My guess is that Microsoft will never see a penny of that money. The guy was in the process of declaring bankrupty. I seriously doubt he has $7M to pay off Microsoft in the first place. This is probably some sort of insider PR deal to make Microsoft look like they're helping the consumer, but ultimately the ruling doesn't stop the guy from spamming or hold him accountable for any of the illegal and unethical activity his company likely engaged in.
when you can use BigFix and it is even more comprehensive in helping you patch and update various systems on your PC. Check it out. Why rely on a Microsoft-centric tool to manage your system when you run a wide variety of software from various sources? Bigfix rules!
This isn't about the video game. By now that should be obvious to most people.
This is about some opportunitstic, sleazebag lawyer and an 85-year-old incompetent parental figure trying to make a quick buck, or get their 15 minutes of attention.
The less we talk about this frivolous lawsuit and the losers involved, the better.
In the last ten years, the game market has turned into shit.
There's really nothing new. There are piggy-backed enhancements of first person shooters, which culminate in hyper-twitching frag-fests like Halo and Unreal, or anti-social technoligized anarchist stupidity like GTA. And what's left over are the same tired RPGs and war games. It gets old real quickly.
There have been some promising games in development. I think SWG was really trying to be revolutionary, but that game has been murdered by corporate overlords who have micromanaged the design so that the game is essentially unplayable. That goes for most of the MMORPGS.
Don't even get me started on console games. The last console I bought was the N64. There were maybe a half-dozen decent games, and then the rest were crap that was stupid and badly designed. It used to be that anything that made it to cart was considered decent quality, but that's not the case any more. There's nothing more soul-sucking than spending money for a game that bores or frustrated you a half hour into it.
There is a reason why the game industry is in a glut. They're making crap. They've become too big and slow and dumb. They keep putting a fresh coat of paint on the latest thing from 1994 and finally people are tired of it.
I've skipped several generations of consoles. I still have no desire to get one. I don't think I've missed a goddam thing either, which is a sad state of affairs.
With the PSP being popular, the blowback from suck-ass game developers is beginning to turn full circle. The older the software supported, the more likely people won't throw the stuff in the trash because the new software sucks. I expect this trend to continue until people rediscover Missile Command, Joust, Asteroids, Robotron, Stargate and the hundreds of truly original and creative games from the 80s. If you think about it, there was more innvoation in six months of any given year from 1980-1990 than there has been in the entire last decade. Pathetic.
to hold stories of this nature, which wildly jump to erroneous conclusions.
Microsoft was apparently too cheap to purchase more recent satellite imagery so they got old, crappy data. Google's is more recent.
Nothing here to see folks except a few people with short attention spans that don't do adequate research.
The mods are to be blamed for this. Just today I had a story rejected that had more information than the one published, but it wasn't as pointed in its title.
Fair enough. We block most of their IP space on port 25 anyway, because they're one of the largest sources of spam in North America.
People shouldn't complain to this company. They should not patronize them period. This latest issue is one of many that confirm Telus is a sleazy company that doesn't deserve patronage.
The fact that so many people are seriously considering vigilante-oriented solutions to these problems calls attention to the woefully inadequate enforcement resources we have.
I am still dumbfounded as to why ANY of the ~200 (or less) spam-gangs (as documented by Spamhaus) who are responsible for 80% of all spam haven't been taken down? I don't buy the jurisdictional problem excuse -- most of them are in the states and all of us know they can be easily traced. Almost every one of these spammers are engaging in multiple criminal activities, including computer tampering, fraud, copyright infringement, RICO violations, identity theft, ponzi schemes, and more.
The biggest casualty of spam is the theft of bandwidth and network resources. DDOS'ing the spammers, while effective in that it may increase their cost of doing business, compounds the problem.
However, at this point, since the feds seem incapable of doing anything about this, I'm unwilling to write off any approach that might wake them up and get them into action. Our country does have a history demonstrating that civil disobedience can be an effective catalyst when the status quo is ambivalent. With that being said, I wouldn't personally endorse anything of questionable legality, but at the same time, I can't help but respect the role of such tactics in history.
Still, it just boggles me that a few FBI agents haven't done something as simple as toss up a few PCs on a cable connection with a packet sniffer, and begun documenting the propagation of worms and how the spammers are operating. It would take no more than a week to build a solid case against so many of these operations, you could pick-and-choose which perpetrator would be the easiest to prosecute. So why hasn't this been done?
