Symantec offer sticks in craw of some Chinese users
'Lacks seriousness and sincerity'
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
We were skeptical on Monday when Symantec said it would atone for a bug that crippled the PCs of tens of thousands Chinese users by giving them free software. "Cockroach in your salad, sir? Have some free salad," was how we put it.
Sure enough, critics in China's electronics industry are pouncing on the compensation offer, which calls for affected users to get a free one-year subscription to Norton AntiVirus. That's the very application that in May wrongly categorized two critical system files in the Simplified Chinese version of Windows XP and left about 50,000 PCs unable to boot up. It seems some PC users in China have had enough salad.
"As a company with an international name, Symantec's response to its Chinese consumers lacks seriousness and sincerity," Alamus, deputy director of China E-commerce Association, was quoted by CCTV. "It's obvious that Symantec avoids mentioning compensation. It is trying to get away with such words as 'offer' and 'goodwill.'"
Lu Benfu, director of the Chinese Academy of Science's Internet Development Research Center, was quoted in the same article saying: "Symantec's offer is better than nothing. But it is not good enough. It's not a real compensation program. The data lost can't be made up for by any such offer or improvement in services."
Symantec declined to comment on the criticism other than to reiterate previous statements that it deeply regrets the error, which was caused by an automated process that has been in place for many years. Symantec estimates the glitch affected a maximum of 50,000 PC, but some critics say the number is higher.
At least two lawsuits have been filed over the incident. ®
COMMENTS
Old Chinese saying...
Man who lies down with dogs
Gets up with fleas
Elephant Graveyard
Corel should buy Symantec, or vice versa, just to complete the cycle. Then they can be the whole useless security/backup/multimedia elephant graveyard.
I have a solution to AV issues
I dont run AV as such on my home PC, I use whats called my Brain 1.0 Simply install Firefox, Ad-aware and Spybot, update and scan after a browsing session and I do browse lots of porn sites also to test the effectivness of this setup...lol Each weekend I do an online test at Trend Micro and I also install AVG, scan and then uninstall and the only time there was an issue was when I tried IE7 and immediatly got trojan'd!! Back to Firefox I went :) I use online mail such as Yahoo and Hotmail who scan all attachments for me, how do these muppets get infected? Nothing is foolproof but its mostly to do with the fool sitting at the machine.
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