Sponsor's Message

Indeed, most countries (including NZ) have a raft of laws designed to ensure that consumers are protected against faulty or unsafe products.

Surely therefore, if a company were to be found selling something that had some fairly major design faults that made it unsafe, there's no way that they'd be allowed to charge extra to fix those faults -- right?

I mean... if your brand new car turned out to have a dangerous fault in its braking system, you would not expect the manufacturer to charge you extra to advise you of the fault and provide some kind of remedy -- would you?

Now have your say Got something to say about today's column, or want to see what others think?  Visit The Forums While you're here, why not visit the Aardvark Hall of Shame and perhaps make your own nomination. 7

Well it seems that if you're the world's largest software company owned by arguably the world's richest man then these rules just don't apply to you.

I refer of course, to Microsoft and its flawed software.

Okay, as someone who's designed and coded more than his fair share of software in the past 30 years, I'm the first to admit that it's impossible to create any non-trivial piece of software that doesn't have a bug or two in it. However, the situation Microsoft has just created is wholly different.

For decades, Bill's boys have been shipping fairly good software that (like all software) has more than a handful of bugs. Until the arrival of the internet however, these bugs were usually just an inconvenience and posed no real threat to users.

But, now that a huge percentage of PCs are "connected", the existence of vulnerabilities and design flaws becomes a whole different kettle of fish.

A bug that might have previously just required you to reboot your PC and restart your applications now has the potential to allow hackers into your system and could even offer then full access to all your sensitive data.

To their credit, Microsoft does offer a regular stream of fixes for vulnerabilities that fall into the "coding errors" basket -- but they seldom provide fixes for design errors (such as allowing any downloaded code to run almost unfettered on a Windows machine).

It must surely contravene our consumer protection laws therefore, that Microsoft is now treating the vulnerabilities it's delivering in its software as a profit centre.

Yes, a new service called "Windows OneCare" is about to be launched by Microsoft and its sole raison d'etre is to address the vulnerabilities and design flaws intrinsic to its own products.

Sure, if a major coding error is uncovered, MS will continue to provide a fix through its update service -- but if you're looking for protection from worms, viruses, key-loggers or trojans that prey on the design flaws intrinsic to Windows, then you'll have to pay an extra US$50 a year.

Now, given that the Commerce Commission has just slammed airlines and other companies for adding "fuel levies" as an extra charge to their products, the addition of this "security levy" must also attract some flak from our consumer watchdog?

It will be interesting to see whether Microsoft's exemption from consumer protection laws extends to New Zealand won't it?

Is the OneCare Live service an admission by Microsoft that it's software is not adequately designed and coded for life in an online environment?

If that's the case, why are customers expected to pay extra to get a reasonable degree of safety out of the product they're buying?

Tell us all and see what others have to say in The Aardvark Forums

If you feel that this is a good thing and/or you hold a "geniune affection" for yours truly -- then you are welcome to gift me some money using the buttons provided. In gifting this money you accept that no goods, service or other consideration is offered, provided, accepted or anticipated in return. Just click on the button to gift whatever you can afford. NOTE: PayPal bills in US dollars so don't accidentally gift more than what you were intending :-)

Contacting Aardvark
I'm always happy to hear from readers, whether they're delivering brickbats, bouquets or news tip-offs. If you'd like to contact me directly, please this form. If you're happy for me to republish your comments then please be sure and select For Publication.

Other media organisations seeking more information or republication rights are also invited to contact me.

Just add a couple of lines of JavaScript to your pages and you can get a free summary of Aardvark's daily commentary -- automatically updated each and every week-day.

Aardvark also makes a summary of this daily column available via XML using the RSS format. More details can be found here.

Contact me if you decide to use either of these feeds and have any problems.

Linking Policy
Want to link to this site? Check out Aardvark's Linking Policy.

Did you tell someone else about Aardvark today? If not then do it now!