What's even more ironic about this issue is that originally McDonald's agreed to pay for the woman's medical expenses. That's ALL she asked for. It was only after McDonald's reniged on their promise that she took the case to court.
Considering how superior AMD processors are to their intel counterparts, in terms of speed, power consumption, heat generation and power-verses-cost, maybe we'll see even more performance gains if AMD can get Intel to stop using bullying tactics to compensate for lack of technical superiority?
I understand AMD is licensing some Intel technology for its chips, but that doesn't detract from the reality that in many cases, AMD is producing a better product at a more reasonable price.
I stopped buying Intel CPUs several years ago. I see no reason when AMD is cheaper and faster and just as reliable (if not moreso). If AMD-centric software has been crippled, I look forward to even more performance gains once they sort this mess out.
Ultimately, I'd say there were more than 1200 infections on this machine.
I used two different boot CDs to gain access to the system to try to remove some of them manually, but both sets of utilities, including the Ultimate Boot CD didn't work. This was a Compaq laptop and it wouldn't run some of the NTFS browsing utilities for some reason. Plus, the trojans were embedded in protected areas like "System Volume Information" that were very hard to get to, even using a separate OS to browse the hard drive.
In the case of my friend, he had McAffee fully installed and patched and was still infected hundreds of times. One of the worst programs was what appears to be a new hybrid of this Look2Me adware.
Maybe I'm the last to realize this because I practice safe computing, but last week a friend brought over a laptop that he said "wasn't working right" for me to "fix."
McAffee reported 337 trojans/worms/viruses on the system.
I cleaned the system, rebooted, ran McAffee again (which takes something like 3-4 hours on a 20G hard drive!) and once again, 200+ infections.
I killed all non-critical processes. Loaded two different startup program removal and monitoring systems, disabled system restore and a bunch of other steps, and still couldn't get the system clean. McAffee seemed to be as much a part of the problem as the worms/viruses themselves.
This new breed of adware is insideous. These programs attach themselves to the OS as extensions to explorer and are thus protected from removal by many of the antivirus programs; they create system restore data that brings them back to life later, and employ many other tricks. And all of them seem to have back doors where their authors (or the black hat hacker public) can use to install additional invasive software.
After messing with this infected machine for a few days, I realized the best approach would have been to re-format and re-install everything, but I was determined to clean the system and finally did, and in the process I was able to test the usefulness of a number of new utilities. I haven't been a fan of Symantec/Norton, but I have to say McAffee is even worse. There were many infections that McAffee, with the most recent virus definitions, didn't recognize, that AVG, with an outdated def file was able to remove. I would recommend AVG over both Symantec and McAffee, and people are right, McAffee is the slowest software I've ever seen. Spybot proved to be useless; Ad-Aware wasn't terribly helpful either. These new breeds of adware are very tough to remove. I ended up getting the best results by using some freeware programs like Startup Monitor and Killbox.
So, the Chinese attacks aren't zombies? They are actually hackers actively probing? Interesting, I don't see either country cracking down on cyber attacks on their traditional enemies. But, if that's the case, then what I said is correct; most zombies are in the EU and USA.
I don't know if they are zombies or a handful of servers that simply rotate their online address from a huge IP space pool. I always suspected it was the latter, but I don't know.
do you notice the first post?most spam do not come from china, and even most illegal activity of systems do not happen only in china , why you dont filter all IP space all theses illegal happened? some numbers you should know:china has 52.99 million PCs,is third of the world.There are over 100 millon internet users in china.what you have done make these people isolated from your world.maybe you think them not important,but what you have done is unfair to them
1. A significant amount of spam is still coming from China. As I was writing this, I just checked logs of one server and the following IPs were spamming me in the last hour: 222.237.165.152, 220.190.82.119, 221.6.123.102, 222.100.112.180, 219.157.92.51, 218.151.35.197, 203.90.211.99, 61.53.155.246, 222.165.91.230, 61.52.26.236, 222.64.195.122, etc... I could go on and on.. the facts show that Chinese IP space is still a huge source of spam.
2. You're right. It is "unfair", but the fact is my clients prefer to alienate the Chinese world in favor of less kiddie porn and stock scam spam.
3. ISPs only act when they have to. There is no incentive for ISPs to police the illegal activity that's happening on their network if there are no repurcussions; if their customers don't complain that they can't access the Internet. It's a necessary evil to effect change. The ISPs make money off bandwidth so they have a vested interest in not curtailing the zombie activity. This is the only way to get their attention unfortunately.
