Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

There is an interesting blurb at Broadband Reports about Dell’s approach to spyware. After initially taking a hands-off attitude, Dell has changed its mind and stated that it will start educating users about this particular “menace”. Things such as a PC security website and anti-spyware software to be included on Dell machines are in the works.

But is it really Dell’s job to take care of users’ spyware problems?

First and foremost, it’s saddening and angering that any appliance you can buy for your home, which can potentially be a useful tool for everyone in your household, can immediately be turned into an outlet for advertising, pornography, and scams, against your will and without your knowledge. Months ago, my mother’s old vintage 1997 PC was rendered completely useless by the deluge of pornography that would pop up the instant she dialed in to her ISP. She has no idea how she got it (although I do, and its not her fault) and she just wanted it to go away so she could use her computer. It pissed me off to no end to have to go over there and see that crap on my mom’s computer and then have to spend my Saturday afternoon cleaning it off. And believe me, looking at a screen full of nasty porn with your mom is as close to hell as I’d like to get.

(I have since purchased an iMac DV for her, and she loves it. She also hasn’t had a single instance of spyware.)

I know most users are ignorant of spyware, how it’s propagated, and the consequences of it. They just want to use their computers. But is the solution really to let users roam free, get infected, and have Dell help them clean it up? Or is the answer smarter users and computers that are, from the ground up, much less vulnerable to such hideousness?

It’s not Dell’s fault that a user’s machine has spyware. The hardware Dell sold these users isn’t broken. Dell hasn’t delivered a product that differs significantly from what it advertises or from what reasonable users expect. Why should Dell bear the support burden of assisting users with a problem that is completely unrelated to the products they manufacture?

If any company should be assisting users with spyware removal, it’s Microsoft. The inadequacies, security holes, and poorly thought out technologies that make up Windows are to blame: They allow spyware to spread, they allow machines to become unknowingly infected, they construct the framework that makes it so easy for the scum of this Earth to force their plague upon us. Where is Microsoft’s anti-spyware campaign?

Another area of the anti-spyware movement that’s critical to mention is user education. Despite (In spite of?) advances in user interface design and efforts to make computers easier, computing is still a very brain-intensive task. Computing is not a passive activity. It requires a user to have a certain baseline knowledge of not only the machine and OS, but uncommon sense as well. Nobody should expect to sit in front of a computer and tune out, and if all that thinkin’ is too much for you, there’s no reason to have a computer in the first place. Dell is doing the right thing in attempting to educate users. While I don’t believe computer manufacturers should in any way be required to assist with user education, we should all encourage any and/or every computer company to assist in that cause for the greater good of the computing world.

Obviously this is an enormous problem that I’m not going to tackle here on my hokey web page. But responsibility for the problem needs to be placed correctly, and spyware is not Dell’s problem to deal with.