Slashdot Mirror
MS Promotion Site Flagged By MS Anti-Phishing
Stony Stevenson writes "Microsoft has launched a marketing campaign that lets any student at an Australian university buy the Ultimate edition of Office 2007, usual price $1,150, for only $75 — a discount of about 93%. But when students go to the promotion site, Microsoft Live OneCare pops up a warning that the site may be a phishing scam.
The warning reads: 'Phishing filter has determined this might be a phishing website. We recommend that you do not give any of your information to such websites. Phishing websites impersonate trustworthy websites for the purpose of obtaining your personal or financial information.'"
That's a tough problem because the easy way to solve it is to add a whitelist to the phishing filter, but that is just asking for security problems (think malware hijacking the whitelist). I guess they will actually just have to make the filter work...
Slightly off topic, but can we motion to come up with a new 'M$' logo?
1. The guy is barely involved within the company anymore.
2. Bill Gates has started a profoundly large charity foundation
3. Someone could make some downright hilarious steve ballmer cyborg icons with minimal effort.
Am I the only one feeling this?
According to TFA, the deal is for students of AU universities with volume licences. In the education volume liscences I have seen, the liscence extends to the students. Which means the school just burns the student a copy. For nothing (or for a materials fee). The school already paid for the student to have it. Why would the student fork out additional money to MS?
They probably left in in the anti-phishing filter deliberately. Irony generates news, and news generate truckloads of free exposure.
"Any publicity is good publicity, as long as they spell my name right"
We all think it's ironic that MS software blocks an MS promotion campaign. We generated a truckload of comments laughing our asses off.
The REAL irony that escapes us is that we gentoo- and ubuntu- running geeks all talk about it, laugh about it, tell our friends, family and collegues in the office about it, and get the word out to a lot of people, a decent percentage of which (who have student IDs in AU and/or access to someone with such) will hear "blah blah office 2k7 ultimate for 75A$ blah blah microsoft blooper blah". And guess what those of them who use office and can do the math will do then.
Thus, thanks to us slashdot crowd, myself being a gentoo-desktop-running Aussie student (who also runs Windows on some of his machines) who is neither religious about being anti-microsoft nor thinks they do not deserve a sane amount of money for a software suite I wish to use, I promptly went out and paid microsoft 75$. Good'on'em.
And looking back at our beloved slashdot crowd, I think that I, for one, welcome our new microsoft-promoting slashdotter overlords.
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