Dell & Spyware: Open Letter

Bingo, Paul, thank you!

Acadia

 

hear, hear!

Well done and well written.

 

This is really interesting . one can only ask the question of why they are behaving in this way ?.
I work for a govt organisation . I am a remote worker in the field . I collect statistics on a Dell laptop . These statistics are ( under the statistics act and Law ) confidential . Could such be compromised by the use of such . I have sent a link to the above letter to the department i work for and shall be most interested to see what and how they respond.

 

Will do and thanks

 

From what I've found after doing 2 destructive recoveries on my own Dell computer using cds provided by Dell, I think there's more behind their attitude than has yet been brought to light. mj

 

Hi Paul!

This open letter is good to see. Has any of our legal-beagles (USA) searched recent court documents to see if Dell is embroiled in any legal wranglings involving copyrights? (These are made public as a matter of record.) Their new policy reeks of legal wrestlings. It appears they are trying to do a CTA (Cover-Their-A**).

 

Thanks Paul for your posting. My cousin purchased a Dell computer and has had all sorts of problems with pop ups, some porno ones too, among other problems. I have been trying to help him in recommending anti-spyware, pop up stoppers, but he still is not free of all this stuff inspite of all the anti-spyware installed. Your letter posted explains a lot and I have forwarded a copy of it to my cousin. I think this info. will blow him away as it is not something we would expect from Dell computers. Thanks again.

 

Hi Peaches4U,

One pointer for your cousin: http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=15913

Regards,

Pieter

 

Thanks Pieter. He did instal Ad-Aware & SpyBot, SpywareBlaster, as I recommended, does the updates & scans but his browser keeps getting hijacked and I recommended downloading Hijack It and posting the log here but he has not done so. He is a real newbie and sort of nervous. Popup stoppers cannot seem to control the pop ups and from what he tells me it is pretty bad. Even his McAfee AV failed him and he got infected so I recommended a free online scan with Panda and it caught & cleaned the virus for him. I suspect he missed his updates & relied on the auto update feature.

I keep recommending he go to these forums for far more knowledgeable help than I can give him but as the saying goes "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink"!! Even if I don't post here, I always learn something here by reading - fantastic forums at Wilders!!!!

 

Let's see. He's still having problems with porn popups after you install anti-spyware? Tell him he has to stop going to porn sites! Most porn popups come from having visited these sites and clicked through their varied links. It is rarily by accident.

I remember an incident at a local grade school. One of the PC's kept having problems with porn popups. The kids weren't doing it. It was the night janitor. LOL

 

Can I have permission to send him your opinion.? Actually, when I used to use AOL at one time, I was always spammed with porn but I never visited any of those sites - had no clue how to find them. I barely knew how to use a computer let alone surf & search. I dumped AOL and have never had that problem since.

Funnily enough I jokingly told him to stop visiting porno sites ... can't imagine him doing it knowingly [not the type] unless he stumbled across the site accidentally. I can have a tad of fun with him on this one. Anyway, your opinion is most interesting.

 

Dell's attitude regarding spyware is puzzling.
It makes no sense to me.
There has to be a "story behind the story".

Regardless of possible motives,Dell is just plain wrong on this one.
Spyware is a daily issue on the internet and their customers definitely deserve support and assistance for that type of problem.

What are they thinking?!

 

Yeah, poor Michael D. Maybe he's trying to catch up to Billy G.

Acadia

 

Dell computers have come down in price considerably presumably to be more competitive. My guess is that to make up the profit shortfall they are being paid to load this software into their computers. I discovered that Hewlett Packard & Compaq are doing it and so is Logitech for the keyboard, mouse & camera. I think that it may well be that what we call spyware they will deem as malware thus indemnifying them. Just a guess.

 

IMHO, I see nothing to debate - Dell is way wrong on this one.

- In this market of cut-throat competition, it doesn't take much for a "black-eye" to turn into a "knockdown". And when you're on top, you have a lot farther to fall.
- "Policy changes" are made every day in business; Dell is no exception...we'll play the "wait and see" game now.


-

 

Peaches, most of the spam in AOL comes from spammer lurking around the chat room and see you screen name. I'm not saying you was lurking in chat rooms and chatting but most of the time if a person does he or she gets spammed almost as soon as they go in a chat room.

Paul thanks for this info . I have a dell I got last year and really never had any problems with Pop ups or spyware (just what spybot s&d calls spyware from media player). The other problem I had was my computer got fried and I had to reinstall my whole OS. Which was a good thing cuz I knocked off all the stuff dell installed on my pc and just instaled what I wanted.

 

Dell MUST encourage people to remove malicious spyware on their computers, NOT encourage them to keep it on their computers.

 

guess i'm alittle slow in this high speed world but I justread this thread but when i try to go to the letter i get a blank page