The reality of the situation is that RBLs and people who wholesale ban IP space of irresponsible networks are the PRIMARY way to force these entities to control the noise they introduce into the Internet. No other way has proven to be any more effective and you cannot argue that. The only reason the Chinese government is acting is because ISPs like me have had enough of their crap and are cutting them off.
Care to back that broad, sweeping statement up with facts? Didn't think so, as you are talking nonsence.
I can back it up with facts. I run three banks of servers in three different continents, and have been doing so since 1995. I menticulously monitor logs and most of the hardcore probes are coming from Chinese and Korean IP space... NOT from zombie PCs.
I've wholesale blocked Chinese IP space from my networks at the router level and my server performance has dramatically increased. I'm not keeping tabs any more on the number of attacks on most of the servers because they can't touch me any more from their space. The zombie PC system probes are still around, but they're NOWHERE near as aggressive and rampant as the Chinese ones were... and the Chinese attacks are still forthcoming because I keep a few boxes un-firewalled just to compare.
Go back to playing Unreal Tournament and don't talk about things you don't know about.
Who are you? Some Asian broadband user who has no experience in this area and thinks this is some kind of cultural issue? It's not. All I care about is stopping attacks on my systems.
According to Spamhaus, whom I completely agree with based on my own experience, 80% of all known spam originates from no more than 200 "spam gangs", most of whom are in the United States. If China cooperates by providing U.S. Authorities with the missing logs to track the illegal activities of these groups so that law enforcement can prosecute them, that will be a good thing. But it still comes down to law enforcement going after the spammers, which is something that's not being done. If just a few of these 200 spam gangs were criminally prosecuted, we'd probably see spam levels drop dramatically. So everyone should contact their District Attorney and demand that they pursue and prosecute these cases.
And then you have big corporations that are deliberately sabotaging anti-spam efforts. AT&T for example is hacking their nameservers to be authoritative for anti-spam RBLs so their users are unable to filter mail based on these services. That's unconscionable, and reason # 87,343 why you shouldn't do business with a provider like AT&T who is not only being ambivalent about spam, but actively interfering with their customers' own attempts to find superior solutions.
I'll tell you why they're doing this. It's not just because almost all Chinese IP space is now RBL'd, it's because many ISPs like mine have gone beyond this and simply filtered all Chinese IP traffic of all types from ever hitting our servers. It's not just about spam. Chinese IP space is also responsible for the lion's share of system probes and DoS activity. I got tired of seeing 5000 connection attempts so we've just wholesale blocked their entire IP space at the router level -- it's not like there's any legitimate TCP activity coming from that space that any of my clients care about.
Until these countries can regulate the illegal activity of their systems, they don't deserve to have unfettered access to the Internet IMO... not when the abuse-to-legitimate traffic ratio is 1000000 to 1.
Hey, you forgot the obligatory, "first born child required for access" - this is the NYT we're talking about, so the link goes to a sign-up screen if you haven't registered.
How disappointing. One of the few things I look forward to on slashdot are how creative the posters can be with maligning the NYT's registration process. Don't let me down!
Actually, I meant a P4. I can't keep track of all those darn things these days. I just keep throwing money and memory and higher CPUs at these boxes trying to make 'em perform decently.
The legacy that Microsoft created, of bundling free software with other core products has scared away many good software developers from wanting to compete in this and other arenas. So just a few who have managed to stay alive because they got started early (Symantec and McAffee) are still around, but there's really not much incentive for them to make their products solid -- I suspect most of these companies are outsourcing programming to India anyway, and their products are so compartmentalized for the purpose of managing big, cheap programming teams, this results in crappy software.
Symantec relies on a mafia-subscription-type structure, and software so complicated and bad, that un-installing it in many cases isn't an option unless you want to have to re-format your hard drive. That's their business model. It's not based around producing a really excellent product.
This is one of those scenarios where the "competition" has become so lazy, it's almost desirable for Microsoft to put the final nail in the coffin and put them out of business. Their products couldn't be any worse than Microsoft's versions, and at least we'd probably have better work-arounds with bugs.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that Microsoft will never see a penny of that money. The guy was in the process of declaring bankrupty. I seriously doubt he has $7M to pay off Microsoft in the first place. This is probably some sort of insider PR deal to make Microsoft look like they're helping the consumer, but ultimately the ruling doesn't stop the guy from spamming or hold him accountable for any of the illegal and unethical activity his company likely engaged in.
when you can use BigFix and it is even more comprehensive in helping you patch and update various systems on your PC. Check it out. Why rely on a Microsoft-centric tool to manage your system when you run a wide variety of software from various sources? Bigfix rules!
