New Mac ads.... ???

[DrDeth]

@Lute Skywatcher

Pop-up ads can be blocked. Never had a problem with a Snopes pop-up or pop-under, and Symantec has nothing about an about:blank trojan.

From wiki “For some time, Snopes’ ad provider was distributing the Zango adware product.”

Siteadvisor had listed Snopes with a warning for “excessive popups” and “adware, spyware, or viruses”. They give them a clean bill of health now.

Here’s another:

Snopes peddling malware?

"*Snopes has been targeted as one of them. It seems for half a year now the company has been pushing Zango, formerly 180Solutions, onto people visiting the site in one form or another. Zango, whose own (former) employees don’t have anything good to say about it, has been spotted more than once peddling their wares in shady ways. So much so that the FTC saw it fit to levy a huge fine on the company. So why would Snopes, a site that has gained a considerable amount of fame for interesting factoids in dispelling or confirming urban legends, want to associate with these folks?

Money is one reason, though third party association is another. Regardless, it seems Snopes is very well aware that they are divvying up ads for Zango. I suppose someone has to, else where would Zango get the money to pay their millions in fines the next time the FTC comes after them."*

as for about blank- per wiki “*about:blank (see CoolWebSearch), generic name for one of the most common but hardest to remove variants of CoolWebSearch malware”. *

and a link to the entire thread, including Polycarps rebbuttal:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=6927283#post6927283

[Skywatcher]

@DrDeth

as for about blank- per wiki “*about:blank (see CoolWebSearch), generic name for one of the most common but hardest to remove variants of CoolWebSearch malware”. *

Scroll down a bit and you’d see that about:blank is associated with CoolWebSearch and Adware.Fastsearchweb, neither of which are trojans.

[jormundgondir]

@InvisibleWombat

A grand total of five laptop computers, no. But five laptops out of the top ten bestselling on Amazon.com using XP is a significant number. Especially when ONE out of those ten uses Vista.

Some of this can be explained just by the way Microsoft does business with their OEMs. From the link:

"Top 10 Laptops (Amazon)

* 3 Apple Macs (No Windows)
* 5 Windows XP Home
* 1 has Linux (No Vista)
* 1 Vista"

Mac are popular nowadays, no doubt: the numbers on Amazon are probably skewed in their favor, though, because the bulk of systems purchased by corporations and such would be done via a reseller or directly from OEMs, so the amazon clientele will have a disproportionately high representation of home users.

Re the conspicuous absence of XP Pro/tablet in that list: For a couple years now Microsoft has been pushing their OEM partners hard to boost Vista, and in fact at this point they are no longer selling XP COAs to OEMs, so the OEMs are limited to selling what they have left in stock as far as license keys go. Moving forward, OEMs are only allowed to provide XP as a “downgrade”, in which they sell the user a Vista COA but include XP install/restore media. They can only preinstall XP for corporate/educational partners who are buying 25 or more units in one batch, and Microsoft has been threatening to terminate even that program soon- they just extended it another six months after shrill protest from some of the big players in OEMland. (Forgive me if I got some of the details backward there, suffice to say they’re making it harder for OEMs to ship XP systems, much less actually sell them as such.)

So why so many XP Home listings up in that Amazon list? My assumption is that those are generally netbooks and cheap/low-end laptops. Microsoft has a new program for OEMs right now to accommodate a category they are calling ULPCs (“ultra low-cost pcs”) in which OEMs can get exceptions to the Vista-only mandate if they are selling cheap/small/slow systems which a) aim to have a very low price point and b) may not have the hardware to run Vista adequately. In these cases they are still letting OEMs sell XP Home pre-installed and with media in-box. I suspect that if you took netbooks and ULPCs out of the equation, or looked at stores with a less consumer-weighted clientele, then you would see Vista much more strongly represented. Of course this doesn’t mean that consumers are clamoring for Vista so much as the fact that Microsoft is trying to make it the only option.

That’s not to say they haven’t had trouble with their roll-out-- given the amount of pushing they’ve been doing on OEMs to promote it, that’s quite obvious-- but I think a lot of that problem is specifically with the roll-out, ie PR and promotion, convincing corporations (who are typically reticent about adopting new tech until it’s gone through a couple of patch cycles) to switch up from Windows XP… and the fact that Windows XP itself turned out to be pretty darned solid, so people see no good reason to upgrade yet.

The commercial in question seems somewhat disingenuous to me, since Microsoft (bless their cold little hearts) have actually been taking pains to make sure XP and Vista both are getting shimmed up as quickly as possible with patches and service packs: Vista Service Pack 2 is already in beta. In the interest of full disclosure, I deal with this crap for a living (I work for a system manufacturer), and at this point I am a fan of Windows Vista both as a user and professionally, and have to say I’m actually looking forward to Windows 7.