PC of late has made some users feel stupid, endangered or just hassled beyond reason.

Overall Internet use continues to grow. But 2004 "was a real turning point in a bad direction," said technology analyst Ted Schadler of Forrester Research. "People are getting really angry. They're angry at Dell and Microsoft and their cable providers, and that's appropriate. They should be."

For many, spyware was the last straw. During the last 18 months, the sneaky programs have soared to the top of the list of tech woes, triggering the most tech support calls to Dell Inc., the nation's top PC maker. Spyware lurks on as many as 80% of computers nationwide, according to the National Cyber Security Alliance, a trade group.

No one is immune. Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates discovered spyware on his personal machine not long ago.

The aggravation level has reached the point that some in the computer industry believe it threatens to undermine advances of the last decade, during which the Internet has grown from a virtually empty domain to a global community of 800 million souls. They say they need to act before the same early adopters who led mainstream Americans online lead them off.

It may well be up to private enterprise. Congress and the Federal Trade Commission are exploring a crackdown on spyware, but government efforts to stop another online scourge, spam, have had limited results, as many with an e-mail account will attest.

The root cause of the problems is the open architecture of the Internet, initially inhabited and managed by a collaborative community from government and universities.

Microsoft's dominant Windows operating system also makes it possible for malicious code to spread, in part because it was designed to allow so many functions. Once a weakness in Windows is discovered by hackers, a virus can wreak havoc on millions of computers before Microsoft can offer a patch — which typical users may not take the initiative to download.

And consumer advocates claim that state and federal laws against spam don't help. Courts have protected software vendors from most consumer lawsuits, and some have held that the companies are all but immunized by warnings buried in lengthy user agreements, those boxes with massive amounts of text with the "I agree" button at the bottom.

The biggest factor behind the rapid increase in spyware is the amount of money at stake. Ads for such blue-chip companies as Motorola Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and JP Morgan Chase & Co. appear in spyware programs.

"The part that worries me most is the tremendous amount of money that can be made by tricking people into installing junk on their computers," said Ben Edelman, a Harvard graduate student who has testified against spyware companies. "It's a great business."

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-fedup14jan14.story