You're right. There was crap available for every platform, but some manufacturers had higher standards than others.
The gaming industry is like commercial radio now. All flash and no substance or creativity.
Dude.. dude...
Switch to decaf.
This isn't about the video game. By now that should be obvious to most people.
This is about some opportunitstic, sleazebag lawyer and an 85-year-old incompetent parental figure trying to make a quick buck, or get their 15 minutes of attention.
The less we talk about this frivolous lawsuit and the losers involved, the better.
In the last ten years, the game market has turned into shit.
There's really nothing new. There are piggy-backed enhancements of first person shooters, which culminate in hyper-twitching frag-fests like Halo and Unreal, or anti-social technoligized anarchist stupidity like GTA. And what's left over are the same tired RPGs and war games. It gets old real quickly.
There have been some promising games in development. I think SWG was really trying to be revolutionary, but that game has been murdered by corporate overlords who have micromanaged the design so that the game is essentially unplayable. That goes for most of the MMORPGS.
Don't even get me started on console games. The last console I bought was the N64. There were maybe a half-dozen decent games, and then the rest were crap that was stupid and badly designed. It used to be that anything that made it to cart was considered decent quality, but that's not the case any more. There's nothing more soul-sucking than spending money for a game that bores or frustrated you a half hour into it.
There is a reason why the game industry is in a glut. They're making crap. They've become too big and slow and dumb. They keep putting a fresh coat of paint on the latest thing from 1994 and finally people are tired of it.
I've skipped several generations of consoles. I still have no desire to get one. I don't think I've missed a goddam thing either, which is a sad state of affairs.
With the PSP being popular, the blowback from suck-ass game developers is beginning to turn full circle. The older the software supported, the more likely people won't throw the stuff in the trash because the new software sucks. I expect this trend to continue until people rediscover Missile Command, Joust, Asteroids, Robotron, Stargate and the hundreds of truly original and creative games from the 80s. If you think about it, there was more innvoation in six months of any given year from 1980-1990 than there has been in the entire last decade. Pathetic.
to hold stories of this nature, which wildly jump to erroneous conclusions.
Microsoft was apparently too cheap to purchase more recent satellite imagery so they got old, crappy data. Google's is more recent.
Nothing here to see folks except a few people with short attention spans that don't do adequate research.
The mods are to be blamed for this. Just today I had a story rejected that had more information than the one published, but it wasn't as pointed in its title.
I take it you're a vegetarian?
Fair enough. We block most of their IP space on port 25 anyway, because they're one of the largest sources of spam in North America.
People shouldn't complain to this company. They should not patronize them period. This latest issue is one of many that confirm Telus is a sleazy company that doesn't deserve patronage.
I have a FreeBSD box with a current uptime of 900+ days. It would have been longer, but we had to move it from one location to another.
The test of the realism of the sim's AI would likely involve how long it takes for one of the sims to seize power and exploit the rest.
The fact that so many people are seriously considering vigilante-oriented solutions to these problems calls attention to the woefully inadequate enforcement resources we have.
I am still dumbfounded as to why ANY of the ~200 (or less) spam-gangs (as documented by Spamhaus) who are responsible for 80% of all spam haven't been taken down? I don't buy the jurisdictional problem excuse -- most of them are in the states and all of us know they can be easily traced. Almost every one of these spammers are engaging in multiple criminal activities, including computer tampering, fraud, copyright infringement, RICO violations, identity theft, ponzi schemes, and more.
The biggest casualty of spam is the theft of bandwidth and network resources. DDOS'ing the spammers, while effective in that it may increase their cost of doing business, compounds the problem.
However, at this point, since the feds seem incapable of doing anything about this, I'm unwilling to write off any approach that might wake them up and get them into action. Our country does have a history demonstrating that civil disobedience can be an effective catalyst when the status quo is ambivalent. With that being said, I wouldn't personally endorse anything of questionable legality, but at the same time, I can't help but respect the role of such tactics in history.
Still, it just boggles me that a few FBI agents haven't done something as simple as toss up a few PCs on a cable connection with a packet sniffer, and begun documenting the propagation of worms and how the spammers are operating. It would take no more than a week to build a solid case against so many of these operations, you could pick-and-choose which perpetrator would be the easiest to prosecute. So why hasn't this been done?
