The Fear Factory

CBS sixty minutes really put me in a bad way sunday night. They ran a story on the "infected internet" that turned out to be a 15 minute commercial for anti virus software. The president of Symantec got most of the airtime. You can catch another blog post on it that pretty much sums up my feelings. Nowhere was it mentioned that the star of the show, the conficker virus, can only infect Windows computers. You can come up with any number of reasons why that might be, depending on how much you like a good conspiracy theory. What do we do? Laugh? Cry? I don't know, but I'm just mad. I'm mad that technogists are not responsible enough to tell the truth rather than base their products on lies. I'm mad Microsoft does not bother to re build their operating system to quelch most of the problems. And I'm especially mad that web users will just accept this fear mongering as truth. But really, what choice do they have? I'm not sure how to react to the growing fear factory motivated by greed, but for now we're going to continue to focus on a great user experience, and hope that doing good begets good.