For the last few years a number of us have been ringing the alarm bells at work over spyware (aka parasites, adware, malware etc…or if you are worried about getting sued call it “crapware”). My team are the ones who get to fix infestations all week long (rebuild roaming profiles, wipe and reimage hosed machines, etc).
It took YEARS to get any sort of response from the team responsible for preventing this kind of crap. Anything that would involve them doing any actual work was “not important”, or there’s “other projects to work on” (you get the picture). Meanwhile we’re spending at least one FTE just cleaning crap up, not to mention having to repeatedly explain to steamed staff and attorneys just why they get to waste jillions of billable hours as we run around fighting fires.
So one great big FUCK YOU to the folks who should have been fixing and blocking this stuff from Day 1. If any of you turds ever had to actually go and clean up one of these heaps of steaming poo and interact with an actual human being you’d have suddenly realized that maybe this IS A FUCKING PRIORITY.
After a while we got some tools like Adaware…which they then decided not to upgrade to the newest version so all of our threat definitions were over 6 months out of date by the time they made the new version available to us.
If we dealt with viruses the way we are dealing with spyware we’d be out of business in a week. Morons.
And finally we got the ability to start putting Firefox on machines. Great, for 99% of our users’ needs this works perfectly and it cuts way down on the problems.
Today I get told that they don’t want to support Firefox or evidently even let anyone know about upgrades to it because “Firefox has released so many patches for vulnerabilities”.
What the holy fuck? In the months since v1.0 came out they have released, by my count, a staggering three upgrades - it’s on v1.0.3 now. And the latest vulnerability was closed off within 24 hours of public notice of the problem. Aside from that we have had ZERO problems with it. Wonder how many IE patches have been released in that time?
To add to the irony, within maybe 30 minutes of that pontification the SAME GROUP of people sends out an email announcing the installation of over a half-dozen patches and hotfixes to IE to fix “Critical” and “Serious” vulnerabilities (per MS).
You guys need to walk a mile in our fucking shoes. Spend a week handling the shit we have to deal with because of your foot-dragging and refusal to recognize reality, then see how important you think this stuff is. If water is pouring down into your living room you will never fix the problem with a bucket, you have to fix the goddam leaky roof.
Grgngngrngaaaah! HULK MAD! SMASH PUNY MANAGERS! REVOKE ADMIN RIGHTS!
Thank you, I just had to get that out of my system. Time for a nice cup of tea now.