What's even more ironic about this issue is that originally McDonald's agreed to pay for the woman's medical expenses. That's ALL she asked for. It was only after McDonald's reniged on their promise that she took the case to court.
All of this is a big smokescreen to cover up truly newsworthy events the media is trying to ignore.
Considering how superior AMD processors are to their intel counterparts, in terms of speed, power consumption, heat generation and power-verses-cost, maybe we'll see even more performance gains if AMD can get Intel to stop using bullying tactics to compensate for lack of technical superiority?
I understand AMD is licensing some Intel technology for its chips, but that doesn't detract from the reality that in many cases, AMD is producing a better product at a more reasonable price.
I stopped buying Intel CPUs several years ago. I see no reason when AMD is cheaper and faster and just as reliable (if not moreso). If AMD-centric software has been crippled, I look forward to even more performance gains once they sort this mess out.
Ultimately, I'd say there were more than 1200 infections on this machine.
I used two different boot CDs to gain access to the system to try to remove some of them manually, but both sets of utilities, including the Ultimate Boot CD didn't work. This was a Compaq laptop and it wouldn't run some of the NTFS browsing utilities for some reason. Plus, the trojans were embedded in protected areas like "System Volume Information" that were very hard to get to, even using a separate OS to browse the hard drive.
In the case of my friend, he had McAffee fully installed and patched and was still infected hundreds of times. One of the worst programs was what appears to be a new hybrid of this Look2Me adware.
Maybe I'm the last to realize this because I practice safe computing, but last week a friend brought over a laptop that he said "wasn't working right" for me to "fix."
McAffee reported 337 trojans/worms/viruses on the system.
I cleaned the system, rebooted, ran McAffee again (which takes something like 3-4 hours on a 20G hard drive!) and once again, 200+ infections.
I killed all non-critical processes. Loaded two different startup program removal and monitoring systems, disabled system restore and a bunch of other steps, and still couldn't get the system clean. McAffee seemed to be as much a part of the problem as the worms/viruses themselves.
This new breed of adware is insideous. These programs attach themselves to the OS as extensions to explorer and are thus protected from removal by many of the antivirus programs; they create system restore data that brings them back to life later, and employ many other tricks. And all of them seem to have back doors where their authors (or the black hat hacker public) can use to install additional invasive software.
After messing with this infected machine for a few days, I realized the best approach would have been to re-format and re-install everything, but I was determined to clean the system and finally did, and in the process I was able to test the usefulness of a number of new utilities. I haven't been a fan of Symantec/Norton, but I have to say McAffee is even worse. There were many infections that McAffee, with the most recent virus definitions, didn't recognize, that AVG, with an outdated def file was able to remove. I would recommend AVG over both Symantec and McAffee, and people are right, McAffee is the slowest software I've ever seen. Spybot proved to be useless; Ad-Aware wasn't terribly helpful either. These new breeds of adware are very tough to remove. I ended up getting the best results by using some freeware programs like Startup Monitor and Killbox.
So, the Chinese attacks aren't zombies? They are actually hackers actively probing? Interesting, I don't see either country cracking down on cyber attacks on their traditional enemies. But, if that's the case, then what I said is correct; most zombies are in the EU and USA.
I don't know if they are zombies or a handful of servers that simply rotate their online address from a huge IP space pool. I always suspected it was the latter, but I don't know.
do you notice the first post?most spam do not come from china, and even most illegal activity of systems do not happen only in china , why you dont filter all IP space all theses illegal happened? some numbers you should know :china has 52.99 million PCs,is third of the world.There are over 100 millon internet users in china.what you have done make these people isolated from your world.maybe you think them not important,but what you have done is unfair to them
1. A significant amount of spam is still coming from China. As I was writing this, I just checked logs of one server and the following IPs were spamming me in the last hour: 222.237.165.152, 220.190.82.119, 221.6.123.102, 222.100.112.180, 219.157.92.51, 218.151.35.197, 203.90.211.99, 61.53.155.246, 222.165.91.230, 61.52.26.236, 222.64.195.122, etc... I could go on and on.. the facts show that Chinese IP space is still a huge source of spam.
2. You're right. It is "unfair", but the fact is my clients prefer to alienate the Chinese world in favor of less kiddie porn and stock scam spam.
