So... I have McAfee from my internet provider, not sure really why I kept Norton running on my laptop. Hell I almost never use my laptop anyway, just to pay bills and a few minor things. Mainly browsing this site.
Anyway so I said fuck Norton and their $80 a year fee. I cancelled my auto renewal a month ago.
They sent me a message. Is it the price? Well yeah. That and the fact it makes my computer so slow it's almost unusable. So they offered me a $10 Amazon card. Wow. That's so worth it.
I ignored the offer.
Since then I've gotten pop ups almost every time I've turned on my computer. Today I got this...




Yeah. That's a pretty bitchy message. Fuck you, Norton.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

Yeah well fuck you too buddy!

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It would be funny if, at the bottom, it calculated how many weekend work hours it would have cost you to renew.

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PC A/V software is a huge waste of money for 95% of internet users.

The 5% that still think AOL is a thing? They need it.

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Rick Hahn is the best GM in baseball.

You really are the devil.

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

I don't trust anti-virus software. It doesn't protect you from the latest stuff. Also, I think they create viruses. My wife finds that idea absurd. I said, "So, McAfee killed a guy and has a stable of teenage concubines but you don't think he's capable of creating a virus to scare people into buying his software. "

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

JORR = Cyber Seacrest

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Do computers have chiropractors?

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"Play until it hurts, then play until it hurts to not play."
http://soundcloud.com/darkside124 HOF 2013, MM Champion 2014

I think IMU is kind of like a computer chiropractor.

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Disc injury?

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You know me like that.

My experience in the two plus years I ran Norton was that it was really good at finding problems and telling me it couldn't fix them.

That's about the kindest remark there can be.

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

I always liked...Norton Commander!

hahahahah... what a fucking racket! they basically prey on the ignorance of people who buy new computers (cuz i dont think anyone in the history of mankind has ever had a computer and stopped and thought "holy shit, i could really use some norton/mcafee protection just to be sure i'm 100% safe and secure when i venture out into the wilderness that is the internet!" --- you know, kinda like having SiriusXM satellite radio in your car/s) and uhh.... wow. i had no idea that they ham it up that much when they're dealing with the marks who have started to pull away from their business of fear and intimidation.

seriously, i ran my old PCs "bareback" on the dialup-BBS/internet scene all the way from the mid-90s well into the 2000s. i downloaded all kinds of "warez" (aka pirated software) and ran shady little strip poker games and all kinds of stuff that these programs would try to tell you is "HIGH RISK! DANGEROUS!" and in my combined internet history the only virus i got was some little thing called the tai pei virus" which basically just inserted ~400 bytes of code into DOS .exe files with no other intent just to kind of latch on and spread and see how far/long it could go. the only reason i'd notice it is that some DOS apps/games would have a CRC check (a cyclic redundancy check, which in and of itself is as redundant as saying ATM machine) where it'd verify that the .exe file was exactly the size it was supposed to be b4 launching.

tho i gotta be real that i eventually got that one dumbass spyware thingy that purported to be some sort of "Windows Defender" or something seemingly offical... you know, where you'd get these little shield icons in your tray that were designed to be nearly identical to the official windows programs shield icon? basically it'd claim that your computer wasn't safe and it's got spyware and if you pay them $20 for this anti-spyware/virus program you could get rid of it and so much more. it's a hilarious concept to have the actual malware purport to be a malware remover where "buying the malware remover" actually disables the annoying aspects and further entrenches its BS on your PC.

incidentally i had to remove that faux-malware-removal-software malware from my PC and also one i was teching for cash, and holy shit that thing was a motherfucker. not only did it have the werewithol to actively seek out ad-aware and malwarebytes on infected PCs and delete/disable the .exe files (in one case it turned malwarebytes.exe into a HTML file =) so you couldn't get rid of it that way, but when you combed the windows registry you'd find out that it'd install like 4-5 different instances of the main malware .exe file in random folders 3-4 levels deep in C:\Windows with filenames like aabd.exe and cF1eV.exe and if you only found, say, 3-4 out of the 5 different .exe files it stashed when you rebooted the PC the remaining one/s would go and replenish the deleted ones (giving them new random .exe names in new random folders and stashing them elsewhere in the registry) so when you went to get rid of this thing you had to be really damn thorough and quick on your feet otherwise you'd be thwarted with regularity. finally defeating it felt like a legit accomplishment tbh.

since that malware, i havent had anything that i know of popping up. maybe malware has gotten less ostentatious and i'm a part of a giant chrome/google botnet thru my browsers? maybe malwarebytes and/or ad-aware cut deals with these guys now? or maybe it's not that much of a giant threat (provided you don't have the OOOH IMMA CLICK THIS DUMB RANDOM SHIT gene) but either way i figure all this norton/mcafee "protection" shit that comes with OEM computers/laptops = a racket that preys on the ignorant/stupid with disposable $$$ who are willing to part with some for a "Feeling" of security.

TLDR = was it benjamin franklin or some other founding father/ish person who said that "people who are willing to exchange freedom for the [illusion/feeling] of security deserve neither freedom nor security" ?? --- yeah pretty much that. it was a pithy bitchy message from norton that clearly thought less of you than it does other people because you were one of their paying marks for a prolonged period of time

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i work in the internet/network security field and i'm pretty sure not one computer in our office has virus protection on it.

Fuck you Greg Norton and your pathetic .249 career average.

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Ugh....he did suck.

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Ewww

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