Tech for the Timid: September 2006

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Should Consumer Reports Do Anti-Spyware Testing?

Consider this sentence from an article in Information Week from Randy Abrams, the person responsible for making sure Microsoft products are malware-free: "I was livid about the testing [Consumer Reports] did. They tested anti-spyware software without ever testing how it detected and removed spyware." Should Consumer Reports be trusted for testing anything?

Consumer Reports have been under fire recently for their blatantly poor job of testing anti-virus and anti-spyware software. If their tests are irresponsibly ineffective, can Consumer Reports be trusted for testing other things, like medications, foods, or life-saving equipment? The article can be found here.

Finding More Free Software From Microsoft

This July, I had read about a free little utility that Microsoft released free of charge to people who went to their web site and validated their copy of Windows. The program was called "My Private Folder" which allowed you to create a private folder on your desktop and protect the contents with a password. However, when I went to the Microsoft Windows Validation web page and successfully validated, the program did not appear for me. The reason behind this led me to discover hidden programs available for download.

After validating, it goes to the Special Offers page and asks you to pick what country you are from, and being from Canada I naturally picked it from the drop-down, then the site displayed the free software available to me. My Private Folder wasn't there, so I went back and chose the United States, then lo and behold it a couple of other downloads appeared. I went through the list of countries and it seems as though Microsoft is determining that some countries are not suitable to be offering some free programs. So if you want to look at their full list, choose United States and you should see the full listing of all available free software!

To test this, just compare the software list from the USA (10 items) vs the list that appears when you select Afghanistan (5 items)! Interestingly, there is no Iran or Iraq in that list. Also, Microsoft quietly removed My Private Folders reportedly due to many people forgetting passwords and not being able to recover their files, as well as some instances where it caused high CPU usage.

Politics aside, if like me you are not American, you can now see and obtain the full list of free software in the special offers for Windows Genuine Advantage customers.