Security

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You’d have thought, over the years, given the abysmal failure of Don’t Copy That 2, the patronising You Wouldn’t Steal A Car adverts and Neil Kinnock’s “well alright!” speech at the Sheffield rally in 1992, suits would have given up trying to “engage” with patronisingly-stereotyped “young people.”

You’d also be wrong. The latest attempt (as reported by El Reg) comes from cybersecurity firm Symantec, “collaborating” with Snoop Dogg to launch a competition to find the best rap about Internet security and cybercrime.

Using the thoroughly “down wiv da kidz” title of HackIsWack.com, it offers a prize consisting of “2 tickets to Snoop concert, meet his mgmt/agent, Toshiba laptop” (their formatting, not mine) and says that entries will be judged based on originality, creativity and message.

Unsurprisingly, El Reg is unimpressed. Neither is anyone else.

I can’t help but think that this is an attempt by Symantec to try to stay relevant in the consumer security market, where the growth of free solutions such as AVG Anti-Virus and Microsoft Security Essentials (along with more robust security built into Windows itself) means the only reason you’d buy Norton AntiVirus is if you’re misinformed, or an idiot. This could well be part of the strategy that’s led to the recent proliferation of the awful Norton Security Scan… but that’s another story.

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clippyRemember MS’s ill-fated get the facts campaign? Well… they’re at it again.

This time, they’re bribing offering a course called ExpertZone to employees of Best Buy in America (sort of like America’s PC World, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar campaign appeared in Gordonland before much longer.) Incidentally, on taking the “course”, said employees get a $10 copy of Windows 7. Hmm.

So a member at Overclock.net has kindly provided screenshots… however, due to Photobucket’s terribleness, they’ve exceeded their bandwidth limit. Not to worry… they’re mirrored here, and they’re probably floating around on 4chan as well. And they might have *cough* accidentally appeared on this site, too.

One of the modules of said course is entitled something along the lines of “Linux vs. Windows 7.”

I won’t list them all, because some of them are so full of horseshit that they’re toxic. Some of them aren’t too bad… however, these ones are. (Follow the show original post link to show these if they don’t appear, or follow the “read more” link if you’re viewing this from the site.)

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Well, I suppose it had to happen eventually. A distributed denial of service attack hit Twitter this morning, meaning the merry collective of twittering twits suffered from various symptoms, including inability to post tweets, timeouts, empty-document errors and general slowness.

Do not panic. *whispers* There is still the real world. If you absolutely must procrastinate, Minesweeper is a good fallback.

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