Making enemies
Sunday dinner with one part of the family and afterwards their laptop comes out [sigh] they'd just switched broadband providers and wanted me to check their security was okay. To keep things simple previously I'd deleted Norton (which just saps the computer of all strength) and used XP's own firewall (good enough) and a simple AV.
The firewall was turned off, and the AV had vanished.Nothing had warned them about this because Norton the programme I'd removed, and wasn't there, was happily telling XP's security system that it had it all covered. Tick boxes and downloads and all sorted. However the next thing was - "While you're on there how do I get music?"
She's got an MP3 player, has happily ripped CDs using Media Player, and transferred them so...? Ah how does she get new music. Talking earlier about things they did on the computer I knew that they had an Amazon account.
So off to Amazon, onto MP3 downloads, and they're offering some freebies. I select one that sounds decent enough and hit One Click; download the Amazon downloader (one-off) and then the file. It adds the music to WMP and asks if you want to open it; and there it is.
"Oooooo" she says I'm looking for...." a song she doesn't know the name of or the artist, just part of the lyric. I show her how to do a general search, then show her YouTube which often features music and "that's the one" she notes the name and artist heads back to Amazon and finds it's only 79p OneClick, open, and WMP there it is.
"Oh that's so easy what else was I after?"
"Thanks a lot for that" says her husband to me
"They're only 79p" she tells him
"That's how they get you." I tell her "Micro-transactions. It's only 79p but you'll just have that one and that one and that one."
"No I'll only buy this one... and this one and..."
"Oh great" says her husband :-)
4 comments:
Glad to hear that I am not the only one who thinks Norton is junk. When we got our first computer, about 5 years ago, PC World sold us Norton for knockdown price. No wonder. I couldn't seem to find a way of changing the settings and it killed the computer. It seemed to be checking every key I pressed. "Ooooh, that "A" looks dodgy, better check that." It didn't help that I was so computer illiterate at that time, that I hadn't realised that a 512 Ram computer, crap chip and dial up internet are not a good match, but even so! I took back to shop on friends advice and have used Mc Affee ever since with no real probs, apart from on old laptop (Also 512ram), when it updates or scans, you might as well give up using it for anything else untill its finished.
ZoneAlarm for business, and the built-in firewall for home; plus some other tweaks at the router. Used to use AVG as an anti-virus, but since the upgrade in 2010 it killed the computer speed so I switched to Avast.
I think Norton wasn't bad until it was taken over by Symantec; not that keen on McAfee either; both can be a real pain to remove should you wish to switch.
Death to Norton and Mcafee.
Careful they might take you seriously and take you to court for threatening behaviour
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