Comments

• your_friend

  2010-03-25 05:21:11

  Let's be fair to Mills. She described a Windows only problem in detail but must have been afraid to say, "no other problems are prevalent." She's also broadened the Drudge story, which was a strange political thing with poor fact checking, into a general investigation on the prevalence of Windows malware in advertising. Check out the details here:
  
  

  Found in ads delivered from those networks was JavaScript code that Avast dubbed "JS:Prontexi," which Avast researcher Jiri Sejtko said is a Trojan in script form that targets the Windows operating system. It looks for vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and Acrobat, Java, QuickTime, and Flash and launches fake antivirus warnings, Sejtko said. Users don't need to click on anything to get infected; a computer becomes infected after the ad is loaded by the browser, Avast said.

  
  
  Wow, what an improvement. Most general audience articles blame the user for "PC" problems. Mills has named Windows and the programs that run on top of it that were broken. It is unfortunate that she did not go on to say that these things are not a problem on other platforms. It would have been better had she recognized that everything she mentioned is Windows Malware. She might have been spun by one or two laboratory successes against non free software like Acrobat reader on Mac and afraid of a categorical statement. It is also unfortunate that she is unaware of free software replacements for half of the junk mentioned on top of Windows. Just the same, this is a vast improvement over other coverage that would not have mentioned Windows at all. Perhaps reporters are noticing that the Windows is almost always the disease carrier.
  
  She also noted, indirectly, that malware puts ads where they should not be, "Google spokesman said it was highly unlikely that malware was served on Google, adding that DoubleClick ads do not run on Google search." The Windows experience is a non stop stream of advertisements placed by criminal gangs as well as more reputable big publishers.
  
  Now for something bad. The unfortunate upshot of asking service providers like Yahoo, Google and Myspace about the problem was a false impression that the problem is the fault of the service providers rather than Microsoft Windows. It's not Google's responsibility to filter Windows malware out of the billions of ads they serve, it's Microsfot's job to build an OS that's not so easy to break.