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McAfee To Pay For PC Repairs After Patch Fiasco
Barence writes "McAfee has offered to pay for the PC repairs of consumers affected by last week's faulty antivirus update. The problematic patch falsely identified the SVCHOST.EXE Windows file as a virus, causing PCs running Windows XP SP3 to crash or enter endless reboot cycles. In a blog post addressed to 'Home or Home Office Consumers,' the company offered to reimburse PC repair expenses, though there was a notable caveat. 'If you have already incurred costs to repair your PC as a result of this issue, we're committed to reimbursing reasonable expenses,' the company said. 'Reasonable expenses' has yet to be formally defined."
Let the billing and accounts recieveable fuckery begin!
Mc's legal department and accounts are going to be looking for ANY reason to tell claimants to go play "Hide and go fuck yourself with that invoice."
I'm pretty sure that reimburshing my IT department's lost money and time is pretty reasonable considering I spent two days walking to every computer on the campus.
I don't see how this even begins to approach the amount they are in for.. they are going about it the wrong way. In signing up to pay home/ home office users, they are automatically assuming guilt for themselves (as if anyone wasn't sure that they were guilty in the first place?)
First off, they are starting with home / home office users. This population will incur the highest cost per computer to fix - i.e. instead of paying 1 IT guy 30/hr to fix a bunch of computers in one place, this is one-at-a-time visits to Geek Squad (ugh) or whatever which will run 50+ per computer..
This is just opening the door for future corporate lawsuits - i.e. "Clearly they have said that they were the cause of this issue and are willing to refund some of their users to the tune of X for just ONE computer. My company lost 1000 computers, I want 1000x dollars, plus lost productivity."
Didn't Google mark all websites as malware-infested about a year ago? All it takes is some engineer to mistype a single keystroke (a "*" in Google's case) and down the whole system comes.
I was thinking this would be a boon for me. I do in home and business support in my off hours, good spending money. However, due to my issues with McAfee, none of my regular clients use McAfee AV products.
So, if I had recommended McAfee to my clients, I would be a rich person now. Damn, doing the right things doesn't make as much money!
What could possibly go wrong?
AV industry is just one big fuck up.
Instead of building a true behaviour based, sandbox'y style AV solutions, they peddle their ugly products and never exchange their virus signatures leading to a situation when no AV can detect all existing viruses, and no AV is even remotely future-proof in defeating unknown malware types.
And let this McAffee debacle become the next little step in embracing of open source OS'es by the corporate world.
What, if any, level of incompetence would (legally) be "indistinguishable from malice"...
Obviously, by installing an AV product, you indicate a desire for it to perform certain operations on your system, and an acceptance of the fact that it will probably tank your I/O performance and so forth. And, in general, courts have generally accepted the notion that vendors are nominally, at best, liable for buggy software.
In this case, albeit unintentionally, McAfee ended up committing several hundred thousand hack attacks. Disabling thousands of computers, including plenty that would fall under the CFA's definition of "protected computers".
Thought experiment: If some punk kid had accidentally disabled some hundreds of thousands of computers(along the lines of that old accidental self-replicator worm, or something), what parts of the book would they be throwing at him right now? Are McAfee's actions just a desperate attempt to keep some of their burned customers, or do they fear something more serious here?
Maybe it will cost them a fortune. Or maybe they'll make everyone trying to file a claim jump through unreasonable hoops and end up paying almost nothing.
Extending a license for 2 years costs them NOTHING if the customer would have left.
And that's just for home users. There's still no word on other users (like school districts).
Ignoring, of course, that this is only reimbursing the private-use of the program. As of now, the corporations who were affected quite severely financially (for following suggested security measures) are still out in the cold.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!