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Conflict of interest

Consumer Reports "State of the Net" (via johnath):

In the past six months, [spyware] infections prompted 850,000 U.S. households to replace their computers.

I imagine that most of the new machines run Windows. Microsoft's near-monopoly position may mean that the company brings in more revenue by allowing spyware to thrive. Never mind the fact that the cost of designing secure code and safe user interfaces would eat into any company's profits due to software insecurity costs being an externality. Hampering spyware could hurt Microsoft's revenue.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “Conflict of interest”

  1. VanillaMozilla Says:
    August 20th, 2007 at 2:30 pm

    The surprising thing in that report is that 50% of users don’t use e-mail. You can tell because only 1 in 2 have experienced high levels of spam.

  2. Funeral Says:
    August 23rd, 2007 at 9:10 pm

    You took it out of context:

    “Findings from our fourth annual national survey of online threats, conducted this spring by the Consumer Reports National Research Center based on 2,030 online households, include the following:”
    …
    “Based on projections from our survey, virus infections prompted 1.8 million households to replace their PCs in the past two years
    and spyware infections 850,000 in the past six months.”

  3. Jesse Ruderman Says:
    August 23rd, 2007 at 11:26 pm

    Thanks for the additional context.