6 March 2012
The biggest scam in history?
Bernie Madoff? Made off with around $65 bn.
The Y2K crisis scam? Allegedly cost 3% of the world GDP for one year, which would make it around the 300 bn mark. I think the Y2K scam was at least partially responsible for an upgrade in computing systems that would need to have been made in the short term anyway, so much of the direct costs have been recouped.
My pick is Symantec and its major product suite of "Norton" "anti-virus". I do put anti-virus in quotation marks advisedly, because it flat-out doesn't work.
The ultimate irony came a few weeks ago, when Symantec admitted they'd been hacked and that their major product ought to be disconnected. No doubt they've fixed that now, but they are worse than a joke. They don't protect you from any new virus, and they don't protect you from lots of the old ones.
I consider Norton to be spyware itself. The only purpose of the product is to report back your habits and information back to Symantec.
If you're willing to bet Symantec does work, e mail me and I'll send you a Trojan for it to play with.
Update 2014: When did the world's biggest anti-virus form become aware of the Heartbleed virus?
Answer: after it had been found by someone else.
If you wanted solid evidence of how worthless Norton is, Heartbleed is perfect. It had existed for years and Norton never knew it was there, despite having billions of dollars each year to spend on finding viruses and worms just like Heartbleed.
Copyright © Alan Charman