3. ISPs only act when they have to. There is no incentive for ISPs to police the illegal activity that's happening on their network if there are no repurcussions; if their customers don't complain that they can't access the Internet. It's a necessary evil to effect change. The ISPs make money off bandwidth so they have a vested interest in not curtailing the zombie activity. This is the only way to get their attention unfortunately.
The reality of the situation is that RBLs and people who wholesale ban IP space of irresponsible networks are the PRIMARY way to force these entities to control the noise they introduce into the Internet. No other way has proven to be any more effective and you cannot argue that. The only reason the Chinese government is acting is because ISPs like me have had enough of their crap and are cutting them off.
Care to back that broad, sweeping statement up with facts? Didn't think so, as you are talking nonsence.
I can back it up with facts. I run three banks of servers in three different continents, and have been doing so since 1995. I menticulously monitor logs and most of the hardcore probes are coming from Chinese and Korean IP space... NOT from zombie PCs.
I've wholesale blocked Chinese IP space from my networks at the router level and my server performance has dramatically increased. I'm not keeping tabs any more on the number of attacks on most of the servers because they can't touch me any more from their space. The zombie PC system probes are still around, but they're NOWHERE near as aggressive and rampant as the Chinese ones were... and the Chinese attacks are still forthcoming because I keep a few boxes un-firewalled just to compare.
Go back to playing Unreal Tournament and don't talk about things you don't know about.
Who are you? Some Asian broadband user who has no experience in this area and thinks this is some kind of cultural issue? It's not. All I care about is stopping attacks on my systems.
According to Spamhaus, whom I completely agree with based on my own experience, 80% of all known spam originates from no more than 200 "spam gangs", most of whom are in the United States. If China cooperates by providing U.S. Authorities with the missing logs to track the illegal activities of these groups so that law enforcement can prosecute them, that will be a good thing. But it still comes down to law enforcement going after the spammers, which is something that's not being done. If just a few of these 200 spam gangs were criminally prosecuted, we'd probably see spam levels drop dramatically. So everyone should contact their District Attorney and demand that they pursue and prosecute these cases.
And then you have big corporations that are deliberately sabotaging anti-spam efforts. AT&T for example is hacking their nameservers to be authoritative for anti-spam RBLs so their users are unable to filter mail based on these services. That's unconscionable, and reason # 87,343 why you shouldn't do business with a provider like AT&T who is not only being ambivalent about spam, but actively interfering with their customers' own attempts to find superior solutions.
I'll tell you why they're doing this. It's not just because almost all Chinese IP space is now RBL'd, it's because many ISPs like mine have gone beyond this and simply filtered all Chinese IP traffic of all types from ever hitting our servers. It's not just about spam. Chinese IP space is also responsible for the lion's share of system probes and DoS activity. I got tired of seeing 5000 connection attempts so we've just wholesale blocked their entire IP space at the router level -- it's not like there's any legitimate TCP activity coming from that space that any of my clients care about.
Until these countries can regulate the illegal activity of their systems, they don't deserve to have unfettered access to the Internet IMO... not when the abuse-to-legitimate traffic ratio is 1000000 to 1.
Hey, you forgot the obligatory, "first born child required for access" - this is the NYT we're talking about, so the link goes to a sign-up screen if you haven't registered.
How disappointing. One of the few things I look forward to on slashdot are how creative the posters can be with maligning the NYT's registration process. Don't let me down!
A "P5"? Hmm...where do you get those?
I took a P2 and P3 and glued them together. ; )
Actually, I meant a P4. I can't keep track of all those darn things these days. I just keep throwing money and memory and higher CPUs at these boxes trying to make 'em perform decently.
The legacy that Microsoft created, of bundling free software with other core products has scared away many good software developers from wanting to compete in this and other arenas. So just a few who have managed to stay alive because they got started early (Symantec and McAffee) are still around, but there's really not much incentive for them to make their products solid -- I suspect most of these companies are outsourcing programming to India anyway, and their products are so compartmentalized for the purpose of managing big, cheap programming teams, this results in crappy software.
Symantec relies on a mafia-subscription-type structure, and software so complicated and bad, that un-installing it in many cases isn't an option unless you want to have to re-format your hard drive. That's their business model. It's not based around producing a really excellent product.
This is one of those scenarios where the "competition" has become so lazy, it's almost desirable for Microsoft to put the final nail in the coffin and put them out of business. Their products couldn't be any worse than Microsoft's versions, and at least we'd probably have better work-arounds with bugs.